"Hunger was never absent": How residential school diets shaped current patterns of diabetes among Indigenous peoples in Canada

One of the most consistent themes in testimony provided to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was the common experience of hunger at residential schools. In his statement to the TRC, survivor Andrew Paul spoke of the unrelenting hunger he experienced during his time at Aklavik Roman Catholic Residential School: they cried to have something good to eat before they sleep. A lot of the times the food they had was rancid, full of maggots, stink. Sometimes they would sneak away from school to go visit their aunts or uncles, just to have a piece of bannock. Such accounts, of course, are not new. In 1965, Indian Affairs Branch employee Russell Moses--who attended the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, from 1942 to 1947--described a typical diet where hunger was never absent. Breakfast consisted of two slices of bread with either jam or honey as the dressing, oatmeal with worms or corn meal porridge, which was minimal in quantity and appalling in quality.