Newly-revealed evidence shows hidden connections between the CIA and experiments on Indigenous children in Canada and imprisoned Black people in the US in the archived project of MK Ultra.

Project MK Ultra was a CIA-administered effort to develop mind-control drugs to use in interrogations and against enemies. 

According to Truthout, a group of Indigenous women known as the Kanien’kehà:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) took a win in their lawsuit against entities including McGill University, the Canadian government, and the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec on April 20, 2023. The win resulted in a process of searching for unmarked graves believed to be buried on the grounds of the hospital by archeologists and cultural monitors.

Two years prior, approximately 1,300 unmarked graves, most of them the remains of Indigenous children, were discovered on lands of five of Canada’s former residential schools. Throughout the 20th century, the residential school system, like its US equivalent Indian Boarding School system, took away Indigenous children from their families, forbade them from speaking their language, and subjected them to forms of abuse amounting to what a truth and reconciliation commission called “cultural genocide".

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Friends in suffering

In October 2021, new evidence came to light when a white Winnipeg resident named Lana Ponting testified in Quebec’s Superior Court.

She stated that in 1958, at a time when she was 16, doctors from the former psychiatric hospital affiliated with McGill and the Royal Victoria Hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute, drugged her with LSD and other substances, subjected her to electroshock treatments, and played a recording telling her over and over again, that she was either “a bad girl” or “a good girl.”

She testified that “some of the children I saw there were Indigenous,” and befriended an Indigenous girl named Morningstar, who suffered what she did, but with the added indignity of being harassed because of her race.

Ponting recalled sneaking out from the hospital at night and running into “people standing over by the cement wall” with shovels and flashlights because of rumors that bodies were buried on the property. “I believe that some of them would be Indigenous people,” she told the court.

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Her testimony matches another Allan Memorial Institute survivor's narration to historian Donovan King a decade earlier, and in 2008, the Squamish Nation included the psychiatric hospital in a list of potential sites of unmarked graves.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and as cited in John Mark’s 1991 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate and Steven Kinzer’s 2019 book Poisoner in Chief, in 1977, a previously hidden box of MK Ultra financial records found by CIA archivists state that the Memorial Institute was home to an MK Ultra sub-project: “Subproject 68.”

Ponting accused psychiatrist Ewen Cameron of raping ­her, as he conducted experiments to “depattern” people’s minds using violent methods he termed “psychic driving.”

However, Cameron was not alone. As historian Alfred McCoy has shown in his 2006 book A Question of Torture, psychologist Donald Hebb was also sponsored by the CIA.

Mohawk Mother Kwetiio said: “I feel like we’re closer to having our future generations heard, our past generations heard, and whatever has happened to our children that they have purpose". 

Mind washing in the Cold War Era

The mothers and their supporters have been gathering archival documents of McGill experiments that may not directly implicate but can expedite the release of restricted files that will paint the full picture. 

In 1966, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose family foundation helped establish the Allan Memorial Institute, helped bring a team of McGill consultants to New York to conduct research at the Dannemora State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, per Canadian psychiatrist Bruno Cormier’s 1975 book The Watcher and the Watched.

The main purpose was to develop new methods for preventing recidivism, but a 1968 report said that it hosted “experimental studies of various aspects of criminal behavior". The following year it was noted that a large number of its participants were Black.

An affidavit authored by anthropologist Phillippe Blouin located correspondence between psychologist Cameron and Cormier. Between 1957 and 1963, the exchanges referenced a proposal for a Pilot Centre for Juvenile Delinquency, including labs “for psychological studies, for work in genetics, for endocrinological investigations, for sociological studies, both within the unit and also for field work.”

Cormier stresses that “research of this kind should bring light on all behavioral problems” and that it had the potential to “bridge the research gap between juvenile delinquency and adult criminality.”

Not long after, New York officials selected him to lead the Memorial Institute’s partnership with the New York prison system with the help of a German physician named Ludwig Fink, who became director of the Dannemora Hospital after practicing psychiatry in Iran and India during the 1940s.

By 1969, Fink and some McGill consultants trained prison guards in hypnosis and aversion therapy techniques, ending in scenes that an observer called “quite revolting both for those who watched and those who took part.”

The state-sponsored experiments of the Cold War era resorted to a range of violent methods to test whether human thoughts and behavior could be predictably controlled. Vulnerable populations incapable of granting consent and viewed as disposable were targeted and assaulted, and their claims were unlikely taken seriously because they were institutionalized and from marginalized groups: Indigenous people, Black people, poor people, disabled people, children, prisoners, women and girls.

This scientific violence at the time was formed by the living nightmares of colonialism and slavery, which continues to find expression in the ongoing “war on terror.”

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