Mountain Sanatorium, Hamilton
Mountain Sanatorium, Hamilton
Ca 1955 to 1963
Operated by The Hamilton Health Association
Even in the early days of the Indian Residential School (IRS) System, Indigenous children were sometimes sent to hospitals when they fell ill. Then, as later, if they passed away in these institutions and the institutions were any distance from the IRS they had been sent from, they were often buried in a cemetery associated with that institution rather than in a cemetery associated with the Indian Residential School they had been attending.
Beginning in 1937, the number of students sent to hospitals and sanatoria increased as Canada declared a war on what it framed as “Indian TB.” Increasingly, Canada compelled Indigenous people to be incarcerated in hospitals or sanatoria that might be privately or provincially controlled, might be federally controlled and locally operated, or might be entirely controlled and operated by the federal government. After World War II, and especially after the transfer of the Indian Health Service (IHS) to the newly created federal Department of Health, Canada increased the number of Indian Hospitals and Sanatoria it funded and oversaw or operated significantly. Indigenous children at Indian Residential Schools were a particular target group for this campaign. Over time, more and more children who fell ill at an Indian Residential School were transferred to one of these hospitals or sanatoria. Those who did not survive their treatment at these institutions were more likely to be buried in a cemetery associated with the hospital or sanatorium they were sent to than one at the school they had come from.
The vast majority of these Indian Hospitals and Sanatoria operated Indian Hospital Schools as part of their mandate. These Indian Hospital Schools mirrored the Indian Residential School System in many ways. Schooling in these institutions was compulsory and mirrored the goals of the IRS system, following the same colonial and assimilationist lines.
The Mountain Sanatorium, later known as Chedoke, began as a settler sanatorium in 1906. By the early 1950s new treatments for tuberculosis meant that the hospital was seeing fewer patients and that patient stays were shorter, leaving the sanatorium operating below capacity. This changed in the mid-1950s when Canada began moving Inuit, many from the eastern Arctic, into the institution. In the five years between 1958 and 1963 over 1200 Inuit were relocated to the Mountain Sanatorium. “In 1956 the largest concentration of Inuit people in the entire country was the 332 Inuit in the Mountain Sanatorium in Hamilton, Ontario,” Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission notes.1
In the early 1960s, as the facility moved its focus away from tuberculosis care, the remaining Inuit at the institution were relocated once more. Many were sent to the Weston Hospital in Toronto, but some were sent to the Clearwater Lake Indian Hospital in Manitoba. In his history of the Manitoba Sanatorium at Ninette Manitoba, David B. Stewart, son of David A. Stewart – a pioneer of tuberculosis treatment in Manitoba, and the first superintendent of the Ninette Sanatorium – framed this move as a kind of punishment for undisciplined behaviour at the Hamilton facility.2
A memorial, erected in 1995 in the Woodland Cemetery, lists the names of 37 Inuit who died at the Mountain Sanatorium and were buried in the cemetery. The project was begun in 1989 by Hamilton’s director of cemeteries, who used cemetery records and plans to identify the names of Inuit buried in the cemetery.
The Mountain Sanatorium was located at 43°14’42.27″N 79°54’57.29″W
1 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools : The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Volume 2 the Inuit and Northern Experience (Montreal: Published for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 74.
2 Pat Sandiford Grygier, A Long Way from Home: The Tuberculosis Epidemic among the Inuit (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 136; D. B. Stewart and J.A. Victor David Museum, Holy Ground: The Story of the Manitoba Sanatorium at Ninette (Killarney Man: J.A. Victor David Museum, 1999),110.
