THE revelations this week that 'nutritional' research was done on malnourished aboriginal children, without their knowledge or consent, should horrify all Canadians.
As part of their experiments, researchers who worked for the federal government in the 1940s and 1950s denied essential food to children in residential schools so they could measure the impacts.
They believed the end justified the means, and that sacrificing the health of their subjects would provide an overall benefit to a greater number. But they were wrong.
Although research ethics were murkier then, the basic rule when encountering people in need of help is that even a researcher's first responsibility is to help them. These experts didn't do that. Instead, they studied hungry children and kept hem hungry to establish a 'control group'.
Such 'research' would never have been carried out on middle-class white children of the time. The ugly truth is these experts didn't consider their First Nations subjects fully human. It was a view of the 'other' shared by the Nazis who in this same time period conducted horrific medical torture in the name of science.
In the case of Canada's aboriginal people, the impacts of mistreatment at residential schools has been long-lasting. In the wake of this week's information, aboriginal leaders asked Ottawa to hand over records of all research done at residential schools. First Nations are owed that - and more.
As Shawn Atleo of the Assembly of First Nations said this week, the past isn't past. Its echoes remain with us.
