Yeah, I am Rob Wilson and I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Alberta and I am the director of the
Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada project
The exploration of eugenics is important to me personally partly because I got involved in
that history in a very personal sort of way
I had come new to the University of Alberta. I didn't know a lot about the history of eugenics,
but I was teaching a couple weeks on eugenics on eugenics, mainly on American eugenics in a course
when low and behold, right in my class, people are asking questions,
students; they indicated they had personal knowledge of this history
because members of their family had been sterilized and
those members of their family were still alive and that led me to find out
that sterilization had been practiced on eugenic grounds in Alberta until 1972,
which was very late. And, moreover, once I looked around the department and said "hey,"
"do you know anything about this history?" It turned out that, yes, people did because the founding Chair
of the department was John MacEachran, who was also the longest serving
provost in the university was the chair of the Eugenics Board for most of its history
so that means that his signature is on the vast majority of the sterilization orders
And the activities of the Eugenics Board
and some of their, let's just say shortcomings, had come to light fairly recently in the late 1990s
through the Leilani Muir trial and the subsequent
cases that were settled out of court.
That was the personal beginning and then I started to meet people who were very familiar with the case
and eventually in many senses culminating with Leilani herself
around 2003, 2004. And I think that personal connection was what
ultimately really hooked me and made me feel fairly strongly committed to
doing what we could to both preserve the sort of history
of eugenics in Alberta and also, more importantly in many ways
to try and make that history known and accessible to people
in high schools, just in the regular community, and not brush over
it in the way, which I think it it had been as an uncomfortable history for many people to acknowledge.
One of the aspects that I think has affected me and continues to affect me
most profoundly about that history, I think, is
discovering that, through the documents from the legal case and talking
to people who were themselves sterilization survivors that lived through institutionalization
for 10 or 15 years of their lives. I mean, finally, they're just ordinary people.
You wouldn't pick them out as having been so-called "feebleminded" or "mentally deficient"
and that's how they were classified. And in some cases,
because I've become friends with a handful of people who've had that sort of experience
and shared some of the documents that were there about them.
The documents...it's very hard to recognize how you could have a documentary file that portrays
you as some kind of menace on the basis of feeblemindedness when you actually put that file together with a person.
They don't really add up, so part of what bothered me was "how does this happen?" Where you actually, you know,
part of the process of authorizing a sterilization for somebody
that was recognized in the legislation as a very serious form of invasion of somebody's bodily integrity,
even if they're mentally deficient, right?,
how do you go about, you know, having people appear before a Eugenics Board,
having a putatively serious review of all the evidence to make sure you've just got the right people
according to the legislation? And then there are these real travesties and it was clear there wasn't just one or two, there were
many, many, many. And that, I think, is documented in Madam Justice Veit's decision
and I think there was a kind of sense of outrage that a system of checks and balances that were in place
to protect some of the most vulnerable citizens were just completely ignored by
the Eugenics Board. And so, I think, a part of the wrongfulness of  sterilization itself
there's the wrongfulness, you might say there's a procedural wrongness, but there is something deeply unjust
about having a set of protections in place and then just ignoring them, you know, if you're the government.
And doing a double whammy on these people who
shouldn't have been there, many of them shouldn't have been there in the first place
were there in places like the Michener Centre, the Provincial Training School and they,
if the Board had been doing their job properly, they should have looked at these people, "literally" looked at them and said, "hang on, you don't...
...belong here," but in almost no cases did that happen. So that's, I just find that outrageous.
And, partly, I want to understand "how did that happen?"
And I guess it set off alarm bells thinking what else is happening now
that's kind of like that where we think we're treating people justly and fairly
and we have to act in a certain sort of way as a society for our own protection, or betterment, or whatever,
but we're really rough riding over people's rights,
sub-humanizing them, ignoring their, what I would call engaged individuality,
their really unique natures, just because they're poor, or just because they have some manifest physical variation
that we want to think of as a deficiency, just because, perhaps of the circumstances
of their background, they don't know how to read and write all that well
and so they do badly on IQ tests
and then what do we do with them? We really, you know, further or exacerbate those
circumstance that they're in
and we, in some sense, penalize them even further.
So, the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta was repealed in 1972
by the last change of government that we had in Alberta, over 40 years ago.
