Hungry Aboriginal Kids Became Unwitting Lab Rats in 1940s Nutrition Experiments
By Steve Mertl
[with video] Reports that scientists used aboriginal children as unwitting guinea pigs in a nutrition-research project shows Canada still has a lot to answer for in its treatment of First Nations. It's not enough that children were wrenched from their parents to spend years in assimilationist native residential schools, where sexual and physical abuse was common. Now we learn that some were deliberately starved as part of a vast experiment in the value of vitamins for at least a decade in the 1940s and early '50s. The Canadian Press reported on research by food historian Ian Mosby of the University of Guelph, who stumbled on references to the federally sponsored research while looking into the development of health policy. “I started to find vague references to studies conducted on ‘Indians’ that piqued my interest and seemed potentially problematic, to say the least,” he told CP. “I went on a search to find out what was going on.” Mosby's digging revealed a picture of a cold, cruelly calculated program using a captive population of at least 1,300 aboriginal children and some adults who were unaware they were subjects of an experiment. The researchers started in northern Manitoba where impoverished First Nations, faced the collapse of the fur trade and declining government support. were suffering from malnutrition. After a visit to the area, the scientists wrote they found a population marked by "shiftlessness, indolence, improvidence and inertia," CP reported. They theorized those characteristics "so long regarded as inherent or hereditary traits in the Indian race," were actually due to malnutrition. But instead of urging First Nation communities get more government support, the researchers saw them as a ready-made laboratory to test their theory. “This is a period of scientific uncertainty around nutrition,” Mosby told CP. “Vitamins and minerals had really only been discovered during the interwar period. “In the 1940s, there were a lot of questions about what are human requirements for vitamins. Malnourished aboriginal people became viewed as possible means of testing these theories.” The research project was launched in 1942 among 300 Cree residents of Norway House, Man. Vitamin supplements were given to 125 people but withheld from the rest. No other aid was provided even though the people were living on less than 1,500 calories a day, compared with the minimum 2,000 calories needed by healthy adults. “The research team was well aware that these vitamin supplements only addressed a small part of the problem,” Mosby wrote his paper on the subject. The nutrition project expanded to other aboriginal populations in Canada, with 1,000 children at six residential schools becoming test subjects. According to Mosby, one school withheld half the children's milk ration to get a "baseline" reading for when the allowance was increased, CP said. At another school, children were split into two groups, with one receiving vitamin, iron and iodine supplements while the other getting none. At yet another school, vitamin B1 levels were depressed to measure its impact and another, children were fed an enriched type of flour that was illegal to sell elsewhere in Canada, CP said. Children at one school got no nutritional supplements at all to compare it with those that did. And since tooth and gum health was an measuring important tool of nutrition, many dental services were withheld so as not to distort the results of the experiments, Mosby found. Lorraine Tallio, who spent three years at a notorious residential school in Port Alberni, B.C., told the Vancouver Sun she remembers half the students got milk to drink while the remainder got none. “They had staff members in the dining room,” she said. “They would make sure that the ones [who] got the milk drank the milk without sharing.” It's not clear if her experience was part of the experiments, since she attended in 1954 and Mosby found no evidence they continued past 1952. However, fellow student Leonard Pootlass, who arrived as a sickly five-year-old in 1951, remembered hunger was a perpetual issue. "They gave us enough [food] to keep us alive, more or less," he told the Sun. Mosby says on his blog that his post-doctoral paper on these experiments was "without a doubt the most difficult research project I've undertaken. "But while the subject matter and the sources were often disturbing, I think that the story itself is one the needs to be told if Canadians hope to come to grips with the devastating impact of Canada’s colonial policies governing the lives of aboriginal peoples," he said. A spokeswoman for Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt said the government was shocked by Mosby's findings. “If this story is true, this is abhorrent and completely unacceptable,” Andrea Richer said in an email to CP. “When Prime Minister [Stephen] 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.” But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by the scientists' callous treatment. When it came to First Nations, Canadian government had inherited Britain's imperialist mindset that viewed the native peoples of its empire as children in need of guidance. It's a paternalistic policy that spawned the native residential school system. How big a step is it to subjecting them to experiments without their permission? But Mosby noted the experiments were ethically dubious even at the time and produced nothing of value. "In the end, these studies did little to alter the structural conditions that led to malnutrition and hunger in the first place and, as a result, did more to bolster the career ambitions of the researchers than to improve the health of those identified as being malnourished," Mosby concluded in his paper. “They knew from the beginning that the real problem and the cause of malnutrition was underfunding," he told CP. "That was established before the studies even started and when the studies were completed that was still the problem.”
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