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FTR#1314 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
FTR#1315 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Detailing a case unfolding in Canada, these programs analyze the heroic efforts of “The Mohawk Mothers” to archive the remains of Native Americans who were the victims of behavior modification programs.
Furthermore, the behavior modification programs overlap the MKULTRA operations in the United States.
A fundamental thematic element in this discussion is the Rockefeller family, Nelson Rockefeller in particular.
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include: The United States’ claim of legal immunity from the process underway in Canada; Harassment of the Mohawk Mothers by security personnel appointed to secure the grounds being examined; Cadaver dogs’ discovery of apparent human remains in the soil being exhumed; Apparent mishandling of some of the soil samples and other pieces of evidence that could fundamentally compromise the integrity of the investigation; The genesis of the behavior modification programs in 1943; Operational overlap between the Canadian programs directed toward indigenous people and programs at Attica and Dannemora prisons in upper New York State directed at African American prisoners; Discussion of Nelson Rockefeller’s tortuous history with Native Americans, from failing to acknowledge life-saving activity from Native American guides in Alaska to brutally exploiting indigenous people in Latin America for profit; Review of the role of the Rockefeller funding of the Allan Memorial Institute in Canada.
The documentary record of “mind control” experiments conducted by the United States and other governments during the Cold War is just the tip of the iceberg, and our collective ignorance is by design. In early 1973, as the fallout from the Watergate scandal exposed the need for greater congressional oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ordered the destruction of all documents related to MK Ultra.
Launched in the wake of the Nuremberg Trials, which exposed the extent of Nazi atrocities carried out in the name of science, MK Ultra involved a range of grotesque experiments on unwitting test subjects within and beyond U.S. borders. Newly revealed evidence exposes previously hidden links between MK Ultra experiments on Indigenous children in Canada and imprisoned Black people in the U.S.
On April 20, 2023, a group of Indigenous women known as the Kanien’kehà:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) achieved a milestone in their ongoing lawsuit against several entities, including McGill University, the Canadian government and the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec. The parties reached an agreement whereby archeologists and cultural monitors would begin the process of searching for unmarked graves, which the Mohawk Mothers believe are buried on the grounds of the hospital.
Over the preceding two years, approximately 1,300 unmarked graves, most of them containing the remains of Indigenous children, have been discovered on the grounds of five of Canada’s former residential schools. Throughout the 20th century, the residential school system — like the Indian Boarding School system, its U.S. counterpart — separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families, stripped them of their language and subjected them to various forms of abuse amounting to what a truth and reconciliation commission called “cultural genocide.” But as these horrific revelations demonstrate, the harm wasn’t only cultural — a 1907 investigation found that nearly one-fourth of school attendees did not survive graduation.
In October of 2021, new evidence surfaced linking disappeared Indigenous children to MK Ultra experiments conducted by CIA-sponsored researchers. A white Winnipeg resident named Lana Ponting testified in Quebec’s Superior Court that in 1958, when she was 16 years old, doctors from the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital affiliated with McGill and the Royal Victoria Hospital, held her against her will, drugged her with LSD and other substances, subjected her to electroshock treatments, and exposed her to auditory indoctrination: playing a recording telling Ponting over and over again, that she was either “a bad girl” or “a good girl.”
Ponting also testified that “some of the children I saw there were Indigenous,” and that she befriended an Indigenous girl named Morningstar, who endured many of the same abuses, with the added indignity of being harassed because of her race. During a reprieve from her drug-induced haze, Ponting recalls sneaking out at night and happening upon “people standing over by the cement wall” with shovels and flashlights. She and other children had heard rumors that bodies were buried on the property. “I believe that some of them would be Indigenous people,” Ponting told the court.
Not only does her testimony corroborate what another Allan Memorial Institute survivor told historian Donovan King a decade earlier, but in 2008, the Squamish Nation included the psychiatric hospital in a list of potential sites containing unmarked graves.
