Given Canada’s rather benign history, media and academia have been manufacturing atrocities Whites have supposedly committed against Natives for a long time, and few are as laughable as Ian Mosby’s “Administering Colonial Science”, a supposed research paper. The abstract explains that the paper reviews “controlled experiments conducted, apparently without the subjects’ informed consent or knowledge, on malnourished Aboriginal populations in Northern Manitoba and, later, in six Indian residential schools”, which he describes as an “episode of exploitation and neglect by the Canadian government.” You have to read on to learn that the experiment was feeding them.
As Ian explains it, “IN MARCH 1942, and after months of planning, a group of scientific and medical researchers travelled by bush plane and dog sled to the Cree communities of Norway House, Cross Lake, God’s Lake Mine, Rossville, and The Pas in Northern Manitoba.” The team included “Dr. Percy Moore and RCAF Wing Commander Dr. Frederick Tisdall – Canada’s leading nutrition expert and the co-inventor of the infant food Pablum.” The team finds the Natives in a poor state, and a researcher is quoted as noting “that if they were white people, they would be in bed and demanding care and medical attention.”
Despite the evil undertones Mosby tries to create throughout his paper, the do-gooder nature of the researchers is often evident. One is quoted in an early report as noting:
“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 highly probable that their great susceptibility to many diseases, paramount amongst which is tuberculosis, may be directly attributable to their high degree of malnutrition arising from lack of proper foods.”
The group set up a series of “experiments” to feed the malnourished Natives with different diets over a multi-year period, lasting about a decade. The first one began in 1942, when a group of 300 natives were selected and “125 were provided with riboflavin, thiamine, or ascorbic acid supplements”. No mention of how their diets were otherwise adjusted to combat the malnutrition, but some were given vitamin supplements while others were not.
The paper is incoherent, as it is not so much the telling of events as it is a desperate search for evil being done to Natives at the hands of White men, and jumps from point to point quickly, seemingly in the hope that some guilt will rub off as they pass, despite the researchers clearly wanting what was best for them, based on the full length quotes he provides. When he wants them to be really evil, he describes their secret intent himself, putting quotes around single words or phrases that could have come from anywhere, and have any number of meanings.
For example, Ian claims that the researchers “came to view Aboriginal bodies as ‘experimental materials’ and residential schools and Aboriginal communities as kinds of ‘laboratories’ that they could use to pursue a number of different political and professional interests”, despite there being no evidence of ulterior motives.
Ian describes groups of Natives making requests to solve their woes, such as “more generous relief during times of extreme hardship, these included increased rations for the old and destitute, timber reserves to be set aside for the building and repairing of houses, and additional fur conservation efforts by the federal government, as well as a request that they be given fishing reserves”.
Ian makes it out as if the White man ignores them and decides to exploit them, stating: “the research team therefore almost immediately set about organizing a scientific experiment on the effectiveness of vitamin supplements conducted primarily by the resident physician for the Indian Affairs.”
To prove his point, Dr. Mosbey quotes a researcher as saying: “We do not know as much as we should as to what motivates the Indian. We have to find out what incentive we can place in front of him. The Indian is very different from us. We have to find out how the Indian can be encouraged, how his work can be diversified, his efforts diversified, so he can make himself self-supporting, so he can obtain the food he needs.”
Ian’s interpretation of this, and the experiments more generally, is difficult to follow, and can be found at length in the following paragraphs. But if the reader would prefer the tl;dr version, they can scroll down to a paragraph which begins: “To summarize Dr. Mosbey’s story,” and goes on to do just that. Ian’s story:
“The James Bay Survey, in other words, was not simply a study of the nutritional status of the Attawapiskat and Rupert’s House First Nations but was also intended to elucidate the connection between food, nutrition, and the ‘Indian Problem’ more generally.”
“In part, this approach reflected one of the key conclusions that Moore, Tisdall, [the researchers running these projects] and others had taken away from their earlier study: that levels of malnutrition had been, in no small part, due to the increasing dependence of Aboriginal peoples on ‘store foods’ – which was the common term used for imported goods from the south – and their movement away from the more nutritious ‘country foods’ like fish, game, and berries. Not only had the Norway House and Cross Lake First Nations been consuming an almost wholly inadequate diet, they argued, but ‘no less than 1,258 [calories], or 85% of the total, were supplied by white flour, lard, sugar and jam.’ As a 1948 press release from Indian Affairs promoting Moore’s nutrition efforts among ‘bush Indians’ argued, ‘Canada’s northern Indians have lost the art of eating.’”
