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Alberta's Invisible Institutions
178 Plays2 years ago
Megan Linton, the creator and host of the stunning and incredibly well done podcast Invisible Institutions, joins host Duncan Kinney to discuss Alberta's past and present when it comes to eugenics, the Michener Centre and institutionalizing and confining people labelled as having intellectual disabilities. After a short interview with Linton that puts the podcast in context for Alberta listeners the final part of the podcast is a replay of episode five of the first season of Invisible Institutions: Let’s Talk About Sex & Reproductive Justice.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'The Progress Report' & Megan Linton
00:00:12
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Amiskwichiwa, Skaigen, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the mighty Kasiska-Saw-Wannasipi, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today is Megan Linton, the host of the amazing podcast, Invisible Institutions, and also a fellow traveler on the Harbinger Media Network. Megan, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much for having me.
00:00:39
Speaker
So, okay, you and I are definitely both podcasters, but I would place your work on a storytelling and audio quality and journalism level
00:00:54
Speaker
at a much higher level than mine. I really like Invisible Institutions. I think it's incredible stuff, and I hope I'm not embarrassing you here, but it's really in the vein of stuff that I would hear on the CBC or This American Life.
Praise for 'Invisible Institutions'
00:01:10
Speaker
The quality is incredible, especially compared to a humble little interview show like what I do.
00:01:18
Speaker
That means so much. I feel like I spent many hours constructing a tiny sound booth in my apartment. But the sound quality paid off and by the sound producer I work with, Helena Grobath, is just outstanding. So thank you so much.
00:01:39
Speaker
And the reason we're having you on today is not only because you're a podcaster, not only because you're on the Harbinger Media Network and I think you produce stuff that people should listen to, but you've told an incredibly emotionally affecting and meaningful story that I think people who listen to this podcast need to hear.
Historical & Ongoing Institutionalization Issues
00:01:57
Speaker
And so like just a heads up for you folks, like this podcast is literally just like a 10, 15 minute interview with Megan. And then we get into the real star of the show, which is the fifth episode in her first season, hopefully first season of Invisible Institutions, which is Megan's podcast. But let's talk about it. So let's talk about this episode. I think people have maybe heard
00:02:18
Speaker
people who listen to this podcast have maybe heard of the Mentioner Center, or of Nellie McClung's fondness for eugenics, or even maybe the government apology for forced sterilizations. But what your podcast, the podcast that we're going to play later, really does well, is bring it all back to kind of the original evil, the original sin, right? The confinement and institutionalization of people who are considered intellectually disabled by the state, right?
Importance of Ending Institutionalization
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, I am so glad that you got to that point because that is really what we're trying to expose with this podcast is that ongoing practice of confinement and of institutionalization of people given the label of intellectual disability. And so why do you tell these stories of these places and why is ending the practice of institutionalization so important to you?
00:03:16
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, I think using the places and using the institutions is really important because it really shows the way that the state has transformed and rationalized confinement in very different ways over the past 150 years.
00:03:35
Speaker
And so the first episode starts at the Rita Regional Center in Ottawa, and then we head to the Manitoba Developmental Center in Portage Little Prairie. And then this episode is focused on the Michener Center. And so all of these institutions have changed faces and names really significantly.
00:03:55
Speaker
But this practice continues to be ongoing.
Personal Connection & COVID-19 Impact
00:03:59
Speaker
And so I think tracing back the really long history to the present day is really important to show the continuity about how even if the justification for confinement has changed,
00:04:14
Speaker
it's still the very same practice and the same belief driving this, which is the belief that disabled people should be confined at the lowest cost possible in order to generate profits for the state. And so ending institutionalization and like telling these stories of these places for me is really important as a disabled
Link to Abolitionist Movements
00:04:37
Speaker
person. I have my own intimate interactions with the institutional system.
00:04:42
Speaker
And I think once you leave, it never leaves you because these spaces are horrific and allow for so much violence that I think people on the outside really don't understand and don't see. And so as a disabled person, this is my community on the inside and a community that continues to be subject to some of the worst harms like we have seen through COVID-19.
Critique of Labor Unions & Michener Center
00:05:11
Speaker
and through the long-term care crisis. I have to break in too, because there was something that had come into my mind, which is that I consider myself a prison abolitionist, a police abolitionist, but I had never really put, until I started listening to your podcast, I had never really considered these institutions as part of that kind of complex.