And it's certainly true that the then Premier, Peter Lougheed,
and the Minister who was responsible for introducing the repeal, David King,
who was a very young Cabinet Minister at the time, felt very strongly on moral grounds
that this legislation had to be removed, and it's to their credit that they did that.
Did eugenics, eugenic thinking, eugenic practices disappear with that?
I don't think so. I think, and it's not just in Alberta.
I think where this happened, to some extent eugenics had already gone underground in many ways.
It had become, that kind of thinking had become part of just a way of doing business.
For example, in prenatal screening or prenatal testing,
sort of more generally, from the 1960s to the 1970s
without people necessarily thinking about it being eugenic.
And I think part of the problem is that people think about eugenics often as just involving the government interfering
on the reproductive rights of some particular individuals.
And once it becomes a matter of individual decisions or it becomes a matter of
more implicit kinds of policies or ways in which people are directed
or relies on certain sorts of background thoughts about who is fully human, for example,
they don't see it as eugenics. But certainly, if you're thinking that anybody who,
passes through a set of screens that indicate that they have trisomy 21,
which is the genetic condition that's associated with Down syndrome.
Anybody in that category is a right candidate
for, and you can list out, you know, so called therapeutic abortion,
for sterilization themselves, for removal into an institution, or whatever.
Generally, parents are encouraged to think "oh, this a major tragedy that's about to befall you"
when you're going through that kind of prenatal screening. I mean you're basically
treating that condition seriously enough that it's, and literally IS for them,
a matter of life and death. So, it's not that we're treating all people equally
or even if you think about them as potential people, as fetuses,
and so I think that there is a range of practices that we still employ that
have that eugenic taint.
The project that we're involved in, the Living Archives on Eugenics project in Western Canada
has a very wide ranging and quite ambitious and almost impossible to fulfill
set of goals, and I think at the end of the day, now we're more than halfway through the project,
I think I can safely say, we're not going to accomplish all of them and it's going to be a bit of a pick and choose.
When we started off, we were very hopeful that one thing we'd be able to preserve is a lot of the
legal record that is not currently available to researchers
that was generated by the legal cases in the late 1990s.
It's unclear that we'll preserve that. That would have been a treasure house for historians and other researchers
in the Health Sciences and Humanities in future generations.
But another strand to the project that's always been important as well has been the
engagement with contemporary issues around disability. And I think here, 
the kind of survivor interviews that we've been doing
with people who have lived experience of institutionalization and sterilization
on eugenic grounds, and also with parents who often identify as being in a similar kind
of position. They certainly identify with the history and with many of the people and the issues that they face today
in terms of being able to keep their children, whether the parents with
disabilities themselves or they're parenting with children with disabilities, or even just facing decisions about
potential disabilities. So I think that kind of testimony, those kinds
of oral histories, those kinds of personal stories, are really important to record because I think that
they're not widely acknowledged, they're not widely recognized and hearing in people's own
words is incredibly powerful. What their experience was like.
For example, when they appeared before the Eugenics Board or what was it like to be put into one of those "quiet" rooms
and left for several days on a cold floor with barely a mattress,
no blankets, and so on, as a child. And one thing we have to remember about the history, and it comes out very powerfully
in a number of the testimonies, is, many of the people who were subject to sterilization
and institutionalization that preceded it, were children.
They were 12, they were 13, they were 14. And many of those children
were not that different from your kids or my kids
in terms of what kinds of, if you like, properties, qualities they had.
They might have had a bit of a rough edge here or there, who doesn't?...I always want to say.
And I'm not saying that if they didn't have...
if they hadn't been, if you like, like "normal" kids or didn't deserve to be there that that treatment would be justified,
but it's an extra layer to the puzzle of what is going on there.
And it's only when, I think, you hear that testimony, that it really hits you.
And I think the more people who can hear that, if we can preserve those kinds of records because
sterilization survivors are not getting any younger
And ... they have almost a unique form of knwoledge
of what went on there. No matter how many books you could read and how much you can reconstruct
various little transcripts and information from people's files. It's not like hearing it from people themselves
what they went through. And especially as those stories start to add up. And one of the interesting things that you might have noticed
is that when survivors get together and they tell their stories about the very same
period, they all of a sudden themselves come to realize things that they didn't know because they were segregated
in various kinds of ways: boys versus girls, for example; "high grade" defectives versus low grade.