The CIA, along with the U.S. and Canadian military and powerful U.S. charitable foundations, are directly implicated in this ordeal. According to John Mark’s 1991 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate and Steven Kinzer’s 2019 book Poisoner in Chief, in 1977, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, CIA archivists uncovered a previously hidden box of MK Ultra financial records revealing, among other things, that the Memorial Institute was home to MK Ultra “Subproject 68.” Under the leadership of psychiatrist Ewen Cameron, whom Ponting accused of raping her, experiments in this subproject sought to “depattern” people’s minds using violent methods Cameron termed “psychic driving.”
Although Cameron is among the most infamous MK Ultra doctors, he was not alone at McGill. As historian Alfred McCoy has shown in his 2006 book A Question of Torture, the sensory deprivation research of Donald Hebb, a McGill psychologist, was also covertly sponsored by the CIA.
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But what the Mohawk Mothers and their allies have found is compelling, particularly for me: I have spent the last several years researching the history of “behavior modification” programs in U.S. prisons. My forthcoming book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (available in October 2023), uncovers the roots of the modern prison abolitionist movement and state efforts to destroy it during the 1960s and 1970s. It details a little-known program of prison-based scientific experimentation that intersects with the Mohawk Mothers struggle.
In 1966, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, whose family foundation helped establish the Allan Memorial Institute, launched a partnership whereby a team of McGill consultants were brought to New York to establish programs and conduct research at the Dannemora State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, according to Canadian psychiatrist Bruno Cormier’s 1975 book The Watcher and the Watched. Located in a remote hamlet 25 miles south of New York’s northernmost border with Quebec, the institution confined prisoners who were transferred from other state facilities after being deemed “insane” by prison doctors.
The official purpose of the collaboration was to develop new methods for preventing recidivism. However, the program hosted “experimental studies of various aspects of criminal behavior,” noted a report from 1968. The following year an attendee of a conference about the program noted that a large number of its participants were Black.
An affidavit authored by anthropologist Phillippe Blouin in support of the Mohawk Mothers identified the late psychiatrist Cormier as a person of interest. Blouin located correspondence between lead “Subproject 68” psychologist Cameron and Cormier, who worked as a clinician at the Allan Memorial Institute during the 1950s and 1960s. Authored between 1957 and 1963, the exchanges pertain to a proposal for a Pilot Centre for Juvenile Delinquency, which would include laboratories “for psychological studies, for work in genetics, for endocrinological investigations, for sociological studies, both within the unit and also for field work.”
Commenting on the proposal, Cormier suggests that the center’s purview should not be limited to rehabilitation. He stresses that “research of this kind should bring light on all behavioral problems” and that it had the potential to “bridge the research gap between juvenile delinquency and adult criminality.”
Not long after this exchange, New York officials selected him to lead the Memorial Institute’s partnership with the New York prison system. The man who helped make this happen was a German physician named Ludwig Fink, who became assistant director and subsequently director of the Dannemora hospital after practicing psychiatry in Iran and India during the 1940s. By 1969, Fink and some of the McGill consultants had trained prison guards in hypnosis and aversion therapy techniques, resulting in scenes that an observer called “quite revolting both for those who watched and those who took part.”
The director of a think tank called the Narcotic and Drug Research Institute described Fink’s “Therapeutic Community” program in ways that are eerily similar to Cameron’s efforts to obliterate human consciousness in order to rebuild it anew. It “takes you back to a kind of kindergarten level and then brings you back up,” he told Congress. Elsewhere, Fink cites the autobiography of Malcolm X and laments the “growing number of aggressive, assertive black males” behind prison walls.
The Mohawk Mothers affidavit mentions Ernest G. Poser, a psychologist, whose research at McGill investigated “cross-cultural differences in tolerance to physical pain using deceptive means and what seemed like torture instruments.” It indicates that Poser “studied patients’ reactions to hypnotic suggestion during methohexitone-induced sleep,” a practice that brings Ponting’s experience of being “brainwashed” to mind. Poser, a colleague of McGill psychologist and sensory deprivation researcher Hebb, was also experimenting on incarcerated people in New York. In 1968, he he investigated whether prisoners deemed “sociopaths” suffer from an adrenaline deficiency that prevents them from learning from “fear-producing experiences.”