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I'm so grateful for the work of Liat Ben-Mosh, who's a prison abolitionist and disability justice scholar, who's made these connections. And I think it's been so important to me to interweave these together. And I was so glad that you actually had James on last week talking about police unions and his article about carceral unionism is really important because
00:06:04
Speaker
On the left, we only hear about these conversations from labor, from labor that justifies and seeks to expand these sites of institutionalization. It's so important to see how
00:06:21
Speaker
abolition ties together with all of these spaces and is the real framework that we need to understand the problems of long-term care, the problems of disability confinement.
History & Evolution of Michener Center
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah, and that's really what's central for me as also an abolitionist and working in alignment with disability justice movements.
00:06:41
Speaker
It helps so much to bring this frame work together and to cover things like what you folks cover, like the drug crisis and the expansion of like treatment facilities and the expansion of prisons. Like they're all so intimately tied together. Yeah. And you brought it up. We may as well expand on it. Like, you know, I was dimly aware of the Michener Center before I listened to your podcast. You obviously go into far more detail. I know far more about it now than I did before.
00:07:08
Speaker
But my awareness of the Missioner Center mostly came about because of a campaign by organized labor to save the institution and to keep it open and to keep those workers employed now, to keep those workers employed there. What should people who listen to this podcast know about the Missioner Center and what are they going to learn when they listen to this podcast? Yeah.
00:07:37
Speaker
It's so important that you point out exactly what I was going to say, which is that we really need to reconsider how labor unions, and specifically in this case, that AUP have dominated this conversation. And why have they dominated this conversation? Why aren't we listening to the people who these institutions are incarcerating?
00:07:59
Speaker
And so that's what this podcast does, is it listens to the people who survived these institutions, and the people who survived these institutions resoundingly want these places burned down. That is the exact language that they hope for.
00:08:17
Speaker
Um, and I think it's like what we need to pursue. And so, I mean, the Michener Center started many, many, many years ago. And it's actually kind of funny. I was trying for so long to figure out if it was still operational because it's not really
00:08:36
Speaker
there's not really readily available information. And how I actually confirmed how many people lived there and what was kind of going on there right now was through a union grievance where it showed that there's like
00:08:49
Speaker
a lot of, lot of, lot of people living and working there. And so like before the Michener Center had this name, it had many different names and forms. And for a very long time, it was the site of a statewide eugenics campaign that sexually sterilized over or roughly around 3,000 people.
Campaigns & Rehabilitation of Institutions
00:09:14
Speaker
Through the 1990s, and to this day, people have fought against the ongoing use of the Michener Center. They've fought against the wide-scale use of group homes and any sites of disability confinement across Canada.
00:09:30
Speaker
And like Alberta and Manitoba have really thought off those narratives and sought to like really rehabilitate the image of Michener Center. And I think like the union campaigns to keep it open through the 2010s were really, really important to show just how willing we are to expand these sites, to normalize a place where disabled people were sent to be eliminated,
Current Status of Michener Center
00:10:01
Speaker
face sterilization and to be removed from society. And they can never be divorced from that because it's still operating as the same function. It's still operating as an institution used to care for disabled people at the lowest cost possible by the state.
00:10:22
Speaker
And the working conditions continue to be incredibly poor. But beyond that, why are we maintaining this? Why are we maintaining this place where so many people died, where so many people were subject to such immense state harm? And I think in 2003, a bolt of lightning struck the Michener Center.
00:10:47
Speaker
And they spent millions of dollars, like millions and millions of dollars rehabilitating the building. And, you know, that's just how far we seek to continue disability confinement and how much we continue to invest in this system that like, you know, even the sky wants to eliminate, to burn down.
Nellie McClung's Eugenics Advocacy
00:11:07
Speaker
So, I mean, I think- God himself struck it.
00:11:11
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think like, I think what people need to know about the Michener Center is that survivors want it burnt down and survivors want it closed. And that's where our opinion should lie. And that's where we should, who we should listen to.
00:11:27
Speaker
And one thing I was also grateful for in your podcast is getting into how you get to 3000 or so sexual sterilizations over the course of several decades. And it was built on the campaigns, eugenics campaigns that were championed by people who are now everywhere in Edmonton. I live in Edmonton, a city with a gajillion famous five memorials, statues, parks, murals, et cetera.
00:11:54
Speaker
You do some digging on the beliefs that Nellie McClung and so many others of her ilk had about eugenics.
History of Eugenics in Alberta
00:12:01
Speaker
How did these people we learn about in social studies class justify a program that ended up sterilizing thousands of people without their consent?
00:12:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so the Famous Five are pretty rife with white supremacist eugenic rhetoric, whether it be about the mass criminalization of drugs, prohibition, deportation of the unfit. And in the case of Alberta and across Canada, their rampant support for sterilization of people labeled as disabled, people labeled as what they consider bad stock.
