Experiments on aboriginal people 'monstrous,' Paul Martin says

Former PM urges federal government to disclose all records on testing 'horrors'

By Kathleen Harris, Jul 18, 2013

Former Prime Minister Paul Martin and former AFN chief Phil Fontaine listen to a question during a discussion on Indigenous governance in a new century at Ryerson University in Toronto Tues. Jan. 25, 2011. (Canadian Press/Frank Gunn)

Former prime minister Paul Martin is urging the federal government to clear the air on "monstrous" reports of nutritional experiments carried out on malnourished First Nations children - and tackle the poverty and discrimination that persists in aboriginal communities today.

In an interview with CBC News, Martin said there must be a full disclosure of all relevant records to get a complete picture of the "horror" that took place in the 1940s and 1950s - and how the legacy of that harm continues now.

"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, but they're entitled to have the story out, and the people who are good analysts who understand this kind of thing put it into context," he said. "Because it is simply too horrible to contemplate, and the only way in which the vow of 'never again' can have any substance is if people have a full awareness of what happened."

Shocked by revelations

Martin was shocked by revelations from the research of Canadian food historian Ian Mosby, which found that at least 1,300 aboriginal people, most of them children, were used as test subjects in the 1940s and 1950s by researchers probing the effectiveness of vitamin supplements.

It began in 1942 on about 300 Cree in Norway House in northern Manitoba, with plans subsequently developed for research on about 1,000 aboriginal children in six residential schools in Port Alberni, B.C., Kenora, Ont., Shubenacadie, N.S., and Lethbridge, Alta.

B.C. residential school survivor says he was starved

Subjects were kept on starvation-level diets, and given or denied vitamins, minerals and certain foods. Some dental services were also withdrawn because researchers thought healthier teeth and gums might skew results.

"When you read or hear about horrors that took place 200 years ago, to a certain extent you say maybe they were different, those people," Martin said. "The kinds of things that happened in the 1940s - we could have known those people - and that they would take those kinds of decisions, do those kinds of things ... it's almost impossible to imagine that could have happened."

Legacy of harm on descendants

Martin said thousands of descendants of the victims are likely still hurting as a direct result of past abuse. And he said more funding for health care, trauma care and education is critical for addressing wrongs of the past.

"When you realize the effect that it had not simply on those people - where it must have been terrible - but on the generations that followed, you begin to understand why treating aboriginal Canadians fairly and funding not just on an equal basis but recognizing the need, and the need for 'catch-up,' becomes crucial," he said.

"The fact that education funding, health care funding, welfare funding is still substantially below the funding that non-aboriginals receive is just simply unspeakable. It's despicable, and there is no excuse for this."

When serving as prime minister, Martin endorsed the Kelowna Accord, which pledged $5 billion over 10 years to improved education, employment and living conditions for aboriginals. It was subsequently scrapped by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Even though education is a universal right in Canada, Martin said persistent funding gaps have led to "unacceptable discrimination." While he said he did not want to get partisan while speaking about the sensitive historic issue of experimentation, Martin called it "unforgiveable" that the Conservative government won't address current funding gaps.

Determine scope of experiments

NDP aboriginal affairs critic Jean Crowder called the experiment revelations "shocking" and urged immediate action by the government to determine the scope of what happened.

"To treat First Nations like a lab experiment and as less than human is pretty appalling," she told CBC News.

Crowder said the government must deliver an apology and swiftly engage with victims' families and aboriginal leaders in the affected communities to determine if, and how, compensation should be awarded. She also demanded a full disclosure of relevant records.

"They need to go through their archives and pull the documents. And I would suggest while they were at it they should take a look to see what else might have gone on," she said.

Address wrongs of past and problems that persist

Liberal aboriginal affairs critic Carolyn Bennett called it "stomach-turning" that hungry children would be used as guinea pigs.

She said the government must immediately engage with the affected aboriginl communities and families of victims to determine the best course of action for remediation. But along with a commitment to address the wrongs of the past must be a commitment to tackle the problems that continue to plague aboriginal communities right now, she said.

"This is about acknowledging the past and engaging with the people in a meaningful way, but it is always about dealing with the situation right now," she said. "This is something all Canadians need to better understand, this appalling chapter in our shared history."

Officials looking into abuse claims

The Prime Minister's Office referred requests for comment to Minister of Aboriginal Affairs Bernard Valcourt. His spokeswoman, Andrea Richer said the minister is travelling and unavailable for an interview.

Instead, she issued a statement on his behalf:

"We are concerned about these allegations and officials are looking into the matter. If this story is true, this is abhorrent and completely unacceptable," she said.

Aboriginal Nutrition Experiments Must Be Acknowledged By Harper: Assembly Of First Nations

By Bob Weber, The Canadian Press Posted: 07/17/2013

The head of Canada's largest aboriginal group says Prime Minister Stephen Harper must acknowledge the "horrors" of nutritional experiments once done on hungry children by increasing support for native child welfare.

