On a brisk spring day in 1965, Annie Michael stepped onto an airplane for the first time.

The 10-year-old had tested positive for tuberculosis, the airborne disease that had ravaged her hometown of Niaqunngut, a remote Baffin Island community southeast of Iqaluit. Her southbound flight was the first leg of a days-long journey to the Queen Mary Hospital for Tuberculous Children in Toronto.

While Michael’s stay at the hospital was meant to cure her potentially deadly condition, the experience left damage of another kind.

When she arrived, hospital staff cut Michael’s long, dark hair into a shaggy bob. She met stern nurses who enforced a strict dress code — tunics and crisp, white blouses — and slapped young patients with rulers for punishment. Michael struggled to process the strange sights and sounds of the bustling sanatorium, and was only allowed to speak to her parents by phone once a month, for 10 minutes.

"They wanted us to dress like the white people, eat like the white people. We were savages to them."

Even her name was different: The English-speaking staff called her Annie E7-1261, her government-supplied “Eskimo” identification number.

“They wanted us to dress like the white people, eat like the white people,” Michael, now 63, recalled. “We were savages to them.”

Michael was among thousands of Indigenous people across Canada who endured a similar experience. For decades, Indigenous children and adults were treated at tuberculosis sanatoriums as well as in segregated, government-run “Indian hospitals.”

Some survivors say they experienced psychological and physical abuse and lost the ability to speak their own language. There are even reports that some patients endured medical experiments at the hands of hospital staff.

Researchers who have explored these accounts say the intended purpose was to separate Indigenous people from the broader community, and that much like residential schools, this health care system was built on a combination of government policy and widespread racism. But unlike the school system that has underpinned a conversation about reconciliation and financial compensation, these hospitals remain largely hidden in the shadows of Canadian history and weren’t included in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

CBC spoke to numerous hospital survivors and researchers about this segregated health-care system, as well as activists hoping to broaden the conversation about reconciliation and expose how decades of isolation and mistreatment have harmed First Nations and Inuit communities to this day.

Annie Michael said her year-and-a-half stay at the Queen Mary, thousands of kilometres from her loved ones, left a lasting impact.

“It was hell on earth for me.”