Canada: A place where kids go hungry still [editorial]

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever written” said Ian Mosby, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Guelph, about his article “Administering Colonial Science”, published in May and revealed to the wider world in a recent Canadian Press report.

Mosby’s work looked at nutritional research conducted on Aboriginal people (many of them children) between 1942 and 1952, and we have to say that the article was a stomach-turning, maddening read, primarily because of the inhumanity of the time, but also because there are so many parallels to that inhumanity in today’s Canada.

The article begins in Norway House and Cross Lake, Man. where nutrition researchers arrived in March of 1942. The desperate state of Indian health was already known. A collapse of the fur trade, the economic collapse of the Great Depression, the scarcity of food animals because of over-hunting, the growing dependency on government and the reduction of relief payments in the name of austerity and restraint had led to much hardship. But even then the researchers were struck by the “frightening toll that malnutrition and hunger appeared to be taking” on the Cree of northern Manitoba.

People were trying to go about making a living when they were “really sick enough to be in bed under treatment and that if they were white people, they would be in bed and demanding care and medical attention,” reads a report from that time. †Disease was also rampant. The death rate from tuberculosis was 1,400 per 100,000 in northern Cree communities (compared with 27.1 for the non-Aboriginal population). The infant mortality rate was eight times greater than in the general Canadian population.

The researchers surmised that the characteristics of “shiftlessness, indolence, improvidence and inertia,” which were attributed to the Indian race, were in fact a result of malnutrition; that disease susceptibility was from a lack of food. And they wanted to test their theories.

Instead of rushing to aid those afflicted by providing emergency food relief, Canada decided that the already malnourished population was ripe for experimentation, using the communities as laboratories and the people’s bodies as research material. And then they expanded that research across the country to other areas known for decades to be impoverished; where the lack of food was a constant—Indian residential schools.

It is heartbreaking to know that Indian children went hungry in residential schools because of the lack of funding provided for their care, but it is infuriating to know that they went hungry by design in the name of scientific research. And for years, hundreds of children were denied dental care, which was readily available to others, in the effort to assess the results of that experimentation.

Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, was quick out of the gate to draw a line from the nutritional experiments of the past that withheld food to children in residential school to the underfunding of child welfare on reserves. And he was right to do so. Instead of ensuring that the children currently in care have what they need, there is another great government experiment occurring that results in continued want.

And we need to also look beyond even this. Not long ago, Canada was critical of a United Nations report that states two to three million people in this country can’t afford the diets they need to live healthy lives. More than one million of those are Aboriginal people. There are places in this country that food is either unaffordable or inaccessible.

Recently, the national chief’s home community of Ahousaht, a remote, isolated island on the west coast of Vancouver Island, opened a food bank. Social assistance payments to the community that is largely bereft of economic opportunity were reduced suddenly and without warning. Canada refuses to negotiate in any substantial way on Ahousaht’s commercial fishing rights, won three times over in Canada’s own courts. If allowed to fully realize the benefits of those rights, Ahousaht citizens could put food on their tables and dollars in their pockets. There would be less dependence; less hunger, less sickness.

Ahousaht is only one community of many hundreds across the country in such dire circumstances. Canada compounds its inhumanity of the past by continually denying Aboriginal communities their fair and deserved share, and the result is simple.

This government is still starving Aboriginal kids.