Even though he was a child, Alvin Dixon found it odd when he was asked to fill in sheets detailing what he had eaten during his time at Alberni Indian Residential School.
“I thought, ‘Why the hell are they asking us about this?’ They knew exactly what they were putting on the table for us,” he said.
Dixon is convinced he was part of the nutritional experiments carried out by the Canadian government and Canadian Red Cross on remote reserves and residential schools. He was 10 years old when he was sent from Bella Bella to the residential school in 1947.
“We would be given these sheets of paper to fill out. There were 250 to 300 of us and we all ate from the same big pot, so no one was getting anything different. That’s why I thought it was strange,” said Dixon, 76, who stayed at the school for eight years.
The food was bad and rarely fresh, said Dixon, who weighed 120 pounds when he graduated from high school, then hit about 160 pounds during his first year of university.
The memories are bad, but for Dixon, the most bitter pill to swallow is his belief that racist attitudes have not changed since the days of using residential school children as human guinea pigs — and that, despite the outrage following revelations about the experiments this week, nothing will change.
“There have been numerous accounts like this over the years and nothing happens,” he said.
“Canadians and the white population don’t care. This won’t change anything.”
Non-aboriginal Canadians need to start pressing the government to do the right thing, whether that means honouring treaties or not appealing court decisions that go in favour of First Nations, Dixon said.
“But this government is no different from the government 40 or 50 years ago. Racism is still rampant,” he said.
“Apologies are useless. Look at [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper’s apology on residential schools. Things have got worse. Our children’s education is underfunded and health care is underfunded and the government is withholding information from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
That commission was established by the federal government in 2008 to examine the legacy of residential schools.
On Thursday, Canada’s largest aboriginal group passed an emergency resolution calling on the federal government to “confirm that these experiments reveal Crown conduct reflecting a pattern of genocide against Indigenous peoples.”
The resolution at the Assembly of First Nations annual meeting in Whitehorse, Yukon, also calls on the Harper government to make restitution to those affected by experiments conducted between 1942 and 1952.
The chiefs “condemn the action of the federal government for condoning, allowing and being involved in these deeply disturbing and shocking experiments,” the resolution said.
Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council president Cliff Atleo is one of the many First Nations leaders who agree that the research on nutritional experiments, dug up by University of Guelph historian Ian Mosby, probably represents the tip of the iceberg.
However, it falls to government to find some independent researchers to look at what other experiments may have been carried out on First Nations children, Atleo said.
“We don’t have the resources to do it ourselves. We are getting a 60 per cent cutback in Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council [federal] funding on April 1,” he said.
Grand Chief Ed John of the First Nations Summit Task Group is also pushing for Canada to account for the experiments.
“[They] are evidence of a larger, institutionalized and dehumanizing colonialist racial ideology which has plagued Canada’s policies towards aboriginal peoples,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada Minister Bernard Valcourt said officials are looking into allegations about the nutritional experiments. “If this story is true, this is abhorrent and completely unacceptable,” she said.
— With files from The Canadian Press
