Old Vic work held up by indigenous concerns
Work being done to refit the old Royal Vic buidings is being held up by a group of Mohawk women who feel there are indigenous people buried on the site, killed in the Ewen Cameron experiments in the 1950s, and want this possibility explored before any construction work begins.
McGill had the site surveyed in 2016 and archaeologists found no evidence of such burials, but this conclusion has been deemed unsatisfactory. Now the situation has been complicated by the vandalism of architects’ offices on site by a different group.
Uatu 10:43 on 2022-10-25 Permalink
I don’t know but I think in the 50s and 60s that it’d be a lot easier to just send the bodies to the morgue for disposal or give them to the medical school for dissection. And after working at the Allan I can tell you that they’d have to rip up the pool and surrounding parking lots etc to make a definitive assessment.
Kate 11:20 on 2022-10-25 Permalink
Uatu, I tend to agree with you. I think it unlikely the Allan was sending people out in the dark of night to bury bodies in the grounds, when they had more discreet ways of disposing of them.
If the Mohawk women think there are much earlier indigenous burials on the site, that’s a different question. An indigenous burial was found not long ago near St Joseph’s Oratory, so it’s possible that similar burials might be found near other existing buildings.
Kevin 11:44 on 2022-10-25 Permalink
The key question is did Dr. Ewen Cameron work on anyone without keeping a record of it.
He had many patients — some entrusted into his care by the courts — and was seen at the time as an upstanding citizen and a leader in psychiatry. Some of his funding may have been covert, but his work was not, and it was discussed throughout the psychiatric field.
Some of the people being brainwashed by Cameron were the children of people that he and his colleagues knew, and they didn’t hide the outcomes of their work.
Kate 13:47 on 2022-10-25 Permalink
Kevin, was Cameron known to recruit indigenous subjects? This is the first I’m hearing about that angle.
Joey 15:35 on 2022-10-25 Permalink
Interesting to read these stories (including some of the previous Rad-Can reporting on this) coupled with Taylor Noakes’s piece. The Mohawk Mothers seem uniquely convinced, against what seems like any tangible evidence to date, that there are *indigenous* remains to be found on the RVH site; Noakes contends that the adjacent McGill campus was most likely not the site of an indigenous settlement prior to the arrival of the colonists. Obviously there is no specific link between the two (I hope I’m not giving the impression that Noakes’s article refutes the Mohawk Mothers’ claim). But there is a thread about location, memory, and distrust of party lines, for lack of a better term, that comes through.
I don’t really see a way in which the concerns of the Mohawk Mothers can be addressed to the point that they would endorse/tacitly support the Vic project from proceeding, absent a complete dig and the identification of remains (presumably a dig that produced no remains would be considered incomplete and a dig that did produce remains would be grounds for halting any development ever). It’s not in the summary, but the article makes clear that the elected Mohawk leadership of Khanwake is basically supportive of the process underway.
Kevin 17:50 on 2022-10-25 Permalink
Kate
The affidavit that is the heart of the Mothers’ lawsuit says there were several indigenous youth being treated, but I don’t know if anyone’s looked through the lists. He had hundreds of subjects and a lot of them have received payouts from previous suits and settlements.
Taylor C. Noakes 18:34 on 2022-10-25 Permalink
@joey – Just to be clear, my only contention is that the Hochelaga stone on McGill’s lower campus is not exactly near the Dawson Site (which was near the intersection of Mansfield and Maisonneuve and where a site of Indigenous habitation was found), and that historical research doubts the Dawson site was the location of Hochelaga.
If the Dawson Site was in fact a satellite village of the larger settlement (which is a plausible theory), that settlement could absolutely have been located on McGill’s campus, it’s just that there’s no evidence to point in that direction (whether because nothing has been or because no one bothered to look).
I’d say anywhere between the mountain and the St Lawrence would have been a likely site for human habitation and thus Hochelaga: it’s where Ville Marie was founded, it’s where the dawson site was found. It’s protected from Northern winds, the land was fertile in the pre-industrial age, it’s close to the river and to the many streams that once crisscrossed the island, and remains have been found all over the place in that area.