This past summer, Ian Mosby published an article in Histoire Sociale/Social History in which he discussed some surprising documents he found while researching Canadian nutrition policy. The documents detailed government-sponsored biomedical and nutritional experimentation on Indigenous children at six Canadian residential schools, as well as in Northern Manitoban Indigenous communities. Soon after CBC Radio reported on the story, debate about Canada’s historic treatment of Indigenous peoples was ignited. At that time, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada had entered its final year after four years of hearing survivors’ testimony about the violence and degradation suffered in Canadian Indian residential schools. But the thought of malnourished children used as test subjects for vitamin supplements, as well as fortified flour that caused anemia, struck a particular chord with the public. It is in this context that, alongside the revelation that the...
Andrew Woolford is a professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Colonial Genocide and Indigenous North America (Duke University Press, 2014) and is currently preparing a manuscript titled “‘This Benevolent Experiment’: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide and Redress in the U.S. and Canada.”
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