Shawn Atleo of the Assembly of First Nations said research showing that at least 1,300 already-hungry children and adults were part of the experiments was driving an emergency resolution at the organization's annual meeting in Whitehorse, Yukon, on Wednesday.

"We're going to call on the prime minister to give effect to the words that he spoke when he said: 'The burden of this experience has been on your shoulders for far too long. The burden is properly ours as a government,'" Atleo said in reference to Harper's 2008 apology for residential schools.

A paper by University of Guelph food historian Ian Mosby detailed tests conducted between 1942 and 1952 on northern Manitoba reserves and at six residential schools across the country.

Well aware that the children and adults were hungry and living on starvation-level diets, the researchers chose to use them as unwitting subjects for tests on the effects of nutritional supplements instead of recommending they be properly fed.

Mosby found that vitamins and minerals were provided to some and not to others. Milk rations at one school were deliberately held below recommended levels. An enriched flour that couldn't legally be sold elsewhere in Canada under food adulteration laws was distributed.

Some dental services were withheld from children over concerns healthier gums and teeth could mask study results.

Atleo's father was one of those children at a residential school in Port Alberni, B.C.

"It hits home in a deeply personal way," he said. "I've heard these stories - some kids allowed to have their oranges and vitamin Cs and others not.

"I've heard these stories all my life."

When The Canadian Press broke the story Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt said the current federal government was shocked by the findings. Andrea Richer said in an email that Harper's 2008 apology was intended to cover all such wrongdoings.

And on Wednesday, she said in another email: "We are concerned about these allegations and officials are looking into the matter."

Atleo wants a more substantive response.

He said the Harper Conservatives should stop fighting efforts by the truth and reconciliation commission to get full access to government documents about residential schools. They should also support aboriginal calls for better funding for child welfare and work to ensure food security in aboriginal families.

"Our people have been faced with incredible unilateral decisions that seem to be ... in the spirit of that same behaviour back in the '40s," said Atleo. "They should be working with First Nations and work on genuine efforts to reconciliation."

The leader of one Manitoba aboriginal community that was part of the experiments agreed.

"The apology came, but nothing follows in terms of how do we restore the dignity that they tried to destroy," said Chief Ron Evans of the Norway House First Nation. "As First Nations leaders today, we're dealing with those intergenerational impacts with very little resources to assist us."

Jean Crowder, aboriginal affairs critic for the Opposition New Democrats, pointed out that half of First Nations children still live in poverty.

"Given that level of poverty, we know that kids are not getting appropriate nutrition," said Crowder, who is attending the AFN meeting. "Perhaps as part of a gesture of good faith, they could look at some of the nutrition programs that are provided."

Federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, also in Whitehorse, said it's important that Canada's historical skeletons come out of the closet.

"There are impacts on this that go into multiple generations, and impacts that have lasting negative effects on communities," he said. "It's also why it's so important that Canadians know what the shameful history of our relationship with First Nations peoples across the country is, so we understand where we need to go in terms of restoring a balance in our relationship with the people who lived on this land first."

The past isn't past, said Atleo. It remains with us to this day.

"For there to be reconciliation, there has to be truth."

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From theGlobeandMail.com

When Canada used hunger to clear the West

JAMES DASCHUK - Jul. 19 2013

Blackfoot Camp, undated. 'a decades-long cycle of malnutrition, suppressed immunity and sickness.' (University of Toronto/Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library)

Twenty years ago, Saskatoon scholar Laurie Barron cautioned that stories of sexual and physical abuse at Indian residential schools should be taken with a grain of salt; he thought they were just too horrific to be believed in their entirety. But national leader Phil Fontaine's public admission of his abuse, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People and the haunting testimony presented recently to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada have brought the horrors of the residential school system to the forefront of our consciousness. We are often shocked, but we really shouldn't be surprised.

Nor should we be surprised by the revelations in Dr. Ian Mosby's article about the medical experimentation on malnourished aboriginal people in northern Canada and in residential schools. Rather than feed the hungry among its wards (even adult "Registered Indians" were not full citizens until 1960), government-employed physicians used pangs of hunger to further their research into malnutrition, in a plot reminiscent of the Tuskegee experiment on African-Americans with syphilis, whose conditions were monitored rather than treated.

Researching my own book forced me to reconsider many of my long-held beliefs about Canadian history. A professor of mine at Trent University once explained that Canadian expansion into the West was much less violent than that of the United States', because in that country, "the person with the fastest horse got the most land." By contrast, in the Dominion's march west, the land was prepared for settlement by government officials before the flood of immigrants.

What we didn't know at the time was that a key aspect of preparing the land was the subjugation and forced removal of indigenous communities from their traditional territories, essentially clearing the plains of aboriginal people to make way for railway construction and settlement. Despite guarantees of food aid in times of famine in Treaty No. 6, Canadian officials used food, or rather denied food, as a means to ethnically cleanse a vast region from Regina to the Alberta border as the Canadian Pacific Railway took shape.

