CANADA
APTN
By Jorge Barrera
APTN National News
The nutritional experiments conducted in First Nation communities and in Indian residential schools were not the only example where Canada’s Indigenous population faced treatment as “guinea pigs,” academic research shows.
First Nation infants were used for Saskatchewan trials of a tuberculosis vaccine that was mired in controversy at the time of the experiment in the 1930s.
The subject of nutritional experiments exploded last week after reports surfaced on a study by University of Guelph food historian Ian Mosby. The study found that experiments were conducted in six residential schools and communities in northern Ontario, northern Manitoba, British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia between 1942 and 1952.
Previous and ongoing academic research shows, however, that the nutritional experiments were part of a wider pattern in the medical and scientific community’s approach to Indigenous people at the time which included experimentation and the persistence of certain types of surgeries that were no longer conducted on non-Indigenous people.
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