Case of R. v. Bella Yellowhorn

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mr. Craven:
This will acknowledge your communication below my email of October 12, 2003.
By copy of this email, I am forwarding your communication to Eric Brooks and
Kirk Lambrecht.

I appreciate your advice as to your proposed witnesses.  I also understand
that you are still working on which documents you wish to produce at the
trial of January 22 and 23.  Unless you can provide me a clear indication of
what the substance of your proposed Elder testimony will be, the best way to
deal with this will be to have the Elders proceed with their testimony, and
then adjourn in order to have these historical facts, and the documents
relied on by you, examined by an expert for the Crown.

You should forward to me the documents upon which you will be seeking to
file in evidence before the Court.  I can then advise you whether the Crown
will consent to the filing of these documents, or whether you must prove
them in the normal way.  This may entail getting certified copies, or
producing a witness who has knowledge about these documents.  If I know what
the document is and know it is authentic, I will in most likelihood consent
to its admission and can save you these steps. Even though you may have
provided some of these documents to the Crown and the Court, please send me
a complete bundle with each document labeled (either under a tab number, or
a document number on the first page of the document).  I will then review
each document and advise you which can go into evidence by consent, and
which you will have to prove.

I will leave it to Mr. Brooks to determine whether it would be appropriate
to communicate any of your comments to the court.  You are certainly free to
communicate with the Court directly, I would only ask that you send me a
copy of that communication.
Yours truly,

Kurt Sandstrom
Barrister and Solicitor
Alberta Justice
Constitutional and Aboriginal Law
9th Floor, Peace Hills Trust Tower,
10011-109 Street
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada  T5J 3S8
Tel:  (780) 422-4160
Fax:  (780) 427-1230


Dear Mr. Sandstrom:

Thanks for your response and helping with outlining the procedures involved
in submissions of documentary evidence and proposed lines of argument. In
this regard, below is an example of some of the evidence on the genocidal
nature of the Indian Act and the right/survival imperative of First Nations
Peoples not to recognize or obey it. For the record, this applies
specifically to Bella Yellow Horn in particular as she was slated to be
sterilized under the color of the Indian Act and Alberta Sterilization Act
and was only saved from sterilization with some last-minute legal
intervention. Had she recognized and--complied with--her obligations under
these Acts, which were in violation of Article II (d) of the 1948 UN
Convention on Genocide to which Canada is a signatory, her present children
would simply not exist and the Blackfoot Nation would have ben deprived of
some of its citizens. Further, Bella and other members of her family were
used for medical experimentation in the Indian Residential Schools, again
under the color of "law" and supposed "obligations" under--and to comply
with--the Indian Act which were in violation of Articles II (a), (b), (c),
(d) and (e) of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide (see below).

We are attempting to comply with all your discovery and other rights prior
to trial. We do not have the resources available to us that the Crown has
and therefore our responses might not be all that you are used to. In any
case, we have made good-faith attempts to comply with all our pre-trial
obligations and ask that our constraints are understood. Those potential
witnesses to be called all have specialized and personal
knowledge/experiences with the genocidal nature and consequences of the
Indian Act and/or Treaty 7 "obligations" past and present and will show that
any First Natins person recognizing/obeying the Indian Act would be aiding
and abetting their own extermination and that of their own People, would
themselves be complicit in genocide and inviolation of several articles of
the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide and those who refuse to recognize or
comply with the Indian Act are objectively acting as agents of the huihger
or "supreme law" of Canada.

Thank you for your assistance.

James M. Craven
(Omahkohkiaayo i' poyi)


Alberta sterilization victims also used as guinea pigs Revelation comes as
40 victims win $4M settlement
                Marina Jimenez  National Post
                10/28/98

As many as 100 of the children at the centre of the Alberta sterilization
scandal of the late 1960s and early 1970s were also used as guinea pigs in
drug trials, the National Post has learned. The children lived at the
Provincial Training School in Red Deer. Some were wards of the province and
others were placed in the school by their parents, who did not consent to
the sterilization or medical experimentation, which included the
administration of powerful steroids and anti-psychotic drugs. Experts say
one of the drugs used, the anabolic steroid norbolethone, is illegal today.
The anti-psychotic tranquilizer haloperidol was also used. Its effect on
children is said to be akin to hitting them over the head with a sledge
hammer.

Yesterday, 40 people who were sterilized against their will reached a
settlement totalling $4-million with the government of Alberta. This brings
to 540 the number of people who have settled with the province for being
sterilized under the now-defunct Alberta Sterilization Act, which was in
effect from 1928 to 1972. The operations were ordered by Alberta's eugenics
board to prevent the mentally disabled from passing on their defects to
offspring. Lawyers say they want more money from the government for victims
who had to endure being tested with powerful drugs in addition to being
sterilized. "Invading people's rights in the form of unauthorized research
and taking advantage of people who couldn't look after themselves is the
kind of thing that courts award punitive damages for," said Jon Faulds, an
Edmonton lawyer representing 109 sterilization victims still negotiating
settlements.

