A group of Indigenous women are hoping to stop the bulldozers at a former Montreal hospital which they believe could hold the truth about children still missing from a grisly half-century-old CIA experiment.
They have spent the last two years trying to delay the construction project by McGill University and the Quebec government. “They took our children and had all kinds of things done to them. They were experimenting on them,” said Kahentinetha, an 85-year-old activist from the Mohawk community of Kahnawake, southwest of Montreal, who goes by just one name.
The activists are relying on archives and testimonies that suggest the site contains unmarked graves of children formerly interned at the Royal Victoria Hospital and Allan Memorial Institute, a neighboring psychiatric hospital.
In the 1950s and 1960s, behind the austere walls of the old psychiatric institute, the US Central Intelligence Agency funded a human experiments programme called MK Ultra.
During the Cold War, the programme aimed to develop procedures and drugs to effectively brainwash people. Experiments were conducted in Britain, Canada and the United States, subjecting people — including Indigenous children in Montreal — to electroshocks, hallucinogenic drugs, and sensory deprivation. “They wanted to erase us,” said Kahentinetha.