00:12:41
Speaker
For McClung and Edwards and The Famous Five, I mean, I think we really need to have a reckoning with who they are and who they are are white supremacists who were set to really build a great, white, strong Canada. And so as a result, a big piece of that was the classic white supremacist dog whistle of protecting children.
00:13:08
Speaker
And so they really used that to justify this program of eugenics, which they thought was a really progressive and liberal idea. Like, of course, they were liberals. And so this was really like the origins was based in this desire to end all breeding, quote unquote, of disabled people. And alongside that,
00:13:36
Speaker
the mass sterilization. And so even though sterilization was limited to Alberta and BC, but they really impacted the eugenic and institutional practices across Canada, which regardless of sterilization, were using institutions to remove disabled people from their communities and sexually segregate them, so the Michener Center.
00:14:00
Speaker
And all institutions had male cabins and female cabins who weren't allowed to interact.
00:14:10
Speaker
went to great extents to sterilize and prohibit from having children. I think it's important to see also how that changed, how it was liberal until a point when eugenics got a bit too intertwined with the overt Nazism. And then at that point in Alberta, it was taken up by far-right evangelicals, namely Bible Bill, Aberhart. And I think it's critical
00:14:38
Speaker
to understand there. And in our current conversations about reproductive justice and American reproductive justice causes, we have our own very intimate and very overt history of
00:14:55
Speaker
Christian influence on access to sexuality and access to reproductive justice. And so, I mean, once eugenics became a bit too overtly problematic, they really shifted it over to it being like a state policy to reduce the costs of disabled people.
Personal & Social Impacts of Institutionalization
00:15:16
Speaker
And this really like operationalized those ideas of useless eaters of what Nazis called disabled people.
00:15:25
Speaker
And, of course, we know that reproductive justice is directly targeted at people labeled as worse by the state.
00:15:41
Speaker
that's changed over time, but it's really continued with upholding white supremacy and removing access to sex and reproduction and all of those important things for disabled people and for lots of other people. Yeah. I mean, time is a flat circle fucking sometimes, right? Like when you started talking about, oh yeah, we were doing what we were doing to these disabled folks because
00:16:08
Speaker
We were worried about our children. It's like the exact same rhetoric used towards trans people or the groomer rhetoric that's going around right now. It just keeps getting recycled. Exactly. Exactly. It's just fascism remains.
00:16:26
Speaker
Well, on that sharing note, I really appreciate you coming on. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to play your podcast right now. If you're listening to this, it'll be starting shortly. How can people follow along with your work? I assume they can find invisible institutions on any pod catcher that you use, but is there any other way that people can follow along with what you're doing?
00:16:47
Speaker
Yeah, so we have two episodes left in the season, and you can follow along on social media. We're on Twitter and Instagram. And on our website, we have full transcripts available, archival photos, further resources, and a bunch of nerdy policy briefs, which is my jam. And you can follow my writing in Canadian Dimension and Friar Patch right now. I'm working with some other amazing disabled organizers on an upcoming
00:17:16
Speaker
Briar patch disability justice special issue. Um, so follow that along and I'm on Twitter at pink cane red lit. Very sweet. Follow along. Megan does great work and, uh, up next invisible institutions. A note that today's episode includes explicit language discussions of sex and sexuality.
00:17:46
Speaker
and a warning that this episode will discuss explicit sexualized violence, medical violence, forced sterilization,
Limitations on Sexual Autonomy in Institutions
00:17:59
Speaker
and eugenics. I subscribe to this thing called Passion Books and they make erotic
00:18:12
Speaker
um movies for women and it's all ran by women and it's all based on romance novels and I am a romance novel junkie so you know some of the they're they're rated on this thing called the barometer of naughtiness so one day I was watching one that was rated not safe for
00:18:44
Speaker
And I told the nurses, I'm like, I'll go watch this movie. It's not safe for work. Can you close my door, please? And they're like, of course we can do that. And I'm like, cool. And then I was watching this one movie one time.
00:19:09
Speaker
And there was some kitchen stuff happening on counters and stuff.
Linking Eugenics to Reproductive Justice
00:19:19
Speaker
And the nurse just like, well, right in while they're doing the thing on the TV. And I was like, oh, hi.
00:19:35
Speaker
Hey, I'm Megan. I'm a disabled researcher and writer passionate about understanding and making known the conditions of disability and institutions in Canada. And this is Invisible Institutions.
00:19:54
Speaker
Access to sexuality is an important way to understand the history of institutionalization and its ongoing impacts on the lives of people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I was 18 the first time I was in a psych ward.
