D. Homicide
“Looking for individual cases of murder in the residential schools is like asking why fetuses are killed at an abortion clinic”- Harriett Nahanee, Alberni school survivor, February 9, 1998
In a system designed to “kill the Indian in the Indian”, to quote Duncan Campbell Scott, and to also kill the Indian, death was the norm; and to search out individual cases of homicide recalls again the words of Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson, who observed early in those war crimes trials:
“The prosecution need not prove the individual culpability of the death camp guard or of the high state official when the system itself was geared to mass destruction. Any single individual serving such a system is assumed to be complicit and guilty by the fact of his association with it.”
That said, individual killings of children by staff, clergy and other students were routine occurrences in the schools, according to many eyewitnesses who saw the murders happen or dug the graves of the victims. Homicide reports even turn up in the heavily-censored official school records, invariably accompanied by a routine vindication of the accused and the refusal by local police to investigate further.
Beatings, gang rapes, forced confinement without food, “disciplinary” tortures like electric shock,
exposure to tuberculosis and even formal executions were the usual homicidal methods of school staff and clergy who were literally beyond the law and protected by RCMP and Indian Agents. (25) The first eyewitness to the killing of a residential school child went public on December 18, 1995, at a public protest organized by Kevin Annett at United Church offices in Vancouver. Harriett Nahanee was a ten year old at the United Church school in Port Alberni when, on Christmas eve 1946 she saw Principal Alfred Caldwell kick a student, Maisie Shaw, to her death.“I was at the bottom of the stairs in the basement. I always went to the bottom of the stairs to sit and cry. I heard her crying, she was looking for her mother. I heard (Caldwell) yelling at the supervisor for letting the child run around on the stairwell. I heard him kick her and she fell down the stairs. I went to look – her eyes were open, she wasn't moving. They didn't even come down the stairs ... I never saw her
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again.” (Figures 74 and 74a) (26)
This first report was immediately shrouded in cover up and official denial by police and church alike, who both claim Maisie was “hit by a train”, which is what Caldwell told her parents. But in January, 1996 researcher Kevin Annett recovered a provincial death certificate for Maisie Shaw that states she died of “Acute Rheumatic Pericarditis”: heart failure. (Figure 75) But further examination revealed that this certificate had only been entered into the provincial archives the month before, shortly after Harriett Nahanee's account appeared in the Sun newspaper.
In a telephone conversation and when asked about this anomaly, Brian Young of the Provincial Coroner's office stated that “There was no death certificate for a Maisie Shaw before last month.”
“Is that normal, no death certificate?” Kevin asked him.
“With Indians it is. It probably meant she was just shoved in the ground somewhere.”
Nor does the information on the newly-deposited “official” death certificate agree with live witnesses. There is no record for a Maisie Shaw at the Port Alberni funeral home the certificate claims buried her. The fact that the Coroner's report was issued the day after she died is “bizarre and unusual ... that never happens”, according to Louise, the Director of the same funeral home.
“I've seen these things before” commented Vancouver Sun Stephen Hume on Maisie's “death certificate” later in 1995. “It's just a crude forgery.”
Yet another crudity was the national press release issued by the United Church of Canada – Caldwell's employer – the day after Harriett Nahanee spoke to the media. The church claimed pre-emptively that it “has not engaged in any form of cover up or deception in relation to this sad occurrence”. But at that point, no-one had accused them of covering up anything.
A second murder by Principal Alfred Caldwell was reported just one week after Harriett's story went public, by another eyewitness, Archie Frank.
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A former inmate at the United Church School in Ahousaht, Archie told Sun reporters that he saw Caldwell beat a boy named Albert Gray senseless for taking a prune out of a jar. Albert died the next day and was buried in secret.
