Expendable Humanity

"I started to find vague references to studies conducted on 'Indians' that piqued my interest and seemed potentially problematic, to say the least. I went on a search to find out what was going on."
"This is a period of scientific uncertainty around nutrition. Vitamins and minerals had really only been discovered during the interwar period. In the 1940s, there were a lot of questions about what are human requirements for vitamins. Malnourished aboriginal people became viewed as [a] possible means of testing these theories."
"The research team was well aware that these vitamin supplements only addressed a small part of the problem. The experiment seems to have been driven, at least in part, by the nutrition experts' desire to test their theories on a ready made 'laboratory' populated with already malnourished human experimental subjects."
"I think they really did think they were helping people. Whether they thought they were helping the people that were actually involved in the studies, that's a different question."
"I assumed that somebody would have written about an experiment conducted on aboriginal people during this period, and kept being surprised when I found more details and the scale of it. I was really, really surprised. It's an emotionally difficult topic to study."
"They knew from the beginning that the real problem and the cause of malnutrition was underfunding. That was established before the studies even started and when the studies were completed that was still the problem."
Ian Mosby, University of Guelph

Mr. Mosby's academic line of study is the history of food in Canada. He happened to be researching the development of government health policy revolving around food and nutrition when he came across documentation that gave him incredulous pause. He began to look a little harder, a little deeper, and what came to his astonished attention was a history that beggared the imagination in its racist stupidity, and he reported on it. "This was the hardest thing I've ever written", he said.

He was speaking of the government documents he uncovered revelatory of a experiment of long standing that used indigenous peoples dependent on government assistance to help them cope with the fundamentals of life's existential requirements, and who appear to have been considered by scientists working for the Government of Canada in the 1940s as a convenient and isolated demographic on whom they could mount experiments.

These were people in huge need. They were hungry and impoverished. The trade in furs that had once sustained them in a subsistence economy had collapsed, making them more heavily dependent on government aid, and government of the day, having invested in prosecuting along with its allies, a world war of great dimensions, had lowered the level of support given aboriginals. The scientists viewed them as being afflicted with "shiftlessness, indolence, improvidence and inertia". Conditions which Mr. Mosby points out acerbically related to famine conditions.

As food and nutrition scientists it should have been obvious to those investigators that what they were confronting was an epidemic of mass starvation requiring immediate government intervention to provide those people with life-nourishing whole foods. Instead, they hit on the idea of using the hungry as experimental subjects where groups were selected to receive vitamin supplements withheld from other groups, to compare the effects. These were people whom the researchers imagined to be living on less than 1,500 calories daily whereas healthy adults require at least 2,000 daily calories.

The initial experiments dated from 1942. By 1947, another brilliant idea took form, to use a thousand hungry aboriginal children in six residential schools in Port Alberni, British Columbia, Kenora, Ontario, Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, and Lethbridge Alberta, for various modes of 'research'. For example, withholding the full daily milk quotient to determine its effect on the needs of a growing child. Children were also divided into groups that received vitamin, iron and iodine supplements, and those where they were withheld. Another where B1 vitamins were used or withheld.

Dental services were withdrawn from participating schools, so that investigation into gum health as a measuring tool of health outcomes wouldn't be compromised by children having dental attention resulting in healthy gums. And finally, it would seem that what resulted from those studies experimenting on growing children and other people in dire need of supplemental foods to maintain a state of decent health, was nothing very much.

The government scientists involved would have been appalled if anyone had suggested that they were operating in a manner that closely resembled the medical science investigation and trials conducted by Third Reich health professionals about the same time frame, during the Second World War, on ill and hungry concentration camp prisoners. Where experiments on human survival and human procreation were undertaken to satisfy the scientific curiosity of a Nazi hierarchy that concerned itself with improving human health.

That is to say the human health of its German citizens within the Nordic community of humanity. The mostly Jews, but also gypsies, gays and prisoners of conscience on whom surgeries and experiments were undertaken were held to be hugely less than human, representing useful fodder for experimentation, whether they might survive their ordeals or not.