Ideas - How Canada forgot it once had a segregated health system

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

In the days before her medically-assisted death, journalist Elaine Dewar made it her mission to finish writing her book revealing ignored history. For more than three years, the author investigated how Canada's health care system cruelly mistreated Indigenous people — including forcing them to use segregated hospitals. Dewar's extensive research uncovers not only a shameful past, but that our collective obliviousness to it all was deliberately manufactured.

Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, and while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada. Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics like Death of a Salesman or Waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at Stratfordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even taped the debaters there once, so I guess we're world-class now. This is a CBC podcast.

Are you good to begin? I am. When I first met Elaine Dewar, she was propped up in bed, draped in hospital blue and white, oxygen tube in her nostrils. Thank you, first of all, so much for speaking with us, given everything that's going on with you. I'm grateful for the opportunity, actually.

A couple of times, she allowed, herself a short break. But she was determined to push through. I'm a journalist. I've got to get the story out. That's my job. You know, my job's not going to end until I'm done. I understand that urgency to get the story out, and I know it well. But there was more to this than a professional imperative. Elaine had stage four cancer. When we met, It was just two days before her medically assisted death. Our conversation, though, was about her investigation into a dark chapter in Canada's medical history. The more I looked, the more I found.

And the more I found, the more horrible it was. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Elaine's investigation led to a book titled Oblivious, part memoir, part investigation, part personal quest to understand how a country so proud of its medical system could be so oblivious to its racist past. Hello, can everyone hear me? We're going to get started in two or three minutes here if you want to find a seat. We're digging a few more out for you.

In a wood-paneled room at Massey College at the University of Toronto, the official launch of Elaine Dewar's book was about to get underway. The room was overflowed. with people, scholars, lawyers, journalists, family, and friends. Everyone, except, of course, Elaine herself. Hello, everyone. And thank you for coming out in support of the launch of Elaine Dewar's final book, oblivious, residential schools, segregated hospitals,

and the use of indigenous people as slaves of race science. Dan Wells is the publisher of Bibliuasis and editor of Elaine's book, an investigation into how indigenous people were treated and horribly mistreated by the Canadian medical system. The final manuscript, though, grapples with much more. Our collective obliviousness, the definition of genocide, and Elaine's own history as a Jewish woman one generation removed from the Holocaust.

Elaine's oblivious is a deeply personal book. it became progressively more so with each pass and edit. But it was also a book very much about connection between individuals, families, communities, and what can happen when ignorance and obliviousness, a word that has come to carry a particular weight in meaning in my vocabulary, fray the ties that should bind. It's about the erosion of trust

and the personal, cultural, and societal costs of this. It's about not only acknowledging the past, but working to correct as best as we are able historical wrongs, which we can't do unless we know what has happened. And not even terminal cancer was going to get in the way of Elaine trying to tell us what happened.

That might have been our greatest gift. How much she cared about other people's stories about what each of us cared about. Anna Dewar-Gully is Elaine's daughter. I have always been immensely proud of my mom, the writer. She used her voice fearlessly, determined not to care how it landed, even though she did care how it landed. She would say, how it lands is not your business, Anna. Your business is to look under every rock, to talk to every voice, to reflect those voices

as truthfully as you possibly can, and to trust your audience to learn alongside you. It was not easy to have a mother like that. She was so present in her work, so, observant, so determined, so mission-driven, and yet I would choose no one else to be my mother. She taught me to see joy and to write it. She taught me to see pain and to use it. She was a lifelong student of this world, and she tried her damnedest to pass it on to me and my sister Danielle is here today. In hospice, as she faced the sudden pain of cancer, she was still determined to get the voices from this book into the world, even the night of her diagnosis, like literally on the table the night of her diagnosis. That was foremost in her mind. At that time,

I actually really didn't understand. I was pissed about it. I just wanted her to be my mom. But by the last day of her life, I actually did understand how her life and her life's work were completely commingled, really one in the same. That's how it came to be that Elaine recorded two interviews in the days just before she died, one with her friends. journalist and author Marcy MacDonald, and one with me. Could I first begin by asking why it had to be you to tell this story? Well, when I got an email from this man, Roland Christian, who is an American Indian movement activist from the 70s, who is a psychologist and a professor at St. Thomas, and I asked him that question.

