Narrator: In 1883, British scholar Sir Francis Galton
first coined the term eugenics.
Five years later and more than 3,000 miles away
two large brick buildings were erected on the shores
of Lake Simcoe, outside of Orillia, Ontario.
This institution, which would come to be known as
the Huronia Regional Centre, was a sprawling complex,
which would be at the heart of Ontario's eugenics movement
Ontario eugenicists, like Dr. Helen MacMurchy
and Dr. Charles K. Clarke,
pushed to label thousands of Ontarians
"feebleminded" or "mentally defective",
sending them to institutions like the one in Orillia.
With the rise of the eugenics movement,
the primary goal of institutions was not to provide care
but to control those who were considered undesirable,
eventually eliminating them from society altogether
Carrieanne Tompkins was thirteen years old
when she was admitted to the Ontario Hospital School.
But her family had been living under the shadow
of the eugenics movement for decades.
It began in 1916, one year after Helen MacMarchy
was named Ontario's Inspector of the Feebleminded.
That year welfare agencies first came into contact
with Carrieanne's grandparents
and labelled them mentally deficient.
Three decades later, Carrieanne's mother
was sent to Orillia, followed by her half brothers
Paul and Lionel.
Carrieanne arrived at the Ontario Hospital School
in 1963, when the institution was nearing
it's most overcrowded.
Nearly 3,000 people were housed in facilities
designed for 1,500 at most.
Crowded into filthy, dilapidated dormitories
and forced to eat substandard food,
those incarcerated at the institution experienced
extremely unsanitary living conditions,
leading to astronomical rates of infectious
diseases and parasites.
Carrieanne: When they brought me here from
the courthouse, they told me I was gonna be here
until eighteen years old and that they were gonna
bring me here for school.
I came here with a police woman
and I was admitted into this isolation ward,
which is a place where you go where they decide
where you go before you enter any cottage.
But in here I, they cut my hair like a boy
and I was...it was so horrible.
And then they checked me for lice
to see if I had any bugs in my head
and then they sent me to K3.
Narrator: The large brick building which made up
the Ontario Hospital School, were called cottages.
Each cottage was designated with a letter
and each floor was given a number.
Cottage K was one of the oldest buildings
at the institution and housed girls deemed
intelligent enough to receive education.
Government documents indicate that abuse
was endemic to the Ontario Hospital School.
Staff used fear as a tactic to control the population
of residents, who far outnumbered them.
The favourite or pet residents of staff members
were given free rein, and restraints such as
cages, isolation rooms and psychotropic drugs
were used excessively and inappropriately,
even for the time.
Carrieanne: From the isolation I came over here to K3.
That's where they send people when they go into school,
when I was in there all the nightmares started,
from the needles, the dope needles, and how they
treated you physically and mentally, sexually and...
There was a nurse there, an RN and her name was *****
and she called me "bug eyes", you know,
and I was just, like, sitting on the floor, then
I got smashed in the face and they broke my leg,
threw me down the stairs and they broke my leg in three
places, by her pets.
And when I was in there I was in agony.
Then when I was in the hallway, they, apparently they
put me right by the pig bucket with a broken leg
because they didn't want the other girls to sit with me.
Mrs. ***** said to me, "You have to listen to what I say."
She said, "You open your mouth, you'll see a needle."
I did get the needle, it was paraldehyde
and I was really drugged.  Ticking dresses, cold tubs.
It was like a horror.  I've never seen...
...only on a horror movie, where they took me in
and they put me under ice cold water and
Mrs. *****'s pets just dumped me under.
It was freezing and they threw the ticking dress on me
and horribly touched my woman parts and grabbed my
breasts and Mrs. ***** let them do it to me.
That was rape to me.
I was on the scrub bucket and I noticed some bleeding
and I thought I cut myself and I said to Mrs. *****,
"I need a bandaid."  And she yanked my hair and
threw me in a room and threw a belt and pads at me
and said, "Now you're a woman, you can have sex."
That's when it started, the violence
about having the baby.
I was sexually assaulted by a staff that worked here
and I got pregnant by him and they ripped the baby out
of me and they really hurt me when they were doing it.
They just took the baby when I...I heard it cry
and then I heard the neck crack and I...
...sadly I said, "What was it, a boy or a girl?"
And all they could say, "It's a girl."
So they took the baby, I don't know where they
took the baby but...  It just seems so horrible
how a man staff could ever work in here and make a
young patient pregnant.
Narrator: Because large institutions like the one in Orillia
were extremely expensive to operate, the forced
and unpaid labour of residents had always been viewed
as a necessity.
At Orillia, residents worked on the farm, in the laundry
and on the wards, where they looked after their fellow
patients and did their best to keep the decrepit
facilities clean.
They also worked in shops, manufacturing all of the
clothing and footwear used at the institutions.
Residents began to recieve pay for their work in
the 1970's but it consisted of only a few cents an hour.
The use of patient labour at Huronia
would not end until the mid 1980s.
Carrieanne: When I was a patient here in the hospital
I worked in a laundry room way over there
and when I was in there it was our job to do the
staff's work.  We were the work bees.
And I went in there, every time going in there
doing the laundry.  So, apparently,
when we were in there folding sheets and whatever,
one of the male laundry room staff had put a patient
into the dryer, which we all were told not to say anything.
They told the police that he put the dryer on himself.
Before the police came he was as black as anything.
He was burned to death from the dryer.
They were those great big, humongous, great big
washers and dryers in there.  So, we all had to tell
us to shut our mouths, because if we said anything
we'd be in serious trouble.
The police had asked all the questions of what
happened in the laundry room.
Of course, I'd seen the body and they took it out
the back, which would probably be that way,
and the guy was covered over.
Narrator: During the first one hundred years of
the Huronia Regional Centre's operation, more than
4,000 residents died behind its walls.
An unknown number of patients were buried
in the cemetery located on the institution grounds.
These graves were once marked with numbered stones
but these were removed and used to pave pathways.
Today only a handful of named and numbered markers remain
and no one knows for certain who is buried where.
After spending much of the 1960's in Orillia,
Carrieanne was transferred to the Muskoka Centre,
a smaller institution located in Gravenhurst.
She later spent time at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital
in Etobicoke, before finally returning to the community.
Today the things she witnessed in institutions
continue to haunt her and she works with
Remember Every Name.  A group of survivors and their
supporters, dedicated to uncovering the truth about
the Huronia Regional Centre Cemetery
and ensuring that what happened in institutions
like Huronia is never forgotten.
