The Federal Indian Hospitals Settlement is an abuse settlement. It is not an Indian Hospital settlement.

Mary Jane Logan McCallum
Port Stanley, Ontario, June 2025

On 24 June 2025, the Federal Court approved the Indian Hospitals Class Action Lawsuit Settlement,[i] seven and a half years after the initial Statement of Claim was made in January 2018 and five and a half years after the class action was certified by the Federal Court in January 2020.

The Settlement[ii] is a historic event that offers a small glimpse into what Indigenous people have been saying for a long time – that Indian hospitals were places of abuse. But the Settlement is extremely limited and in fact has very little to do with the hospitals, federal health policy or the Indian Health Services (IHS) system.

Because of this, it is important to step back, assess and recognize what the Settlement is not before assuming that the Settlement is the last word on Indian hospitals, or that the history of segregated Indigenous healthcare has been addressed and accounted for appropriately by Canada.

No Common Experience Payment

Unlike the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) and other similar school-related settlements, the Indian Hospitals Class Action Settlement does not include any common experience payment for Survivors of Indian hospitals.

This even though we know that the Indian Health system was persistently underfunded and that patients suffered the same kinds of cultural and language dislocation, removal, and poor treatment that students in Indian Residential Schools (IRS) experienced.

To make a claim, a Survivor’s abuse must fit into a very limited definition that does not include the impacts of systemic racism and abuse or the consistently substandard conditions and practices at the hospitals and sanatoriums that resulted from these systemic elements. Claims connected to standards of care and medical treatment are not covered in this agreement.

It does not appear that the law firms systematically investigated records of federal Indian hospitals to identify patterns of abuse within the federally run hospitals. This settlement’s failure to examine, identify and address the harms that Survivors have endured as a result of the structural racism and abuse that underwrote the IHS system contributes to what the Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor calls settler amnesty and a culture of impunity when it comes to Indigenous people.

Claims involving any hospitals or medical facilities other than Federal Indian hospitals are excluded

The Settlement does not cover people who were compelled by the federal government under the Indian Act to be treated at institutions outside of the federal Indian Hospital system.

In these other institutions Indigenous patients could find themselves placed in separate or basement wards and segregated from the white patient population. Moreover, the federal government rarely agreed to cover the going rates for services in non-Indian hospitals. Maureen Lux cites George Manuel’s criticism of the inadequate physician service under federal contracts: “Half a fee, half a visit.”[iii]

The stark exclusion of non-Indian hospitals from the settlement ignores the practices and policies of Indian Health Services. For example, in 1962, Inuit from the Mountain Sanitorium in Hamilton were transferred to Clearwater Lake Indian hospital, and when Clearwater Lake closed in 1965, the remaining patients there were sent to the Ninette Sanatorium. The Settlement only covers the abuse Inuit suffered at Clearwater Lake hospital and discounts their experiences of forced evacuations and removals from families to distant hospitals in the south, and the loss of language and culture, major aspects of the Statement of Apology on behalf of the Government to Inuit for the management of the Tuberculosis Epidemic from the 1940s-1960s.

The Manitoba hospitals included in the Indian Hospitals Settlement are below. It’s important to note that, in some cases, the dates that are applicable under the Settlement do not include the entire period that the hospital was in operation.

Brandon Indian Hospital: June 15, 1947 - January 31, 1961

Clearwater Lake Indian Hospital: September 24, 1945 - February 28, 1965

Dynevor Indian Hospital: September 1, 1939 - November 1, 1957

Fisher River Indian Hospital: July 6, 1940 - June 18, 1973

Fort Alexander Indian Hospital: December 1, 1937 - November 18, 1964

Norway House Indian Hospital: January 1, 1936 - December 31, 1981

Percy E. Moore Hospital: June 18, 1973 - December 31, 1981

Importantly, Ninette Sanatorium, the St. Boniface Sanatorium and the Central TB Clinic and Health Sciences Hospital in Winnipeg are not included under the Settlement although the federal government did send and pay for First Nations and Inuit patients to be treated in these institutions.

If Canada sent an Indigenous person to a hospital outside of the Indian Hospital system, Canada was still sending someone for medical treatment. Under “Indian rates,” however, this treatment was not to exceed half of the amount paid for the treatment of indigent non-Indigenous patients. Many non-Indigenous people do not realize that they might have gone to the same hospitals as Indigenous patients, who, if they were not sent there under federal Indian policy, may have received very different care. As well, being sent to a hospital outside of the federal Indian Hospital system still meant being removed and isolated from community and family.

Patients who died before 2016 are not accounted for in Settlement

The Settlement excludes patients who died before 2016. Because of this, the settlement fails to account for deaths during treatment and for the shortened life expectancy of Indigenous people and especially of Indigenous tuberculosis patients.

As Canada had closed many of its federally operated Indian hospitals by the late 1970s, Indigenous people who experienced the kinds of mistreatment and abuse at federal Indian hospitals that this Settlement is supposed to cover are more likely to have died by the 2016 cutoff date. Patients who were sent for treatment during and after the 1970s, and therefore, even based on age alone, are more likely to be alive today and were more likely to have been sent to institutions that do not qualify for the Settlement.

Not an Indian Hospital Settlement

Before considering what is included in the Settlement, we need to understand what has been excluded: a meaningful investigation of the wider Indian Health Services system that fostered the punitive, underfunded, racially-segregated and unequal health care at Indian Hospitals in Canada. By focusing on abuse within the hospitals, the Indian Hospitals Class Action Settlement focuses on (but does not name) individual abusers and not systemic inequities in health care stemming from deliberate underfunding, neglect and mismanagement of Indian Health Services and its hospitals. For more information about this system and its history and legacy, see indigenoustbhistory.ca.

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[i] At the Kosky Minsky Law Firm website at: https://assets.kmlaw.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Federal_Court_Decision_T_143_18_ANN_CECILE_HARDY_v_AGC.pdf Accessed 30 June 2025.

[ii] At the Kosky Minsky Law Firm website at: https://assets.kmlaw.ca/wp- content/uploads/2025/03/Proposed_Settlement_Agreement_and_Schedules_2025_03_06.pdf Accessed 30 June 2025.

[iii] George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (New York: Free Press, 1974), 106. As cited in Maureen Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920s-1980s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 150.

This blog has also been posted on the Shekon Neechie website.