Apologies to minorities on behalf of a nation don’t mean much when the nation’s leader contradicts them in public statements shortly after; they mean even less after it becomes clear that that government, beyond abusing those minorities physically and sexually, also performed undisclosed scientific experiments on them.
This past week, news broke of Canadian food historian Ian Mosby’s confirmation that the Canadian government had been performing nutritional-based experiments on students at Indian Residential Schools between 1942 and 1952. The story continues to unfold, but as it stands, at least 1,300 students were unwittingly involved in these experiments.
Based on preliminary observations, those involved reported that “while most of the [Indigenous] people were going about trying to make a living, they were really sick enough to be . . . under treatment and that if they were white people, they would be in bed and demanding care and medical attention.”
Rather than work to improve these conditions immediately, especially for the children in Residential schools who were wards of the state, those subjected to the study had their levels of malnourishment maintained for two years to collect baseline data and then schools were denied different nutrients to measure the specific effects of malnutrition. The children were not allowed dental care, as gums and teeth were used as a means of measuring health changes.
Some have already noted the dubious ethics of science experimentation of the inter-war period. This seems like a valid point. Anecdotes I heard from my grandmother (who worked as a nurse’s aide in hospitals during this time period) affirm that what would be a breach of human rights, patient rights, etc. now was par for the course then. This would be a reminder for us not to make too much of an anachronistic reading of the situation.
Except that it’s clear the researchers knew full well that the experiment was prolonging a state of poor health, and as noted, if these same levels of poor health were observed in white communities, they would be demanding treatment — and receiving it.
Moreover, these experiments continued on four years after The Nuremberg Code was adopted. I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not sure how informed consent would work when government-supported experiments are being exacted on wards of the state, but that’s an article unto itself. Suffice to say the letters nuns made the students write thanking the government for the good care they received while at the institutions seem like a plot twist in a bizarre horror movie.
When SFU hosted Residential School Awareness Week earlier this year, a panel of Residential School survivors talked about their experiences, with two of the women involved specifically mentioning the food as part of the hell they endured, stating that to this day there are some foods they just can’t eat. One elder broke down in tears while recounting the diversity and bounty of food, and the cultural practices associated with it, that she missed while she was eating army rations at school. However, another survivor who entered the school system later than they did said she had no problem with the food.
How could a nationally run program differ so greatly from region to region? And while some school survivors indicated that life had been hard at home before they left, others seem to have left perfectly prosperous communities. If the children’s welfare was at issue, why remove students from homes that were already providing for them without financial assistance from the government?
I guess the overarching question to ask here is what else is there to know about the Indian Residential School system?
As contributor Helena Friesen pointed out in her Feb. 17 article, “Robinson rebuke reinforces negative assumptions about aboriginals,” the Canadian Government currently has 6.5 km worth of documents pertaining to its Indian Residential Schools that are currently inaccessible because they can’t create space to house them.
Yes, 6.5 km is a lot of space, but high-density library filing systems mean that we could probably house these all in one building. However, it would require going through all of the documents — really going through them all to find out what was in them, so that one could easily search through a database for every infringement of basic human rights imaginable. Or by name, location, and year, whatever.
“Canadians are entitled to know the whole story, and they’re entitled not to have it leak out to them in dribs and drabs this way,” former Prime Minister Paul Martin has said of the event. Indeed, there is no rationale behind keeping this information from the public now, especially when information like this comes to the fore. The level of secrecy that shrouds this information reeks of guilt.
Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, Bernard Valcourt, has responded in part to this information by affirming, “When Prime Minister Harper made a historic apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools in 2008 on behalf of all Canadians, he recognized that this period had caused great harm and had no place in Canada.” I’m sorry, but a vague apology about “harm” made five years prior to this rediscovery just isn’t going to cut it.
With the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s BC-hosted week-long event fast approaching, there’s added impetus to get the ball rolling on examining the extent of these mandated abuses. The Canadian Government has starved generations of Indigenous people in so many ways: the right to land, language, family, and now, so too, it seems, food. The least they can do now is not starve us of our shared history by sequestering documents.