00:20:21
Speaker
I remember giggling with another patient about the lure of the conjugal room. Did it exist? Did you have to book it? Was it literally just a bed? I asked the nurse. Her face turned bright red. She gave me a lecture about ability to consent. In retrospect, pretty funny.
00:20:47
Speaker
I hadn't consented to being there in the first place, so why was she so concerned about this? Conjugal rooms are rooms, generally in prisons and hospitals, set aside specifically for sexual activity. It turned out that psychoid didn't have a conjugal room. And the look of horror on the nurse's face made it pretty clear that this wasn't a question to ask.
00:21:16
Speaker
But as I giggled, the wheels started churning. I started out my work in disability, researching sexuality policies in these places. The places you don't really have a choice in being there. Places like prisons, like psych wards, like group homes, and like Vicky, long-term care homes.
00:21:42
Speaker
You heard Vicky at the top of the show. She's 30, unwillingly living in a nursing home in Nova Scotia, trying to watch porn in her room. Her access to sex is limited because she lives in an institution. We'll get back to her in a bit. Today,
00:22:05
Speaker
people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Too often are
Call to Action for Inclusive Justice
00:22:11
Speaker
forced into institutions as a result of failures to fund housing and access to supports.
00:22:20
Speaker
Being forced into an institution where you don't have privacy, where you're stuck in a single bed, where you're not allowed to have partners over, is but one way that access to sexuality, reproduction and intimacy are controlled. And it's one that stretches back.
00:22:44
Speaker
Here's Dr. Alan Martino, a researcher and an instructor at the University of Calgary. People and institutions were segregated in multiple ways. They weren't able to build connections in the community. They were able to form relationships.
00:23:01
Speaker
and have experiences that a lot of people outside of institutions would have. You know, when we look at the history of Canada and other countries, the ways that we have, you know, dealt with in quotes, the sexualities of people with disabilities is quite bleak. There were actually cases of involuntary sterilization in our country, and not only with people with disabilities, but also with Indigenous peoples in Canada and other social groups that are marginalized.
00:23:32
Speaker
Now, forcing people into institutions is one way that Canada has used to deal with the sexualities of people with disabilities. This is but one part in Canada's history of eugenics, deeply embedded in settler colonialism.
00:23:55
Speaker
Eugenics is the attempt to control the human population, to make it more productive, to improve the stock and manage the population. Eugenics has been implemented in a few interconnected ways. Today, we're really going to dig into institutionalization and its connection to forced sterilization.
00:24:23
Speaker
Now, the history of eugenics and reproductive injustice have particularly targeted indigenous women and women labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities. And maybe history is an overstatement.
00:24:42
Speaker
Coerced sterilization of Indigenous women has been reported as recent as 2019. And coerced sterilization of labeled people has been reported frequently in the last decade. We have a history of institutionalization, ways of controlling, surveilling the sexualities of people with disabilities. And I think the saddest part is that we continue to see some of those practices is still happening.
00:25:11
Speaker
And the nurse just like, well, right in while they're doing the thing on the TV. And I was like, Oh, hi. Um, and luckily they were really like, funny about it. They're like, Oh, why don't you watch it? You know? And then they stood there and like, we laughed about it. Cause the nurse thought the dude was hot. So she was like, Oh, I'm going to stay here for a minute. And, um,
00:25:41
Speaker
You know, we joked about it and we laughed, but that was a little awkward for me. Now, sex is often a taboo subject to talk about, but this is even more so the case for people with disabilities, especially the label of intellectual and developmental disabilities.
00:26:04
Speaker
Because although explicit eugenics policy isn't legislation anymore, it's still apparent in the policies of institutionalization and in our social understanding of disability that asexualizes and infantilizes people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
00:26:30
Speaker
It extends by not having access to supportive decision-making and instead having decisions made about you. I think about a recent story covered by Kelly Egan for the Ottawa Citizen. Sherry Bratchfield had her wedding all set for December 29th. The venue, the dress, the ring, a man she loved.
00:26:59
Speaker
But the Ontario Guardian stopped her wedding by refusing to allow her to move out of her group home. So today we're going to talk about sex. And by doing so, we're also going to talk about some darker things. Eugenics, sexualized violence, and sterilization.
00:27:27
Speaker
Now, across Canada, provincial policies varied with regards to sterilization and eugenics policy. In places like Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia,
00:27:42
Speaker
There weren't explicit sterilization policies. Instead, eugenics took place through the use of institutions to remove people from their communities and sexually segregate them. As one report of the Ontario government reminds us,
00:28:03
Speaker
So keen were the officials that there be no possibility of sex or propagation by these deviants, that upon death men and women were sometimes buried in separate burial grounds.