I mean, what he wanted me to do was to investigate the Canadian government's genocide of indigenous people. And I said to him, well, you know, the Truth in Reconciliation Commission said cultural genocide. They didn't mean the genocide that you're referring to. And we had a lot of back and forth over the meaning of the word genocide, the history of the convention that was in part created by, a Jewish lawyer who fled Poland on time before the start of World War, two, and who began to outline what was going on in Nazi Germany. And basically, at the end of the day, it got down to two things. One, I would not exist, if not for indigenous people, because my grandparents and great-grandparents were saved by them several times when they first arrived in Canada on the

only government of Canada, Jewish agricultural colony in the country. They were not equipped. They were dropped in the middle of nowhere, and their indigenous neighbors kept them alive. And that story persists in my family down through three generations. The other factor that Roland pointed to, he said, you have the skill set, which in a way is true. I mean, the last several books I've done have involved reading scientific literature with a very sharp eye. And it is a skill set. And so obligation on the one hand, capacity on the other. But the obligation was augmented by who I am and how I came to be. Who I am is the daughter of a doctor, the niece of another doctor, the niece of an RN, the niece of a pharmacist. And what I am is the daughter of a doctor. And what

What grabbed me was the allegation that indigenous people were used as subjects of science without informed consent. So all of these things came together and the obligation was what really stuck. There's a lot to unpack there, but I do want to get a bit closer to the motivation. And what kept you going because this was not an easy investigation? Could you talk about the process and what kept you sort of motivated as you went through it? On the one hand, sheer stubbornness. I was looking for what Christian described as the cause of a group of indigenous men that he sat with during the Royal Commission on Aboriginal peoples in the 90s,

who were displaying symptoms associated with certain kinds of drugs and who claimed to have been taken to the basements of their residential schools, strapped down on a table, injected with something, after which they developed tardive dyskinesias and seizures. So there was something there. There was something physical there to get my hands on. And when I started just doing general Googling, I found, oh, my goodness,

there is a whole literature describing all kinds of experiments done on not just residential school children, but adults and entire adult communities. So the more I look, the more I found, and the more I found, the more horrible it was. One of the horrible and defining discoveries Elaine made was that for decades, indigenous people were required to be treated in hospitals

that were separate from the mainstream Canadian system. That fact has since been, the subject of scholarly research, books, and class action lawsuits. And yet, it still isn't widely known, and wasn't to Elaine either. So she broadened her inquiry to ask how that shameful history of two separate and unequal medical systems got buried. Could you just lay out the importance of that, the fact that there were two separate systems, you know, dealing with people living in this country. Yeah, and how I discovered this was just Googling one day, and I asked a different set of questions than normal, and up comes a lawsuit filed by Tony Merchant in Saskatchewan,

who I grew up two blocks away from, on segregated hospitals. And he says, you know, there's the segregated hospital system that existed between 1945 and 1981 or 82. These hospitals were all over Western Canada. There were 29 of them, I believe it's a number. There were two of them in Saskatchewan. One of them was at Fort Capel. So I'm going, that's impossible. There can't have been a segregated hospital system.

My father would have gone ballistic. I can't, you know, did anybody, how could I not know that that system existed? So next set of questions was to my friends who did go to medical school, did you know about this system? And the answer was 100% no until I got to the last one

who turned out to have worked for one in Sue Lookout, knew it as the Zone Hospital. On his first day, doing his internship rotation, saw the sign Indian Hospital over the front door. So that was the first indication

that people of my generation were even aware of this. My aunt, who was a training, at Holy Family in Prince Albert, never heard of it. And she's like not that far from North Battleford where one of the hospitals were. And then I remembered, I was actually in Fort Capel for a writers and dramatist

two-week set of seminars organized by the government of Saskatchew and its Arts Council for high schoolers who had an interest in the arts. And I realized I must have walked by that hospital every day for two weeks without noticing a sign that said segregated. I mean, the sign said Indian hospital, but the meaning was segregated. And this is the 1960s where segregation is all over the news, where outrage about what's going on in the United States is everywhere. and I realized that for 40 years, a segregated hospital system had existed without my knowledge.

So it became a question of, how is it possible to remain oblivious to an entire health system, which nobody even looked at as historians or academics, until another 40 years after it was shut down? How did that work? What is going on? So the question of obliviousness and the mechanics of it became another driving force in doing this book.

