Annie Michael is one of many Indigenous Canadians who experienced intimidation and abuse in the health-care system.
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.
Even her name was different: The English-speaking staff called her Annie E7-1261, her government-supplied “Eskimo” identification number.
At the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton, which began admitting patients in 1945, there were instances of forced sterilization, said researcher and documentarian Miranda Jimmy, who interviewed numerous survivors and hospital staff for a documentary released by the Edmonton Heritage Council in 2016.
The largest facility of its kind, the Camsell was the setting for 125 sterilizations of First Nations and Inuit patients from 1971 to 1974 alone, according to government data cited in a 2012 journal article by Karen Stote, a professor at Wilfred Laurier University.
Some survivors and researchers also believe overly aggressive treatments or medical experimentation took place at some hospital sites. Lux said many survivors she spoke to shared stories of major chest surgeries that weren’t being performed on non-Indigenous patients. At the Camsell, she said, one surgeon doing these procedures preferred to use a local anesthetic to a general one.
“Patients were actually conscious while their chests were opened up, their ribs sawn and removed,” Lux said. “This was not a one-off or an unusual occurrence.”
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