The recent surfacing of a journal article describing experimentation on Indian residential school students for psychic ability reveals yet again how much still remains obscured about this dark period of Canadian history, says the head of the research centre slated to eventually house millions of documents from that era.

Jorge Barrera

APTN National News

The recent surfacing of an academic journal article describing experimentation on Indian residential school students to reveal their potential psychic ability reveals yet again how much still remains obscured about this dark period of Canadian history, says the head of the research centre slated to eventually house millions of documents from that era.

Ry Moran, the director of the National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, said the 1940s study is another example of an element of residential school history that has yet to be fully unearthed.

“What we are seeing about these cases of experimentation coming out is that this was yet another dynamic happening in residential schools,” said Moran.

Winnipeg researcher Maeengan Linklater recently came across an article published in 1943 by the Journal of Parapsychology that described experimentation on residential school students in Brandon, Man., to test their levels of extrasensory perception or ESP.

The experiment used 50 students aged six to 20 years of age and tested their psychic abilities during the winter of 1940-1941. The students were tested on their ability to read ESP cards which were held behind a screen.

“It may be said that at least one group of American Indian children have given scores in ESP card tests that are ascribable only to the ability known as extra-sensory perception,” wrote the study’s author A.A. Foster, who is described as coming from the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University which is in the U.S. Foster, the article states, moved to Toronto to “engage in industrial war work.”

While Foster’s study did not really unearth any conclusive evidence, he determined it was worthwhile because “the subjects are of the American Indian race” and “this is the first report of ESP tests given to members of that racial group.”

The study

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Moran, who previously worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created to delve into the dark past of residential schools, said some survivors mentioned experimentation in their oral testimony.

“It is certainly something we have heard from survivors in the oral history,” said Moran.

He said the TRC has obtained numerous documents from Health Canada that could eventually reveal more evidence of experimentation.

“The relationship between residential schools and Indian hospitals was a direct line,” he said. “They were being educated right inside the hospitals.”

Evidence has already surfaced that First Nations children were used as subjects for the testing of an experimental tuberculosis vaccine in the 1930s and 1940s.

The students were also subjected to nutritional experiments. Ian Mosby, a post-doctoral fellow at McMaster University’s L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History in Hamilton, Ont., revealed the nutritional experiments in 2013. He discovered that the experiments were conducted on students at six residential schools and communities in Ontario, Manitoba, British Columbia and Nova Scotia between 1942 and 1952.

Mosby received a copy of the article in the parapsychology journal over the weekend from Linklater.

“It is a pretty bizarre experiment. It is somewhat laughable in terms of its goals and methodology,” said Mosby. “But the fact is children in residential schools were once again being made part of scientific experiment at a time when they were wards of the state, when the federal government was in charge of their care.”

Currently, the time spent at Indian hospitals or sanitariums are not included as part of the multi-billion dollar Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. Survivors who spent time at the Fort William Sanatorium filed a request for direction this past October with the judges responsible for overseeing the settlement agreement seeking to have the sanitarium qualify as a residential school covered by the agreement.

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