"Perhaps you are wondering why you are brought down from your home leaving your friends and perhaps family behind. The reason is that you are sick, and if you were left at home, you may endanger those at home. So you are here to get well again... But do not be afraid. Nobody here will harm you."?Mountain Views, Hamilton Sanatorium, 1955

With this quote Shawn Selway begins his thorough investigation of the evacuation of 1,274 Inuit and Cree sufferers of tuberculosis from the Eastern Arctic to Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, Ontario, from 1950 to 1965. Selway considers not only the political culture, and the systemic racism within that culture, in which the decisions were made, but also the technological and economic changes that made these relocations possible. Selway carefully documents the impact of the evacuations on the Inuit community and has included an assortment of archival images within the book. This is an important look at a difficult time in our country's history.

Shawn Selway has a BA in Religion from McMaster and an Industrial Mechanic license from the Province of Ontario via the Steel Company of Canada basic works in Hamilton, Ontario. He is a moderate technological determinist broadly interested in questions of material culture and the attendant paradoxes. Accordingly, he finds himself writing about municipal planning issues for the local civic affairs blog, and about superseded industrial equipment for the clients of his consultancy in the conservation of historic machinery. He is the author of Nobody Here Will Harm You, a book about mass medical evacuation from the Eastern Arctic during the second half of the twentieth century.

Shawn Selway's profile page

"This rarely explored part of Hamilton's history is the subject of historian Shawn Selway's book, Nobody Here Will Harm You, in which he considers the systemic racism and political culture behind the decision to relocate Indigenous patients and the legacy that was left behind." - Hamilton Magazine