What do you know about eugenics in Western Canada?
The second Alberta Eugenics Awareness Week was held in  
October of 2012. 
The week began with the team meeting of the "Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada" project. 
The week included talks by Karen Stote on the sterilization of aboriginal 
and First Nations women; a reading of the play, "Invisible Child", written by David Cheoros, 
Leilani Muir, and Lou Morin; an event at City Hall in Edmonton commemorating the 40th anniversary
of the repeal of the sexual sterilization act of Alberta; 
a Person's Day panel discussion
on feminism, indigenous well-being, and linguicide; and a performative art show,
"Crip Tease: An Evening of Irreverent Art", on disability and sexuality. 
This is the highlight video of that week. Additional interviews with Sandra Anderson, Colette Leung, 
and Lesley Cormack give special insight about the historical context of eugenics 
and its contemporary relevance. 
What do you know about eugenics in Western Canada?
Welcome everyone and thank you for letting us join you. My name is David Cheoros.
I'm the playwright of this piece, working alongside 
Leilani and Lou Morin who were instrumental in crafting this piece
"Invisible Child." I'd like to introduce Linda Grass, Randy
Brososky, and Jenny Mckillop who performed this show about
eight weeks ago at the Edmonton Fringe Festival. 
'This is the story, of Leilani O'Malley, of unearthing the truth about the Alberta Eugenics Board, of a 
court case that changed the way Albertans looked at themselves.'
I'm Sandra Anderson and I practiced law with 
Field LLP before my retirement a year ago, and
I was counsel for Leilani Muir and the other sterilization 
victims for a number of years of my practice. 
'This is the story, of how our legal system was effective in reversing a decades-old wrong, of a
classic David and Goliath fight, one person against the government, an extraordinary woman who overcame
tremendous hardships in order to finally settle into her own voice. We talk about courage, conflicts, 
Constitutional challenges as we dissect the moments that lead  up to one of the most important 
cases in Alberta's history. In our touching portrait, documentary, gripping courtroom drama, 
told in passionate documentary style - 
Welcome!' 
Today I'm really pleased to welcome Karen Stote from the University of New Brunswick. 
I must admit I was really excited to hear about Rob 
and his team and the work they've been doing here in Alberta because there is very little work that's been done
on eugenics in Canada. Involuntary sterilization is a practice that arose out of the eugenics
movement in the early 1900s. And the idea behind it was that the illness and
the poverty and the many social problems that were manifesting themselves at the time
were the result of some sort of innate biological characteristics of 
individuals rather than the way society was being organized at  the time. And so as
the industrial capitalist mode of production expanded many private 
interest groups considered it more cost effective to intervene and stop these so-called 
'problem groups' from reproducing rather than implement broader social 
measures, things like better nutrition and wages, and generally just creating a more inclusive
society for everyone. Sterilization became a cost-effective method of addressing what were
in fact social problems. 
Basically the Sexual Sterilization Act was enacted in 1928 
to respond to a movement which 
said that if we improve the breeding stock of
people we will start to wipe out of all the scourges of humanity. 
So, the idea was that if you put people into confined
institutions and you sterilize them so that they cannot carry on their
deficiencies, society would gradually improve. 
'The Sexual Sterilization Act, 1928:
"When it is proposed to discharge any inmate of a mental hospital, 
the medical superintendant may cause the inmate to be examined by a board." No board
interview, no discharge. "If upon such examination the board is unanimously of opinion 
that the patient might safely be discharged if the danger of procreation with its attendant risk of multiplication
of the evil by transmission of disability to progeny were eliminated," if you have a genetic 
disease which might get passed along, "the board may direct a surgical operation for 
sexual sterilization of the inmate." You don't get out unless you get sterilized. 
My paper is called "Attacks on Historical Memory and the Politics of Archives:
How decisions are made and who makes them."
My name is Colette Leung, I am a joint student in the library science program and humanities computing
here at the University of Alberta. Before I was brought on to the Living Archives Project, I hadn't even 
heard of Leilani and I hadn't actually known about even what eugenics meant as
a term. I remember being asked to work on the project and then going home 
and looking up Wikipedia, like, 'What is Eugenics" right?
One facet of this project is the digitization of extant and to be accumulated 
paper archives as well as the creation of oral histories captured on digital 
video. The purpose of this digitization is not solely to make paper archives 
available online through links, but also to package the digital content for use
in the school curriculum. 
I think very few Albertans know about it. I'm actually more surprised when someone knows about it than when someone doesn't. 
We very much shape what we think Alberta's history should be. And so it's not really something
that we talk about a lot, right?
The Living Archives Project is achieving lofty but not impossible goals. Perhaps
the greatest of these are the validation of personal and collective memories
so they may transform present and future generations' understanding of the past. 
"In 1937 it was determined that the board was taking too long to make its decisions, that
you could be sterilized even if your perceived defect wasn't genetic, or when if
you were a mental defective they no longer needed to get anyone's permission. Most sterilizations occurred at either the 
Alberta Hospital in Ponoka or the Provincial Training School in Red Deer. The government would like to remind
all Albertans that it was the Progessive Conservatives who repealed the Act in 1942, 
after 2,800 people were sterilized."
