Artifact #2: Photograph of the Provincial Training School - In Red Deer Alberta, now known as the Michener Centre.

Foto Arts Studio. “Provincial Training School, Red Deer.” Photograph. Red Deer Alberta: City of Red Deer Archives, 1955. From the City of Red Deer Archives. https://albertaonrecord.ca/is-red-432. “Accessed October 6, 2024.”

The two photographs presented are of the Red Deer provincial Training Centre for the mentally defective later being changed to the name the Michener Centre which operated from 1928-1977. This facility is one of the last remaining institutions in Canada to participate in sterilization of disabled children as per the Sterilization Act of 1928. In this facility children with mental and physical disabilities were taken either involuntarily or voluntarily by their parents and assessed by the Eugenics board of Canada to determine if they will be sterilized based on incomplete and insufficient pre-screening, testing, and consent. The goal of this institution and the Eugenics Board of Canada was to eliminate disability within future generations of children through eugenics which is reduction of “breeding out” disease or disability. It was later determined that these procedures would range from total oophorectomies to total castrations with most children claiming they were told they were going for an appendectomy. In this facility children were lied to regarding the extent of the procedures and would later realize the repercussions of these procedures that happened in this facility, and in some cases take legal action.

Claudia Malacrida. A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years. (University of Toronto Press, 2015), chap. 2, https://search-ebscohost-com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat03710a&AN=alb.7498433&site=eds-live&scope=site.