Hunger Experimentation on Aboriginals (1940s-50s)
In May 2013, Ian Mosby, a historian of food and nutrition and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph, published an article entitled, "Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952," in Histoire sociale/Social History. The article presents the finding that beginning in 1942 aboriginal populations—children and adults—were used for nutritional experiments without their consent. Mosby summarizes his paper as follows:
Between 1942 and 1952, some of Canada’s leading nutrition experts, in cooperation with various federal departments, conducted an unprecedented series of nutritional studies of Aboriginal communities and residential schools. The most ambitious and perhaps best known of these was the 1947-1948 James Bay Survey of the Attawapiskat and Rupert’s House Cree First Nations. Less well known were two separate long-term studies that went so far as to include controlled experiments conducted, apparently without the subjects’ informed consent or knowledge, on malnourished Aboriginal populations in Northern Manitoba and, later, in six Indian residential schools.
The notion of using aboriginal populations for experimentation emerged when government researchers visiting some remote reserve communities discovered that residents were suffering from hunger, a result of the declining fur trade and reduced government support programs. In the case of the first experiment in 1942, 300 malnourished Norway House Cree in Manitoba were used as a testing group, with 125 being selected to receive vitamin supplements.
The experiments eventually spread to various other aboriginal populations, including six residential schools located in Port Alberni (BC), Kenora (ON), Schubenacadie (NS), and Lethbridge (AB). In the case of one school, milk rations were purposely cut to half the recommended amount for two years in order to develop a 'baseline' reading for the research.
Ultimately, Mosby notes that the research achieved little in the way of improving the healthy of aboriginal peoples who were studied:
The experiments eventually spread to various other aboriginal populations, including six residential schools located in Port Alberni (BC), Kenora (ON), Schubenacadie (NS), and Lethbridge (AB). In the case of one school, milk rations were purposely cut to half the recommended amount for two years in order to develop a 'baseline' reading for the research.
Ultimately, Mosby notes that the research achieved little in the way of improving the healthy of aboriginal peoples who were studied:
... these studies did little to alter the structural conditions that led to malnutrition and hunger in the first place and, as a result, did more to bolster the career ambitions of the researchers than to improve the health of those identified as being malnourished.
