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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!’ ”
Are they going to get away with it? A coverup in the face of court orders? Maybe. They’re at least on track to get away with it. That’s the trouble update we’ve received in the last month or so about the ongoing legal battle taking place in Canada between the Mohawk Mothers and McGill University over the suspected unmarked graves currently at risk of being excavated and destroyed. As we saw at the end of October, the Mohawk Mothers were taking McGill and the Société Québécoise des infrastructures (SQI) back to court after filing an emergency motion to halt the excavation process following the discovery of evidence of possible human remains. As part of that emergency filing, the Mothers also alleged that the three-person archaeological advisory panel set up as part of the prior settlement was improperly dismissed by McGill.
As we’re going to see in the following article excerpts, the courts issued their ruling about a month later, finding that yes the three-person advisory panel was improperly dismissed and must be reinstated. But at the same time, the court rules that the reinstatement of the panel means there’s no immediate need to halt the excavation process. As such, the excavation process is ongoing. At the same time, McGill announced it was appealing the ruling, a move that is presumably only going to add further delays to the properly sharing of information worth the reinstated panel. And all the while, the excavation continues. So while there was some good news in this ruling, the destruction of evidence continues.
But human remains aren’t the only evidence at risk of being lost here. There’s another chapter to this story that hasn’t received as much attention so far but could probe to be crucial for unraveling the fates of these indigenous children: access the archival patient records. Yes, as we should expect, McGill is refusing to turn over those archives to the Mothers. Using as bad faith a legal argument as we should also expect by now: they are arguing that patient privacy laws bar them from handing over the archives. This is despite the fact that the court settlement already stated that privacy concerns can be overruled in this case.
So we have McGill appealing a court ruling mandating the reinstatement of an advisory panel McGill improperly dismissed, at the same time McGill is refusing to hand over patient archives citing privacy concerns. This is, of course, privacy concerns for patients who are suspected of having died while undergoing horrific experiments and buried in unmarked graves now at risk of being destroyed. The whole situation just reeks of bad faith. Bad faith and, if you’re a cadaver dog, human remains. And, as of now, it appears that McGill is on track to get away with it. Again, despite the newly reinstate panel, the excavation continues, along with all the bad faith footdragging and obstruction:
“The written judgement from justice Gregory Moore, which was released on Monday, November 20, reinstates the panel of archaeologists, a decision the judge describes as “an exceptional remedy” that is only issued in cases where the court is convinced “that irreparable harm will occur if the order is not issued.””
The unilateral dismissal of the advisory panel by McGill and the SQI risked “irreparable harm” to the families, necessitating “an exceptional remedy” by the judge of a court ordered reinstatement of the panel. That was the excellent news the Mohawk Mothers received from the courts back in November after they were forced to apply for a safeguard order following months of footdragging and refusals by McGill and the SQI to halt the excavation work. The panel will be back. Hopefully in time to make a difference:
Troublingly, though, the judge didn’t actually order a halt to the excavation work, reasoning that the reinstitution of the panel made the halting of the work no longer necessary. At the same time, both McGill and the SQI are issuing statements about how the excavation work will continue, with SQI adding that, “work can continue without interruption, the request to suspend the work having not been accepted.” It’s the kind of statement that suggests McGill and SQI are still very intent on completing the excavation process as soon as possible as long as the courts allow them to get away with it:
But also note this other legal issue looming over this entire story that has nothing to do with the excavation process: access to the patient archives:
And that brings us to the following report from early December about the Mohawk Mothers’ legal battle for those archives. A battle that has already achieved a surreal level of bad faith on the part of McGill. As we’re going to see, McGill has thus far refused to turn over archives on the Mohawk Mothers’ family members due to “patient confidentiality”. Yep, McGill is insisting that the patients’ privacy needs to be protected and that’s why they can’t turn over the archives. This is despite the fact that, as the Mohawk Mothers’ attorneys point out, the legal settlement in this case already allows the defendants to override “confidentiality concerns” without consent from the patients. Patients who, of course, are now dead thanks to the horrific experiments done on them and may now be buried in unmarked graves at risk of being excavated:
“Mohawk Mother Kahentinetha was the first to speak before Justice Gregory Moore. She reminded the court that under articles two, three, and four of the settlement agreement, McGill, MUHC, and the Attorney General of Canada are bound to provide expedited access to their archives and records. She alleged that MUHC refused to share their archival records on medical experiments on Indigenous children, which she believed to be direct evidence of denialism.”