To find out, he and a graduate student named Deborah G. Sittman injected them with adrenaline and subjected them to electric shocks. Wilfrid Derby, a student of Poser and Hebb, proposed an experiment in which multiple prisoners would be strapped to an electroconvulsive therapy device and told they were in a competitive situation where the “loser” would receive the shock level set for him by his opponent.
Between September 9 and 13, 1971, nearly 1,300 incarcerated people rebelled in New York’s Attica prison. Most of them were Black, but a few, such as John Boncore “Dacajeweiah” Hill were Mohawk.. New York’s partnership with McGill appears to have ended shortly after the uprising and the brutal state-orchestrated massacre that followed it. At roughly the same time, the Dannemora State Hospital was rebranded the Adirondack Correctional Treatment Education Center, and became home to a “new” behavior modification initiative called the Prescription (Rx) Program.
Multiple letters published by prisoners’ rights organizations accused prison authorities of surreptitiously drugging their food and water and of attempting to turn them into “zombies.” A government panel noted that the program evoked “the spectre of the resocialization, rethinking, and brainwashing camps of totalitarian societies.”
According to Walter Dunbar, who had recently left the California prison system to become New York’s deputy corrections commissioner, the Rx Program focused on prisoners guilty of “overt acts that incite, agitate, and provoke other inmates to militant, radical, and antisocial activities.” Such statements link the program to plantation discourses that pathologize Black resistance, while implicating prison authorities in the use of behavior modification techniques for political ends: counterinsurgency.
Notably, Dunbar’s name appears multiple times in a cache of documents released via FOIA by the CIA. The documents discuss agency-sponsored narcotics research on incarcerated people in Vacaville Medical Facility, a California prison that helped inspire the New York prison system’s partnership with McGill.
The state-sponsored experiments of the Cold War era employed a range of scandalous methods to test whether human thoughts and behavior could be predictably controlled. The outcome of this research and the fate of its victims remain obscure, but a common thread runs across different experimental contexts. Researchers targeted and assaulted vulnerable populations who were incapable of granting consent and who were viewed as disposable. Their allegations were unlikely to be taken seriously and their avenues for redress were limited because they were institutionalized and from marginalized groups: Indigenous people, Black people, poor people, disabled people, children, prisoners, women and girls. This scientific violence was shaped by living legacies of colonialism and slavery, violence that continues to find expression in the ongoing “war on terror.”
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A proposed class-action lawsuit over infamous brainwashing experiments at a Montreal psychiatric hospital was before Quebec’s highest court Thursday, as victims attempted to remove immunity granted to the United States government.
The U.S. government successfully argued in Quebec Superior Court last August that the country couldn’t be sued for the project known as MK-ULTRA, allegedly funded by the Canadian government and the CIA.
U.S. lawyers argued that foreign states had absolute immunity from lawsuits in Canada between the 1940s and 1960s, when the program took place.
But survivors (and their families) of the experiments at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute — which included experimental drugs, rounds of electroshocks and sleep deprivation — appealed that decision.
On Thursday, a lawyer representing the United States government told the Quebec Court of Appeal that the country should be immune from prosecution and that any lawsuit against the U.S. government should be filed in that country.
The court case stems from a class-action lawsuit filed against McGill University — which was affiliated to the psychiatric hospital — Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital and the Canadian and U.S. governments after Montrealers allegedly had their memories erased and were reduced to childlike states.
Class-action lawyer Jeff Orenstein said Thursday he believes Canada’s 1982 State Immunity Act, which outlines how foreign states can be sued in the country, is retroactive and can apply in this case.
He said the 1982 act allows foreign states to be sued in cases of bodily injury.
“But this took place in the 1950s and ’60s,” Orenstein told reporters, regarding the psychological experiments. “And so the exception had not been in effect during that period so (the U.S.) argued that the old law would prevail and the old law was absolute immunity.”
“What we’re claiming is the law is retrospective, that you can look back even before the act was passed and apply it today,” Orenstein said.
He noted there were also exemptions during the 1950s and 1960s for commercial-activity lawsuits, adding that the Montreal experiments involved a funding arrangement between private parties.
“Even under the old law, you would be able to pursue in Canadian courts,” Orenstein said.
He also said the case could be heard in Quebec. “We don’t think that Canadian citizens who are injured on Canadian soil are required to go to the United States to sue.”
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Lasting impact of MK-ULTRA
The class-action request, filed in January 2019, alleges that the government of Canada funded psychiatric treatments by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute between 1948 and 1964 that were allegedly part of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program of covert mind-control. It has not been authorized yet by a judge.
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Content Warning: Descriptions of medical abuse, physical abuse, and psychological torture
Charles Tanny visited the Allan Memorial Institute, a research and psychiatric centre operated by McGill’s Royal Victoria Hospital, in August 1957. He was referred to the Allan after experiencing pain in his face, a condition his family doctor believed was psychosomatic—Charles suffered from trigeminal neuralgia, a neuropathic condition—rather than a psychological one.
Nearly seven decades later, Charles’s daughter, Julie Tanny, is now the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against McGill, the Royal Victoria Hospital, the Canadian government, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Tanny, along with hundreds of other plaintiffs, alleges that the Allan conducted psychological experimentation on unconsenting patients between 1943 and 1964.
From 1957 to 1964, the CIA funded 89 institutions that researched mind control and brainwashing techniques in a project known as MK ULTRA. Subproject 68, one of 144, took place at the Allan under the supervision of psychiatry professor Donald Ewen Cameron. Tanny’s lawsuit alleges that the experiments started in 1943 when McGill hired Cameron as the founding director of the Allan, years before the CIA’s involvement.
Cameron, whose research focused on the causes of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, believed that mentally ill patients could be “depatterned” through prolonged comas, large doses of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, and extreme electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). After “depatterning”—which resulted in memory erasure, acute confusion, and/or losing bladder and bowel control—Cameron believed patients could be re-taught healthy behaviour through “psychic driving,” a process during which patients were sedated and subjected to tape recordings of a single sentence on repeat. Tanny, who obtained her father’s medical records in 1977, says her dad was put into an insulin coma and kept asleep for 23 out of 24 hours every day, while a background audio recording played endlessly. The content of the recording was not disclosed in his medical records.
“After the first months, he asked to see my mother, so they wrote in his file that he still had connections to his former life […] so they put him back into treatment for another month,” Tanny told The Tribune. “After the second month, they said that it looked like this was as far as they could take him.”
Charles, Tanny’s father, was also subject to extreme ECT shocks, allegedly administered two to three times per day at 20 to 40 times the normal voltage at the Allan. Tanny says that when Charles returned from the Allan after two and half months of experiments, he had no recollection of his three children.
“My father was a very devoted father [….] Every weekend, he took us to Belmont Park we went fishing, he built us a skating rink, very attached. And after the experiments, there was zero relationship. He was extremely detached, and that never changed,” Tanny said. “There’s one common thread with a lot of people who were depatterned: They came home quite physically violent and angry. And in my father’s case, he went from a very loving and gentle man to someone who used to hit me regularly.”
Lana Jean Ponting spent a month at the Allan in April 1958. She was admitted because of a court order her parents received after running away from her house at 15 years old. Now 81, she remembers her time at the Allan vividly.
“When I got to the Allan, it was a scary-looking building,” Ponting said in an interview with The Tribune. “When I went in there, I noticed a strange chemical smell. Dr. Cameron assured my parents that he would take care of me. I remember going to sit in Dr. Cameron’s office, he took me to a room where I had one pillow, a mattress, and a blanket. He told me to stay in the room. The nurse came in with a pole and a bag with something in it. She told me to lie down and she put a needle in my arm. I felt funny. And so it began.”
Ponting, who has been on medication since the experiments to offset the side effects, suffers from flashbacks and never spoke of her time at the Allan with anyone, not even her husband. She only recently uncovered that she was a victim of the experiments after her brother noticed an ad about the class action lawsuit in The Montreal Gazette.
Since piecing together her memories of the Allan with her newfound knowledge of the experiments, Ponting has testified in the Kanien’kehà:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers)’s ongoing lawsuit against McGill. The Mothers suspect the university’s New Vic site, formerly the Royal Victoria Hospital, holds unmarked Indigenous graves. In an affidavit that was enclosed with a note from her doctor attesting that she is of sound mind and body, Ponting says she saw digging at night as a patient.
