Intergenerational Impact of Hunger in Residential Schools

When thinking beyond the individual, we also need to think about how colonial impacts could play a role in health risks on Indigenous peoples. We have already established the prevalence of hunger and malnutrition in residential schools in previous chapters. To summarize, a typical diet in residential schools consisted of inadequate protein and fat, extremely restricted access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and other low- calorie and poor-quality foods that increased the risk of food-borne infection and disease. While the recommended daily caloric requirements for children aged 4-18 years is between 1400-3200 kcal/d, the Indigenous children were meeting a maximum of 1260 kcal/day.^[1] Therefore, these diets served to simply blunt the sharp pangs of hunger, but never enough to trigger satiety.

As mentioned in Chapter 9, one of the many long-term effects of this severe malnutrition was height stunting. Height-stunted children deposit greater amounts of fat mass than lean mass, making them more predisposed to facing obesity. Additionally, height-stunting is associated with increased insulin sensitivity and decreased insulin levels, and thus increases the risk of developing type II diabetes. In addition to this, the effects of height-stunting on women produce reproductive health concerns such as increased risk of stillbirths, premature birth, and infant mortality.^[2] Furthermore, research studies have shown that the effects of malnutrition during early life development extend beyond one’s lifespan and can be passed on to the descendants of affected individuals. The infants born to women that developed obesity and chronic diseases because of childhood hunger are more susceptible to experiencing intrauterine growth failure, abnormal birth weight, and faltering growth. These infants also face an increased risk of developing insulin resistance and type II diabetes through their childhood and adolescent years.^[3] Researchers further investigating these intergenerational effects have observed elevated BMI and obesity rates among the adult grandchildren of the famine survivors, thus suggesting that the effects of childhood undernutrition can be transmitted to even the third generation of exposed individuals.^[4]

The effects of the hunger and malnutrition experienced by Indigenous children in residential schools have received insufficient attention from healthcare practitioners. The failure to consider the effects of childhood undernutrition on the health of Indigenous peoples living in Canada today serves as a compelling reason to call for immediate change. Mosby and Galloway suggest that healthcare practitioners can modify their current behavioural and pharmacologic interventions with strategies that are more community-centred, trauma-informed, and culturally suitable when addressing the prevalence of chronic disease among Indigenous populations. Mosby and Galloway further highlight the importance of advocating for future generations of Indigenous children. This can be done by demanding for the enforcement of government policies that ensure Indigenous children have ample access to healthy, nutrient-dense, and traditional foods that were cruelly withheld from their ancestors. By doing so, we will be taking a tiny step toward protecting these future generations of children from the effects of childhood malnutrition.