It should be stated that I, like Leilani, was sterilized at the tender age of  
14 at the Red Deer Institution. We never should've been sterilized. She would've
been a wonderful, wonderful mother. I see how she treats her pets, 
how she's so kind to others, how she cooks wonderful meals, keeps a clean home. You couldn't as for 
more. A fine example of a fine woman. 
I'm Lesley Cormack. I am a historian of science at the University of Alberta. 
I'm presently the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. I do think that it's important to learn about 
eugenics in the education system. It is the case that many
people have never heard of this. 
Sexual sterilization was achieved through surgical intervention  on the reproductive systems 
of citizens deemed 'less fit.' Their procreation was held to pose an,
quote, "attendant risk of multiplication of the evil 
by transmission of the disability to progeny." The foundation of eugenics is the idea
that through the agency of governments, social organizations, and institutions, 
and via individual decision, society can and should alter 
for the better what sorts of people there are in future generations. 
For me the message of the eugenics movement is that
good people, who think that they are doing good for society and even
for the people that they are treating, can be misled, can 
do things in the name of science, in the names of progress, that actually have 
shattering consequences. 
The people in the 1920s who advocated for the introduction of the Sexual Sterilization 
Act were well meaning. They were certainly well
known and very powerful: Emily Murphy, Louise
McKinney, Nellie McClung, the President of the University of Alberta, 
the National Council of Women, the United Farm Women of Alberta, the list goes on, 
and on. These people were well-meaning, they were passionate,
and they were wrong. 
We gotta keep talking about this so it never happens again,
because my belief is history repeats. If we shut up
about it, it will repeat, so, I gotta keep talking about it all over the world, 
and hopefully we can stop it everywhere. 
So, this is the day on which we remember the legacy of Edwards v. Canada 
and of the five Canadian first-wave feminists who were responsible for this legal victory. 
If the victory in Edwards was both fundamentally important and also narrow, the 
legacy of the 'Famous Five' is also very fraught as we all know.  
Though passionate advocates for women's citizenship rights, these women were at same time
anti-immigration and also explicitly racist. As everyone
in this room knows, the women who struggled for women's inclusion and legal personhood
were proponents of eugenics. McClung promoted the benefits of sterilization, 
particularly for, quote, "young simpleminded girls." Emily Murphy
particularly in her nom de plume 'Janey Canuck,' railed 
against the unrestricted breeding by the feeble-minded, and she 
argued that insane people are not entitled to progeny. 
As Karen Stote argued in her talk on Monday, eugenics was explicitly 
rationalized as a cost-effective solution to social problems. 
When I was originally asked to talk about eugenics I was a bit stumped, not because 
there isn't ample examples of eugenics-type projects being carried out
among indigenous people in Canada as Lise has just talked to, but because I don't
do a lot of work in eugenics kind of as narrowly conceived,
and also because in kind of the post-war era in Canada we've kind of moved away
from the eliminatory policies that are part-and-parcel of kind of eugenicist logics 
and we've started moving towards what in indigenous studies we'd tend to talk about as the 'improvement era,' right,
so this whole idea of integrating indigenous people into the Canadian body politic. 
Just as some parents might have been complicit in seeking sterilization of their children
some parents have been complicit in hastening language laws by 
immigrating away from their home communities, by intermarrying, by not speaking their heritage
language to their children. Unquestionably language diversity is on a sharp decline. 
You know, eugenics is all tied up in purity, and human beings are not
pure, nor cultures, nor our languages. 
Do you have slender trouble?
When you see a fat person eating, 
are you reminded of what you've had to sacrifice in order to fit into that
tiny box called 'normal'?
Have you accepted self-denial as part of
a balanced diet?
Is it possible your slenderness is a phase you'll
grow out of?
Are you afraid you're gonna catch 'the obesity'? Maybe from a toilet
seat, or from drinking from a fat person's glass, or maybe from not washing your
hands after touching a hamburger?
When you go out with your 
fat friends - you have fat friends, right? - do you choose places with 
right-type booths that will bruise their guts, chairs with arms that will hug  
their butts, spots you enter by too many stairs with rickety old 
chairs that you worry would quit lickety-split if I ate just a bit
more shit?
Once you start learning about it, it starts
kind of seeping into everything. You start to see how eugenics plays into our lives a lot, every single day
and not just in these very definite sexual sterilization, like not just the definite laws that existed, 
but even in how we go about our lives now. You know, you go see 'X-Men' and you realize
the entire premise behind 'X-Men' is whether or not mutants should be allowed to live or to procreate
and, you know, so it's in pop culture, but we don't really think about it as like, 'Oh
that's eugenics' right? So much of this people, I think, 
think, you know, the Sexual Sterilization Act ended 1972, it's done and gone. But it 
really isn't, and there are very important conversations to have, and they're not black and white. 
You think of all of the work that's now being done on
the prediction of sex of unborn children
and that's social engineering that is now possible, medically, 
well that's, that's eugenics. 
We'll never be through with it, I don't think, until we
value individuals, each individual 
as different, perhaps, but entirely
of the quality and the worth of every other individual. 
Nobody, not one of us, is able to do that
successfully all the time. And no system
can be set up which actually does that, and that's
our problem. 
In closing, it was certainly a dark, very dark, chapter in Alberta's 
history, but one that we should never forget. 
