In 2019, five Inuit from Iglulik, Nunavut, sued the federal government for medical experiments, including painful skin grafts, conducted on them in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1968 to 1972, researchers – academics, dentists, and physicians employed by Canadian universities and government – arrived in two Nunavut communities to study the Inuit. As part of the International Biological Programme (ibp), they engaged with a transnational scientific construction of the world’s Indigenous peoples as “primitives” who were assumed to embody the secrets of human evolution and adaptation. Research would reveal those secrets for the “civilized” world seemingly on the brink of environmental destruction. In return for the promise of needed health care, the community councils agreed to cooperate with researchers who then took away blood, tissue, teeth, x-rays, personal data, photographs, and at least one child. John Dossetor, who directed the skin graft experiments, was subsequently hailed as a pioneer in medical ethics and memorialized in the University of Alberta’s medical ethics centre. This article argues that the ibp experiments indulged professional interests and advanced careers while implicating the developing field of bioethics in colonial violence.
Alberta's coal industry experienced decline and resurgence in the mid-twentieth century, including the expansion of surface mine operations throughout the 1960s after a major energy transition saw the rise of oil and gas alongside the dramatic contraction of underground coal mining. Surface coal mining was seen as the best hope for profitable ongoing coal extraction. However, surface operations came at a cost as the destruction of the land threatened agriculture, watersheds, wilderness, and tourism. This destruction was most visible in the eastern foothills and Rocky Mountains. Many different groups of Albertans, including coal miners, urban residents, farmers, and outdoor enthusiasts called on the provincial government to impose restrictions on surface mine operations. Surface mining became a flashpoint for 1960s environmental activism and led to major 1970s environmental legislation. Mine reclamation became the centrepiece to a firmly expanding extractive ideology within Alberta - one that guaranteed the continued extraction of coal in a manner that promised to make as little long-term environmental impact as possible, satisfying the demands of both industry and activists. With the election of Peter Lougheed's Progressive Conservatives in late 1971, public hearings brought these different voices to the table, leading to the passage of the 1973 Land Surface Conservation and Reclamation Act. These hearings and the policies they informed served to defuse public opposition through promoting reclamation as the solution to environmental problems, obscuring the ongoing destructiveness of strip mining through the promise of a future in which the land could be restored.
In December 1858, Rear-Admiral Robert Baynes wrote to the Admiralty requesting that Esquimalt Harbour on Vancouver Island become a permanent depot. This document was key in establishing a permanent naval presence in what is now British Columbia and the construction of a naval base still utilized by Canada's Pacific fleet. This decision was not solely a response to events and conditions in British Columbia or even the North Pacific, however. It was made in a remarkably global context that has largely been passed over in historical analyses of Esquimalt, which indicates that British concerns in Pacific Latin America - namely, Chile, Peru, and Panama - were central in the discussion to establish a permanent base on Vancouver Island. This article repositions Pacific Latin America as an essential component to the navy's interest in Esquimalt Harbour circa 1858 and details the larger imperial context within which that interest arose. British naval policy, strategy in the East Pacific, and the influence of Esquimalt's Latin American connection on what was perhaps the most violent and tumultuous period in British Columbia's colonial history constitute just one instance of how the Pacific world was sewn together through imperial means.
