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“According to a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, a long-standing federal government policy that required First Nations children to attend residential schools away from their families has contributed to the diabetes epidemic seen on Canadian reserves today.
“There’s quite a bit of evidence that children who attended residential schools across Canada, in different provinces and territories and over many decades of the 20th century, were very hungry,” said Tracey Galloway, professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and one of the study’s co-authors.
“What we found is that those children experienced lifelong consequences to their health, and in fact their children and grandchildren bear the biological costs of that hunger and malnutrition.”
Galloway says children who suffer from malnutrition in their youth go on to have a body that wants to accumulate fat reserves more quickly than it accumulates muscle. As a result, these children are at a higher risk of obesity, insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes, and this increased risk is passed to their children and grandchildren.”
– Global News, Residential school system contributed to current First Nations diabetes epidemic: study.
“For 13 years, Barney Williams Jr. remembers sitting in a dining room with his residential school classmates eating “mush” as he watched their disciplinarian feast on bacon, eggs, toast and jam.
“We didn’t get healthy food in the school. Mush in the morning and then sometimes wieners, baloney at times,” Williams recalled of his time at the B.C. school. “You had half an orange sometimes and if you were lucky, the bully didn’t take it. Most of us were hungry a lot of the time.”
A University of Toronto study published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows that malnutrition and severe hunger in residential schools has contributed to long-term health issues in the Indigenous community, even among younger generations.
Elevated risk of obesity and diabetes in Indigenous peoples can be linked back to the mistreatment of residential school children, according to the research.”
– The Star, Study links hunger in residential schools to Indigenous health problems today.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
