Elaine Dewar made finishing her book, Oblivious, imperative after she was diagnosed with stage four cancer.Danielle Dewar/Supplied
Elaine Dewar spent her career as a journalist and author dismantling the artifice of convenient stories. Her new book, Oblivious, published posthumously, is a natural extension of that. In it, she seeks to unpack not just the horrors experienced by 20th-century Indigenous peoples in segregated hospitals, and as subjects of non-consensual experiments, but also to investigate how easily governments and institutions allowed this to happen – in ways that encouraged settler Canadians to remain ignorant.
When she discovered last August that she had stage four cancer and might only have weeks to live, she made finishing the book an imperative. Among the other reasons for her urgency: She’d recently confirmed that one doctor who’d spent years in the North had direct ties to leaders of the Nazis’ racist medical movement. She’d “nabbed him,” her daughter, Anna Dewar Gully, recalls her saying; the public needed to know what she’d learned.
“One of her key priorities was to ensure that Canadians understood what she uncovered,” says Dan Wells, the Windsor-based publisher of Biblioasis, which released Oblivious last Tuesday. “That was really what she was focused on in her final days.”
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Dewar’s research and shifting understanding is the narrative throughline of Oblivious. It presents her digging through decades-old books and scientific papers, and conducting interviews with living researchers and victims, to highlight systemic harms that she and many Canadians never knew had afflicted so many Indigenous communities.
She foregrounds not just her nearly lifelong obliviousness, but also her willingness to learn and recontextualize her own understandings. That included her understanding, as a Jewish settler one generation removed from the Holocaust, of what constitutes a genocide. The more she unearthed, the more her mind shifted about whether Canadian officials and systems perpetrated genocide against Indigenous peoples. Her initial hesitance morphs, over the course of the book, to a firm yes.
“I turned my back enough over the course of my life that I simply couldn’t do it anymore,” Dewar said in an interview with her friend and fellow author Marci McDonald, three days before Dewar’s death on Sept. 18 at age 77 – the audio of which Wells shared with The Globe and Mail.
Donald Worme, a Cree lawyer from the Kawacatoose First Nation, Treaty Four, Saskatchewan – who was, among his many efforts to bring justice to Indigenous peoples in Canada, lead counsel for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – spoke to Dewar at length for the book. He began to realize during their conversations that she was experiencing a transformation.
“She could not, she said, turn away and simply delete what she had known,” he says. “I hand that to her incredible character.” Even though Dewar was a non-Indigenous writer writing about Indigenous suffering, Worme says that her work was part of a necessary conversation for Canadians to stop living in denial of the conditions settlers imposed on Indigenous people in the past and continue to impose now.
“With her courageous work and her selfless investigative work, I am certain we’ll continue that conversation as it must,” Worme says.
“I see this as a real moral conflict that she had engaged in. And I think that really is a a microcosm of the discussion that occurs, and has been occurring in this country.”
Investigative journalist and author Elaine Dewar was drawn to controversy
Dewar was a longtime journalist who racked up four gold National Magazine Awards during her career. She won one of those, as well as the NMAs’ President’s Medal, for a 1987 article in Toronto Life about the Reichmann family that prompted a $102-million lawsuit from the family. (The Reichmanns founded the massive real-estate firm Olympia & York, and the story included allegations about the family’s Second World War-era business activities; the matter was eventually settled for an undisclosed sum donated to charity, and an apology.)
In the 1990s, Dewar turned her attention to books, and she would go on to win the Writers’ Trust Award for Non-Fiction for 2004’s The Second Tree: Stem Cells, Clones, Chimeras and Quests for Immortality. She began working with Biblioasis in the 2010s, rankling the publishing industry with her book on McClelland & Stewart, The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada’s Best Publisher and the Best Part of Our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational. In 2021, she made headlines with On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years, for diving into the COVID-19 lab-leak theory.
The road to Oblivious began at the start of 2022, when she got an e-mail from Roland Chrisjohn – a professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton who is Onyota’a:ka of the Haudenausaunee. (Prof. Chrisjohn declined to comment for this story.) Dewar wrote that he implored her to investigate what he called the government’s “cover-up” of genocide through residential schools, as well as the possibility that Donald Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist alleged to have developed brainwashing techniques, used Indigenous children as subjects for his experiments.
Though she was unable to corroborate the claims against Ewen Cameron, Dewar did come across legitimate evidence that First Nations and Inuit people, including children, were made nonconsensual experiment subjects – or “slaves of race science,” as the book’s subtitle describes them. She found that Otto Schaefer, a member of the Order of Canada described on one federal government website as “one of the great pioneers of Arctic medicine,” had conducted “a slew” of “unethical studies done without informed consent on patients in segregated Indigenous hospitals.”
And as she dug deeper – certainly more deeply than anyone involved with Schaefer’s emigration to Canada from Germany in 1951 – she learned that his thesis at Heidelberg University was supervised by Carl Schneider, a Nazi who collected and dissected the brains of murdered children during the Second World War. “Schaefer was a disciple of men who ran the medical machinery of the Nazi regime,” Dewar wrote.
By late 2024, as Dewar was chipping away at her book, she began to mention to people close to her that she was feeling pain in her wrists and hands, remembers her daughter Dewar Gully, the co-chief executive of the strategy firm Tidal Equality.
“I can think of maybe one other time that my mother had ever complained about any sort of pain,” Dewar Gully says, “She hadn’t taken an antibiotic in, like, 25 years. She was just a really robust person.”
A doctor suspected it was a rheumatic condition and prescribed some medication. Dewar soon began to feel stomach pain, her daughter says, but the family wrote it off as a side effect of the medication. (She has another daughter, Danielle Dewar, and three grandchildren; her husband Stephen Dewar died in 2019.)
Her pain still hadn’t gone away by the summer of 2025, when she and her family took a vacation – a road trip to Quebec followed by stops in Muskoka and Lake Huron. Dewar, who enjoyed swimming and walking, spent much of the holiday in a chair. Dewar Gully made her mother promise to visit a doctor upon their return in mid-August.
Things moved quickly from there. Dewar returned on a Sunday, and had bloodwork done the next day. She was diagnosed with cancer by Friday. There were so many masses, her daughter says, that doctors weren’t initially sure of its origin; it was only later determined to be colorectal.
“On the table she was diagnosed on, she said, ‘I knew this was going to be my last book,’” Dewar Gully says.
Dewar called Wells then and there. He remembers it being early in the morning; he was walking to work. “What she was most concerned about was getting edits done, and seeing if we could speed up the timeline so that she would be around for the publication,” the publisher recalls. That didn’t happen; Wells recalls Dewar initially believing she’d have six months to live, then two to three months – and then, quickly, just a few weeks. She opted for a medically assisted death, to take place on September 18.
It took some time to find the right date, working around Shabbat, and with Rosh Hashanah beginning September 22. “Elaine, being as funny as she was, made me laugh, despite how sad everything was,” says her agent, Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory. “She said, ‘I can’t even tell you how hard it is to find a day to die during the Jewish holidays.’”
She began ploughing through edits and end notes, regularly returning to the hospital as she grappled with tremendous pain. Wells travelled to Toronto’s Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital from Windsor to work with her on final edits and finish the last few pages, ensuring that she nailed the conclusion.
It was this: policy needs to change, she wrote, “to correct the historical wrongs that have been perpetrated and make sure they are never repeated.” That change, she believed, would not be instigated by governments. Instead, she wrote, on her final page of her final book, that needs to come from engaged Canadians.
“It’s in you that I put my faith,” she wrote.