“He got strapped to death. Just for stealing one prune, Caldwell strapped him to death. Beat the s..t right out of him ...The day after he got strapped so badly he couldn't get out of bed. The strap wore through a half inch of his skin. His kidneys gave out. He couldn't hold his water anymore ... They wouldn't bring him to a doctor. I don't think they wanted to reveal the extent of his injuries.” (Figure 76, “Beaten to Death for theft of a prune” by Mark Hume, The Vancouver Sun, December 20, 1995)
After Albert died, Archie and another boy named Stanley Sam were ordered by Principal Caldwell to bury him in the woods behind the school. Two days before he was to be video interviewed by Kevin Annett, Archie Frank died of undisclosed causes, in January of 2000: the same week that another key witness died - Willie Sport, who was also scheduled for an interview with Annett.
Another former inmate at the United Church School in Port Alberni, Harry Wilson, went public in 1997. He described in an affidavit how when he was fourteen he stumbled across the body of a dead girl on the grounds of the school, and what happened to him when he reported it.
“In 1967, I discovered a dead body behind the Caldwell Hall at the school. Two kids from the Tseshaht reserve and me found a young girl, she was about 16, lying dead, completely naked and covered in blood. There was blood everywhere. I ran and told (Principal) Mr. Andrews, and he said he was calling the RCMP. But I never saw them show up, and the girl’s body disappeared ... Less than two months later, after I told Andrews about finding her body, I was shipped out to Nanaimo and put in the hospital there for three months ... I was expelled from the school in 1970. I was sent to the Bella Bella hospital then ... the Mounties had me committed and I was strapped down in bed. I was in there like that for months.” (September 17, 1997) (Figure 77)
Harry's story gets even more interesting. Recruited by human rights investigators from the U.N. group IHRAAM to speak at a public forum in Port Alberni the following year, Harry was approached
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by two aboriginal officials of the state-funded Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribal Council, Ron Hamilton and Charlie Thompson. In a signed statement of March 31, 1998, Harry describes,
“Just before I was to talk about the girl I found Ron Hamilton comes up to me and says, 'I wouldn't talk about her if I was you. If you say anything about it, you’ll be sorry ... As Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council official Charlie Thompson left our Circle, he walked by me and said to me, 'Harry, you have half a brain and no-one will miss you if you're found floating face down in the water.' “(Figure 78)
Naturally, Harry didn't say a word at the forum. When he was later found dead on a Vancouver street, Harry Wilson's death received the same attention as had the young girl whose body he found when he was eleven.
Harry's friend Dennis Tallio, another Alberni school inmate, also found a dead body on the grounds of the same establishment, in 1965. According to Dennis, “We even found a dead body at the school. It was in the fall of 1965. We were playing soccer in the back field behind the school, where it was really covered in weeds ... in those weeds I came across the remains of a body, maybe three feet long. It was decomposed and you could see a lot of skeleton ... I ran to the school, and then we had to call the RCMP ... After that, the RCMP came to us and told us not to say anything about what we had discovered in the field. I thought this was strange. Why would they want us to keep quiet?” (Figure 79)
The forested hills behind the Alberni residential school hold many of the graves of the dead children, according to Harry, Dennis and other witnesses. In April, 2008 a forensic specialist and his team conducted a survey of the suspected mass burial site in these hills identified by survivors. His survey confirmed what they had reported.
“The land has all the classic signs of multiple burials, the telltale vegetation and the presence of regular sinkholes and the undulating terrain. It covers more than a hundred square meters. That kind of disturbance means that a lot of digging's gone on there. I've examined mass graves in Kosovo and Bosnia and what I saw behind the Alberni School bears all the same features.” (Statement of Dennis Ball to Kevin Annett, April 3, 2008; See his survey map in Figure 80 - sinkholes are circled)
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Based on the Port Alberni evidence and other surveys and eyewitness accounts of burials, on April 10, 2008, Kevin Annett released to the world media a list of 28 suspected mass graves near former Indian residential schools across Canada. (Appendix Five) Not a single Canadian media outlet responded to the release, nor did the police.
Another suspected mass grave in British Columbia is on the grounds of the former Catholic Kamloops Indian School: one of the “special treatment” centers where children who ran away more than once tended to be concentrated for particular discipline and punishment. William Combes, who was incarcerated at the Kamloops facility from 1962 to 1964, saw a priest bury a child there one night, in the orchard south of the main building.
