Sharon Whonnock’s first memory is being transferred to the Nanaimo Indian hospital where she says she spent nearly a decade tied to a bed for almost 24 hours a day while being treated for tuberculosis.
The remaining childhood memories for the Kwakwaka’wakw grandmother of what happened to her at the second biggest Indian hospital in Canada are vivid, and she says they haunt her still.
Through the glass partition between beds, she says she could see other children also being tied and untied.
“The only time we were untied was first thing in the morning to have a bath and then change our pajamas and go back to bed,” she said.
The ties were also taken off for meals they ate in the bed and if they needed to use the bathroom they were brought a bedpan.
Sharon Whonnock spent almost a decade at Nanaimo Indian Hospital. She says she was tied to a bed for almost 24 hours a day while being treated for tuberculosis. (Family photo)
Whannock recalls having chickenpox, and being served turnips. The smell made her ill and she threw up on her plate. A nurse hit her with a rod and made her eat the vomit.
When she left the hospital, walking was difficult, because she hadn’t used her legs much for all those years.
She doesn’t have any proof but feels strongly that experiments were conducted on her.
“I think I was used as a guinea pig, I really feel that’s why I’ve had trouble with my health my whole life,” she said.
But she says the sexual abuse she suffered was the hardest thing to bear, and she still leaves the lights on at night.
Barbara Hunt (R) with a friend at Nanaimo Indian Hospital where she was treated for tuberculosis. (Hunt family photo)
The Nanaimo hospital was one of 29 run by the Department of National Health and Welfare across Canada for indigenous patients from 1946 to 1967.
One of the original academics who looked at the topic says the paternalistic system affected all aspects of life and the hospital system was intertwined with the residential school system. Children were sent to the hospitals from the schools and from the schools to the hospitals.
Laurie Meijer Drees, who heads the department of First Nations studies at Vancouver Island University, wrote a book called Healing Histories: Stories from Canada’s Indian Hospitals. Over years of research documenting their stories, she spoke to many who had been through Nanaimo Indian Hospital
The Nanaimo Indian Hospital in November 1966, shortly before it was closed. (Times Colonist/Agnes M. Flett)
The notion of informed consent, she says, was not practiced generally and even less at the Indian hospitals and so people would not have known why they were being treated. Medical methods of the day were also not well developed.
Some people were at the hospital for months, others for as long as eight years. Drees said in cases of bone TB, the bacterium would make bones brittle so children and adults would be immobilized in full-body casts or be strapped onto stretchers to be still.
“The immobilization was very distressing, especially for young children and if you didn’t know why that was being done,” she said.
Young patients had to go to school on site and those too sick to leave their beds were given individual tutoring. 0:47
Barbara Hunt was taken from her residential school in Alert Bay and sent to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital when she was about six years old, and then again when she was 11.
In 2002 she was diagnosed with cancer and given two months to live. She made it her purpose to tell her story and began sharing it with her daughter Ainjil Hunt.
‘Canadians would be shocked’
“Canadians would be shocked if they truly knew what the government, church and medical professions did to our people,” she said.
Anjil Hunt says her mother’s spine was damaged as part of her TB treatment and she ended up temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.
Construction of the Nanaimo army hospital, the future home of the Nanaimo Indian Hospital in 1941. (Nanaimo Archives )
Barbara Hunt’s best friend Art Thompson, who also later died of cancer, was taken from the Alberni school and put into the Nanaimo Indian hospital around the same time.
Both were told they were sick and needed medical help.
“[My Mom] was told she had TB, but many years later when she went to the doctor they said to her ‘no, you would have had scars on your lungs,’ ” Hunt says.
Hunt also thinks her mother was experimented on at the hospital, but like Whonnock does not have proof. She went digging for records and kept coming up empty-handed.
‘Mindboggling, difficult to fathom’
One of the lawyers leading the proposed $1.1-billion class action lawsuit says he has confidence that they will find the documents needed.
“We expect that more medical documents will have survived than some of the other claims like the Sixties Scoop,” said Steve Cooper of the Edmonton firm Masuch Albert LLP.
He says ample scholarly work done on Indian hospitals already will help the case.
He expects to hear from about 10,000 former patients, including the three in B.C. — the Coqualeetza Indian Hospital in Sardis, the Nanaimo Indian Hospital and the Miller Bay Indian Hospital in Prince Rupert.
“We’ve heard many, many stories of sexual and physical abuse and malnourishment,” Cooper said.
“We are now getting additional information that there was actual medical experimentation, it is absolutely mind-boggling and difficult to fathom,” he said.