00:28:20
Speaker
Now, Alberta ran a different kind of terrible. A massive, active eugenics program that operated mainly out of one institution in Red Deer, Alberta. That, like most institutions, has had a few different names over time. The Provincial Training Center, Deer Home, Alberta School, and, today, the Michener Center.
00:28:50
Speaker
When it opened in 1923, it was a single building with 108 people. By the 1970s, there were more than 2,000 people incarcerated in this massive site of 66 buildings.
00:29:09
Speaker
We're going to hear a bit more about this institution and its place in the history of eugenics in Canada. With People First of Canada's The Freedom Tour, and Dr. Claudia Malacreta, a professor of sociology and author of several books on disability, health, and the body.
00:29:30
Speaker
But the one we're really diving into today is A Special Hell, Institutional Life in Alberta's Eugenics Years. In this book, there's rare interviews with former inmates and workers, institutional documentation, and governmental archives.
00:29:53
Speaker
Claudia Malacrita helped shed light on Alberta's history of institutionalization and eugenics. As a researcher, she has focused on historical eugenics, but also its connection to present-day restrictions on disabled people's sexuality and reproduction. Here she is.
00:30:20
Speaker
BC's history of involuntary sterilization was much more covert than in Alberta. Nellie McClung was the first judge in Alberta, and she had the portfolio of family services. And these women, they were liberal, and they were progressives, and they did believe in the improvement of the human race. And they lobbied hard for legislature that would protect children,
00:30:51
Speaker
which often meant removing them from their homes and for legislature to improve human stock. So maybe you've heard of Nellie McClung, but let's hear from her. Here's what she had to say in her lobbying for the sterilization of children.
00:31:15
Speaker
To bring children into the world suffering from the handicaps caused by ignorance, poverty, or criminality of the parents is an appalling crime against the innocent and hopeless, and yet one about which practically nothing is said. Marriage, homemaking, and the rearing of children
00:31:41
Speaker
are left entirely to chance. And so it is no wonder that humanity produces so many specimens who, if they were silk stockings or boots, would be marked seconds. So you can hear there just how fully of a eugenicist Nellie McClung was advocating for sterilization, advocating that disabled children are burdensome and broken.
00:32:09
Speaker
McClung and her famous five kindred advocated for a kind of feminism that was rooted entirely in white supremacy. And she's not the only famous Canadian part of this. Here's Dr. Malacrita.
00:32:27
Speaker
A lot of these social reformers were, as we know, like Tommy Douglas, you know, who was pro eugenic, were racist, who were worried about the influx of immigrants who were overbreeding and the middle classes who were ceasing to produce at those same rates. Just freak people out.
00:32:48
Speaker
Yeah, that Tommy Douglas. I mean, to be fair, his master's thesis was titled, The Problems of the Subnormal Family. Okay, back to Claudia. So there was a lot of lobbying in the teens and twenties. And finally, in 1927, there was a bill put forward, the Sexual Sterilization Act,
00:33:15
Speaker
There were protests against it, but what it essentially did was it enticed people to voluntarily undergo sexual sterilization. It was passed really quickly without a lot of debate in March of 1928. And I think that social reformers really thought there'd be a bit of a charge to try and get yourself sterilized because it would give you a better life, blah, blah, blah.
00:33:45
Speaker
Here's some newspaper articles from Alberta at the time, collected by Dr. Rob Wilson for the Eugenics Archives, link obviously in the show notes. January 3rd, 1927, in the United Farmers of Alberta, resolutions for women's convention deal with important issues, feeble-minded. For UFWA convention, segregation or sexual sterilization,
00:34:15
Speaker
sterilized the feeble-minded. And these eugenicists thought in earnest that people would line up to get sterilized. People did not, you know, storm the gates to get sterilized and so
00:34:34
Speaker
With the voting in of the Social Credit Party, which was very socially and religiously conservative, an amendment to the act was proposed by Dr. W.W. Cross, the Minister of Health, and it passed. So, a bit of a background on who this fresh social credit government was. Now, at the time, Alberta was led by radio evangelist, Bible Bill Aberhart.
00:35:04
Speaker
This is the Calgary Prophetic Bible Institute, broadcasting the regular Sunday afternoon program over Canadian station CFCM, the voice of the prairies. Known for his Bible Belt fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, and creating an explicitly anti-science environment. It is claimed that we are mixing religion and politics. There is no sphere of our life.