“I would sneak out of the Allan at night when I could. I actually saw people with shovels. I could see them because their lights were so bright. And I noticed that [the shovels] had red handles, I will never forget the red handles,” Ponting said.
While most of the plaintiffs are the relatives of victims, Ponting is one of the few living child survivors.
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While the class action was filed in 2019, it has yet to be certified—the process through which a lawsuit is approved by a court before proceeding to trial. In March 2021, the United States Attorney General filed a motion to be dismissed as a defendant, claiming it had immunity from lawsuits in Canada at the time of the alleged experiments. The motion was heard and later won in 2022. The plaintiffs have since filed an appeal, which was heard at the Quebec Court of Appeals on March 30, 2023.
Jeff Orenstein, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, says the State Immunity Act, which determines how foreign states can be sued in Canada, is retrospective and can apply to cases before the Act was passed. Orenstein argues that when Canada drafted the Act, it took direction from similar documents in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. While the British and European documents clearly indicate that their immunity acts are not retroactive, both the American and Canadian immunity acts do not establish whether they apply to instances prior to the policies’ adoptions. Orenstein sees the lack of a specific retrospectivity clause in the Act as an intentional choice.
“Anyone who was a Canadian who was injured on Canadian soil for personal injury has jurisdiction in Canada, without a doubt. And so, if the Act applies, there’s not much else to decide. Clearly, we have jurisdiction in Quebec,” Orenstein told the Tribune. “If Canada didn’t recopy [the retrospectivity clause], they obviously intended it to apply to things that happened in the past.”
As Tanny and Orenstein await an appeals decision from the judges, they are optimistic that they will win based on the questions the judges asked during the March 30 hearing.
“The judges seemed to be quite interested in the retrospectivity debate,” Orenstein said. “It is a serious question that I think will take them some time to work through [….] They’re going to want to take their time to really write a very serious, reasoned judgement, knowing that it might end up in front of nine judges in Ottawa [at the Supreme Court].”
After the U.S.’s status as a defendant is decided, the remaining defendants, including McGill, will have to present their defences for the class action to be certified, a process that Orenstein estimates could take years.
In a statement to Global News in 2019, the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), which was born from the merger of the Royal Victoria Hospital with four other hospitals in the city, recognized Cameron’s experiments but denied responsibility, claiming that Cameron acted independently and was not an official MUHC employee. The plaintiffs amended their application to list McGill as a defendant instead of the MUHC. The Tribune contacted McGill in light of its involvement in the lawsuit, but was referred to the MUHC, who declined to comment, citing the ongoing nature of the suit.
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Cadaver dogs have detected potential human remains on McGill University grounds where a group called the Mohawk Mothers believe unmarked graves exist.
On June 9, 2023, three cadaver dog teams from the Ottawa Valley Search and Rescue Dog Association scoured the grounds under the supervision of archeologists, dog handlers and two Kanieke’haka cultural monitors.
All dogs signaled that they detected human remains in front of the Hersey Pavillion, which was the site of the old Royal Victoria Hospital’s nurses’ sleeping quarters.
“Given that three separate dog teams indicated the same location independently with a TFR, we are confident that the odour of human remains is in this area,” said the report.
This was part of the archeological procedures mandated in a settlement agreement reached in early April between McGill University, Quebec’s infrastructure society, the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and the Mohawk Mothers, or Kanistansera, six women from Kahnawake.
The Kanistensera allege that unmarked graves of victims of the MK-ULTRA mind control experiments from the 1950s and 1960s may be found on the grounds of the Royal Victoria Hospital and the old Allan Memorial institute, where McGill plans to build the New Vic project, a renovated facility.
Since the site was detected, archeological procedures have been halted and the parties involved in the agreement have returned to the negotiating table to determine how to handle these new developments.
McGill has been attempting to go forward with the New Vic project, which would revamp the old Royal Victoria site – which neighbours the AMI where CIA- and Canadian-funded psychiatric experiments took place from 1957 to 1964.
