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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS