Sharon Whonnock’s first childhood memory is being transferred from her home in northern Vancouver Island to Nanaimo Indian Hospital in the early 1950s, where she said she spent nearly a decade tied to a bed for almost 24 hours a day while being treated for tuberculosis.

The Kwakwaka’wakw woman spent about nine years there, and the remaining memories of what happened to her at the second-biggest Indian hospital in Canada are vivid. She said they haunt her still.

Through the glass partition between beds, she said she could see other children also being tied