CANADA
Montreal Gazette
BY MICHAEL WOODS, POSTMEDIA NEWS JULY 23, 2013
OTTAWA — Grassroots indigenous activists are calling on the Harper government to honour the 2008 Indian residential schools apology, part of the ongoing fallout from news that aboriginal adults and children were unwitting subjects of nutritional experiments run by government bureaucrats in the 1940s and 1950s.
News of the experiments has provoked mass outrage and also led to renewed scrutiny of what critics see as the government’s lack of cooperation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) efforts to compile a historical record of Indian residential schools.
The experiments, which involved intentionally depriving 1,300 aboriginal people — including children in several residential schools — of important vitamins and leaving them malnourished between 1942 and 1952, were detailed in a research paper by University of Guelph food historian Ian Mosby.
The news provoked horror among non-aboriginal Canadians, and outrage coupled with a sad sense of familiarity among indigenous peoples whose relatives have told them of such horrors that took place at the government-funded, church-run residential schools.
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