A group of indigenous women are hoping to stop the bulldozers at a former Montreal hospital that they believe could hold the truth about children still missing from a grisly half-century-old CIA experiment.
They have spent the past two years trying to delay the construction project by McGill University and the Quebec government.
“They took our children and had all kinds of things done to them. They were experimenting on them,” said Kahentinetha, an 85-year-old rights advocate from the Mohawk community of Kahnawake, southwest of Montreal, who goes by just one name.
Photo: AFP
The women are relying on archives and testimonies that suggest the site contains unmarked graves of children formerly interned at the Royal Victoria Hospital and Allan Memorial Institute, a neighboring psychiatric hospital.
In the 1950s and 1960s, behind the walls of the old psychiatric institute, the US CIA funded a human experiments program called MK Ultra. During the Cold War, the program aimed to develop procedures and drugs to effectively brainwash people.
Experiments were conducted in the UK, Canada and the US, subjecting people — including indigenous children in Montreal — to electroshocks, hallucinogenic drugs and sensory deprivation.
“They wanted to erase us,” Kahentinetha said.
A leading figure in the indigenous rights movement who has traveled to the UK and the US to denounce colonialism, she called this fight “the most important of [her] life.”
“We want to know why they did this and who’s going to take the blame for it,” she said.
In the fall of 2022, the mothers obtained an injunction to suspend work on a new university campus and research center at the site — a project worth C$870 million (US$643 million).
Fellow rights advocate Kwetiio, 52, who also uses just one name, said they insisted on arguing the case themselves without lawyers, “because in our ways, no one speaks for us.”
Last summer, sniffer dogs and specialized probes were brought in to search the property’s expansive and dilapidated buildings. They identified three areas of interest for excavations.
However, McGill and the government’s Societe Quebecoise des Infrastructure say that “no human remains have been discovered.”
The Mohawk mothers accuse the university and the government infrastructure agency of breaching an agreement by selecting the archeologists who did the search and then ending their work too soon.
“They gave themselves the power to lead the investigation of crimes that were potentially committed by their own employees in the past,” said Philippe Blouin, an anthropologist working with the women.
Even though their appeal was dismissed earlier this month, they have vowed to continue their fight.
“People should know history, so that it does not repeat itself,” Kwetiio said.
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