And there is a new kind of, I guess a kind of self-realization
for them, which, if you think about it, it's another layer of the
deep injustice or wrong that's been done is to deny people that sense of
basic sense of community and being able to share knowledge about common sorts of experiences,
partly because of the shame that's associated with that sort of history and people wanting to, uh, it's not exactly the kind of thing that you
put on your CV, if you have one, that you were at the Provincial Training School.
And we know cases where people have, that information has come out and it has further damaged their lives.
Do I think that people telling their stories will prevent eugenics recurring or
eugenic practices from continuing? I'd like to be that optimistic. I certainly think it can make
a difference in the hearts and minds of people, especially
young people who will go on to become the leaders of tomorrow. So that's why I feel strongly about High School education,
about University education on these matters. And I very much believe, along with Gregor Wolbring,
who is on our team, that it's up to individuals to decide themselves.
There are complicated issues about what sorts of social policies are best for society where
you can't have everything and not everybody can be happy, but even if not everybody can be happy, you don't have to exploit the
most vulnerable people and come down on them like a tonne of bricks, which is really what happened in, if you like, explicit eugenics era.
So, when I am more optimistic, I like to,
put my little Pollyanna hat on and think
that, through changing the hearts and minds of individuals, one person at a time, giving them
that room to make up their own mind, that
it's going to be very difficult in a democracy where explicit policies have to be
vetted in a certain public form for those kinds of policies to recur.
It's hard to see how it will, as directly, change the 
more implicit forms of eugenics. So, for example, if you start to raise questions about prenatal screening
as being, at least in certain forms, a certain kind of form of eugenics, then
I think the most you can do is get people to really start to make that connection and think
at least for a second time before just signing off on having a whole bunch tests that I think you're
sort of railroaded into having as part of "normal" prenatal care, if you like.
But will that lead to those practices being sort of stopped or changed radically?
It's hard to see that happening. Whereas if people tried to 
reintroduce explicit eugenic legislation, and that's happened in the last five years in the United States.
In several different states where some interestingly minded state Senator suggested
we go sterilize all the poor people in the neighbourhood because that will save so much money. People have said this!
And it doesn't get much, I mean it gets air-played, but it's lampooned, it's criticized strongly.
And I think raising awareness and these oral histories play a role in doing that, will make a difference to that kind of recurrence.
One aspect of this research that's quite new to me, as just a boringly analytically trained philosopher,
is that it has involved working closely with community members
many of whom I would never have met in the course of my normal professional life, if you like.
And I think that much of what we're doing in the project just simply couldn't be done
without the active participation of survivors,
of parents, of people in community organizations who have that lived experience
that we'll never get just simply as university researchers.
It's true that on our team, we have a remarkable number of people who have had
very marginalizing sorts of experiences, from having been institutionalized themselves
on one of a number of grounds, to having
very visible disabilities in other cases,
to having had a kind of existence in street life as teenagers,
to having other debilitating kinds of illnesses and conditions that carry a lot of stigma with them.
And that, I think, has helped to inform the way in which we've approached
the work that we've been doing. And a lot of the work is, I mean it really blurs that line between,
university research and community outreach because
what we're not doing is we're not simply using sterilization survivors as 
repositories for knowledge and saying "thank you, on your way now." We're involving them in a much deeper way
as people and hoping that the research partly is helpful to them as they
participate and that they have control over their stories, that they have an interest
and they're invested in having those stories be conveyed
into school environments. So, there will be parts of what we're producing, which stand on their own
and can be viewed on the web or could be part of a larger film unit.
But some of it will make its impact when people step out with their own story
with their video and they'll go to a school and they'll be telling that story.
And that's one of the things that makes the biggest difference to
people who hear those stories for first time as being to be able to actually physically interact with them.
It makes it just all the more real for them to have somebody they can
say "and, hang on, did this really happen?" in some sense.  Not that they don't believe, but they can probe a little bit more.
I think that one of the unique aspects to this project, and it wasn't something that dawned on me
when we first got the project off the ground, but I think it is true now
is that although there is a lot of work that's been done on eugenics, especially in the United States,
in Scandinavia, it's nearly all archival, it's nearly all based on
dusty, but important, pieces of paper that are buried and hard to access
and involve a lot, many, many hours of research of skilled archival and historian researchers.
