CANADA
Daily Brew
By Steve Mertl | Daily Brew
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.”
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