CANADA
Calgary Herald
Heartbreaking is the only word that can describe the revelations by University of Guelph food historian Ian Mosby that aboriginal children and adults were deliberately kept on starvation diets and denied basic nutrition as part of experiments more than 60 years ago.
Mosby said that experiments took place on reserves in northern Manitoba as well as at six residential schools around the country. They involved denying some of the children and adults vitamins and minerals, recommended levels of milk, adulterated flour, oranges, and even dental services. The 1,300 “subjects” used in the experiments were already hungry and suffering nutritionally. One of those children was Assembly of First Nations national chief Shawn Atleo’s father, who attended a residential school in Port Alberni, B.C.
It is terribly painful to think of people being deliberately deprived of food in this land of plenty, and adding to that hurt is the knowledge that they were treated as heartlessly as if they had been lab rats instead of human beings. In fact, the experiments and the complete lack of ethics involved with carrying them out sound, frankly, like something that would have come out of Nazi Germany.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.