correction
A previous version of this article contained an image which was provided by Getty Images and contained inaccurate caption information, that was not of Chief Andrea Paul. She was Deneen Bernard. We have removed the images from this article.
Dozens of Indigenous people have brought a lawsuit against two radiologists in Canada, accusing them of conducting MRI scans without their consent as part of a secret scientific study of their livers.
According to the lawsuit, 59 members of the Pictou Landing First Nation were subjected to invasive MRI scans in 2017 and 2018 for research purposes without their knowledge. The complaint was first filed to Nova Scotia’s Supreme Court in June 2020 and was certified as a class-action lawsuit this month.
In their suit, the plaintiffs invoked Canada’s dark history of subjecting Indigenous people to nonconsensual experimentation, which they said was motivated by racism.
According to the claim, Pictou Landing Chief Andrea Paul, the lead plaintiff, took part in a consensual MRI scan in March 2017 as part of a medical research project conducted by the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds at a research facility in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Instead of being withdrawn from the MRI machine when the scan finished, the suit alleges, Paul was unwittingly kept in the scanner as part of a second, separate study into liver disease among First Nation populations.
“Chief Andrea was unaware of the Indigenous Study or that she was participating in it. As she lay inside the claustrophobic MRI chamber holding her breath and cringing from the loud banging sounds around her, the MRI scans generated data that revealed intimate medical information about her body without her knowledge or consent,” the suit said. “She had been singled out for one reason — she was Mi’kmaq.”
The lawsuit named radiologists Robert Miller and Sharon Clarke as the defendants, accusing them of undertaking the separate MRI study. Based on the scans, the suit said, Miller and Clarke later presented their results to a conference in Halifax and wrote an unpublished research paper titled “MRI Findings of Liver Disease in an Atlantic Canada First Nations Population.”
When contacted by The Washington Post, a lawyer representing Miller and Clarke declined to comment. Lawyers representing the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Paul learned about the other study in June 2018, after which, the suit said, dozens more members of the Pictou Landing First Nation community also became aware that their livers had been studied without their consent in 2017 and 2018.
“Knowing the long history of subjecting Indigenous people in Canada to cruel medical experiments, including starvation studies among children, and knowing that there were research protocols in place to ensure the consent of Indigenous participants in health studies and to confirm the Indigenous right to own and control research data of Indigenous people, Chief Andrea felt powerless, vulnerable and discriminated against because she was Mi’kmaq,” the lawsuit said.
According to the website of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, the participants were not given the results of their scans — even when they “revealed a medical issue requiring medical treatment.”
The plaintiffs are seeking damages from the defendants and declarations of invasion of privacy, unlawful imprisonment, assault and battery, negligence, breaches of fiduciary and trust duties, and breach of contract. The action will next proceed to a common issues trial, for which no date has yet been set, the lawyers said.
What to know about Canada’s residential schools and the unmarked graves found nearby
In recent years, Canada has embarked on a national reckoning around its treatment of its Indigenous populations — including the observation of a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to commemorate the Indigenous victims and survivors of Canada’s government-funded and Catholic Church-run boarding school system.
Nearly 150,000 Indigenous children were sent to the residential schools to be assimilated between the 19th century and the late 1990s. In 2021, the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in unmarked graves near the grounds of one residential school in British Columbia.
Within the schools, researchers subjected children to bizarre, invasive and cruel experiments — many of which the wider Canadian public has only learned of recently.
In the 1940s, 50 children at the Brandon Indian Residential School in Brandon, Manitoba, were subjected to tests seeking to establish evidence of extrasensory perception, or a “sixth sense,” among Indigenous people.
In 2013, a researcher revealed that starting in 1942, researchers conducted nearly a decade of “nutritional” experimentation on Indigenous children. The experiments involved depriving children of nutrition in the name of science and allowing conditions of virtual starvation to continue.
The Crown broke a promise to First Nations. It could now owe billions.
Prominent institutions in the United States are also grappling with their histories of mistreating Indigenous people and artifacts in the pursuit of scientific research, including many violations that have only recently come to light.
Last year, The Washington Post reported that the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History holds more than 30,700 sets of human remains largely taken from graveyards, battlefields, morgues and hospitals around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries; among them were 255 human brains, most of which were taken from Black, Indigenous and other people of color to further now-debunked theories of racial differences.
Revealing the Smithsonian’s ‘racial brain collection’
In January, the American Museum of Natural History in New York announced that it would close two halls dedicated to Indigenous cultures of North America while it reviewed whether the museum needed consent to display the artifacts. Last year, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland strengthened federal regulations requiring museums and federal agencies to identify and return stolen sacred items to their respective cultural groups.