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Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952

By Ian Mosby
Project Muse
July 19, 2013

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/histoire_sociale_social_history/v046/46.91.mosby.html

Between 1942 and 1952, some of Canada’s leading nutrition experts, in cooperation with various federal departments, conducted an unprecedented series of nutritional studies of Aboriginal communities and residential schools. The most ambitious and perhaps best known of these was the 1947–1948 James Bay Survey of the Attawapiskat and Rupert’s House Cree First Nations. Less well known were two separate long-term studies that went so far as to include controlled experiments conducted, apparently without the subjects’ informed consent or knowledge, on malnourished Aboriginal populations in Northern Manitoba and, later, in six Indian residential schools. This article explores these studies and experiments, in part to provide a narrative record of a largely unexamined episode of exploitation and neglect by the Canadian government. At the same time, it situates these studies within the context of broader federal policies governing the lives of Aboriginal peoples, a shifting Canadian consensus concerning the science of nutrition, and changing attitudes towards the ethics of biomedical experimentation on human beings during a period that encompassed, among other things, the establishment of the Nuremberg Code of experimental research ethics.

Resume

Entre 1942 et 1952, certains des principaux specialistes canadiens de la nutrition ont realise, en collaboration avec divers ministeres federaux, une serie sans precedent d’etudes nutritionnelles dans les communautes autochtones et les pensionnats indiens. La plus ambitieuse et peut-etre la plus connue d’entre elles est l’enquete realisee en 1947–1948 aupres des nations cries d’Attawapiskat et de Rupert House de la baie James. Mais ce qu’on savait moins, c’est que deux etudes a long terme distinctes etaient meme [End Page 145] allees jusqu’a faire des experiences controlees, apparemment sans leur consentement eclaire ou a leur insu, sur les populations souffrant de malnutrition du Nord du Manitoba et, plus tard, de six pensionnats indiens. L’article examine ces etudes et ces experiences pour, en partie, faire le compte rendu d’un episode largement inexplore d’exploitation et de negligence par le gouvernement canadien. Il situe egalement ces etudes dans le cadre des politiques plus larges du gouvernement federal gouvernant la vie des peuples autochtones, de l’evolution du consensus canadien sur la science de la nutrition ainsi que du changement d’attitude face a l’ethique de l’experimentation biomedicale chez l’etre humain durant une periode qui aura ete temoin, entre autres choses, de l’etablissement du Code de Nuremberg, qui precise les regles d’ethique a respecter pour faire de la recherche experimentale sur l’etre humain.

 

 

 

 

 




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