Abused and Experimented On, Survivors of Canadian Indian School Receive Apology from Church

By Deborah Hastings
New York Daily News
August 16, 2013

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/church-abuse-dormitory-school-canada-article-1.1428958

Archive photos of Canadian students at the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario.

Survivors of an infamous dormitory school who were abused, subjected to medical experiments and put on starvation diets for several years after World War II, received a personal apology this week from the Presbyterian Church of Canada.

A recent study revealed that children at the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School, and five other institutions, were unwitting subjects in medical and nutritional experiments.

In the 1940s and 1950s, researchers at Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Reisdential School, as well as five other dormitory schools, kept students on severely low diets, administering vitamins only to some to gauge the effectiveness of the supplements.

Vitamins and mineral supplements were new medical products at the time and scientists were keen to track their benefits to humans.

Presbyterian archives photo of dormitory school classroom in 1960.

But the Canada experiments went beyond that. Children had their milk rations cut and were denied dental care so as not to interfere with the effects of being kept on a starvation-level diet.

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Thes new report, conducted by Canadian food historian Ian Mosby, is the latest atrocity to come to light from the government program of taking aboriginal children from their families and installing them in dormitory schools across the country, where they were banned from speaking their native tongues, forced to attend Christian church services, and subjected to physical and sexual abuse by staff members including priests and nuns.

Several survivors gathered Wednesday on the grounds where the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School once stood in Ontario, holding a vigil for native Canadian children who were ripped from their families and forced into residential schools run by churches and funded by the government.

Former students at Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School demand full disclosure of what was done to them after revelations they had been subjected to medical experiments.

Some wept as church representative Peter Bush told them, “I want to acknowledge that at Cecilia Jeffrey, there was physical abuse and sexual abuse and emotional abuse. For that, I am profoundly and deeply sorry,” he said, according to CBC News.

“We sinned, and I am sorry for that.”

Established in the late 1800s, the last residential school closed in 1996.