“My friend Jessie Jules and me were out scavenging for food for all the little ones since they never fed us regular. It was night but we could see from the moonlight that Brother Murphy was dragging this bag out into the orchard. We watched and he turned it over and a small little body fell out, and he kicked it into the hole with one boot. Then he started throwing the dirt in.” (27)
East of Kamloops in Cranbrook, British Columbia stood the Catholic St. Eugene Indian School. Before she died suddenly in early 2004 after confronting the local Catholic Church over the missing children there, survivor Virginia Baptiste described the reign of terror and the local mass grave.
“We called St. Eugene’s 'boot hill' 'cause so many kids were dying there from disease. Every second or third kid. I saw a nun lock up a little girl in a closet and she just left her in there to starve to death. They all ended up in that big grave not far from the school ... After we started our protests and made a big stink, guess what? The feds came in and spent a million bucks covering the graves with a new golf course. The Chief was in on the deal. Everybody knew what was in that ground, but now everyone wants to forget.” (See Figure 81) (28)
Virginia's friend Helene Armstrong of the local Osoyoos Indian tribe also attended St. Eugene and knows lots of local history, including where some of it all started.
“I know a lot of the local Doukhobours and they tell me that the first whites into this area got the land from our people after showing the Indian Agent the fingertips of the Indians they'd killed off. That would have been around 1910 or 1920. All of the Naramatas were chased out of Arrow Lakes by bounty hunters hired by gold mining
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companies. There are mass graves all over the Arrow Lakes region. When all the rez school kids started dying off, they just shoved them in those graves that were already there.” (29)
One of the Douhhobours, and a member of the Osoyoos Nation, is Pierre Kruger, who lives near Penticton.
“We spent years documenting all the graves around here because we wanted the world to know. Our mistake was to trust the whites. In 1992, we contacted the provincial government and asked the Heritage Conservation Branch to come out and inspect the mass graves we mapped. We found more than twenty of them between Cranbrook and Nelson. The government people showed up on a Thursday and by Sunday they'd brought in the backhoes and wiped out most of the sites. Completely gone. Since then we don't tell nothing to nobody.” (30)
The same pattern repeated itself in Alberta residential schools. A nine year old girl, Vicky Stewart, was killed with a two-by-four one morning in April, 1958 at the United Church's Edmonton residential school. The killer was a school supervisor named Anne Knizky.
Little Vicky's sister Beryl saw it happen.
“We were running in from the yard and, just because we were running, that's why (Knizky) hit Vicky” Beryl told the Vancouver Province newspaper in May, 2009. “First she got me in the back with the two-by-four and then she got Vicky over the head. Then by next morning they told us she had died.” (See Figure 82, picture, and Figure 83, “Family says school staffer killed 9 year old girl sister” by Sam Cooper, Vancouver Province, May 28, 2009)
The “official” cause of death for Vicky was tuberculosis. The RCMP and the United Church still stick by that story, and refuse to investigate further, despite Beryl's eyewitness account. Significantly, the Edmonton school Principal when Vicky was killed was the same Alfred Caldwell killed two children on the west coast years before according to witnesses Nahanee and Frank. (Figure 84)
Interviewed for Kevin Annett's award-winning documentary film Unrepentant (2007), another
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Edmonton residential school survivor, Doug Wilson of the Haida nation, describes burying kids at the same school in 1961.
“I don't know how all the other kids died, but I know we dug a lot of graves. Lots from the school, but also from Charles Camsell (Indian hospital) ... I couldn't figure out after that why I couldn't remember anything. Then I read in your book about shock treatment ... All I remember is they had me down and I kept seeing these flashing lights and then nothing. I guess it was to make me forget.” (31)
Sylvester Green was another student at the United Church's Edmonton school, and was also interviewed for Unrepentant. In the fall of 1962, he and three other students buried an Inuit boy who was beaten to death by Principal Rev. Jim Ludford, according to Sylvester's companion Mel Patzie who witnessed it.