00:35:33
Speaker
In which religion does not play its very important part. The Social Credit Party was an explicitly Christian, anti-communist party committed to social credit theory. As a matter of fact, we've had rather more to say about economics than about politics. An anti-Semitic monetary theory that the folks at Alberta Advantage do a much better job of explaining.
00:35:57
Speaker
So in this environment, in 1935, major amendments were made to the act. It produced the Alberta Eugenics Board, who in the act became exempt from any civil action by individuals taking part in the surgical operation. So it basically legislated their impunity.
00:36:19
Speaker
Now we're gonna get into some nitty gritty behind the scenes logistics of these powerful bureaucrats who are making decisions around life, death, and ableist violence. Things called guidance clinics were brought into being. And these were groups of doctors, nurses, public health nurses, social workers, and often family physicians or church leaders. They used to do like a little tour around the province.
00:36:49
Speaker
once or twice a year and visit your local health clinic or your local family doctor and find out who was unfit, who were often brought to the attention of officials who then would work hard to convince people to surrender children. Once those kids were in the system, and especially once they were institutionalized,
00:37:13
Speaker
It became very difficult for them to avoid sterilization because of the ways that the Eugenics Board operated. Members of the Eugenics Board were also, they included people like the superintendent of Michener Center, what was originally called the Alberta Training Hospital or Alberta School Hospital in Red Deer. So there was a kind of a conflict of interest, I suppose you could really say.
00:37:45
Speaker
Other members of the Eugenics Board included people from other institutions across the province. And a case would come before the Board for a hearing. And of over 5,000 cases heard, there were really less than 100 that resulted in a negative decision. It was pretty much an inevitability that you would be approved for sterilization.
00:38:15
Speaker
That didn't mean that you would actually necessarily be sterilized, but it increased the likelihood, particularly if you had a consent form that signed over the right to make decisions about health to the institution itself, which is something that did happen regularly at Michener. Now, the reason that this happened regularly at the Michener Center
00:38:44
Speaker
was that these really were children, totally isolated from their families and potential advocates. When children came into Mentioner's Center, their parents were advised not to come and visit for the first year. It would impede any progress that the institution was going to make on their training. So, you know, the kids who came into Mentioner's Center were very young and often
00:39:14
Speaker
not informed of what it was that was happening to them. I mean, some of the stories that people told were almost cinematic. You know, it's like I'm out in my dust bowl farmhouse and a black car comes up the roadway and out steps a lady with us and my mom comes out of the house with a suitcase and I get in the car and I never saw my family again.
00:39:43
Speaker
This severed relationship between communities had a really profound impact, not only on the institutionalized person, but also their family and their entire community. Here's Tedda, a survivor of the Michener Center, an advocate for deinstitutionalization. I lived in Michener Center in Red Deer for 20 years.
00:40:21
Speaker
At the age of 15, that's when I left my family completely. I went to Mission Center when I was 15 years old, but I'll never forget. There was this great big building
00:40:37
Speaker
And that's when I said goodbye to my family for a whole year. We could not see family for a whole year. I was really scared, but I did what they wanted and I worked really hard. The family isolation that Teddah shares is devastating. And it's not isolated from the experience of eugenics.
00:41:08
Speaker
In fact, Dr. Malacreta links them together. One of the problems with Mentioner Center, and I refer to it as a form of passive eugenics, was that it did separate people from their communities. So there's sort of ripples of trauma that have come out of these experiences. These severed relationships expedited and permitted the violence against these children.
00:41:36
Speaker
as they did not have allies outside to expose the institution and make it accountable for its actions.
00:41:46
Speaker
because, of course, the institution nor the province were accountable for such violence. There are many, many instances in the record of what are called extraordinary events or unusual events, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and sometimes death, escapes that ended in death. From the archives that Dr. Malacrita excavated,
00:42:15
Speaker
X received a stab wound behind right ear approximately one inch in length. Treated with cold compress and application of buttery bandage. Clinical noted. Stitches given. Returned from doctor 1030 hour.
00:42:32
Speaker
Other memos included procedures on the appropriate use of RCMP search dogs, the composition of internal search and rescue teams, the proper chain of command for reporting escapes, and the procedures for billing various authorities for costs relating to these searches. We've heard this time and time again.
00:43:02
Speaker
These conditions were punishing, traumatizing, earth-shattering, so much violence. Now, I'm going to introduce you to some sisters in Alberta, Jude and Bonnie. My name's Bonnie Pakad, and I'm Judy's younger sisters. Judy has two other sisters. Judy's the oldest in our family.
