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ABOVE:The 250 bed Brandon Sanatorium is pictured at soma point during Its 1947-59 run In ttiis.to, (Sutomilted) LEFT: Sharon Oixon Is saan with har mother, Altca Marina Young, In the common room of Valieyview long Term Cara Home In September. In the 1950s, Young was an eight-year resident of the Brandon Sanatorium, a facility that has been cited In a $1.1-billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of patients. /7/ter CtarWTheBrandonSw)Brandon Sanatorium named in lawsuit•Y TYLER CLARKEA dass-action lawsuit on behalf of former Indian hospital patients has named the Brandon Indian Hospital as one of the 29 segregated hospitals targeted.Th al is morecommonly known as the Brandon Sanatorium, which served Indigenous tuberculosis patients from 1947 to 1958.At the rime of its cloture, patients were shipped out to the Ninette Sanatorium and the Brandon location was restructured as the Assiniboine Hospital.According to a CBC News story, the $1.1-billion class-action lawsuit cites allegations of widespread mistreatment and abuse among so-called Indian hospitals, where patients were forcibly detained Brandon woman Alice Marina Young spent approximately eight years at the Brandon Sanatorium inthe 1950s, during which she said that she was shut off from her family and society at large.She escaped on at least one occasion, only to be captured by a police officer and returned to the hospital Now an 85-year-old resident of the Valieyview Long Term Care Home in Brandon, her time at the BrandonSanatorium remains cemented in her mind.During a conversation with The Brandon Sun inSeptember, she asked on several occasions whether she was at the BrandonSanatorium Daughter Sharon Dixon said this week that although her mother has never said anything about being mistreated, she believes that the class-acrion lawsuit is worthwhile University of Winnipeg historian Mary Jane McCallum has been studying Manitoba’s racially segregatedtuberculosis treatment facilities with postdoctoral fellow Scott de Groot for the past few years, collecting the oral histories of those involved.While certain cases of abuse might not have been overt, McCall um said she has found a parallel between how the Brandon Sanatorium operated and bow the residential school system was structured.Located at the comer of 10th Street and Queens Avenue, the BrandonSanatorium had a social orientation’’ program that helped assimilate patients into white communities.McCallum and de Groot conducted and processed six substantial interviews withpatients of ManitobasanatoriumsAll of the interviewees spoke about their experiences of being removed from their families and the hardships they faced — both short and longterm — as a result.McCallum wrote. These consequences included a loss of language — which resulted in difficult ics adjusting back to family and community life after their return from the hospitals.These past patients also complained about the extreme isolation they faced at sanatoriums, as well as the length of time they were made to remain in the health-care facilities.Manitoba Lung Association CEO Neil Johnston said that what he has heard from past patients of these sanatoriums has been “certainly very troubling and tragic and something that we’re concerned about. The Manitoba Lung Association was founded in 1975 as a division of the Sanatorium Board of Manitoba to tackle community health programs and education services.The Sanatorium Board ofManitoba’s only activity at present is its operation of the Manitoba Lung Association, and Johnston said that they’ve long since divested of medical records that individual sanatoriums would have kept .Uncertain as to the local implications of the national dass-action kwsuit, Johnston said that they’re currently trying to figure out things themselves.“Because we’re basically starting from scratch ourselves, from a record perspective, we have to be careful and make sure we get the information we need to take any kind of steps, he said.Although the Ninette Sanatorium is not listed in this dass-action lawsuit, Winnipeg-based Indigenous advocate Gerald Mclvor is working ondeveloping a wider-reaching dass-action lawsuit, which he said on Friday would be national in scope and field in federal courtThis class-action lawsuit would centre on “a serious breach of human rights and Canada’s fiduciaryresponsibility toward First Nations people, he said.Unlike the Brandon Sanatorium, the Ninette Sanatorium was not dedicated exclusively to Indigenous people.The dass-action lawsuit that dtes the “Brandon Indian Hospital (BrandonSanatorium) was filed m Toronto last week by Koskie Minsky LLP and MasucA Albert LLP of Alberta* tclarfctbrafHlontun com - Twitter eT/isrCiartnMB
Newspaper Details
Brandon Sun
Brandon, Manitoba, CA
Sat, Feb 03, 2018
Page 6
Full Page
Clipped by
Kenneth J.
NA, NA 08 Feb 2024
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