In her quest to get at the mechanics of how a nation forgets its past wrongs, Elaine scoured the archives and related lawsuits launched in recent years. She also consulted historians. Eventually, the story of how the history of the segregated hospitals was overlooked, began to take shape. No one asked the questions, what happened after the treaty? How did these people fare after that? You know, why are health conditions, the history of criminal injustice?

Why is that also different than the lives of most ordinary Canadians? One of the people Elaine interviewed was John Malloy, Professor Emeritus of History and Native Studies at Trenchard. University and leading historian of Canada's residential school system. He's author of the seminal book A National Crime, the Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1988, based on his research for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal peoples.

There was little history written on the subject before he took it on. Those questions were asked, really, not for a very long time. And part of it was, part of it was the economy of the historical profession in Canada. It's not a lot of us who are historians, right? And doing Aboriginal history, if you can even call it that, it was not the smartest thing to do. I remember.

Why not? Well, I remember years ago when I put my name in for funding and didn't get it, and my friend got it, a nice amount of money, and he was doing French-English relations, and he said, He said, I told you to get with the game. The game is French Canada. It's not Indians.

So it was that sort of process. And it changed, obviously. The more we got interested in indigenous issues, you know, the more there was funded inquiries. You know, the Royal Commission, all those sorts of things. We're wanting to hire people to really deal. into some of the more interesting aspects of that relationship. I know that it's a moment in the book when Elaine comes to you and asks you,

where's the mention, where's the study of segregated hospitals? It was kind of in plain sight, and yet so few Canadians even today know. Yeah, no, it's right true. One of the problems was the economy of the study, studies sort of thing. there was money to do particular sorts of things and not to do anything else or not to do other sorts of things. So the focus got put on what was apparently the most important, and that was the nature of the political relationship between Canada and these indigenous communities sort of thing. The socioeconomic conditions were there, but it wasn't what was going to bring in the research funding.

That, you know, be perfectly frank, It's what the discipline exists on. To bring the history of segregated hospitals into the present, Elaine also set out to speak to survivors. My name is Anne Burk Hardy. I come from a long, proud family of Métis people from the Northwest Territories and the Red River. As a child, Anne Hardy contracted tuberculosis

and was sent in 1969 to a segregated hospital in Edmonton called the Charles Camsell, quote, Indian Hospital, where she both witnessed and endured sexual assault. As an adult, she became the representative plaintiff of a related class action lawsuit against the federal government, and a drawn-out legal process ensued. Anne agreed to speak to me on the eve of the launch of Elaine. book. What was it like for you just to see this book in print form? It was wonderful to see it in print, I guess.

It was very hard to read, but it was a good overall picture. And by that I mean the lack of awareness by the settler people, how we knew what was happening, even in residential school. We knew about residential school issues. We knew about hospital issues in our indigenous communities. But the outside world was totally oblivious to it. Why do you think so many Canadians are oblivious to such an important event in the history of this country? and certainly an important event in your life and many other indigenous people. Well, I think it was easier to ignore.

I mean, we were out of sight, out of mind. Why did you decide to talk to a lane doer about your experience? Well, we were already into the lawsuit by that time. So my story had come out in public, you know, and to some degree. And I kind of was backing off of what I was. I wasn't sure I wanted to do any more interviews. But when I, you know, was introduced to the idea that Elaine was going to actually write a book about it, you know, this is what I, what I wanted was education of the public to understand the depth of the systemic racism that we faced,

that, you know, where many of them were under the impression that, you know, It was residential schools, and that was one and done. It was much more than just residential schools. There were other issues that were reverberating through our community. Issues like what went on at those segregated hospitals. At the camsale, an narrowly escaped major surgery that was more radical than treatment at the time for white people, with the same condition.

But though we knew that was not acceptable medical practice anymore, they were still doing it to our community. Now, luckily, and what's really surprising, because both my parents are products of residential school. And, you know, when they heard things from the authorities, from, you know, they would take it in stride, even though they might not be happy about it and they'd real about it at home, they followed the rule, you know.

And, but that they were able to come and advocate for me is, you know, an amazing story unto itself that they were able to come and tell the doctor, no, you know, they did not want this for me. They prevented it. They did prevent it, yes. And, you know, quite frankly, the doctor told them, well, you're going to have to take her home to die then because she's not going to survive. So that's... But here you are.

Yeah, here I am. You know, I was sent home with some, you know, large pills. I'm guessing antibiotics, three big pills, so nine pills a day, you know, that I had to take for three years. But here I am alive to tell the story. I go for a regular checkup sex rays and have never had recurrence or anything. But, you know, it makes me wonder how often do things like this happen. You know, and I mean, here they were going to do this surgery. And until, you know, and this is a thing as a parent and as a grandparent, that kind of blows me away. My parents never surrendered me. They sent me for medical treatment. And they were going to give me

this surgery or supposed surgery without my parents' permission and without their knowledge, even though they had a telephone in their own home. How would you think that's all right? You know, and I like people to sit and think about that as a parent or as a, you know, grandparent, how would you feel if, you know,

such a drastic medical intervention had been taken and you weren't aware of it until afterwards? As author and journalist Elaine Dune discovered such needless surgeries were just one part of a much larger story. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, and while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada. Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics like Death of a Salesman or Waiting for Godot,

there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at Stratfordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even tape the debaters there once, so I guess we're world class now. At this point, you're not really interested in starting from scratch, because you've built something.

A career, a reputation, a life that's already in motion. But maybe staying right where you are isn't feeling right anymore. At the University of Alberta, our flexible online graduate programs are built for working professionals so you can step up without stepping away from your work, your income, from everything you've built. Explore online graduate programs at UAB.ca slash step up. Journalist and author Elaine Dewar died with medical assistance in September 2025. In the weeks leading up to that day, she spent hours pouring over the manuscript of her

final book entitled Oblivious. And two days before she passed away, She spoke to me about it and about her discovery of unethical experiments that used indigenous people as subjects right here in Canada. The more I looked, the more I found, and the more I found, the more horrible it was. Elaine would conclude, our obliviousness to all this was deliberately manufactured. And that became to me the worst part of all of this. That whole chunks simply were wiped off because they had to do with Aboriginal people.

Elaine turned up document after document, some of them published in scientific journals describing such experiments. Elaine focused on a series of them funded by the Canadian government as part of a global effort called the International Biological Program. That program was conducted between 1968 and 1974

in the Inuit communities of Iglulik and Hall Beach in the Arctic. And according to Elaine's investigation, they were all done without informed consent. And a warning, there are distressing descriptions of those experiments in this part of our conversation. I have to ask you just how horrible. What kind of experiments did you discover? It's not like we're talking about the Nazi experiments in which death was part of the experiment. they were the kind of demeaning

and certainly in the science side useless experiments trying to delineate the capacities of indigenous people from others as if race made a physiological difference to their functioning and behavior so this was racist science from stem to Gajun and its purpose was what

and its product was less than what, and yet whole communities were being subjected to really stupid experiments that purported to show that there was a physiological difference between indigenous men and white men, for example, and how they process alcohol. Nonsense studies. And here you have this population who can't say no. Another experiment, which later became the subject of another lawsuit,

involved experimental skin grafting, in which pieces of skin were removed from Inuit teenagers and then transplanted onto others, again, without informed consent. Under what guise were those experiments held? The lure was that these people would be treated for their medical situations. And it was a lure. I mean, in the correspondence, it's clear as a bell that they knew they were using it as a lure,

and that's why they did it. There is also some evidence in the correspondence that they failed to deliver, especially in a glulik and haul beach. You know, when you're doing measurements of the skin thickness of a three-year-old or an eight-year-old, or if you're subjecting a two-and-a-half-year-old

to a dental mold so that you can show that there is some, either relationship or distinction between a group of Inuit who died off a thousand years ago and a group of Inuit who are alive now. I mean, you do not subject children to having a metal plate stuffed with glueish substance in their mouths dripping down the back. I was just amazed that people had the cruelty to do that. Again, I need to ask this, but could you describe that particular experiment?

Just what it is they did and what it was they were trying to do. So the guy who did it was a dentist who was interested in the physical anthropology of dentistry. So there are some shape differences, for example, between indigenous people and Eastern Canada and Mayan people in Mexico and between white people and whatever. So what he was trying to show by taking early measurements and later measurements of, of Inuit teeth, was whether or not there was a continuous relationship between the remains found on burial sites, some of which he helped dig, and the living populations in the 1960s and 70s in the Eastern Arctic. And it was curiosity. I mean, science is curiosity.

That's what it's about. But science that is done with unchecked power. can lead to absurdity, bad science, and misery. Where in Canada were those experiments conducted and what institutions were involved beyond the residential schools? I would say probably every indigenous group in this country from the northwest all the way to the eastern Arctic were at least had bloods taken to show blood relationships.

that would be minimum case. So the aspect of where is everywhere. The institutions that were involved were the major universities of this country. In particular, the Agulac Hall Beach International Biological Program experiments were entirely orchestrated by the National Research Council and by the Medical Research Council.