“There were four of us who dug the grave: myself, my brother, Mel Patzie and Albert Cardinal. It was right next to the staff garden. The boy was from up north somewhere ... Every Sunday in church Mr. Ludford used to preach to us and he always ended by saying, 'Remember: the only good Indian is a dead Indian.' And we all had to repeat his words.“ (32)
The total number of homicides in residential schools can never be known, considering their
systemically violent environment and the continual official secrecy surrounding children’s deaths. In
a basically homicidal system, no death can or should be considered accidental or unintended.
What is certain is that none of those who killed innocent children at these schools were ever
arrested, charged or tried before a court of law. Rather, the killers were shielded and protected by
those courts, by their church employers, and by every level of government in Canada.
In the words of Doug Wilson, “The only reason I survived that place was I learned to use a knife when I was a very young boy, and I stole food whenever I could. It turned me into something I wasn’t, but that’s what makes a survivor.” (33)
Other Contributory Causes of Death
As we have described, the primary cause of the enormous mortality rate in residential schools was
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the staff's deliberate spreading of tuberculosis and smallpox between sick and healthy children, accompanied by a denial of all care and treatment for the infected. Any of the deaths arising from this murderous practice could only have been deliberate, for the simple reason that human beings do not die easily or immediately from tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis is a wasting and debilitating disease that only kills after many weeks, once the host's immune system has collapsed. Logically then, for so many children to have died so consistently from T.B. they had to have been deliberately denied proper food, warmth and other of life's essentials for long enough to allow the germs to have their deadly effect. And such indeed were the standard conditions deliberately maintained in every residential school across the country, as doctors, Indian Agents and public records continually reported.
The fact that this policy of deliberately creating sickness among residential school children was emanating from the highest level of government was described by the Indian Affairs medical officer, Dr. Peter Bryce, who had first reported on the enormous death rates in the schools.
In his book A National Crime, published in 1922, Bryce claims that 93% of Indian children suffered from tuberculosis after entering a residential school, but that only ten cents per Indian was spent by the government on combating T.B., compared to over $3.oo for every white Canadian with T.B. He also claimed that the federal government deliberately encouraged the overcrowding and poor conditions in the schools and successfully pressured the Canadian Tuberculosis Association to ignore the whole issue. (Appendix Three)
Years before Bryce’s report, a chief inspector for Indian Affairs summed up how residential schools were a threat to the health of all its young inmates when he said in an official letter,
“Whatever good the children may receive through residence in a boarding school will be at the expense of the health of all and the lives of some. Of the truth of this statement we have the indisputable proof of long and uniform experience.” (Figure 85)
Even the most diehard proponents of residential schools, like Principal A.R. Lett of the Anglican St.
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George’s school in Lytton, British Columbia concurred with this estimate when he arrived at the school.
“The children were lean, anemic and T.B. glands were running in many cases ... The children were ill clothed and turned out into the cold to work and without leadership ... Dormitories in bad repair, no cleaning had been done for years, floors worn out in many places, ventilation poor, beds absent or broken down. Small wonder parents had to be forced to place their children here.” (34)
Mabel Sport, a survivor of the Christie school on Meares Island between 1935 and 1944, recalls:
“The food was always rotten and inedible, the dorms were always cold, and we were never even given winter clothing. They starved us and froze us until we all came down sick ... “I can't even stand to look at nuns anymore. They were trying to deliberately infect us with TB because they always made me sleep in the same bed with girls who had it. One on each side of me. I was so scared, so I slept turned away from them, even under the bed sometimes. I'd always open the windows, too. But then the nuns would come and close them and even nail them shut.” (35)
Photographic proof of this practice of mixing the sick with the healthy is found in Figure 81, taken from John Miller's book Shingwauk's Vision (1996). The photo shows a class of Sarcee Indian children in the Anglican school on their reserve early in 1912. Two of the students who are sitting among healthy children are wearing bandages around their heads, and the caption states they are suffering from “active and open tubercular sores.” (Figure 86)
It's significant that the two infected, bandaged boys in the photograph - Reggie Starlight and Ronald Big Bear - were both the children of hereditary tribal chiefs, according to a relative of Reggie. As Harriett Nahanee, Steve Sampson and other witnesses have described, the offspring of the “blue blood” traditional leaders were the primary targets of rape and killing in the schools, in the same way that many of the missing aboriginal women today come from hereditary clan mother tribal leaders.
