Aboriginal children in six residential schools across the country, including one run by the Presbyterian Church, were subjects in nutrition experiments in the 1940s and 50s, a food historian has revealed.
In the wake of World War II, official investigations showed food service was “overwhelmingly poor” in many residential schools. Government grants were not sufficient to provide foods that would meet the children’s basic nutritional requirements, yet “the official response was not to increase these grants immediately, but instead to launch further investigations,” Ian Mosby, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph, wrote in an article published in the journal Histoire sociale / Social History.
“Ian Mosby’s paper is chilling and painful to read,” says a statement issued by the Presbyterian Church. “These nutritional experiments were carried out without the knowledge and consent of the affected communities and the parents whose children attended residential school.”
In a five-year study that began in 1948, researchers examined how a different type of dietary intervention at each of six schools affected the health of students.
One of the schools was Cecilia Jeffrey in Kenora, Ont., one of two residential schools that remained the responsibility of the Presbyterian Church after the United Church was created in 1925.
In the experiment at Cecilia Jeffrey, writes Mosby, children were given the option of eating whole wheat bread “combined with an educational programme for staff and children, so as to ‘study the effects of educational procedures on choice of foods and nutrition status in a residential school.’”
At other schools run by other denominations in Kenora, Port Alberni, B.C., Schubenacadie, N.S., and southern Alberta, near Lethbridge, experiments included introducing enriched flour, vitamin supplements or increasing how much milk the children drank. In some cases, the children’s previous diet, although it was known to be inadequate, was maintained for two years to create a “base line” to be used to assess the effect of the changes. And no changes were made to the menu at one school, which acted as a “control” for the experiments.
Some forms of dental care were also denied to students for the duration of the study, since tooth decay and gingivitis “are both important factors in assessing nutritional status,” the chief of the dental health division wrote in 1949.
“The journey of healing and reconciliation between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people in Canada is a path laden with painful truth telling,” the church said in its statement. “Nutritional experimentation is another example of that painful truth. The Confession, adopted by the 120th General Assembly (1994), is a living document and we turn to it again in seeking forgiveness from God and from our aboriginal brothers and sisters whose parents were part of these nutritional experiments or who themselves may have been part of the experiments.”
Vivian Ketchum’s mother attended St. Mary’s, a Catholic-run residential school in Kenora. It was one of the six schools used for the nutrition experiments. As children, Ketchum and her siblings attended Cecilia Jeffrey, as did her father before her.
When she heard about the experiments, Ketchum said she felt angry and disgusted. “The thought of my mum as a child being used as a guinea pig was kind of sad,” she said. “My mum was a very respected person as she got older. So it was the future elders, future respected leaders that they were doing this to.”
“For us as Presbyterians, we need to be honest about the fact that this is a part of our own history since aspects of these experiments took place in Cecilia Jeffery, one of the schools we ran,” said Stephen Kendall, principal clerk of the General Assembly and the chair of the Ecumenical Working Group on Residential Schools. “That calls us to understand the truth of what happened and seek reconciliation from those who were affected by it.”
Ketchum agrees. In her work with the church’s healing and reconciliation committee, she urged people set aside their books and notes, sit in a circle together and listen with their hearts.
“The bottom line is—maybe that’s why I shared my experience and why I talk so much about this—I want people not to see us as residential school survivors but as people,” she said.
