How Residential School Students Became Victims of Nazi Race Science

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.

Napier’s groundbreaking story brought the grim facts of the schools to a readership that needed to understand what had gone on but was unlikely to plow through the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples or John Milloy’s or J. R. Miller’s well-documented works on residential schools.

The Journal was interested in the schools because, following the revelatory hearings of the Royal Commission, residential school survivors had filed about 7,000 lawsuits against the churches that ran the schools until 1969 (after which time the federal government took them over and did no better) and the federal government. A few claims had already been adjudicated, resulting in large damage awards. The churches were staring at the likelihood that many more claims would succeed. Church bankruptcies were probable.

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.

The Journal’s editor tracked down Pett, who was, by then, living in a retirement home in British Columbia. Napier interviewed him on the phone. Pett told Napier he had no regrets about doing the study.

Napier, editor David Harris, and freelance handling editor Moira Farr decided to run the story on Pett’s experiment separate from their main opus on the schools. They gave it front-page treatment, and it was noticed. The day the story came out, Napier spent all day on the phone explaining what he’d found to reporter after reporter from the CBC. (Months later, the New York Times ran a front-page story above the fold.) But after that first rush of phone calls, media interest dissipated. The editor at the Anglican Journal was soon out of a job.

In 2013, Ian Mosby, now a historian of food and “the politics of settler colonialism” at Toronto Metropolitan University—but then a post-doc at the University of Guelph—published a lengthy paper in the academic journal Histoire Sociale/Social History. His paper gave the historical context for Pett’s nutrition experiment that Napier had reported on and also described two nutrition surveys of Indigenous people led by scientists working for the Canadian government and major institutions such as McGill University and the US Public Health Service.

Mosby’s article caused a stir in the national and international media as well as in the bioethics community. Mosby gave a detailed exposition of Pett’s nutrition experiment (mentioning Napier in two footnotes). Starting in 1948, according to Mosby, Pett and his colleagues tested nutrition supplements on about a thousand children in five residential schools. It had been well known for years within the departments responsible for services to reserves and for the residential schools that the kids were not properly fed. During the Depression, the government had cut back on the per-capita grants it paid to the churches, making it impossible to improve diets.

Instead, the food got worse and stayed that way. Canadian officials in charge of the schools received numerous reports from their own staff about appalling practices in the schools’ kitchens and pleas for more money from despairing school principals. They also got complaints from school visitors and workmen, who saw kids rooting around for edible garbage in the animal barns, and from parents, all decrying the fact that the kids were not eating enough food—and eating rotten food. Officials were warned repeatedly over many years that the unpasteurized milk used in many schools harboured tuberculosis bacilli, and this was causing the disease to spread from the children back to their reserves.

Pett had in hand survey results showing the children in the residential schools were deficient in the full range of vitamins deemed necessary for human health. From his point of view, their malnourished state made them useful as study subjects. As Mosby explained, nutrition as a science was still in its early days. There were many questions to resolve. Which specific supplements would have a desirable impact on health? In what form? The children studied were subjected to numerous blood tests, IQ tests, aptitude tests, and dental exams. They were thoroughly objectified.

Mosby’s exposition, like Napier’s, made it clear that the children were basically still hungry throughout the five years when the experiment proceeded. At Port Alberni school, in BC, which was known to give its students less than half the milk they needed, the nutritional effects of tripling the amount of milk were tested. But first, for two years, all the children in that school were kept on deficient milk rations to provide a baseline, according to Mosby. At another school, the use of vitamin-fortified flour including the additive bone meal was tested, though the federal government did not allow such flour to be used in Canada. Some of the children who ate it developed anemia.

Answering scientific questions had been Pett’s priority. And yet he published his results only in a few papers given at conferences, or in internal reports to his colleagues. I found no article by Pett in which he told the scientific community all of what had been learned.

From the point of view of human decency, the nutritional surveys Mosby reported on in the same article were just as bad, perhaps worse. The people studied in several Indigenous communities were under the impression that the doctors, the nurse, the dentist, and the anthropologist pinching and prodding them and the technician X-raying them had come to treat their diseases.

They were deceived. And they were in no position to provide voluntary informed consent as specified by the Nuremberg Code, not that there is any evidence they were asked to give it. Their means of livelihood had been hunting, trapping, and fishing, but the animals they had relied on had begun to disappear. By the time the second survey was done, they were, in large measure, dependent on food purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company. The money for buying that food came in part from trading furs but mainly from the federal government’s newly instituted family allowance payments. After that benefit was introduced, annual incomes on reserves had gone up about 50 percent—from close to nothing during World War II to barely something by 1947. Because Canadian officials and scientists conducted these surveys under Canada’s authority, and because the people in those communities relied on the government for their survival, they were under duress to comply.