Besides maintaining the unhealthy environment needed to lower immunity and breed tubercular infections among children, the staff of residential schools uniformly terrorized their little inmates
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with routine, habitual violence. Hourly bed checks during the night, random beatings and organized gang raping of students of every age were the norm. (See Appendix One)
In addition, every staff member was expected to carry on them at all times a “prescribed leather belt” with which to flog students. Those who refused to carry it were often fired on the spot by the Principal, normally a clergyman, who under church regulations had absolute power to hire and fire staff, censor their letters and phone calls and have them arrested by the local, compliant RCMP. (From a list of regulations at the United Church Alberni school circa 1962, see Appendix Nine)
The existence of this military-style hierarchy in every residential school was necessary in order to maintain the high degree of secrecy and information control required in a killing zone. The outside world could not be allowed to know the fate of so many suffering children. Accordingly, humane staff members who showed sympathy for the children tended to be weeded out quickly and fired.
Marion MacFarlane was one such staffer. Speaking at a public forum in Vancouver in early 1998, she
described her experience at the United Church School in Port Alberni in the mid 1960’s.
“I only worked at the school for nine months until I got canned by the Principal, Mr. Andrews. It
happened because I saved the life of a little girl ... One morning I came across one of the other matrons
beating this girl viciously with a piano leg. The blood was flying, it was terrible. So I grabbed the woman
and I belted her and knocked her cold. But then I got called before Andrews and he fired me for hitting
the woman. Me, not the one beating the girl!
“When I objected to Andrews and said how she was killing that little girl, Andrews just smiled and said, 'Nothing that would have happened to that little squaw would have been as bad as losing your colleague. She plays the organ in church on Sundays.' That showed me where the children ranked in the things. We were expected to go along and let them die if we wanted to keep our jobs.” (36)
As mentioned, records show that T.B. infected children were routinely admitted into residential schools without any screening or examination. Examples of such admissions occur in the documentary record in the years 1919, 1924, 1937 and 1952, in different schools across B.C. and Alberta: the two provinces where germ warfare, medical experimentation and sexual sterilization
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against Indian children were especially concentrated throughout the 20th century.
Many of these murderous actions also occurred in state-funded and church-run Indian hospitals, especially in isolated west coast communities like Sardis, Bella Bella, Nanaimo and Prince Rupert. These hospitals operated as fronts for grisly experiments under the guise of tuberculosis sanitariums. Children were deliberately infected with TB and then studied as they died, or used as involuntary test subjects for drug testing.
In 1963, Joan Morris of the Songhees nation on Vancouver Island was imprisoned in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital. She was just five years old. Joan was held there for over six years and experimented on by military doctors.
“They told my mother I had tuberculosis but I didn't, I was perfectly healthy. That was their excuse. They shipped me off to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital after that ... They used me like a guinea pig. I was strapped down in a bed for months at a time. They took out some of my rib bones and parts of my lungs, and they even broke all the bones in my feet; I've got X rays of that.
“They also injected me with drugs that made me sick all the time. They made me drink something that later I learned was radioactive iodine. After I was there awhile I did come down with TB but they must have infected me with it because nobody there had TB when they arrived.
“I saw lots of other Indians kids in there too, all of them like me: healthy when they arrived, then they all got TB and a lot of them died off. The doctors and nurses let it happen ... I remember the doctors there, Dr. Weinrib and Lang, Schmidt and Connelly, they never helped the kids, just stood around and took notes. They'd give kids the shots and they'd get the TB and die.” (37)
The Indian hospitals relied on the residential schools as a source of easily obtained experimental subjects whose disappearance could go unquestioned. Kenny Quatell was one of those disappeared.
