Ornery History: Nutritional Testing at Residential Schools
It’s real history, as told by some angry dude in my inbox and me.
This post contains sensitive content on racism and the abuse of Indigenous people, specifically children. It also contains an intense amount of body shaming from him. Reader discretion is advised.
The children were starving of obvious malnourishment. The solution was there in the researchers’ records. The children needed healthier food and more of it, but that isn’t what happened. This story focuses on tests done by nutritional experts and the Canadian government between 1942-1952 at multiple Residential Schools.
After the loss of their land, and being forced to rely on processed foods, many Indigenous peoples faced lack of nutrition and starvation levels of calorie intake. Their way of life was disrupted in all ways from the non Aboriginal people, who over hunted the wildlife, and fish, making it difficult to find food, or furs to trade. In 1942 a group of researchers began to run medical testing on Aboriginal communities. Immediately they found malnutrition and hunger describing it as, “while most of the people were going about trying to make a living, 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.” The average daily calorie intake was only 1,470, far less than what would be healthy. Their children, forcibly taken from them and placed in Residential Schools, faced no better fate.
Hunger was in the memories of those that survived the horror of those schools, if they even survived. The death rate for Canada’s Residential Schools in some cases exceeded 50 percent. It was within this nightmare environment that researchers began studying Aboriginal children at Alberni Residential School.
Although usually the guests on my history stories are messaging a satirical profile of me as a conservative, this man messaged Let’s Not Date on Facebook. He came to tell me how much he loved the page, I think.
Even when these men are trying to be angry, they still circle back to penises.
The children never saw any benefit from being used as test subjects. Although the researchers saw they were starving, the researchers seemed to care only about using these people to further their own careers. The children’s stay at the Residential Schools only exacerbated the issue of malnourishment. The children were never taught traditional ways of sustenance and were forced to rely on processed foods.
Indigenous communities have historically been used as laboratories for tests that benefit white families. I’ll be covering more in the future. If you have a suggestion for a specific story on this that you think should be known by more people, please leave me a comment.
The story of how these children were used as test subjects was uncovered by historian Ian Mosby. Thank you to his efforts digging through old files to find this story, and his efforts talking to the media to make this information public.
If you think you’ve read this story before, you may have. This is part of my old work that I am re-editing to higher image quality as well as adding more information to my introduction as I get these ready to put into a book. Speaking of which, the best way to help me achieve this goal is to subscribe.
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Sources:
The Legacy of Nutritional Experiments in Residential School
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All that and all he can ask is about dicks
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