'Canadians would be shocked': Survivors, lawyers describe treatment at Nanaimo Indian Hospital

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