“We Are Not Monkeys, We Are Not Animals”: Inuit, Medical Experimentation, and the International Biological Programme, 1968–72

In 2019, five Inuit from Iglulik, Nunavut, sued the federal government for medical experiments, including painful skin grafts, conducted on them in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1968 to 1972, researchers – academics, dentists, and physicians employed by Canadian universities and government – arrived in two Nunavut communities to study the Inuit. As part of the International Biological Programme (ibp), they engaged with a transnational scientific construction of the world’s Indigenous peoples as “primitives” who were assumed to embody the secrets of human evolution and adaptation. Research would reveal those secrets for the “civilized” world seemingly on the brink of environmental destruction. In return for the promise of needed health care, the community councils agreed to cooperate with researchers who then took away blood, tissue, teeth, x-rays, personal data, photographs, and at least one child. John Dossetor, who directed the skin graft experiments, was subsequently hailed as a pioneer in medical ethics and memorialized in the University of Alberta’s medical ethics centre. This article argues that the ibp experiments indulged professional interests and advanced careers while implicating the developing field of bioethics in colonial violence.