The first nutrition survey was done in 1942, among people the scientists called “Bush Indians,” who lived in Norway House, Cross Lake, God’s Lake, Rossville, and the Pas. The second was done in the Indigenous communities of Attawapiskat and Rupert’s House, both near James Bay. The first was led by Percy Moore, who, at that time, was the acting superintendent of medical services in the Indian Affairs branch of the Department of Mines and Resources. (That’s right: the health of Indigenous people at that time was in the hands of bureaucrats in charge of exploiting natural resources.) By 1945, Moore and the medical services branch, renamed Indian Health Services, had moved to the Department of Health and Welfare.

Moore would use the results of these surveys, which showed that people in the communities were getting by on a nutritionally hopeless diet of lard, white flour, sugar, and jam, to ask the Hudson’s Bay Company to only let people use family allowance money to buy clothing and foods on a government-approved list. The main articles on the surveys were published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 1946 and 1948. Doctors across the country would have read both.

I pulled out those papers. According to the first article published in 1946 (whose first author was Moore) Indigenous people in the bush were in transition from a once-healthy life to a modern one, which was anything but. The authors displayed a repugnant, supercilious racism when describing the circumstances of the people in the communities surveyed.

The authors also listed the terrifying rates of disease and death among these Indigenous communities: deaths in childbirth were as high as 400 per 1,000 live births (versus fifty-two for white Canadians). The tuberculosis rate was 1,400 per 100,000, while for the white population of Manitoba, it was 27.1 per 100,000. All the people studied showed signs of nutritional deficiencies: “It is obvious that the basic food of the Norway House Indian was deficient in practically every nutritional factor studied.”

The researchers understood that such dietary insufficiencies were the cause of higher levels of morbidity and mortality. Their summary of findings included the following: “The dietary intake failed to meet the recommended daily allowances for most nutrients. For a number of nutrients the margin was so far under the recommended levels that it is obvious the diet was markedly deficient. . . .”

As Mosby pointed out, the adults of these Manitoba communities were getting fewer calories than the number Ancel Keys, an American physiologist and the inventor of K-rations for US military use during World War II, had determined would result in starvation. The inhabitants of Norway House had clear clinical indicators of malnutrition: ophthalmological changes, gingivitis, even the neurological signs of diseases like beriberi. Where, once, these people had been described as having extraordinary vigour, now they were described as listless. “Every Indian observed had some abnormality of the conjunctive, ocular limbic blood vessels, tongue or gums.”

The article ended with this: “It is not unlikely that many characteristics such as shiftlessness, indolence, improvidence and inertia, so long regarded as inherent or hereditary traits in the Indian race may, at the root, be really the manifestations of malnutrition. Furthermore, it is probable that the Indians’ great susceptibility to many diseases paramount amongst which is tuberculosis, may be attributable among other causes to their high degree of malnutrition, arising from lack of proper foods.”

This survey was followed in 1947 by a second one done on the communities of Attawapiskat and Rupert’s House. The second survey team was bigger than the first. It included anthropologists under the direction of Gordon Brown of the University of Toronto, a dentist, and an X-ray technician with X-ray equipment. The first author of the resulting article was R. P. Vivian, chairman of the Department of Health and Social Medicine at McGill University.

The survey was in part funded by the departments of National Health and Welfare and Mines and Resources, as recommended by a joint Senate and House committee then investigating Indigenous affairs. Again, this survey was unethical because those who were studied had no capacity to say no.

While the second survey showed that the Attawapiskat and Rupert’s House communities were much better fed than the people in Norway House, consuming almost two times more calories daily, it pointed out that two-thirds of Attawapiskat teenage girls, half of Rupert’s House girls, and one-third of the boys “in both bands” were ten to thirty pounds underweight for their heights and widths. Tuberculosis was forty-six times higher than in the white population in Ontario, and it was twice as bad in Attawapiskat as in Rupert’s House.

It wasn’t just Indigenous residential school students who’d become involuntary human subjects. Entire First Nations and Inuit communities, everyone from the youngest babies to the most ancient Elders, had been turned into objects of scientific curiosity.

The endnotes of each journal article I found led me to more. Most of the early postwar studies were steeped in the beliefs and methods of race science, the same science that had inspired the Nazi race laws, the American anti-miscegenation laws, Canadian sterilization laws, and the white men in the American south who dragged Black men and women out of segregated restaurants as the civil rights movement gathered force. Many of these studies were done more than twenty years after the justices presiding over the doctors’ trial in Nuremberg laid out the absolute necessity to get informed consent from any individual who was to be the subject of medical study.

There were numerous IQ studies. There were numerous racial blood studies. But what I came upon next was plain shocking.