00:43:31
Speaker
Jude doesn't use words to communicate, so the doctors kept recommending to my mom, pushing my mom to put her into Michener Centre. And so my mom did not want that to happen, but finally she did give in to the doctors and she put Judy into Michener Centre. It was really built up for our family that it would be a nice place and then when it, in reality, it turned out to be one of the biggest nightmares of her life. You know, my sister lived with
00:43:59
Speaker
65 other people in her bedroom in that, in Michener, and the door was locked from the outside. So there was lots of awful things that happened in those rooms at nighttime when she was there. I think it's important to put those awful things that happened at nighttime alongside the things that happened in broad daylight. Forced sterilization.
00:44:31
Speaker
How it operated for people who lived in Mentionr was they would kind of hit puberty and it was rote that you would go before the board. And if you didn't have somebody who could advocate for you, if you didn't have somebody who had to provide an individual rather than a blanket permission, you'd go. So 5,500 cases
00:44:59
Speaker
28 and change cases were actually implemented with involuntary sterilization. And most of those did come from places like Michener Center, where it was children who were intellectually disabled and without resources in the community.
00:45:26
Speaker
Here's Bonnie again, talking about the medical violence that Jude experienced. So when Jude was 24, they pulled all her teeth. When she was 17, they gave her a hysterectomy. They sterilized her at the age of 17. They had said that, well, they didn't even tell us what
00:45:54
Speaker
that she actually had that. We just read that in a report that that had happened, that she had been sterilized. But there was lots of reasons that we'd heard about afterwards. So that was a terrible, terrible thing that happened to her. Well, I think that the reason that they sterilized her was because there was a lot of sexual abuse happening in this institution by staff. To this day, Jude
00:46:19
Speaker
really still suffers very much emotionally from the things that happened to her in Michener Center. She doesn't sleep at night. She just cannot sleep at night. She's very afraid of the dark. She can go three to four nights without sleeping. Now, I want to make clear the horror of Jude's story. Jude was sterilized at the age of 17.
00:46:49
Speaker
because of repeated instances of sexual abuse happening in the institution by staff. Her sterilization and medical abuse was used to cover the biggest nightmares. And this legislated impunity wasn't that long ago.
00:47:19
Speaker
The Sexual Sterilization Act was open for 50 years until 1972, when the progressive conservative Peter Loggheed government explained that the government feels very, very strongly that the bill is offensive and at odds with the proposed Alberta Bill of Rights.
00:47:44
Speaker
And for some, the violences of the Michener Center haunted them for lifetimes across possible generations. She's constantly, I think, tormented by the thoughts of Michener now. Still, even if you mention the word Michener Center to her, she's upset for at least two days afterwards. She just is so, it has taken such an emotional toll on her. I think that, you know, I always say her Down syndrome is not Jude's problem,
00:48:14
Speaker
She has these emotional problems that she deals with on a constant basis and still deals with those every day, the horror of what happened to her in Michener Center. She's had her nose broken, she's had her knee kicked out from, like her knee was dislocated, somebody kicked it. Lots of those kind of things have happened to her in Michener Center. She had lots of abuse.
00:48:43
Speaker
They're very unsafe places. I think that people are harmed. There's lots of abuse and neglect that still happens in those facilities. It was just something you wouldn't do to your animals. It was just the treatment was unbelievable. These were places that were supposed to provide care, but people
00:49:06
Speaker
Children were subject to torture, to solitary confinement, abuse, sensory deprivation, isolation. Here's Dr. Malacrita again.
00:49:23
Speaker
These people came to be profoundly damaged by the institution so that when Michener Center was opened as the training school, it was the intention that children would be returned to society by the 18th birthday. But of course, they were incapable thereof. So in the mid-40s, Michener Center expanded its facility and added another 2,000 adult beds.
00:49:48
Speaker
And so you have a population of children who come in and basically cradle to grave without hope, live these lives. So it was a place from the people with whom I spoke. Nobody wanted to go back, very, very few positive memories.
00:50:11
Speaker
and a lot of emotion in the interviews, reliving some of those experiences. I want to tell you about one more story, one that you should definitely read. Leilani Moore was institutionalized into the Michener Center as a child. When she was 14, the center told her she was having her appendix taken out. They lied to her.
00:50:41
Speaker
Years later, Leilani left the institution and got married. She was trying to become a mother when she found out that she was irreversibly sterilized. She was one of the 2,834 people in the Alberta Eugenics Program who were legally subject to sexual sterilization surgery.
00:51:18
Speaker
In 1996, Leilani sued the province of Alberta and won, inspiring other survivors to take the government of Alberta to court for its many violences of institutionalization and sterilization. But winning the lawsuit would not return her access to reproduction and motherhood.
