Contested memories: efforts of the powerful to silence former inmates’ histories of life in an institution for ‘mental defectives’

Abstract

This paper discusses the barriers encountered in undertaking an oral history project with survivors of a total institution for ‘mental defectives’ in the province of Alberta, Canada. Powerful social actors were able to bar access to survivors through legal guardianship orders, and to make access to the institution and its grounds and to publicly archived materials quite prohibitive to the researcher. In addition to overt efforts on the part of powerful social actors to block the project, concerns about the potential to discredit survivor narratives led to changes in the research design. Specifically, research and literature about the ‘acquiescence’ of intellectuals with intellectual impairments led the researcher to broaden the sources for this history as a preemptive strategy. Despite these barriers, survivors of the institution provided a rich and powerful testimony to the brutality of institutionalization, and provide us with an emancipatory history from the perspectives of those most oppressed by disability policies and practices.

Notes

1. This institution has gone under a number of names. Originally opened as the Provincial Training School, it was later called the Alberta School Hospital, and through an amalgamation between PTS/ASH and an adjacent adult institution called Deer Home, has finally become known as Michener Centre (Alberta Government Publications, 1985).

2. Although the general descriptor for inmates was ‘mental deficiency’, in fact there were six possible classifications for admission to the institute at this time: a child could be admitted on the grounds of being an idiot, an imbecile, a moron, constitutionally inferior, psychopathic or ‘mentally deficient and psychopathic’ (Alberta Government Publications, 1985).

3. In Canada, the term ‘developmentally disabled’ is used to describe individuals with intellectual challenges, while in the UK, ‘learning disabled’ is more typically used.

4. The official history of the Michener Center refers to individuals who live/have lived in the Institution as ‘residents’ or as ‘trainees’; however, given the carcereal qualities of the institution and its relative dearth of educational focus, ‘inmate’ more accurately describes these people’s status within the institution.

5. From the available archival records, it appears that two individuals drowned and one person died of hypothermia while attempting to escape, during 1973 alone.

6. Mr. Skoreyko is one of the initiators of the project. He is the Vice‐President of the Alberta Leadership Today Society, and a prominent member of the Alberta chapter of People First. He has asked that his real name be used.

7. Michener Center continues to operate, albeit in a more ‘stakeholder‐driven’ model than in previous years (governance of the Institution was turned over to a consortium of parents, community volunteers and a board comprised of Michener residents in 2002). As of January, 2005, it housed 351 individuals in 50 group homes scatted across its 317 acres (Persons with Development Disabilities, 2006)

8. In 2003, a fire in the main building on Michener Center caused enormous destruction of these historical materials. In a recent discussion with the new Executive Director of Michener Center, I understand that these water‐soaked materials have been saved, in freezers, in the hope that someday they can be retrieved for historical use.

9. It has also been acknowledged that the open‐ended methods of oral histories are likely to be less prone to ‘acquiescence’ than positivist, fixed‐response interviews (Finlay & Lyons, 2002).