CANADA
Toronto Star
By: Wendy Gillis News reporter, Published on Fri Jul 19 2013
Leonard Pootlass was just five years old when he was taken from the British Columbia home he shared with his grandfather and brought to Port Alberni’s residential school on Vancouver Island.
It was 1951 and, as Canadians learned this week, the young boy was about to enter a school in the midst of scientific human experimentation — nutritional testing, including the deprivation of important vitamins, without the consent or even knowledge of the young participants.
Among Pootlass’s memories of his year at the school are beatings, being left alone for days without treatment while battling illness, and having to hand wash his sheets as punishment for wetting the bed.
Learning this week that he may also have been an unwitting participant in ongoing human trials has been “alarming,” he said.
But it was not necessarily a surprise.
“When I start thinking about some of the things that they’ve done to us in the residential school, yeah, it kind of comes to mind that they were doing things to us that weren’t right,” he said in an interview from his Bella Coola, B.C. home, his voice breaking at times.
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