00:51:45
Speaker
You can read and hear more about Leilani's story through the National Film Board film, The Sterilization of Leilani Moore. And in her book, A Whisper Past, childless after the eugenics sterilization in Alberta.
00:52:06
Speaker
In 1999, after Leilani Moore won her case against the government, the Premier of Alberta apologized, airing that they extend regrets for the actions of another government in another period of time. It's unfortunate. I mean, I won't say it's criminal. It was the law, but it was a bad law.
00:52:30
Speaker
That's a half apology. And that apology didn't end the impacts of eugenics in Canada. Here's Claudia Malacrida once more. I want to say that we know the numbers of people who came under the knife.
00:52:52
Speaker
as part of the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act, but I believe strongly this is a tip of the iceberg. I think that Indigenous children had these things happen to them in Indian hospitals, as did adult women particularly. We are conscious of these events occurring today.
00:53:16
Speaker
also in parallel kinds of forms between people with disabilities, profound physical disabilities and intellectual disabilities primarily, and indigenous people where hospitalization can be a very dangerous event, where consent is very loosely given. Although explicit eugenics policy isn't legislation anymore, it's still apparent in the policies of institutionalization
00:53:47
Speaker
I think for kids, children and young adults or dependents who have intellectual disability, although it's putatively impossible to involuntarily sterilize someone, active eugenics persist in the form of decisions that are made around hygiene or she can't manage her periods.
00:54:11
Speaker
or that these relationships would be really dangerous. And I mean, I would argue that making somebody sterile can be a really good smokescreen for being a victim of sexual abuse for people with profound disabilities. Sterilization is a practicality. Sterilization is a smokescreen.
00:54:37
Speaker
and sterilization is an ongoing reality in Canada. Part of the living histories of eugenics policies and then our social understanding of disability that asexualizes and infantilizes people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
00:54:59
Speaker
Many of the old buildings of the Michener Center were blown up, but on the grounds of the Michener Center, group homes for labeled people were built and remain. The impacts of eugenics, of sterilization, echoing off their walls. And not too far away, a long-term care home in Red Deer boasts about having a wing just for young people.
00:55:31
Speaker
Shoshana and I spoke in November 2020. I am an Indigenous disabled woman from Winnipeg. I live at Riverview Health Centre. I don't feel my needs are best suited to living in a 388 bed facility.
00:55:52
Speaker
I wish that I could live in the community where my friends and family can come freely and visit me whenever they want. And if my husband wants to spend the night, there's just space to be able to do that. Let's go back to Vicky once more to hear about how her long-term care wing impacted her love life.
00:56:21
Speaker
a lot, you know, my friends tell me not to be, but when they come over my house, I'm embarrassed of where I live. And I'm ashamed. You know, those are things I worry about. Privacy, another thing I worry about, depending on who's on. Yeah. So can you tell me a little bit more about the privacy problem? Well,
00:56:51
Speaker
You know, when somebody's door, like when you are in somebody's house, when you go to someone's house, you knock on their door and you be like, hi Rob, can I come in please? And they, some of them are just not all of them, but some of them don't respect that. And they, cause as far as I'm concerned, this room is my house. And if you are going to come into my house, you have to knock
00:57:20
Speaker
You know, so they don't always do that depending on the person. And it can be very awkward for me, especially like I said, if I'm either in a meeting or, you know, girls got needs. So occasionally I watch erotic movies and that can be awkward.
00:57:50
Speaker
So people ask me what we can do, how we can move beyond eugenics, and how can we support the sexual lives of people labeled with intellectual and developmental disabilities? Well, I think ending institutionalization is a really great place to start. Robust movements towards reproductive justice must include people with disabilities
00:58:17
Speaker
and institutionalized people. Because it's about more than sex. But also, sex is great. Invisible Institutions was created by me, Megan Linton, with support from People First of Canada and Inclusion Canada's Joint Task Force on Deinstitutionalization. Audio recording also by me. With production assistance by Kendall David.
00:58:47
Speaker
This episode was advised by the Joint Task Force on Deinstitutionalization, with additional audio narration by Helena Grobath and Alex Johnston.
00:58:58
Speaker
Audio post-production and sound design were by Helena Crobeth, and our theme music was composed by Barra Alaudic. Special thanks to Claudia Malacrita, Alan Martino, Vicky Lavec, Shoshana Forrester-Smith, Erica Dick, and the Eugenic Archives.
00:59:18
Speaker
to the wonderful creators and narrators of the Freedom Tour, and an extra special thanks to Leilani Moore, institutional survivors, researchers, and self advocates. Talk soon.