First Nation infants subject to “human experimental work” for TB vaccine in 1930’s – 40’s.

The nutritional experiments conducted in First Nation communities and in Indian residential schools were not the only example where Canada’s Indigenous population faced treatment as “guinea pigs,” academic research shows. 

First Nation infants were used for Saskatchewan trials of a tuberculosis vaccine that was mired in controversy at the time of the experiment in the 1930s and 1940s. Academic research also shows that many Indigenous people who died undergoing medical care for diseases like tuberculosis (TB) were buried in unmarked graves because Indian Affairs would not pay to take their bodies back to their home communities. The bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine trials were backed by the National Research Council and Indian Affairs. The trials were eventually successful and the vaccine is still around today but at the cost of human experiments on aboriginal infants. Indian affairs did not want to pay for proper burials so they were buried in unmarked graves spread across the country. 

The subject of nutritional experiments exploded weeks after reports surfaced on a study by University of Guelph food historian Ian Mosby. The study found that experiments were conducted in six residential schools and communities in northern Ontario, northern Manitoba, British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia between 1942 and 1952. Previous and ongoing academic research shows, however, that the nutritional experiments were part of a wider pattern in the medical and scientific community’s approach to Indigenous people at the time which included experimentation and the persistence of certain types of surgeries that were no longer conducted on non-Indigenous people. Academic research also shows that many Indigenous people who died undergoing medical care for diseases like tuberculosis (TB) were buried in unmarked graves because Indian Affairs would not pay to take their bodies back to their home communities. The vaccine trial on First Nation children from the Qu’Appelle reserves in southern Saskatchewan is one of those threads in that story. But vaccines were cheaper than paying to improve the conditions of Indian residential schools and reserves or treating people in sanatoriums which could turn into lengthy stays. Lux said the urgency to conduct the vaccine trials on First Nation infants in southern Saskatchewan was also driven by a fear that Indigenous people would infect the non-Indigenous population with TB. “They were seen as vectors of disease because TB rates in the non-Aboriginal community were falling quickly. They were better fed and housed, but not so on-reserve,” said Lux, in an interview. “My point in the article was that TB wasn’t the big threat…the big threat was poverty because more kids died of poverty related diseases than from TB.” The BCG vaccine at the time was controversial. A German experiment in 1930 led to the deaths 71 children after they were given a contaminated strain. At the time of the Qu’Appelle trial, close to 400,000 children had been vaccinated and trials had been conducted in Montreal, but it was still unclear at the time whether the vaccine would regain its virulence. The United States and Britain did not use the BCG vaccine at the time “because of fears that the vaccine was not stable,” wrote Lux.  Worries over the vaccine were expressed in a confidential memo to federal authorities. “I feel as though it would be unwise to initiate human experimental work among Indian children who are the direct wards of the government, and for which reasons they are not in a position to exercise voluntary cooperation,” wrote Dr. R. George Ferguson, the medical superintendant of the Fort Qu’Appelle Sanatorium, to the president of the National Research Council. “Furthermore in case of difficulties arising, the government itself could not be without responsibility.” The trial went ahead in 1933 and it proved successful. According to Lux, between 1933 and 1945, 306 infants were vaccinated and 303 were used as a control group. Only six vaccinated infants contracted TB and two died. In the unvaccinated group, 29 caught TB and nine died. Lux said doctors also continued to surgically remove TB from Indigenous patients into the 1950s and 60s, after the procedure was no longer done on the non-Indigenous population. Whether there were other types of experimentation beyond what has already surfaced, Lux said she can’t give a definite answer. However, the existing record of the medical system’s treatment of Indigenous patients is already a dark one, she said. “It is pretty depressing. It is just document after document. They treated these people like they were not even human,” she said. “It is definitely the hardest thing I have ever done.”