For years, government officials withheld food from aboriginal people until they moved to their appointed reserves, forcing them to trade freedom for rations. Once on reserves, food placed in ration houses was withheld for so long that much of it rotted while the people it was intended to feed fell into a decades-long cycle of malnutrition, suppressed immunity and sickness from tuberculosis and other diseases. Thousands died.

Sir John A. Macdonald, acting as both prime minister and minister of Indian affairs during the darkest days of the famine, even boasted that the indigenous population was kept on the "verge of actual starvation," in an attempt to deflect criticism that he was squandering public funds.

Within a generation, aboriginal bison hunters went from being the "tallest in the world," due to the quality of their nutrition, to a population so sick, they were believed to be racially more susceptible to disease. With this belief that aboriginal people were inherently unwell, their marginalization from mainstream Canada was, in a sense, complete.

For more than a century, Canadians have been accustomed to reports of terrible housing conditions on reserves, unsafe drinking water, dismal educational outcomes and, at least in Western Canada, prison populations disproportionally stacked with aboriginal inmates. Aboriginal leaders and young people such as those who embraced the Idle No More movement have been calling for Canadians to fundamentally acknowledge the injustices and atrocities of the past and fix the problems that keep indigenous Canadians from living the same quality of life as their non-aboriginal neighbours.

As the skeletons in our collective closet are exposed to the light, through the work of Dr. Mosby and others, perhaps we will come to understand the uncomfortable truths that modern Canada is founded upon - ethnic cleansing and genocide - and push our leaders and ourselves to make a nation we can be proud to call home.

Dr. James Daschuk is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, an assistant professor in the faculty of kinesiology and health studies at the University of Regina and a researcher with the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit.

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From ReginaLeaderPost.com

Another ugly episode from Canada's past

THE LEADER-POST JULY 20, 2013

Canadians might have thought they knew the full story of how aboriginal communities were mistreated, relocated, neglected and abused over the last few centuries. They might have thought there was no part of that history that still had the capacity to shock.

If so, they were proved wrong by new research from Ian Mosby at the University of Guelph. The historian uncovered evidence that government researchers conducted nutritional experiments in communities in northern Manitoba and in residential schools in the 1940s and 1950s.

Although Mosby suggests the ethics might have been considered dubious even by the standards of the time, these were not rogue scientists doing covert work. They were the country's leading nutritional experts (including the co-inventor of Pablum), in the employ of Canada's government and working in stated support of the government's overall "Indian" policies.

The ends justified the means, in their minds: they wanted to come up with government strategies to help aboriginal communities be more productive and healthy.

In Northern Manitoba, they came across Cree people who were going hungry, even starving - including old people and children in government-sanctioned institutions - and instead of feeding them, they studied them.

In fact, some of the experiments depended on keeping some hungry people to an inadequate nutritional baseline for years, or denying nutrients to some parts of the population, just for comparison's sake.

In residential schools, researchers deliberately kept milk rations to less than half of the Canada Food Rules requirement for two years, to get a baseline. One school was chosen to be a "control," and thus left with a menu that the researchers acknowledged to be nutritionally poor.

Professional objectivity can be taken too far; ethics demands a respect for the fundamental rights of any research subject, especially when that subject is a human being.

The capacity these researchers showed for removing themselves from the subject of their research, for holding themselves aloof, is sickening. These were children, not objects or equations.

One goal of the project was to find out how to improve nutrition in these communities - considered to be a puzzle because, in the words of one of the nutritional experts who spearheaded the Manitoba project, "the Indian is different from us."

And why didn't they obtain informed consent from their subjects? "The Indian," as another of the lead nutrition experts put it, would only be alarmed by researchers "speaking within his hearing of procedures that he does not understand" because he "has the psychology of a child."

On the one hand, researchers were reporting that many people in Northern Manitoba were trying their best to earn a living while starving to the point where "if they were white people" they would be in bed receiving medical care; on the other hand, supporters of the project hoped it would, in the words of one residential school principal, inform agricultural education to "lead the Indian people away from indolent habits inherent in the race."

What sheer, offensive gall.

It's easy to look back at this history and sneer, to congratulate ourselves on how far we have come. But the impact of past abuse is still there for anyone to see, on many reserves and in the stories of many individuals.

This is recent, painful history. Some of the children who were in residential schools in the middle of the 20th century are still alive today. Canada is still dealing, and not very well, with the consequences of systemic racism, and still working to eradicate its persistent vestiges.

If we are ever going to move forward, as a country, from the mistakes and even crimes of our history, we must learn our history's painful lessons.

Research such as Mosby's is essential to help aboriginal communities and all Canadians come to terms with what really happened. It demonstrates the importance of good record keeping and the fact that serendipity often leads researchers down unexpected paths; Mosby wasn't looking for this story when he began his research.

And it demonstrates that Stephen Harper's apology to the victims of the residential school system was only the beginning of a process of learning, listening, and as far as possible, making amends.

This is an ugly part of our past that Canada's government must acknowledge and address.

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Canada's experiments with hungry First Nation children requires acknowledgement and action