But what people haven't done, and this was said to me at a conference I was at in Uppsala,
a couple of years ago, was they said, and this was somebody who had worked a lot on
the Swedish sterilization cases, which in certain ways paralleled
the Canadian history. You have a sort of welfare state
that has a strong role for government to play in the provision of health
and they sterilized people right up until about 1975 in most of the Scandinavian countries.
And so the question was: "how did that happen?" We're not just talking about Nazis and authoritarian government.
How did a free democracy that provides for its citizens continue this kind of policy for such a long time?
But one of the researchers just said, when I talked about our project, they just said: "yeah, we never thought...
...to interview survivors." Of course, they have survivors, just as we do, because it lasted roughly the same amount of time
and people were sterilized in their teen years often. And I thought, of course
that's what you do if people are there and they're willing to talk and it's partly good for them and it preserves a kind of history that
just wouldn't be there otherwise. Why wouldn't you do that? But, I think, for most academics,
that's not how they go about doing their work.
And so, I think one of the things that's unique is that we will have a series of stories, exactly how many, we'll see,
ten, twenty, thirty? from people who lived through this. And that's going to be
very, very powerful. Somebody had approached us about a documentary, doing a documentary.
They're very interested in people of a particular ethnic background and wanting to know, do we have
checklist, people from this ethnicity...
immigrant background amongst the people we're interviewing because, they said, "look, we've worked a lot in the States...
...and we don't have a single case," for all the other work that's been done
of a detailed oral history that's provided by somebody.
And I thought, that was kind of hard to believe, but I believed it.
Someone who knows better, might ask me [laughs].
"Are there any unique ethical considerations that arise in interviewing people with these kinds of traumatic histories?"
And these histories ARE traumatic. It's not only traumatic at the time, but it's traumatic to relive and tell
these stories. It's traumatic to hear them, often.
And so, I think there are a range of ethical challenges.
First and foremost, people have to be comfortable telling uncomfortable stories.
If people don't want to be involved, you can't proceed.
But I think one of the things that, I don't know how unique this would be in other jurisdictions, 
but one thing that surprised me at first, and I think it was one of the things that motivated was that
when you meet people like Leilani Muir or Judy Lytton,
Glenn Sinclair, they want their stories to be told!
Because they have been denied that opportunity and they each
tell their stories in very unique and different sorts of ways.
And so, the idea of being able to provide a forum in which that can occur,
if it's done in the right way, in a way in which they can have control of their stories,
they can have a say in "get rid of that bad hair shot," in a way in which people often can't
when you're making documentaries or recording interviews or oral histories,
then, I think we're doing something good for them.
And, moreover, the doing something good for them is a part of, I think, bringing out
some unique sort of knowledge that would just be completely lost. So, there is a challenge to do that properly,
but once you get the point that they're not just subjects in some sort of research, but they're real people with stories to be told
and those stories themselves are important. They may have instrumental value as well for
outreach and public engagement or university researchers' little projects.
But they're important in and of themselves because of the people whose stories they are and the way in which
those people have been marginalized throughout most of their lives because of the
institutionalization, sterilization, and further stigmatization,
that's been so laid down on them. So, I think one of the challenges
is making sure that people in some sense are fully on board and they often can be. Other challenges
when people, it's not so clear just how to gain consent and to gain that active participation.
You have to work a lot harder if you're working with people who do have
more limited forms or alternative forms of communication. For example, if they can't speak.
And some people can't speak. So, how do you ensure that people are fully engaged and involved
and they're on board. Okay, it can be trickier to do that.
So, one question you might ask is how relevant are the stories of sterilization survivors to
people who might well see themselves as, as some people say, "there but for the grace of God, go I."
So, people who have, for example, intellectual disabilities thinking, look, if I had been born before 1972,
that would have been me! I think,
it's people in that position who can probably best answer that question
and as an eavesdropper to some of those conversations, I guess I can report that
it makes a lot of difference to those people, to people
who immediately identify with the circumstances of 
people who were sterilized. And you can have a lot of empathy at a distance
and you can weep a lot of liberal tears for, oh these poor people, but it becomes very patronizing very quickly.
