Starved Canadian Aboriginal Children Were Used In Government Experiments During 1940s
July 19th, 2013
Aboriginal children were deliberately starved in the 1940s and ’50s by government researchers in the name of science.
Milk rations were halved for years at residential schools across the country.
Essential vitamins were kept from people who needed them.
Dental services were withheld because gum health was a measuring tool for scientists and dental care would distort research.
For over a decade, aboriginal children and adults were unknowingly subjected to nutritional experiments by Canadian government bureaucrats.
This disturbing look into government policy toward aboriginals after World War II comes to light in recently published historical research.
When Canadian researchers went to a number of northern Manitoba reserves in 1942 they found rampant malnourishment. But instead of recommending increased federal support to improve the health of hundreds of aboriginals suffering from a collapsing fur trade and already limited government aid, they decided against it. Nutritionally deprived aboriginals would be the perfect test subjects, researchers thought.
The details come from Ian Mosby, a post-doctorate at the University of Guelph, whose research focused on one of the most horrific aspects of government policy toward aboriginals during a time when rules for research on humans were just being adopted by the scientific community.
Researching the development of health policy for a different research project, Mosby uncovered “vague references to studies conducted on ‘Indians’ ” and began to investigate.
Government documents eventually revealed a long-standing, government-run experiment that came to span the entire country and involved at least 1,300 aboriginals, most of them children.
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