Inter-racial, inter-faith crowd rallies for answers

Prayer vigils were held July 25 in Edmonton and Calgary as part of national action to condemn the federal government for using children at six residential schools for experimentation.  Children who attended St. Paul’s and Blood schools, on the Blood reserve, were among those included in government tests.

 “Scientists chose Aboriginal children because they were already malnourished and starving,” said Jodi Stonehouse, member of the Michel First Nation and local organizer for the Edmonton event.

The gathering in Edmonton, which was relocated at the last minute to Beaver Hills Park in downtown, was a mixture of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and a variety of faith communities.

“I find that really hopeful,” said Stonehouse.  “They’re saying as Canadians we care about what happened.”

That all Canadians take an interest in what is happening is “absolutely critical,” said MP Edmonton Strathcona MP Linda Duncan, who spoke at the #HonourtheApology event in Edmonton.  “We are all treaty people … and we need to honour those treaties.”

Duncan said a recent forum hosted by the NDP to discuss the Idle No More movement had a “very mixed audience” of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal and may be a sign that Canadians are becoming more aware that Indigenous issues have a broader impact.

In early July, University of Guelph historian Ian Mosby published research that indicated that First Nations communities – and close to 1,000 children in six residential schools – were unknowing subjects in biomedical experiments in malnourishment and hunger by federal government officials between 1942-52. Experimentation in the schools took place in 1948-1952.

Stonehouse says stories of malnutrition and lack of food at residential schools have been well known, but the news that scientists and Aboriginal Affairs Canada chose to study the issue instead of correct the problem is “shocking.”

According to Mosby’s findings, students at the Blood school had their diet supplemented with Canada Approved Vitamin B flour after a two-year baseline study for thiamine deficiency had been established, while students at St. Paul’s were chosen as part of a “control” group, despite clear indication that their food was inadequate and vitamin-deficient.

“…During the war and early postwar period – bureaucrats, doctors, and scientists recognized the problems of hunger and malnutrition, yet increasingly came to view Aboriginal bodies as ‘experimental materials’ and residential schools and Aboriginal communities as kinds of ‘laboratories’ that they could use to purse a number of different political and professional interests,” writes Mosby.

Mosby also states that the limitation of residential school documentation makes it difficult to determine “how much these ethical considerations – or the fact that children known to be malnourished would be used as controls – played into the design of the experiment or were explicitly discussed by the researchers.”

For this very reason, says Stonehouse, the federal government needs to abide by a court ruling made earlier this year stating that all documentation on residential schools be turned over to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC challenged the federal government in Ontario Superior Court to produce all relevant documentation housed in the Library and Archives of Canada.

But, says Stonehouse, the government is claiming it will cost too much to comply.

Forcing the government to produce that documentation was one of the rallying points at the national gatherings.  Participants are also pushing for a national inquiry into the experiments at the schools and the students involved.

“I think people have a right to know what was done to their bodies,” said Stonehouse. That right also extends to the next generations, whose health may suffer from what was done to their parents or grandparents.

Speaking following the event, Duncan said she was wary about calling for another inquiry, especially now that provincial leaders have gotten behind the push for a national inquiry on murdered and missing Aboriginal women and girls.

“There needs to be some kind of open forum, in particular for First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, a briefing for every community,” she said.

States Mosby, “Perhaps the most significant legacy of these studies of Aboriginal nutrition during the 1940s and 1950s is that they provide us with a unique and disturbing window into the ways in which – under the guise of benevolent administrators and even charity – bureaucrats, scientists, and a whole range of experts exploited their ‘discovery’ of malnutrition in Aboriginal communities and residential schools to further their own professional and political interests rather than to address the root causes of these problems or, for that matter, the Canadian government’s complicity in them.”

#HonourtheApology events were held Vancouver, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, a number of Ontario locations, as well as First Nations.

Caption: Lewis Cardinal watches on as NDP Edmonton Strathcona MP Linda Duncan addresses close to 250 people  at the recent #HonourtheApology vigil held in Edmonton. Events took place throughout the country.