Yes, despite the court settlement, the archives have remained under wraps, with lawyers for McGill arguing that patient confidentiality prohibited them from sharing the records. That’s despite the court settlement telling them to override confidentiality concerns without consent from the patients. Now long dead patients who might be buried in unmarked graves McGill is trying as hard as possible to excavate:
At the same time, McGill has indicated that it intends to appeal the ruling mandating the reinstatement of the advisory panel. An appeal that will presumably delay that reinstatement, at the same time the excavation process continues. It’s like they are buying time to complete the excavation process and just make it fait accompli kind of situation:
Student tuition is even going towards these appeals and legal battles. Which raises the question about how expensive will this whole saga ultimately get when it’s all over? Will McGill get away with destroying the evidence without having to pay an significant fines in the process? Or is the plan to just ignore the court orders, destroy the evidence, and accept the inevitable fines and other legal consequences? We don’t know. But it’s beyond obvious by this point that there is a mega-scandal under this rock that McGill, SQI, and presumably much of the rest of the Canadian government (not to mention the US government) are determined to keep under this rock...until the rock and everything beneath it are excavated away into the dustbin of history. That’s the plan. A plan that appears to be working.
They CIA won. As expected. And the Mohawk Mothers lost, also as expected. At least that’s how the legal battle over the excavation of McGill University’s Royal Victoria Hospital grounds amid an ongoing search for unmarked graves appears to have ultimately been resolved following a recent Quebec Appeals Court decision overturning the ruling from back in November in favor of the Mohawk Mothers. Recall how that legal fight was centered around the three-person panel of archeological advisors that was dismissed by McGill University and the Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI) — the Quebec government agency that manages infrastructure — in the summer of 2023. McGill and SQI argued that the panel had completed its stated mission and was no longer needed. The Mohawk Mothers obviously disagreed. And as we’ve seen, the panel of archeologists also disagreed with their dismissal and has called for additional experts, like the appoint of a forensics expert, which McGill and SQI have refused to do. That call for additional experts, and the refusal to appoint them, is particularly notable given that, as we’re going to see, McGill and SQI argue that the panel lacked the necessary scientific expertise to assess findings.
Then, back in October, the Mohawk Mothers took McGill and the SQI back to court after filing an emergency motion to halt the excavation process following the discovery of evidence of possible human remains. As part of that emergency filing, the Mothers also alleged that the three-person archeological advisory panel was improperly dismissed by McGill. Judge Gregory Moore ruled back in November that the panel was improperly dismissed and must be reinstated. But as we also saw, it was a ruling that didn’t halt the excavation process. So excavations were allowed to continue while these appeals play out.
That’s the appeals process that finally came to a conclusion, with the three-judge appeals court ruling that Judge Moore’s ruling was unenforceable. As a result, it appears the three-person advisory panel unilaterally dismissed by McGill and SQI will remain dismissed. And while we are told excavation work will continue this year, it also sounds like it’s going to be the experts selected by McGill and SQI fully in control of the process.
Oh, and there’s another related update to the overall situation that helps provide some broader context for the incredible mega-scandal underlying this case: the Canadian government released a new resource back in June to assist indigenous communities in their ongoing hung for unmarked graves at the sites of government-run residential schools, where over 150,000 indigenous children were housed after being taken from their families. Those schools no longer exist, having been torn down and paved over decades ago, but that hasn’t ended the search for unmarked graves. Now, with this new historical map of those residential schools, investigators can now query whether or not a discovered unmarked grave was in the proximity of one of those now-demolished structures.
As we’ll see, the new historical map doesn’t include every institution known to have housed indigenous children. Only federally funded institutions were included. Over 100 indigenous communities are currently involved with that effort to identify these hidden graves. That’s all part of the context of the ongoing, but largely lost, battle to identify the bodies hiding on the Royal Victoria Hospital grounds. So many indigenous children went missing in Canada while under the ‘care’ of government-run institutions that a special historical map had to be made to assist in that ongoing hunt for their hidden graves. And that’s on top of grizzly reality that the unmarked graves suspected to be hiding on the grounds of the Royal Victoria Hospital were likely victims of CIA-sponsored MKUltra experiments. Mega-scandals on top of mega-scandals. That’s what’s being investigated...and covered up.
Ok, first, here’s an update on the then-ongoing appeals by McGill and SQI from back in June. And as we can see, it’s not just the Mohawk Mothers who were arguing their panel of archeologists were still necessary to oversee the excavation process given all the conflicts-of-interest inherent in having McGill and SQI overseeing the process. The archeologists are making that case too:
“McGill and the SQI are appealing. It’s now up to the Court of Appeal to decide.”