So the leading arbiters about who got what money to do what research, were in charge of these kinds of experiments. The National Research Council, in other words, an arm of... The federal government, they would say they're not 100%. They would say they're at Crown Corp, whatever. They are the main dispersers of funds for hard research in this country. That means chemistry, physics, not necessarily biology,

but certainly chemistry and physics. And what's interesting is that the Internet, biological program was an environmental change project. It was trying to chart it, and it was trying to chart how environmental change was having an impact on human adaptations. And in particular, they were looking in places like the Far North for adaptations that may have been particular to very difficult circumstances, Arctic deserts, jungles, whatever. In Canada, it, it, the focus was the Arctic. In its response to a lawsuit about the experiments in the Arctic,

the government of Canada denied both involvement in and knowledge of the specifics of the research that was conducted and was therefore, quote, not liable for the harms alleged. In her conversation with friend and journalist Marcy MacDonald, Elaine pushed back on that statement. You take that statement and you go back into the archive and you see what you can find. And what I found was the International Biological Program was signed onto by the National Research Council, which was then the most significant funder of hard science in this country,

that not only did they fund it, but they picked the particular universities they wanted to work with. They went after particular academics to do particular work, and they continued to fund the programs part in Canada by involving other members, other departments of the government of Canada, such as defense, health and welfare, and on and on. So not only was that statement inaccurate, it completely denied the reality of the situation, which was that the NRC was in charge

from beginning to end of Canada's contribution to the International Biological Program. Elaine's investigation also led her to conclude that a doctor involved in these experiments, named Otto Schaefer, had a Nazi connection. As soon as I saw his name and realized by doing a little background checking that he had become a doctor,

at Heidelberg during World War II, and that he had become responsible for health and welfare Canada's research arm in the north, so across the entire north. Red flags started popping up in my head, and that's because I'm a Jewish girl who asks questions about what was going on in Heidelberg between 1940 and 1945, and the answer is it was the most Nazified university in. in all of Germany, and that's saying a lot. His professors would have been those closest to Hitler's theories of race, and eventually when I went to the trouble

of getting his medical records from that university of what he studied, he studied a lot about hygiene, which is the preferred word to race studies. So all those red flags are going off in my head and when I was told by one of my interviewees that he had left his papers to the University of Alberta, I was there like, boom, let's see what we got. And we got was all kinds of conflicting stories.

He told this person, this story, this person, that story, this person, that story, this person, the other story. Again, a whole row of red flags. What's he hiding? Why is he hiding it? I knew that I had to hold myself in check because it is bad. and it is wrong for a journalist to start chasing somebody on the basis of red flags that have to do with my personal history to the Holocaust, my relationship to that ending. So I restrained myself. Actually, I restrained myself too long.

But eventually I went after it and what I discovered was a guy who had studied under the worst of the worst, had been praised by the worst of the worst, and had been given an inordinate amount of power over the physical circumstances of people in the North who happened to be Aboriginal as opposed to white. What did he do with that power? He launched all kinds of investigations. He was the organizer of the so-called consent

for the International Biological Program experiments. He was the guy who told the communities that everything would be great. And we can't actually know what he told the communities because apparently his inuctitude was so poor that everybody said no matter what he was speaking, it sounded like German. So the whole question of consent becomes this guy

who works for the federal government who is responsible for their health care is asking them to do this, do we actually have informed consent or do we have coercion? And in my view, we had coercion. It was about lack of respect, and it was about helplessness. How do you say no to the people in charge of your annual payments as a family, who can actually pull that money away from you if you don't behave,

who can keep you from hunting and fishing because your economy is collapsed and the only way you can get oil and gas for your boats, and bullets to kill the animals you need to eat comes from that federal government. So coercion is this story. It's this story from beginning to end. Elaine's conclusions about Otto Schaefer came as a shock to Anne Hardy. Oh, it was awful. You know, it was a large setback for me personally, emotionally.