The Kahnistansera allege that there is a strong possibility that bodies of Indigenous children who they say were victims of botched psychiatric experiments are buried on the grounds of the Allan Memorial Institute (AMI), a former psychiatric hospital which is owned by McGill.
After a settlement agreement was reached in April, archeological works began to determine whether human remains were present on-site.
Kanistensera alleges insufficient onsite security
At the case management hearing June 29, the Kanistensera and the special interlocutor on unmarked graves’ legal representation, Julian Falconer, stated that the settlement agreement was not sufficient to address these new developments.
Section 17 of the agreement states that if a discovery is made, “McGill, SQI and the Kanien’keha:ka Kahnistensera will seek the advice of the Panel [of archeologists] as to how to move forward.”
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“As required the work has been stopped, security is patrolling, and fences have been put up,” said Doug Mitchell, McGill’s legal representative.
Mitchell also stated they had filed a permit to begin archeological works to verify if human remains were present on the site of concern.
While McGill and SQI said they were following the procedures outlined in the agreement by following the advice of the panel of archeologists, Falconer said “the [archeology] panel expressly stated they don’t have expertise on security recommendations” to prevent the site from being disturbed.
Additionally, the Kanistensera said their cultural monitors have not seen the promised 24-hour surveillance of the site in question at McGill. One cultural monitor, Karonhia’nó:ron Dallas Binette of Kanesatake, said that during the archeological foot survey of the site of the old Royal Victoria Hospital in May, he and the archeologists noticed recently disturbed ground behind the Ross Pavillion.
“There were artifacts that were disturbed, mainly related to a dump behind the Ross Pavilion, but grounds being disturbed,” said Karonhia’nó:ron.
“There was evidence of non-authorized persons being able to freely walk around the Royal Victoria and Allan Memorial site,” he said.
Karonhia’nó:ron said that on June 9, “while the [cadaver] dogs were working, pedestrians were able to encroach on their space. This didn’t affect the work of the dogs, but just in terms of respecting the site archeologically. More needs to be done to protect the integrity of the land and people’s spirits.”
The Kanistensera contested McGill’s claims that there has been sufficient security increased after the findings of the sniffer dogs.
Cooperation ‘not what it could be’ says archives firm
There are also concerns over the speed of handing over archival records. In the settlement agreement, the MUHC, McGill, and the Library and Archives Canada are supposed to expedite access to relevant archival records on those who may have attended the Allan Memorial Institute and been subject to the MK-ULTRA experiments to Know History, an independent history firm.
However, the panel has only been contracted for six months to advise on archeological works on the proposed New Vic site.
“If you don’t have access to the records in a timely way, then conclusions are tainted by that. You’re operating essentially in the blind. And so this accelerated timeline has meant the need for accelerated access to records and that’s not happening,” said Falconer in a post-hearing interview with APTN News.
While MUHC, McGill and Library and Archives Canada stated they were in the process of handing over records, Falconer said he had received communication from Know History that cooperation was “not what it could be.”
“What the defendants described in the case management meeting was their interpretation of how things are progressing,” said Falconer. “What I can tell you is we are getting reports directly back from Know History that simply don’t support that, as we indicated in court.”
Judge Gregory Moore gave the Kanistensera three options: to expand the panel to include expertise in site security; to revisit the mediation process between the defendants and plaintiffs and possibly modify the settlement agreement; or to begin a litigation process against the defendants.
The Kanistensera have until July 14 to decide how to proceed.
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Technicians have completed their ground penetrating radar search at McGill University in Montreal to help determine if there are historical unmarked graves of Indigenous children.
The work took place in front of the Hersey Pavillion at McGill, where cadaver dogs detected the scent of decomposing bodies, according to a report by the Ottawa Valley Search and Rescue Dog Association.
These archeological procedures were sparked by Kanien’keha:ka Kahnistensera, also known as the Mohawk Mothers – a group of women from Kahnawá:ke, Que., who allege there are unmarked graves on the site from child victims of botched psychiatric experiments that were part of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program.
“We’re doing what we said we’re going to do, and we’re looking for our children,” said Kahentintha, a Mohawk mother overseeing the work.
