Without consent
Let’s call it what it is: Canada’s historical treatment of Aboriginal Peoples qualifies as a crime against humanity.
The recently unearthed documents describing horrific experiments on malnourished Native children in the 1940s and 1950s is further proof that, even after the horrors of Nazi Germany, the Canadian government treated our ancestors as less than fully human.
These medical experiments, implemented without the knowledge or consent of its subjects or their parents, were conducted after doctors began to link high rates of tuberculosis and blindness in the Manitoba village of Norway House to widespread malnutrition. Instead of treating everyone stricken with starvation-related diseases, however, these researchers let some children continue to starve while providing proper care to a portion of the community’s patients.
Not surprisingly, the lucky members showed a marked improvement in health. Still, according to Canadian food historian Ian Mosby, the experiments that began in Norway House expanded to residential schools in Port Alberni, BC; Kenora, ON; Shubenacadie, NS; and Lethbridge, AB. At least 1300 Native people, most of them helpless children in residential schools, were ruthlessly used as guinea pigs by researchers probing the effectiveness of vitamin supplements.
Subjects were kept on starvation-level diets and were given or denied vitamins, minerals and certain foods. At one school, no students were allowed essential supplements. In another, researchers had a school feed their captive students less than half the recommended amount of milk rations for two years to get a “baseline” reading for the point in time that milk servings were increased. Dental services were also denied to enable researchers to measure the accuracy of their inhuman experiments, which continued for over a decade.
The Canadian government now says it is appalled to learn that federal bureaucrats may have used hungry Aboriginal children and adults as unwitting subjects in nutritional experiments. Given that this research began at the same time as the Nuremberg trials were making worldwide headlines, there is no question that federal decision-makers didn’t understand the inhumanity of their actions.
The Nuremburg trials also addressed the infamous Nazi experiments on captive human beings. Of course, the Nazis didn’t consider their largely Jewish test subjects to be fully human, an attitude that enabled them to impose terrible suffering on fellow humans in the name of science. I fail to see the difference with the government-enforced starvation of Native children here. It’s important to note that a House of Commons committee gave its official blessing to the continuation and expansion of nutritional experiments.
The Nuremberg trials led to the development of the Nuremberg Code. It is a fundamental international law whose first stipulation states that medical research on human subjects must never be conducted without the voluntary consent of the test subject. Another ironclad rule forbids all unnecessary physical and mental suffering or injury. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the research at any stage if he or she has probable cause to believe that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death.
Even as the Canadian government signed on to the Nuremberg Code, it was knowingly and enthusiastically breaking it.
“Not much was learned from those hungry little bodies,” said Mosby. “They knew from the beginning that the real problem and the cause of malnutrition was underfunding. That was established before the studies even started and when the studies were completed that was still the problem.”
Did the Canadian government need to starve hundreds of children to see if it would have a detrimental effect on their health? Asking the question makes one wonder what the real motives could have been. We are still prosecuting 90-year-old Nazis for their roles, however small, in the Holocaust. So when will the government perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Canada be brought to justice?