E. Imposing Measures to Prevent Births and Conception
“You're a good Christian, Ed. Have lots of children. I only sterilize the pagans”- Dr. George Darby sr., United Church missionary doctor, to Ed Martin of the Hesquait Nation, Bella Bella, B.C., 1952
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There is no more clear an act and intention of genocide than attempting to stop a targeted group from procreating, by preventing both conception and births, and by killing the newborn. The existence of laws to legitimate these crimes and to allow involuntary sterilizations of a specific group confirms the intent of a government and nation to wipe out that group.
Canada passed such laws between 1929 and 1933 (Figures 64-66a, above) and they were aimed specifically at Indians and Metis people. Within dozens of residential schools, Indian hospitals and special research centers on military facilities, many thousands of Indians were made infertile simply because they were Indians, or for “disciplinary” or experimental purposes. These programs sprung from a wider Eugenics movement that originated in America during the 1880's and spread like wildfire through Canada as the 20th century dawned. Many of the leading Eugenicists practiced on Canadian Indians and residential school children, including Nazi researchers brought into Canada after World War Two under the infamous Project Paperclip. (38)
According to author Edwin Black, in his book War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003),
“In Canada, eugenics passions became inflamed over many issues, including the birth rate of French Canadians ... Following the example of America's hunt for mongrels, Alberta disproportionately sterilized Indians and Metis, who constituted just 2.5 per cent of Canada's population, but represented 25 per cent of Alberta's sterilized.” (39)
In effect, any step designed to disrupt or destroy the ability of a group to perpetuate itself can be considered genocidal eugenics, including by separating males and females at a young age and alienating them from their families, traditions and normal sexual and biological functions. All of these crimes were intrinsic to the Indian residential school system.
Sterilizations
Intrusive, radiological and chemical sterilizations of residential school children began in earnest after the passing of the Sexual Sterilization Acts in British Columbia and Alberta between 1929 and 1933,
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and continue to the present day. The operations were normally performed at Indian hospitals or even in clinics of larger Catholic, Anglican and United Church residential schools.
Jackson Steene is a Dene Indian man who was sterilized as a child at the Carcross Anglican residential school in the Yukon, one of the last schools to close, which it finally did in 1996.
“I guess it would have been sometime around 1969 or 1970. They did the procedure to me and all ten of my brothers when we were at the school, just before we reached puberty. One after another. I was taken into the infirmary and strapped down onto a gurney and wheeled under an X ray machine. They positioned it over my pelvis and left it on me for at least ten minutes. I didn't know what I was at the time; they told me they had to scan me for tuberculosis. But I was never able to have children. Neither could any of my brothers who got done that day. I tried suing the Anglican church years later but my lawyer wouldn't raise the sterilization thing in court.” (40)
Another Anglican school in Alert Bay also sterilized children. Cambel Quatell, a Kwakiutl man from Campbell River, B.C. was made infertile in the local church-run St. Joseph's hospital.
“I could never talk about this shit for years but now more of the truth's coming out. I led the fight for compensation around here but everyone's too chicken shit to talk about the sterilizations. Well it happened to me and all seven brothers of mine except James, he's the only one of us who could have kids. They gave me some vile shit to drink and then gave me a shot and I don't remember anything after that. I hurt pretty bad after that but I never put two and two together. One of the priests used to call us his 'lab rats'. Something went on there around 1962 that made me infertile; me, and a lot of other kids too.” (41)
Especially intelligent indian children with high marks, or those who were more independent or confrontational with the white authorities, tended to be targeted for sterilization. Sam Adolph went to the Catholic Kamloops School and was sterilized there in 1959 when he was fourteen.