“And we’re using the latest high-tech gadgets that exist.”
The analysis of the data won’t be available for another month or so, said Peter Takacs of Geoscan, the company doing the GPR scans.
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Takacs said the raw data is not very useful on its own.
“What that might be needs to be analysed by local experts, archeologists, you know, anyone who can give you more information about what it could be,” he said.
“You can’t just look at the ground penetrating radar data and say there are unmarked graves. You need to know the local geology, the history of the site, so it’s a very complex sort of analysis.”
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A group of Mohawk women overseeing a search for human remains on the grounds of a former hospital in Montreal say security staff verbally abused and evicted them from the site despite a court order authorizing the work.
The women are members of Kanien’keha:ka Kahnistensera, or Mohawk Mothers, a group that has been fighting in court since 2015 to halt a McGill University expansion project at the former Royal Victoria Hospital until it can be searched for burials.
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In October, 2022, a judge granted an injunction on construction until archeological work could be completed. Earlier this year, the Mothers struck a court-authorized settlement with McGill and Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI), the Quebec government agency that manages infrastructure, to carry out an archeological search at the location.
But the Mohawk Mothers said any goodwill created by the settlement has been undone by the actions of security personnel contracted by SQI. On the afternoon of July 25, three security guards approached five of the women on the Royal Victoria grounds and told them to leave.
“The one security guard was very hostile,” said one of the women, Kwetiio, who goes by a single name. “She told us we weren’t allowed to be there. I said actually we are allowed by court order.”
When someone tried to record the encounter on a phone, security staff seized the device and erased the clip, Kwetiio said. That’s when another person on the scene started a second video recording.
The video, viewed by The Globe and Mail, shows one of the Mothers objecting to their treatment, saying to the security personnel, “I think your company needs to reassess its workers.”
“I think you guys need a life,” responded a female security guard to the assembly of elders, who range in age from 51 to 83. “Go get a life. Go get a husband. Go get some kids. Go have some kids.”
One of the elders, Kahentinetha, said that Indigenous children had been murdered on the site, “and now you’re benefiting from these murders.”
“Exactly, we’re benefiting from it, that’s correct,” the guard responded in the video.
The elders, along with two cultural monitors hired as part of the settlement to ensure that the archeology work complies with traditional protocols, can then be seen leaving the grounds.
“I’m still in shock,” said Kwetiio in an interview with The Globe. “What happened here? Nobody will tell us.”
In an e‑mailed statement, SQI said the encounter was an isolated incident and singled out one of the guards. “[SQI] condemns all forms of racism and aggression and considered the comments and behaviour of this officer in particular during the incident to be unacceptable.”
The guard who made dismissive comments to the women has now been suspended pending further investigation, according to a statement from the Quebec division of Commissionaires, the security company that employs the guards.
McGill University spokesman Michel Proulx called the incident unfortunate and said the institution looks forward to continuing collaboration with the Mohawk Mothers.
“We’re confident the SQI, which is responsible for security on the site, is taking the appropriate steps to address the situation,” he said in an e‑mailed statement. “We’ve been working closely with the Mohawk Mothers and the SQI in a spirit of mutual respect and collaboration, and we will continue to do so.”
Kimberly Murray, the federally appointed Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves, was one of the intervenors in the case that led to the settlement agreement. She said the heated encounter could have been avoided if SQI and McGill had chosen a vetted security company with cultural competency training and a solid background in the search effort taking place on the site.
“What they have done is completely contrary to what is supposed to be a collaborative approach as per the settlement agreement,” she said.
Kwetiio said that the older Mothers won’t feel comfortable returning to the site unless security personnel changes.
“We are not satisfied returning yet because we have asked questions about people employed there, and about getting them cultural training, and haven’t received answers,” she said. “They need to speak to us in a culturally appropriate manner. We need to have this resolved as quick as possible because we need to find our children.”
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Archeological dig at old Montreal hospital on hold after incident with security guard.
A spokesperson for the Mohawk Mothers, or Kahnistensera, says the group feels pushed aside in the search for unmarked graves on a site owned by Société Québécoise des Infrastructures, or SQI. McGill says it leases part of the property.
