Samir Shaheen-Hussain interview: Doctors left children to suffer

Discoveries of mass graves of Indigenous children in Canada have prompted new scrutiny of the residential school system – including the role physicians played in unethical experiments, says paediatrician Samir Shaheen-Hussain

By Roxanne Khamsi

IN RECENT months, more than 1300 unmarked graves of Indigenous children have been discovered in Canada. They were found at the sites of former residential schools, facilities authorised and funded by the Canadian government to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. Between the 1880s and 1990s, 150,000 children were taken from their families and placed in these schools, which were largely run by the Catholic church.

The recent discovery of these graves has sent shock waves around the world and confirmed what many Indigenous communities have long maintained – that children sent to these schools lived in dangerous and traumatic conditions, and many of them entered never to be seen again.

The legacy of prejudice that led to separating children from their parents continues to affect Indigenous communities in Canada today. Until recently, for example, when Indigenous children living in remote areas of Quebec needed emergency evacuation for medical care, their parents were barred from accompanying them. Samir Shaheen-Hussain, a paediatric emergency physician, was part of a successful campaign in 2018 to change that.

His participation in activism for Indigenous rights inspired him to look more closely at the residential school system. In his new book, Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting medical colonialism against Indigenous children in Canada, Shaheen-Hussain examines the role that doctors and scientists working at the schools played in perpetuating the system and endangering children’s lives. He writes that not only did they let deadly diseases such as tuberculosis run …