“They called us the 'red tag' boys. At the end of each term they'd hand out the red tags and if you had one you had to report to the clinic. That's where I got cut. I don't know who the doctor was, he was from
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somewhere else and we never saw him again. But he fixed me so I could never have a kid.” (42)
The R.W. Large Hospital in Bella Bella, British Columbia, which is still in operation, was a major sterilization center for at least forty years. Established as a United Church missionary clinic by Rev. Dr. George Darby senior, (1889-1962) the hospital has received major federal government funding. Dr. Darby and his son, Dr. George Darby junior, personally sterilized many hundreds of aboriginal women at the facility between 1930 and 1962, often simply because they weren't Christians or wouldn't attend church. (See Figure 87)
The late Ethel Wilson was one of his victims.
“Darby was king in Bella Bella and Waglisla, and his word was law. He sterilized a lot of us. He used to
watch who wasn't going to church in the village. He said to me once, 'Ethel, you'd better go to church if
you don't want the treatment.' That was around 1949.
“Well, I had my appendix out the next year and that's when Darby did me when I was under. I knew
something was wrong when I woke up. My insides really hurt and all my gold teeth were missing. Later I
found out in Vancouver I'd had my tubes tied. That went on all the time with the women on our reserve,
even recently.” (43)
Ed Martin, another resident of Waglisla, spoke to the IHRAAM Tribunal in 1998 about Dr. Darby.
“I went to Darby around 1952 to get a vasectomy 'cause I couldn't feed all my children, but he just
laughed and he said, 'Ed, you're a good Christian. Have lots of children. I only sterilize the pagans.'
I guess he liked me 'cause I went to his church. Later he told me the government was paying him $300 for
every Indian woman he sterilized.” (44)
The R.W. Large Hospital kept annotated records of all the sterilizations, until many of them were destroyed in 1995 soon after the residential school atrocities began to make news in British Columbia. According to Christy White, a former hospital employee, all of the sterilization records were “dumped in the ocean” by an administrator named Barb Brown.
Steve Sampson, a traditional Chemainus elder on Vancouver Island, claims to have seen samples of
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the Bella Bella sterilization records when he and other members of the Red Power movement occupied Indian Affairs headquarters in Vancouver during the summer of 1973. Perhaps not accidentally, Steve's own two sons were subsequently sterilized.
“They got my eldest son in 1975, when he was just four. The cops took him to Victoria General Hospital and fixed him so he couldn't carry on our line, which is royalty, we are the Siem of our people. They've always been trying to destroy us. My second son was sterilized when he was nine, in 1981. Both times they were grabbed by the Mounties when I was away. It was Dr. Bowen-Roberts and Dr. Boaker who supervised the operations. They were both Indian Affairs doctors who worked for the government. They’re buddies with the Harris family on our reserve, the sellouts who were set up by the Crown as puppet chiefs many years ago. I also learned that our local doctors in Duncan were sterilizing our people, Dr. Styles and Dr. Henderson, right on Ingram street. It's all out in the open but nobody will talk about it.” (45)
Traditionally, any aboriginal person could be targeted for sterilization under the law. Sterilizations especially occurred in regions of rich natural resources still occupied by Indians, or in areas more densely populated by off-reserve or traditional indigenous groups. Sarah Modeste, who lives not far from Steve Sampson in Duncan, B.C., was sterilized by a government-funded doctor in 1951 after she married a non-assimilated, traditional chief.
“Doctor Goodbrand heard that I was going to marry Freddie, and he got so mad. He came to my home and said, 'Sarah, if you marry Freddie I'll have to do an operation on you.' I was really scared after that and I tried to get away, but we couldn't leave the reserve without a pass back then. But the next year after Freddie and I were married I got pregnant with our daughter. Goodbrand was the only doctor we were allowed to see. So when I gave birth it was Goodbrand who did the delivery, in the King's Daughters Clinic in Duncan.
“When I woke up I was bleeding a lot and it wouldn't stop ... Later I learned that my tubes had been tied. He did it to me when I was unconscious I guess ... I couldn't have any more children after Dr. Goodbrand did that to me. But that happened a lot to our women. It was still going on in the seventies and eighties.” (46)
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