“The process can no longer by any means be considered Indigenous-led, as the SQI and McGill attempt to control the whole process, reducing the role of Indigenous people to performing ceremonies on the site,” said Kahentinetha, one of the Mothers who added that they feel blindsided by the communications that happened without consulting them.
Quebec’s infrastructure society, or SQI, and McGill both put out statements on Aug. 3 saying nine potential gravesites were identified through ground penetrating radar, or GPR, without consulting the Kahnistensera.
They excluded the information that, according to Geoscan’s report, “It is possible that some of the unknown features may be unmarked graves, particularly in the case of older burials without coffins and also possibly child-size graves.”
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“The only way we can find out is to be right there, because we are not told and I don’t know why the material goes to them, and then they distribute it in the way they want and eventually we get a copy of it,” she said. “It seems like this is violating the court order.”
They were present on-site when archeologists also dug up a woman’s dress and a pair of children’s shoes, the style dating back to around the 1940s.
But the archeologist panel appointed in the settlement agreement said that they need to appoint a forensic specialist to handle these items, something the SQI has refused, said researcher Philippe Blouin.
“That has been refused now, officially, even though it was a recommendation from the panel, and their recommendations are supposed to be binding, as per the settlement agreement. It’s been refused by the SQI,” he said.
In an email statement to APTN News, the SQI stated that a bioarcheologist is present when archeological works are underway – but did not say whether they were trained in handling potentially criminal evidence.
“The dress was found just a few inches inside the ground and then put in a plastic bag but it has to be a tamper-proof bag for it to stand in a criminal court. There are many chances that it is possible that this comes to a criminal court and this chain of custody has to be preserved for this prosecution to be successful,” said Blouin.
Blouin said they also have left partially covered piles of dirt to sit in the rain since July 25 that was dug up where sniffer dogs detected the scent of human remains in early June.
“The piles have not been sifted through, and that was also a recommendation from the panel that was not respected by the SQI to sift through these piles that were extracted from the site where the search dogs sniffed a target to sift through them immediately because the human remains could be inside these piles.”
Kahentinetha said that in the midst of these recommendations being ignored, “Despite publicly stating their support for the process and commitment to reconciliation, McGill and SQI have unilaterally deemed the panel’s mandate terminated.”
This would mean that archeological works would continue with the firm Ethnoscope, but they would be guided by McGill and SQI, rather than a panel of expert archeologists. The SQI stated that the archeologist’s panel had the mandate to submit two reports of recommendations, one being submitted on May 8 and the other on July 17. The SQI said they were “very satisfied by and grateful for the work accomplished by the experts.”
The settlement agreement states, “SQI, McGill and the Kanien’keha:ka Kahnistensera agree to be bound by the recommendations of the Panel as to the Techniques and agree to be guided by the recommendations of the Panel as to the specialists to carry out the techniques and analyse the relevant data, but McGill and SQI retain discretion to retain other providers with the appropriate qualifications and expertise if the circumstances warrant.”
The Kahnistensera also don’t want to return to work until they have mohawk security guards after a security guard appointed by a private company hired by SQI kicked them off the grounds on July 25.
“We need to have our own people to do the security. and we do have a group in Kahnawake ready to come and do it, and we’re working on bringing them in.”
Archeological digs have been suspended since that incident.
The SQI and McGill both said that dialogue is underway with the Kahnistensera. In an email statement to APTN, the SQI did not say whether they’d hire a Mohawk security form, but said the agents assigned to the site would receive “awareness training about Indigenous realities including a portion on residential schools and missing children” as well as “a specific training on Mohawk culture provided by the Mothers.”
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10. Sitting Bull at the Powder River Council
The following words were spoken by Sitting Bull at the purely Indian “Powder River Council” of 1877, as recounted by men who were present to Charles A. Eastman (author of Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains):
“Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Every seed is awakened, and all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.”
“Yet hear me, friends! we have now to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not! They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege.”
“This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.”
“We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also. My brothers, shall we submit? or shall we say to them: ‘First kill me, before you can take possession of my fatherland!’ ”
Discussion
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