Tainted milk led to deaths of Alberta residential school children, group says

WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find distressing.

A new report suggests tainted, unpasteurized milk was responsible for the deaths of many First Nations children at an Alberta residential school.

The conclusion comes from a preliminary report released Tuesday by the Acimowin Opaspiw Society. The Saddle Lake Cree Nation formed the group in 2021 to investigate unmarked burial sites of the Blue Quills residential school in central Alberta.

The organization has been gathering testimony and sifting through documents provided by the Catholic Church to produce the report with some of its early findings.

"It appears as though people like to accept the fact that these children just died of tuberculosis because First Nations people are natural carriers of tuberculosis and that is a farce," Leah Redcrow, executive director for the society, said at a news conference held at the Sacred Heart cemetery grounds in Saddle Lake.

The report links the consumption of unpasteurized milk to rampant disease among the children, citing diet as a differentiating factor between them and staff administrators. 

Redcrow said children who entered the school healthy were ill within a month and, in many cases, soon died.

"We feel that these children were being deliberately infected with tuberculosis," she said, adding that other residential school investigations should examine livestock records.

Roman Catholic missionaries established the school at Lac La Biche, Alta., in 1891. The buildings were moved to the Saddle Lake First Nation in 1898 and were renamed Blue Quills.

The school was relocated in 1931 to a spot near St. Paul, Alta., approximately 150 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.

Keith Warriner, a professor of food safety at the University of Guelph, said it wasn't until around the early decades of the 20th century that people accepted and associated raw milk with tuberculosis.

"It was a hard sell," he said Tuesday.

Pasteurization is the process wherein certain foods are quickly heated to kill bacteria. It took some time to catch on, however, as it was sometimes viewed as unnatural. Warriner said by the 1940s the provinces were being pressured to legislate the practice. Federally, the process would only become mandated in 1991.

"Basically, pasteurization was only one sort of element to the control of tuberculosis," he said.