Canadian Nutrition Experiments ‘alarming’ but Not Surprising, Says Former Aboriginal Student
By Wendy Gillis
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. “We kind of suspected something like that was happening.” As University of Guelph researcher and food historian Ian Mosby recently detailed in a startling research paper, Pootlass may have been one of the 1,300 aboriginal people used as guinea pigs in the 1940s and 1950s to test how the deprivation of nutritional needs affected those who were malnourished. “They never treated us as human beings,” said Pootlass, who also attended another residential school when he was a teenager. “We feel devastated by what they’ve done to us at the residential schools. Even to this day, I’m 67, I’m still haunted by it.” Rather than help aboriginal people suffering the effects of malnutrition — caused by limited government aid and a collapsing fur trade — researchers decided those on struggling reserves would instead make ideal test subjects. At Pootlass’ Alberni school, researchers noticed children were particularly lacking in vitamins A, B and C. Of all the residential schools, it had the highest average deficiency of riboflavin, an important vitamin found in dairy, among other sources. Researchers therefore chose the Alberni school to test the effect of milk deprivation, according to the paper. They planned to triple the amount of milk the children were currently receiving, which was about eight ounces a day — less than half of the recommended amount. In order to get “baseline” statistics, however, they kept the children on the unhealthy eight-ounce ration for another two years. Former Port Alberni student Lorraine Tallio told the Vancouver Sun she remembered half of the children getting milk at meals. “(Staff members) would make sure that the ones (who) got the milk drank the milk without sharing,” she said. Other experiments included depriving some students of dental care, and providing some aboriginal children with the necessary vitamins they required while withholding them from others. Reached by the Star Thursday, Mosby said it was difficult to determine whether the research gleaned from the human subjects was useful. No widely cited studies were produced from the experiments themselves, he said. “I would just say overall, there was no groundbreaking scientific knowledge, definitely, and not a lot of well-cited materials were produced, from these experiments,” Mosby said. On Thursday, at the annual Assembly of First Nations meeting in Whitehorse, Yukon, the group was preparing to debate an emergency resolution calling on the Canadian government to apologize for the experiments. Chiefs at the meeting argued the apology given by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2008, acknowledging the harm caused by residential schools, was not good enough. “The chiefs-in-assembly will not accept the apology as catch-all recognition for all federal policy past, present and ongoing, which have and continue to negatively impact aboriginal peoples,” the draft resolution stated. Speaking to the Anglican Journal, which ran an article about the experiments in 2000, Dr. L.B. Pett, a researcher and the brains behind trials, acknowledged parental consent was not always obtained. But he stood behind the experiments. Defending the withholding of dental care for children in some studies, for instance, Pett, then 90, told the magazine: “It was not a deliberate attempt to leave children to develop (cavities) except for a limited time or place or purpose, and only then to study the effects of vitamin C or fluoride.” Pett died in 2003, and Mosby believes all of the researchers are now dead. Though the experiments today are ethically dubious and shocking, Mosby said he’s not surprised Pett defended his research. He thinks researchers may have truly believed the experiments were ethical. “The views that these researchers had of aboriginal people, and so called inherent racial traits, and these types of things, are so foreign, but it really coloured their worldview of what was considered ethical and what they could do to these people.” Wendy Gillis can be reached at wgillis@thestar.ca
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