CANADA
CBC News
As a 10-year-old boy, Alvin Dixon remembers having to milk cows during his stay at a residential school in Port Alberni, B.C.
Yet, he was always fed only powdered milk.
Dixon, who is now 76 years old, was forcibly taken from his family in Bella Bella, on British Columbia’s northwest coast, when he was a child and relocated to Port Alberni, B.C., where he said he and many of his classmates were starved.
“We would be so hungry and we would steal these potatoes [from farmers’ fields] and eat it raw,” he told CBC News.
Recently published research suggests Dixon’s experiences were part of a long-standing, government-run experiment designed by researchers to test the effects of malnutrition.
The research by food historian Ian Mosby has revealed the experiments involved at least 1,300 aboriginal people, most of them children.
In 1947, plans were developed for research on about 1,000 hungry aboriginal children in six residential schools in Port Alberni, B.C., Kenora, Ont., Schubenacadie, N.S., and Lethbridge, Alta.
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