Press release Ian quotes: “They have abandoned the native eating habits of their forefathers and adopted a semi civilized, semi native diet which lacks essential food values, brings them to malnutrition and leaves them prey to tuberculosis and other disease. The white man, who unintentionally is responsible for the Indians’ changed eating habits, now is trying to salvage the red man by directing him towards proper food channels.”
Ian: “This theory that the partial adoption of non-Aboriginal foodways had led to a decline in the health of Aboriginal peoples was not new… Moore, however, sought to address the problem directly by adopting a range of decidedly experimental strategies designed to promote the purchase of more nutritious store foods… These strategies ranged from education to coercion, and they provide some important insight into motivations behind the James Bay study.”
“One of Moore’s key strategies was to introduce vitamin supplements and fortified foods into the diet of Aboriginal peoples… Moore began work developing a number of novel nutritional supplements including a special ‘carrot’ biscuit containing large quantities of vitamin A and a ‘Blood Sausage’ product containing a long list of ingredients, including beef blood; pork scalps, rinds, snouts, and ears; beef lungs; beef, pork, veal, sheep, and lamb spleens; beef or pork brains; hog stomach; beef tripe; cooked pork carcass bones; cooked pigs’ feet; oatmeal flour; and seasoning. While the biscuit was ultimately distributed to northern communities, the blood sausage – along with a similarly ‘nutritious’ ‘Meat Spread’ – was rejected by the Department of Agriculture”.
“Perhaps the policy that had the greatest impact on the diets of Aboriginal peoples in the North – at least until the many ‘experimental’ relocations of Inuit communities that would begin during the 1950s was the regulation put in place by Moore and others that limited the kinds of goods that could be purchased with Family Allowances. These universal monthly payments of between $5 for children under six and $8 for children between 13 and 16 came into effect in 1945 and had a profound impact on the diets of Aboriginal peoples throughout the Canadian subarctic. It was estimated by John J. Honigmann, one of the James Bay Survey’s anthropologists, that Family Allowances saw the per capita income in the Attawapiskat Cree First Nation – where he lived doing field research for nearly a year – increase by 52 per cent in 1946-1947 and by 38 per cent in 1947- 1948… Moore sought to harness the profound economic and nutritional potential of Family Allowances by preventing indigenous families in the North from collecting them as cash, as all other Canadians were entitled to do, and instead establishing a separate, in-kind system of payment for so-called ‘Bush Indians’ and ‘Eskimos.’ Purchases were therefore limited to certain items of clothing and ‘foods of high nutritive value over and above their basic subsistence requirements.’ These included canned tomatoes (or grapefruit juice), rolled oats, Pablum, pork luncheon meat (such as Spork, Klick, or Prem), dried prunes or apricots, and cheese or canned butter. In some cases, moreover, it seems that Indian Affairs officials went so far as to experiment with preventing some families from using Family Allowances to purchase flour – despite the fact that it had long been a key dietary staple – as part of a broader effort both to encourage them to increase their consumption of country food and to discourage families from returning to the local HBC post too often. In Great Whale River, the consequence of this policy during late 1949 and early 1950 was that many Inuit families were forced to go on their annual winter hunt with insufficient flour to last for the entire season. Within a few months, some went hungry and were forced to resort to eating their sled dogs and boiled seal skin.”
To summarize Dr. Mosbey’s story, it was White people’s fault that 85% of Native diets were flour, sugar and lard, White people who claimed to be concerned about this and who would like to encourage them to hunt and farm just wanted to run experiments on them, government benefits increased their income by about 50%, then the researchers decided to give them “foods of high nutritive value” instead of cash- likely because this was five years into the experiment and they were still malnourished due to eating mostly flour and sugar, though no explanation is offered- and they were even limited in how much flour they could buy, and this led to them eating dogs because they didn’t have enough flour.
While none of Ian’s article makes sense, there is a common thread: Everything White people do is bad. A researcher described his goals as finding “practical means for increasing their supplies of wild foods, of the chances of really interesting the Indians in raising gardens, and of the possibility of improving the nutritional value of the food purchased at the posts.” Even this is somehow presented with dark undertones.