It was up to the Quebec Court of Appeal to resolve the ongoing dispute following the decision by McGill and SQI to appeal Judge Moore’s ruling back in November. A ruling that found that the three-person panel of advisors was improperly dismissed and must be reinstated. But as we also saw, it was a ruling that didn’t halt the excavation process. So excavations were allowed to continue while these appeals play out. That’s part of the context of this story of the ongoing appeals: the appeals double as a stalling tactic to allow the excavation to continue:
Also note part of the argument by McGil and SQI for the decision to terminate the three-personal panel of archeologists early: they argue that this panel wants to replace “the interpretation of experts and archeological geophysics with their own interpretation, even though their lack of scientific competence in the field is blatant.” It’s being turned into a fight over forensic expertise. At the same time, McGill and SQI insist that no evidence has been uncovered so far hinting at human remains. This is a good time to recall how the Mohawk Mothers charge that McGill and SQI ended investigative work early despite evidence from Ground Penetrating Radar and Historic Human Remains Detection Dogs (HHRDD) indicating human remains. Also recall how the panel called for a forensics expert to be added but McGill and SQI refused. So when we find McGill and SQI besmirching the scientific expertise of these archeologists, keep in mind that McGill and SQI have their own team of experts ready to make conclusions like ‘the evidence of human remains isn’t strong enough’, etc:
And that brings us to the allegations from figures like Julian Falconer, a lawyer for the special interlocutor, that McGill and SQI effectively shut the three person panel down after they started asking too many questions. In other words, they got shut down for doing their jobs. That’s the picture emerging:
That was the update we got back in June. Then, last week, the Quebec Court of Appeals made its ruling, overturning Judge Moore’s ruling and siding with McGill and the SQI:
““The Court (of Appeal) is of the view that the judge’s order is not enforceable,” the panel of three judges wrote in a decision delivered Friday afternoon.”
Well, that’s an unfortunate ruling. And more or less exactly what we should have expected. There was no way a story this scandalous and sensitive would be allowed to really be uncovered:
Well, at least for now, it appears McGill and SQI have triumphed. No real investigation should be expected at this point. Or at least not one that isn’t incredibly conflicted. It’s basically going to be a “trust us to do the right thing” operation from here on out.
So given this highly predictable apparent end to this legal battle, it’s worth noting a closely related story from back in June that gives some additional context to this legal battle: the government of Ottawa launch a new interactive historiccal map of government run residential schools for indigenous children. Schools that have all been torn down and paved over decades ago.
Why create the map? To find unmarked graves. As one anthropology professor put it, “If we find evidence of a cemetery or a burial, and we know where it is relative to buildings in the 1930s, we can use this kind of information to say: ‘Where is this today?’ ”
It sounds like more than 100 indigenous communities are involved with this ongoing residential school grave search project. A gruesome consequence of the over 150,000 indigenous children removed from their families as the schools were in operation. It’s a reminder that the discovery of unmarked graves at a site like the Royal Victoria Hospital where indigenous children were housed isn’t like some remote possibility to be explored. Instead, unmarked graves for indigenous children appear to be so widespread in Canada, it would almost be weird if there that hospital didn’t have any:
“Many residential school buildings have been torn down, paved or built over since the first one opened in Canada in the 1830s and the last one closed in the mid-1990s.”
It’s a now familiar story: the institutions where indigenous children went missing no longer exist. Or to put it another way, the very thing that the Mohawk Mothers are trying to avoid in their legal battle over the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec was something that already happened in one residential school building after another: buildings were torn down, paved over, and presumably a lot of unmarked graves were destroyed in the process. But maybe not all of them, hence the value of this new historical map:
And note the number of communities involved in this search for missing children: more than 100 indigenous communities. Who had fight to get access to this information:
Finally, note how this map, while incredibly useful, is far from complete and leaves out a number of other institutions with a history of housing indigenous children, including entities not funded by the Canadian federal government. Which is a reminder that the exploitation of indigenous children potentially included all sorts of private institutions or financing from non-federal entities. Which raises the question of how the CIA’s sponsorship of the MKUltra experiments at the Royal Victoria Hospital were financed:
How many unmarked graves will indigenous communities be able to identify thanks to these new maps? Time will tell. Many of the graves they were looking for were presumably destroyed when these schools themselves were demolished and paved over. Graves lost forever, along with some sort of final conclusion for the families. It’s a reminder that this fight for historic truth is in many ways a fight for a final conclusion. A final conclusion of that comes to the families of the victims when a grave is finally discovered. Or the final conclusion for the perpetrators of these historic crimes. And it’s pretty clear at this point which side is likely to get its preferred final conclusion.