While living in Alberta and working at the University of Alberta in Edmonton I came across the origin of universal health care in Canada. It was an Indigenous idea. Indigenous people in Canada have always looked to the whole community of creation for wellbeing. We all had our own medical system with specialists and generalists. Our parents, especially our mothers, were the main generalists. But we also had specialists as herbalists and ceremonialists. 

Contact with Canadians of European descent meant our people had to deal with epidemics and diseases they were unfamiliar with. This was especially devastating for my own Haudenosaunee people because of how we lived. We lived in clan longhouses owned by the oldest mother and a new section added as each daughter married. Husbands came from another clan and lived in the longhouse of his wife. Daughters, granddaughters, great-granddaughters, etc. made for a very LONGhouse over time. One was 450 feet long!

Living communally our people had great clan and family support. This living arrangement prevented spousal and child abuse as the whole longhouse protected their clan family members. With the introduction of European pandemic diseases this social way of living didn’t work so well so our people built small cabins after European design to help stop the spread of disease. That is one reason we no longer live in longhouses.

Out of this reality came the 1876 request for the western medicine chest. This was medical care for all the Indigenous peoples of Treaty Six. Medical care was for all.

The medicine chest clause was written into the text of Treaty 6 (1876). It reads:

That a medicine chest shall be kept at the house of each Indian agent for the use and benefit of the Indians at the direction of such agent.... That in the event hereafter of the Indians comprised within this Treaty being overtaken by any pestilence, or by a general famine, the Queen, on being satisfied and certified thereof by Her Indian Agent or Agents, will grant ... assistance of such character or to such extent as the Chief Superintendent of Indian Affairs shall deem necessary and sufficient to relieve the Indians of the calumet that shall have befallen them.

Tommy Douglas is credited with being the author of Universal Health Care in Canada beginning in Saskatchewan in 1963 and extending to all of Canada in 1964. As noted here the idea of Universal Health Care was articulated eighty-seven years earlier in Treaty 6. Indigenous people had a good idea and eventually Canada caught on and agreed.

The Apostle Paul compared our connection to Christ using the analogy of a head and body. We are individual members of the Body of Christ (the church) and Jesus is the Head of the Body. 

Just like we need all the parts of our physical bodies so every member of the Body Of Christ is needed too. Paul said that when one part of the body suffers every part suffers and when one part rejoices we all rejoice.

1 Corinthians 12:25, 26 

So that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

This is basic Christianity. We could say if one person in the church is suffering sickness everyone suffers. Taking care of one another is the most Christian thing you could do. Even when only my mother was a Christian our traditional Haudenosaunee family made sure we took care of our extended family too. My mother received herbal medicine and healing ceremonies and went to her Western doctor.

In the case of Universal Health Care it is a way for the whole community to take care of every other member. And this is done at the lowest overall cost because we all share in the cost of care. This is unselfishness. This is the love of God. 

Indigenous people understood the care that Creator provided in all of creation and human ingenuity. The costs of this are the efforts of love and compassion to fashion therapeutics from the ingredients provided by creation, and the empathy conveyed in ceremony. This is the Common Grace afforded all humanity that opens the door to the Special Grace in Jesus.