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Humanity, history, intellectual disability in Alberta |
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Written by Claudia Malacrida
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Friday, March 05 2010, 8:52 PM |
What does it mean to be human? For people with disabilities, this question has centered on inclusion — things like community acceptance, appropriate education and employment, involvement in the full range of human relationships, including parenting. Unfortunately, these rights have not always been on offer to Albertans with disabilities.
We know this in part because of the Eugenics Act, which administered the involuntary sterilization of almost 3,000 Albertans between 1928 and 1973. But we probably would not even know this, were it not for several high-profile lawsuits against the government for unlawful sterilization. Histories like those of the Eugenics Act are often considered “best to be forgotten” until a victim or a survivor makes the point of reminding us how precarious the right to human treatment can be.
Alberta’s Eugenics Act is intimately connected to another hidden history — that of Michener Center, a Red Deer institution opened in 1923 as the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives (PTS). The Eugenics Board held meetings four times yearly in Michener/PTS and the vast majority of involuntary sterilizations were performed on PTS/Michener residents. Drawing on interviews with ex-residents and ex-workers and stacks of institutional records, the picture that emerges from Michener Center is one of systematic dehumanization.
First, people deemed to be “mentally defective” were deprived of the ability to be part of their families and communities. Children admitted into Michener Center were kept separate from their families during their first year in the institution, because supposedly this would help them acclimatize better to institutional life. As a result, the children quickly became anonymous members of a separate society, cut off from any “normal” human childhood experiences. Eventually, many were abandoned by parents and family. Once they turned 18, after years of institutional neglect, they were shipped from the children’s side to Deerhome, an adult facility on the Michener campus.
The second form of dehumanization was a denial of the children’s right to develop their human potential. Once inside, personal effects were put into storage, uniforms were worn, and personal space became an impossible luxury. Children typically slept in dormitories of 40 or more, without walls separating their beds, without places to keep personal possessions, and without the ability to make decisions about how to spend their time. Toilets, showers, and “dayrooms” were both locked and communal. As a result, children were never really free to move, to choose how or with whom they would spend their time, or to regulate their own bodies. They also were very rarely afforded the opportunity to develop their minds; of all inmates, less than 15 per cent ever received any real education. In short, they were never really permitted to grow up.
It is important to know that many who found themselves in the institution got there for eugenic reasons. They came from the wrong kind of family — poor, single-parented, immigrant. Or, they came from the wrong social groups. Indian and Metis children, Eastern and Southern Europeans were highly overrepresented in the hallways of Michener Center and in the operating rooms of the Eugenics Board.
While the Eugenics Board ceased operations in 1973, Michener continued on. From its heyday in 1974 with almost 2,400 souls interned, today less than 300 residents remain. And while the Red Deer facility is a smaller and much more pleasant place than it once was, it and its residents continue to remain outside of the human contract. In light of the historical record, isn’t it time we extended full human rights and full human inclusion to citizens with intellectual disabilities in Alberta?
Claudia Malacrida is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Lethbridge. She will present “Humanity, History and Intellectual Disability in Alberta” on March 9 at 4 p.m. in Anderson Hall, AH100, at the U of L.
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