Allan Garber, another Edmonton lawyer acting for the former training school
residents, said they were treated like cattle. "The experimental drug
treatment only compounds the evil that was done to our clients."  Dr.
Leonard J. LeVann, medical superintendent from 1949 to 1974 at the Red Deer
school, published the results of his drug experiments in scholarly journals,
which were recently turned over to lawyers for the victims.  The articles
show that Dr. LeVann, who is dead, gave 100 undersized children the anabolic
steroid norbolethone over a 12-month period in 1971. The drug -- now illegal
in Canada -- made the children gain weight. But it also produced some side
effects: the genitals of two boys increased in size and one girl's voice
deepened."The treatment of retarded growth in children with anabolic agents
is controversial," he wrote in the September 1971 edition of the
International Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, Therapy and Toxicology.
Nonetheless, he called the drug study "entirely satisfactory."

Norbolethone is illegal today because of its powerful side effects - damage
to the liver and negative psychological symptoms. Anabolic steroids can also
increase aggressive sexual behaviour in men and cause secondary sexual
characteristics, for example, facial hair in girls. Dr. LeVann also gave 100
children haloperidol, an anti-psychotic tranquilizer, over a period of 40
days in the late 1960s to counter hyperactivity and excitability. Dr. Louis
Pagliaro, a professor of educational psychology and the associate director
of the substance abusology research unit at the University of Alberta, says
haloperidol "would essentially knock
(children) out. (It) generally decreases people's ability to learn and
adversely affects memory and behaviour." Dr. LeVann's studies are "full of
half-truths, assumptions and by today's standards, lack proper research
methodology," says Dr. Pagliaro.

About 2,800 people were sterilized in Alberta before the Sexual
Sterilization Act was finally repealed. Documents now show that many of the
people sterilized were not mentally disabled. In 1996, the Alberta Court of
Queen's Bench ordered the provincial government to pay Leilani Muirer
$740,000 for being wrongfully confined in the Red Deer school and
sterilized. Her landmark victory opened a floodgate of litigation. In June,
1998, the government agreed to pay 500 more sterilization claimants up to
$100,000. Many continue to live in the Red Deer facility, known today as the
Michener Centre. The  province has spent $54 million on settlements to date.
The compensation deal for the sterilizaiton victims announced yesterday,
much the same as those announced last June, gives claimants $75,000 now and
another $25,000 after three years, if they are then living outside
institutions.



The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, April 26, 2000 Native children deprived of
care Preventive dentistry banned during study

By Michael Valpy

Federal-government doctors withheld specialized dental care for children in
eight aboriginal residential schools in the 1940s and 1950s to see what the
effect would be on their teeth and overall health. The specialized  dental
care was withheld as part of a five-year study of aboriginal children's
nutrition. The study's director, Dr. L. B. Pett, the retired chief of the
nutrition division of the Department of National Health and Welfare, said
parental consent was not obtained for the study. Instead, the government
obtained permission from the school principals.

A letter dated Oct. 3, 1949, from Dr. H. K. Brown, chief of the department's
dental health division, said: "It is important that during the period of
this study, no specialized, over-all type of dental service should be
provided, such as the use of sodium fluoride, dental prophylaxis
[professional cleaning] or even urea compounds [used in treatment of decay].

"In this study dental caries [decay] and gingivitis [gum disease] are both
important factors in assessing nutritional status. The caries index could be
upset by such specialized dental measures as those referred to above.

The letter -- referring specifically to the United Church school in Port
Alberni, B.C. -- also said that preventive dental treatment would make the
study of "questionable value" in measuring vitamin C deficiency.

Fillings and extractions were to continue.

Professor Gary Accursi of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Dentistry
said yesterday that a dental-ethics committee would be unlikely to approve
such a trial today. He said he did not know whether it would have passed the
ethical standards of the time.

A Toronto medical expert on clinical trials, who asked not to be identified,
said the letter, on its face, implied clearly that the Canadian government
was prepared to let aboriginal children suffer the effects of poor nutrition
without intervention so long as its study was not adulterated.

Dr. Pett, in an interview yesterday, put the study, which he said was
conducted at eight schools, in a different context. It was carried out, he
said, to improve nutrition for aboriginal children and provide information
on good nutrition for their parents.

Fluoride treatment, now considered one of history's greatest public-health
advances, was then in its infancy.  The first fluoride trials in Canada, in
Stratford and Brantford, were being carried out at the time of the study.
The only thing that bothered Dr. Pett about the study from an ethical point
of view, he said, was the absence of parental consent. "Parental consent was
always an issue," he said. "It was hard to contact them. So many were in the
bush."

So the study went ahead, he said, with the consent of the school principals,
who were given more-or-less legal status as in loco parentis (in the place
of a parent).

The records of the nutritional study were found in Ottawa's National
Archives by freelance writer David Napier, commissioned by the Anglican
Journal, the newspaper of the Anglican Church of Canada, to inquire into
aboriginal residential schools. The Journal will publish his article, the
result of eight months research, later this month.

The schools were operated by churches in a contractual relationship with the
federal government for more than a century.

Children as young as five were taken away from their families and placed in
the schools. They were ordered not to use their mother tongue and to set
aside their cultural values and practices.

The Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Churches, along with the federal
government, face hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits from nearly
6,000 former students.

Copyright 2000 | The Globe and Mail


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