You know, my whole body went into shock. just reading the words. I had to read it over and over just to let it sink in and grasp the meaning of it. And so when you sat with what you discovered, I can hear the emotion in what you felt, what did it add to your knowledge of this system

that was supposedly taking care of you? Well, you know, I guess in some ways it was another thing, a building blocker, a clog in the wheel, another part of the machinery that was starting to make sense. Because here was all these different things, the racism, the institutional care, the, you know, taking us away from our culture and our ways of knowing and our families. and then putting us in this place, you know, that the government knowingly, they had to know, you know, what happened in Germany and what they did with their minority populations. And here they gave this job to somebody here in Edmonton, you know, and I know people, people, you know, real at the, when we, say, well, it was a holocaust for us. You know, it was our, our version. And they can't understand

why we will say, you know, use terminology like that. And, you know, like how could anybody think that we were overreacting? It would be very tempting for people maybe to say, oh, well, that explains, you know, that explains what the problem was, that it came from the outside. What would you say to that, to that kind of critique? Yeah. No, I think we had the environment at that time in Canada, in the government of Canada, to allow him to come here and work and instill his practices. The government does not make up one individual.

It is several people that we thought, the government at the people at that time, thought the best thing was to warehouse the indigenous people and to treat them separately. Elaine also underlined that very point, and I'm quoting from her epilogue here. There was a deeper and more disturbing link between Canadian and Nazi medical science than Otto Schaefer's personal story, she writes. Top Canadian medical and anthropological scientists of the World War II generation were not so ideologically distant from the Nazis. In the main, they too were scientific racists. They assumed that race determined indigenous people's most important characteristics, that it shaped their intelligence, bound their behavior, drove their proclivities to disease and addictions, and constrained their futures. Indigenous people, if they receive treatment at all, were treated in a haphazard and sometimes cruel way in exchange for helping the doctors, dentists, nutritionists, geneticists, psychologists, and physical anthropologists build their careers.

End quote. It's no surprise that we were made invisible, that we were made oblivious in a country that. that is so rich in resources that every lake and every river and every mountain bears our names. The final speaker at the Massey College book launch of Oblivious was Indigenous lawyer, Dawn Worm. And that's the first thing that was erased when the settlers came in. Because that's what you do. You erase everything about the people. If you want to claim their land and their resources,

to build the kind of country that we have now, that's what you have to do, and that's what was done. Like Elaine, Don Worme grew up in Saskatchewan. Their shared, but vastly different history is partly why Elaine interviewed him. Don also served as counsel for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The calls to action that we eventually issued at the Truth and Reconciliation, the 94 calls to action,

only a handful of which have actually been realized to date. They are still relevant, my friends. And the conversation that Elaine has challenged us to continue is right there. And I submit to you with great respect that those 94 calls to action of the truth and reconciliation contain a blueprint where we can continue forward and build a kind of world that our grandchildren deserve. Not the world where some are oblivious and some have disappeared. And the teachings of my grandfather and what he told me that they are here to wipe us out.

I never wanted to believe them, and I didn't believe him. And shame on me for that. But that's exactly what it was. And Professor Malloy, Dr. Malloy, has said it so starkly here tonight. And I am encouraged by that. And I'm encouraged by the writings of Elaine Baugh. And I'm encouraged by her children. And I'm encouraged by her family and others who had recognized that your ancestors were assisted by my ancestors.

And understand this, that the period pre-treaty, the hundreds, over 200 years, pre-treaty, were not like they were in the last 200. they were not. There were relationships that were built. There were strong relationships that were built. And somewhere along the line that got lost. And part of the education system was instrumental in ensuring that those revelations were never brought to light.

And it's only because of the strength and the character of people like Elaine and others who will continue to ensure that these conversations and our head. After nearly four years of conversations and research, Elaine Dewar had no doubt that genocide was the right word to describe the experience of indigenous people in Canada. She was also certain that our obliviousness to it all was deliberately manufactured by decades of leaving indigenous experiences

out of this country's story. So the mechanics of... of oblivion and obliviousness, it seems to me, are you leave things out of the narrative. And by leaving things out, you create the capacity to ignore what's in front of your face. It's not written about it, not in a really thorough way. It's not described with language particular to us. There is no history. There is nothing until the 1990s, the Royal Commission,

followed by thousands of lawsuits marshaled by some very wonderful lawyers who worked their buns off and almost went broke to bring those cases to court. Nothing. So all those years, when I am oblivious, it's because we're leaving things out of the story because they're uncomfortable.