And I think there is almost no danger of that kind of patronizing response
when you have people who really feel "that is me!" 
And we have a number of people, we've interacted with a number of people at public events
and some people on the team, I think who really have that sort of feeling; they have the same kind of standpoint,
if you like, on a deep level. And it's not just subjective in terms of
they're feeling some kind of empathy. It's partly a function of their objective circumstances and knowing
"yeah, these, the very policies when I read this legislation, wow! If we change the dates here...
...my whole life would have been likely completely different in a much, much worse way."
We called the project the "Living" Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada. We did find out after
we called it that that we'd been scooped, there was another "living" archives on something else project.
But that's okay, we're the only Living Archives on Eugenics project around.
And the short answer to "why is it called that?" is because we had another name the first year we applied for funding:
"From Archives to Activism." And we were told by our funders when we were unsuccessful in the first year
that we could reapply, but you can't reapply for the same project and in probing on what counts as the same project,
it turned out that having a different name, meant it was a different project. So, we came up with a different name.
So we couldn't use "From Archives to Activism." But why "Living Archives?"
I think it's this idea that people think of an archive as a kind of
dusty repository for documents. And although
either retaining, preserving documents, and
certainly increasing our access to the documents that are there, is one of the things
that we've been doing in the archives. It's not the only and not really the most central we've been doing.
We've been trying to preserve living histories and work with people who
themselves are walking, talking encyclopedias about their own lives
and their own lives provide an insight into the history of institutionalization and sterilization
in Alberta and Western Canada, more generally, that you can't get in any other kind of way.
But it's also living in another sense in that there is, I think there, woven into the project, there's a
deep connection between, if you like, the eugenic past and what many of us would think of as the eugenic present.
So that it's living for people with intellectual disabilities or for people who might well
be though to have intellectual disabilities. For example, people with Cerebral palsy, who often don't have
intellectual disabilities, but would often be thought to have had intellectual disabilities.
And, so I think that it's living in at least those two sorts of senses,
drawing on living, lived experiences, from "living" people and
it's also a live issue for people who work
around, with, live with disability.
So, in Canada, the two provinces of British Columbia and Alberta
were the only provinces that introduced eugenic sterilization legislation.
In Alberta, in 1928, and in British Columbia, modelled on the Alberta legislation in 1933.
There were certainly eugenic ideals and ideas floating around
and a strong influence from, especially Ontario, but from Eastern Canada more generally
on the West, but the West really picked up eugenic ideas and ran with them in a way that was unique in Canada.
Certainly wasn't unique in North America. There were 31, I believe, states
in the United States that passed some form of eugenic sterilization legislation.
Many of those states amended their sterilization legislation.
So, there were at least, there were about 70 Acts that were in place across those 30 states at different times
right through until the late 1970s, early 1980s.
But I think what was distinctive in Canada was there seemed to be
almost a unique disregard
for the people who were sub-humanized through the sterilization process.
There were very few protections in the legislation itself,
and very little attention to whether the rules were even being followed.
And I think that's one thing that set up the legal cases,
Leilani's case and the others, 700 or so that were settled out of court.
And I think that's non-obvious, even in light of the decisions that were made in the legal cases
because part of what was being assessed was looking in terms of the ideas people had at the time,
as wrong-headed as we might think of them now, in terms of what was transmissible and what could be prevented through through sterilization,
conditions that people had, or allegedly had.
Did we sort of follow the rules that we had in place? 
And the finding, essentially, in Leilani's case, was "no."
But I think that that 'no' just understates what was going on. I mean...
...it turns out that if you look at the Alberta legislation,
people often think "oh, they were sterilizing mental defectives, or people with mental deficiency, or people who were feebleminded."
You actually don't find any of that wording in there.
It's just somebody who was, in the language they used, was an inmate of some
"mental hospital." Good question whether the Provincial Training School was a mental hospital?
Okay. There wasn't really that kind of attention to detail. It's this idea if we know the kinds of 
people we want to get rid of. And it was really just left to individuals to make those decisions.
And unfortunately, some of those individuals, the members of the Eugenics Board, were charged with,
they had a responsibility to protect, in part, vulnerable individuals and they failed miserably.
They didn't do it.