While the first part of Ian’s article is long, meandering and led nowhere, the second part is even more stupid, but it is at least simple. Dr. Moseby explains that the next “experiment” was conducted at a residential school where the students were riboflavin deficient, so they wanted “to test the effects of tripling the children’s milk consumption from its existing serving of 8 ounces per day – less than half of the quantity recommended in Canada’s Food Rules – to 24 ounces. First, however, the 8-ounce ration was maintained for two years to provide a ‘base line’ that could be used to assess the later results.”
This was shortly after World War II, when rations were increasing wherever they had been implemented or decreased, and Ian would like you to believe that they were starved for two years in order to provide something called a “base line” for unexplained reasons. But this was not simply post WWII, it was shortly after a report which had concluded that these institutions were not feeding the children adequately, and by establishing a new base line they meant after they had increased their supply of meat, vegetables and everything else, so after two years of improved diet they would have improved health: a new “base line,” and then they gave them more milk. But Ian wants the reader to think ‘they deprived starving children of milk for two years? How evil!’
The most ridiculous part of the article is Ian’s attempt at speaking for the poor children he imagines being tortured. As part of these feeding programs, the children were given health care and were monitored by doctors, and many wrote to the doctors later, which Dr. Mosbey can see the true meaning of, writing: “the letters range from simple statements like ‘Thank you for the medical you gave us’ to the more revealing ‘Tell the nurse I said thank you for the pokes she gave me.’”
He continues: “Another common – and far more troubling – theme of the letters was that many children wanted to reassure the doctors that their tests had not hurt. One child, for instance, wrote to thank them for showing educational movies and added that ‘The pokes that I got didn’t hurt me very much’ and that ‘I got a couple of my teeth out by the dentist but it didn’t hurt very much when he pulled them out.’ Another student wrote, ‘Thank you for all the pricks you gave us. I hope we are all going to be healthy all through the year, and not to take so many teeth out. We will all try not to get sick.’”
“The fear involved in the clinical interaction between doctors and students was perhaps best captured by a student who wrote, ‘When the nurse pricked me it did not hurt me at all but a little part of it is showing yet. I hope I am O.K.’ Perhaps tellingly, the same student’s letter also included a correction in which the original statement thanking the doctors and nurses ‘for what they have done to us all” was changed to “for what they have done for us.’ Although many of the students thanked the research team for ‘coming here to help us be well strong and healthy,’ it was clear by the end of the study that its benefits were disproportionately skewed towards the professional interests of Pett and the other researchers.”
So this guy reads letters from children thanking doctors for the medical care they received, and is convinced they are sending subliminal messages of their true pain, which they are too terrified to reveal.
Also, he never explains how the researchers benefited. He does mention: “There is little evidence, for instance, that the experiment started in Northern Manitoba was ever actually finished but, even if it was, the results do not appear to have been published in a scientific journal. Some of the results of the other experiments in residential schools were presented at conferences or workshops or were published in journals, but they too seem to have had little effect on the operation of food services in residential schools beyond those that took part in the study.”
The article claims to be exposing medical experiments that White people conducted on Natives unethically, as there was no consent given to feed them and give some extra vitamins. Even “the atrocities committed by Nazi doctors and scientists” are mentioned in an attempt to give all things White an aura of evil, but it’s all stupid. It’s just babble, and most would expect this to be an obscure piece of writing that has been mocked by all who have read it. But that is not the case.
At the time of publishing in 2013, Ian’s article was widely covered by mainstream media outlets as if it were a serious piece of research, and the CBC has written an article as late as 2021 titled “The Dark History of Canada’s Food Guide: how Experiments on Indigenous Children Shaped Nutrition Policy” which begins: “When historian Ian Mosby published evidence that the Canadian government had conducted nutritional experiments on Indigenous children in residential schools, his findings made headlines across the country”, and contains: “’Indigenous people had been arguing for a long time that their kids were hungry in residential schools, that government policies were creating conditions of hunger in their communities,’ explained Mosby.”
Those who hate White people sometimes claim that we conducted medical experiments on Natives, as if they were tortured with chemicals being poured into their eyes. But this is what they are talking about. We fed them, gave some of them extra vitamins, and now White people are supposed to pretend that every BIPOC in the world can come here because Natives were here first and we were mean to them.
How do Natives benefit from Indians, Africans and Chinese people flooding Canada? We are supposed to believe that White people building one of the richest nations of all time around them was detrimental to Natives, but now flooding it with strangers who behave in often disgusting ways is beneficial for them?