That's how we did it. In 2025, the Canadian government settled the segregated hospital class act. lawsuit and the window for claims opened in early 2026. You know, justice does run slowly. It's taking a long time. Like, you know, somebody was saying, oh, finally, you know, seven years, 10 years, whatever, the lawsuits, you know, depending on their timeline, the lines, the lawsuit's finally done. And you must be so relieved that all those years is finally done.

Well, for me, it's 57 years. I've been living with this and knowing that, you know, what happened to me was unfair. And it's not done, is it? No, it's not. It'll never be done. Not for me, you know. And it's, yeah, for other people too. I mean, okay, again, you know, like residential schools, what happens to me echoes through my children.

Right. I will be an ancestor one day and this is going to play on my, you know, on the future of my family also. I understand that you're getting, you know, you may feel, oh, enough already, I've heard so much about this and I've heard about that. And, you know, I've had a tough life too. And it's easy to get into, I think, that kind of thought process. However, it's looking about, you know, looking at the human condition. You know, we all, yes, other people have had issues. Different minorities may have other issues too. And we have to look at those things. We absolutely have to know what makes up our country.

The good, the bad, the evil, but how we can pull things together and how we can make a beautiful country together. You know, let's accept all of us. And, you know, maybe it's pie in the sky thinking, but I really believe that we all have something to contribute. But we have to acknowledge the past. We absolutely have to acknowledge the past and all the different things that went into it and how those influence us today. What do you want Canadians to know now about what you and so many others went through in those hospitals? What I'm hoping, really hoping, is that we can open up this conversation, look at it from different viewpoints.

You know, and that's what I love about Elaine's book, is that she talks about her family and the things that they were going. through and how, you know, it could be that they missed what we were going through, even though they were a family involved in the medical system, you know, and for her later on to become aware of it, the differences, you know, like for her, you know, then to end her career, you know, in the sunset of her life, writing this story is just so beautiful, I think, and shows you the changes that can happen if we get that education, right? When we find out this did happen, let's learn about it. And, you know, let's open the history books. Let's not whitewash things. And, you know, let's understand. what happened in the past, and let's never let it repeat in the future.

So in some ways, as horrific as the findings are in Elaine's book, you see it as a sign of hope in a way. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. What do you want the legacy of this book to be? What do you want Canadians to take away from the work that you have done? I just want them to know what the facts were. And I want them to think very hard about why they try to ignore those facts, why they don't want to act on them, why they're getting, you know, as Anne Hardy put it, why they're getting annoyed by the amount of money that's being spent to try and make up for all the wrongs that were done. I want them to understand that the wrongs were every bit as bad and maybe worse than what has come out in the courts and that we can't.

do this again. We can't slide back into a state of ignorance about who was doing what and to whom and under what law and what we can't go back there. And how we avoid obliviousness in the future. That's up to you guys to figure out. But, you know, but we got to figure it out. I would hazard to say that you're speaking with us today is sort of an active, um, Anti-oblivion? Sure, of combating kind of that oblivious. Just, it shows such a generosity of spirit to spend some time before your departure to tell us these stories. I'm a journalist, I've got to get the story out. That's my job. You know, my job's not going to end until I'm done. It's my job. What do you want us to do with it? Make sure it doesn't happen ever again. make sure that people understand that all of this was published in plain sight,

that nobody, especially at the medical journals, picked up that informed consent wasn't happening, asked any questions about that, treated indigenous subjects as if they had no rights to privacy. I mean, I want them to look at themselves in the mirror and say, you should never have done that, don't ever do it again. I really appreciate you making time for us. Thank you for making time for me. Journalist and author Elaine Dewar passed away with medical assistance on September 18, 2025. She was 77 years old.

Our deepest condolences to her family and friends and all who knew her. Many thanks to Bibliuasis publisher Dan Wells for making this episode possible. Much gratitude also to Anne Hardy and to all others who spoke to us for this episode. Many thanks also to Elaine's daughter. Anna Dewar-Gully and Danielle Doer, and to her colleague and friend and fellow journalist Marcy MacDonald for their help.

Thanks as well to Corey Haberstock at CBC Edmonton. If you'd like to comment on anything you're heard in this episode or in any other, you can do that on our website, cbc.ca.ca. Ideas. Technical production, Emily Carvasio and Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. My final question to Elaine, two days before she died, was whether she had anything else to add. I want to say thank you, Roland Christian, for setting me off on this tour, because it really mattered to me,

and it really matters to my family, and it really matters, I hope, to the rest of us. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.