Canada’s brutal experiences with Indigenous schoolchildren revealed | the Chronicle

The discovery of more than a thousand bodies of children at Canada revealed the massacre that the colonizers carried out in the indigenous communities through the system Residential schools. A recent investigation assures that minors have been used as “Laboratory rats ” in research based on diets poor in nutrients and minerals, and subjecting them to chronic disease.

The researcher’s work Allison daniel of University of Toronto it was published yesterday by The Conversation magazine. In the paper, the scientist highlights the damage caused by the malnutrition and nutrition experiences on indigenous peoples and the dark legacy they left.

The publication mentions the historian of food, Indigenous health and the politics of Canadian colonialism, Ian mosby, who discovered that between 1942 and 1952 the region’s leading nutrition scientists lconducted unethical research on 1,300 indigenous people, including 1,000 children, in the Cree communities of the north Manitoba and six residential schools in Canada.

Most of the boys were already suffering from malnutrition due to destructive government policies and dire conditions in residential schools. For researchers, this made them ideal test subjects.

Frédéric Tisdall, famous for being the co-creator of the Pablum children’s meal in the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, with Percy Moore and Lionel Bradley Pett they were the main architects of nutritional experiments.

They promised the federal government that education and dietary interventions would make Indigenous peoples most profitable assets for Canada, that if indigenous peoples were in better health, the transmission of diseases like tuberculosis to whites would decrease and assimilation would be easier.

A deadly nutritional plan

Tisdall, Moore and their team based their proposal on the results they found after subjecting 400 Cree adults and children in northern Manitoba to a series of intrusive assessments, including physical exams, x-rays and blood tests. blood.

The doctors wanted to give the children Alberni Native Residential School during two years so little milk that they are deprived of calories and nutrients necessary for their growth.

Other experiments consisted of not giving essential vitamins and minerals to children in control groups, while preventing children from Health services for the natives providing dental care under the pretext that it could affect the results of the study.

Research became more relevant in the 1940s, after the Canadian council on nutrition recognized that over 60% of the Canadian population is nutritionally deficient.

“Until then, all food-related experiments had been done on animals, but researchers like Pett, who was the lead author of what would later become Canada’s Food Guide, seized the opportunity to use indigenous peoples as laboratory rats“Daniel explained.

“While writers like Pett have often acted under the pretext of understanding and helping Indigenous peoples, it was clear that these nutritional experiences were motivated by race“adds the researcher.

AE Caldwell, director of the Alberni Indigenous Residential School, said malnutrition was caused by traditional diets and lifestyles, which he also called “indolent habits”.

“Prohibiting all children from appropriate traditional foods is yet another means of colonization and cultural genocide“said the academic.

the Final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission indicates that the main causes of death of children in residential schools were physical damage, malnutrition, disease and neglect. For the children who survived, going through these schools was an extremely traumatic experience.

“Experimenting with children who were already in pain was immoral”, finished the scientist.

Since the discovery of the first bodies of Indigenous children, a wave of indignation in Canada, where ten Catholic churches were vandalized, nearly a dozen temples were destroyed by fires and statues in front of the Manitoba Provincial Parliament were demolished by about a thousand people.