How Residential School Students Became Victims of Nazi Race Science | The Walrus
In 2000, David Napier, a freelance journalist then based in Toronto, produced a long story about Indigenous residential schools. It appeared in the Anglican Journal, an “independent” newspaper of the Anglican Church with a large circulation (now about 38,000). The Journal’s editor, David Harris, recruited Napier at the suggestion of former Saturday Night magazine editor John Fraser to spend a year criss-crossing the country to find out what had transpired in residential schools and tell the stories of any survivors and staff who would speak with him.
While doing exploratory documentary research at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Napier came upon correspondence about a nutrition experiment led by a federal civil servant—Lionel Pett, the leading nutritionist in the Department of Health and Welfare—that was conducted in six residential schools between 1948 and 1952. The point of the experiment was to see which, if any, of several vitamin and mineral supplements might make a difference to the health of the generally malnourished students. The students, in other words, were known by the bureaucrats in charge of the schools to be malnourished: that was why they were useful as human subjects.
Five of the six schools each tested a different supplement. The sixth school was used as a control. Some of the students within the five schools were also used as controls and given no supplements. The study ran for five years, during which time the students essentially remained malnourished and hungry.
In addition to the basic facts of the experiment, which were bad enough, Napier found a damning memo from H. K. Brown, then chief of the Dental Health Division of Indian Health Services, to his then colleague G. Leroux, the assistant director, asking that no dental prophylaxis or sodium fluoride be used on the students during the experiment’s five-year course. Dental problems go hand in hand with vitamin deficiencies, and watching for them to appear or be relieved was part of the experiment.
While doing exploratory documentary research at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Napier came upon correspondence about a nutrition experiment led by a federal civil servant—Lionel Pett, the leading nutritionist in the Department of Health and Welfare—that was conducted in six residential schools between 1948 and 1952. The point of the experiment was to see which, if any, of several vitamin and mineral supplements might make a difference to the health of the generally malnourished students. The students, in other words, were known by the bureaucrats in charge of the schools to be malnourished: that was why they were useful as human subjects.
Five of the six schools each tested a different supplement. The sixth school was used as a control. Some of the students within the five schools were also used as controls and given no supplements. The study ran for five years, during which time the students essentially remained malnourished and hungry.
In addition to the basic facts of the experiment, which were bad enough, Napier found a damning memo from H. K. Brown, then chief of the Dental Health Division of Indian Health Services, to his then colleague G. Leroux, the assistant director, asking that no dental prophylaxis or sodium fluoride be used on the students during the experiment’s five-year course. Dental problems go hand in hand with vitamin deficiencies, and watching for them to appear or be relieved was part of the experiment.