• The Stark Reality Ten Years after the Truth and Reconciliation Report
• Where the Children Are Buried
• My Father Was Found in a Residential School Incinerator When He Was an Infant

One day, I sat at my computer and ran another general Google search for medical experiments done on Indigenous Canadians. The way I worded it must have been slightly different from those I’d done before because, this time, up popped a story about a class-action lawsuit filed in 2018.

It was brought against the federal government on behalf of Indigenous people used in “cruel” experiments. The lawsuit had been filed by the Merchant Law Group, based in Regina. The statement of claim referred to experiments done in residential schools and sanatoria. Most I had already found in the literature. But the bulk of the lawsuit’s claims revolved around a segregated “Indian” hospital system once run by the federal government.

The Merchant Law Group’s class action, which was filed in a Saskatchewan court, was echoed by a similar action launched in the federal court. Both said Indian Health Services of the Department of Health and Welfare ran this Indian hospital system from 1945 to 1981. According to the claim filed in the federal court, status Indians and Inuit had been required to use this system instead of the general hospitals in towns and cities across the country. Both claims asserted that these federally run hospitals were grossly inferior to the general hospitals regulated by the provinces, often staffed by incompetent, unlicensed, or uncertified doctors and nurses willing to work for low wages because they were not qualified to work elsewhere.

The federal court claim argued that, in addition to getting inferior care, Indigenous patients had been physically and sexually abused. In other words, this hospital system was a repeat of the residential schools.

I read these claims with amazement. I’d read a lot of Canadian newspapers and magazines over fifty years as a journalist and non-fiction author, but I had never heard before that the government of Canada ran a segregated Indian hospital system, and I could not remember any media stories about segregated Indian hospitals. I soon found a small literature that describes it, but the books are relatively new.

The claim in the federal court included a list of the twenty-nine hospitals. Most had been set up after 1945 in military buildings left over from World War II. There were two hospitals in Saskatchewan.

One was in North Battleford; the other one was in Fort Qu’Appelle. The North Battleford hospital opened in 1949. It was eventually shut down, over the strenuous objections of the Indigenous communities that used it despite the hospital’s numerous failings. In 2016, Maureen Lux, professor of the history of medicine at Brock University, published a book on the system, called Separate Beds, containing this description: “makeshift and drafty, pipes froze in winter and patients sweltered in summer, and fire was a constant threat. Cross-infection was a particular hazard in the military-style open dormitories. By the 1950s staff shortages had created a dangerous situation, especially in the two large wards for infants and children where nursing staff moved from patient to patient without changing gowns or washing their hands. Children and infants were bathed in a common tub, infant formula was improperly prepared, bottles were propped for feeding and then left in cribs, soiled diapers were left in the ward and then laundered with other linens.”

Yet the leaders of the reserves around North Battleford had wanted to keep this hospital running because they were more concerned about the racism they would encounter at the town’s general hospital than about the Indian hospital’s failings. Minister of Health and Welfare John Munro had tried to shut it down in 1971. But it was still operational in 1977 when Health and Welfare Minister Marc Lalonde also set out to kill it.

The hospital in Fort Qu’Appelle had a longer history. It predated the Indian hospital system by nine years. According to Lux, it was built to take pressure off the Department of Indian Affairs. During the Depression, tuberculosis associations were concerned that Indigenous people with TB were not being treated in the sanatoria in the west. The federal government had cut back on medical services to Indigenous people, even ordering Indian agents to pull the sick out of hospitals. The associations argued that their untreated TB would spread from reserves and residential schools to white communities.

The Fort Qu’Appelle Indian Hospital was opened in 1936 across from the provincial TB sanatorium where white persons were treated (and where Indigenous people were treated in forty beds set aside for them after the sanatorium ran short of money and needed federal dollars). R. G. Ferguson used the new Indian hospital as a site to test the newish BCG vaccine against TB. He enticed women from the nearby reserves to give birth at the hospital instead of at home. He vaccinated their newborns over the course of twelve years. Children born on the reserves became the controls for his experiment. Ferguson’s study showed that the unvaccinated children got TB at a much higher rate than those vaccinated in the Indian hospital. (But as Lux pointed out, many of them died anyway from gastroenteritis and pneumonia—also diseases of poverty.)

How could a whole segregated hospital system have existed in Canada yet not be widely known?

Alisa Lombard, an Indigenous lawyer who filed a class-action suit against several doctors, Canada, Saskatchewan, and the Saskatchewan Health Authority for sterilizing Indigenous women through pressure tactics, and therefore without proper informed consent, had two choice words to characterize this.

“Mississippi North,” she called it.

Adapted, with permission, from Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Hospitals, and the Use of Indigenous Peoples as Slaves of Race Science by Elaine Dewar, published by Biblioasis, 2026.

Photo: “FtQu’AppelleBldg.JPG” by SriMesh, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), modified from the original / Danielle Suijkerbujjk, Unsplash / iStock / Ana Luisa O.J.