Consequences of White Rule

Alroy Fonseca
(Cult)ure Magazine, December 2007

“It suffices for us to know ... that of a total of 1,537 pupils reported upon nearly 25 per cent of ex-pupils are dead. Of one school with an absolutely accurate statement, 69 per cent of ex-pupils are dead. Everywhere the almost invariable cause of death given is tuberculosis.”

With these words, Dr. Peter H. Bryce, Chief Medical Officer of the Canadian Indian department during the early 20th century, warned his superiors of the staggering toll the residential school system was taking on aboriginal populations in Manitoba and the Northwest. Dr. Bryce’s report, completed after he visited 15 schools, was quoted in an article on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen, on November 15, 1907. Thus, a hundred years ago, it became public knowledge that a generation of aboriginals living in Canada was dying at a staggering rate as a result of the mixing of healthy and sick children in dorm rooms.

The Citizen article has gained new currency due to the efforts of Kevin Annett, a former United Church minister. Annett notes that the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide lists five possible acts, “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” as constituting genocide, of which “killing members of the group” – which most of us associate with the Nazi extermination of European Jews – is one. Another act identified in the Convention, however, is “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group,” and this, he says, applies to the Canadian case. Moreover, Annett argues that school administrators intentionally kept healthy pupils in the same poorly ventilated dorms as those sick with tuberculosis, thereby showing an ‘intent’ to spread the disease and kill more students.

Still, others who have examined the residential schools issue disagree with Annett’s ‘genocide’ label. John Milloy of Trent University (who was hired by the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples to study government archives), is quoted in a recent Globe and Mail article as saying that what transpired at the residential schools “has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of ‘Let’s get them sick with tuberculosis and wipe them out as a species on the earth.’” Instead, Milloy argues that the high death rate was a result of poorly funded schools, which led administrators to simply stuff as many students – sick or healthy – into the building in order to qualify for as much per capita government funding as possible.

Milloy’s divergent interpretation from that of Annett’s seems to be centered on the question of intent. That is, did putting healthy and unhealthy students in the same rooms constitute intent to kill them? Did the Indian Department’s lack of an adequate response to the death rate of these aboriginal children imply that it deemed their deaths acceptable?

Regardless of which view is correct, Dr. Bryce’s report shows that aboriginal children in the Canadian residential school system suffered tremendously and died in great numbers. St. Thomas University’s Roland Chrisjohn argues that this is why, in 1952, the Canadian government refused to ratify the UN Genocide Convention in full, leaving out the sections relating to “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” and “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.”

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It is fitting for us to take note of the 100th anniversary of the publishing of Dr. Bryce’s rarely remembered findings in a mainstream newspaper, given that the legacy of the suffering he brought to light continues to the present day. Following his report on the dangerous situation faced by aboriginal children in residential schools, Dr. Bryce was removed from his position in the Indian Department. Much later, in 1922, he published a short book, entitled The Story of a National Crime, in which he lambasted the Indian Department for not responding to his concerns. Unfortunately, this work is little known in the mainstream and rarely, if ever, mentioned in official school curricula, despite its obvious significance to our nation’s history.

Like Dr. Bryce, Annett was also fired from his job at about the same time as he began digging into the Church’s troubled history with the Canadian residential school system. His view is generally echoed by the well-known Native American historian Ward Churchill, who gave a talk at the University of Ottawa in October. Best known for publishing A Little Matter of Genocide, a detailed examination of the decimation of Native Americans by white colonials, Churchill was recently fired from his teaching post at the University of Denver. This was after a lengthy witch-hunt initiated by his detractors – again, a consequence of investigating those unpleasant parts of history.

Even so, the Canadian Government recently launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to “acknowledge Residential School experiences, impacts and consequences,” amongst other goals. We will thus surely hear more about the suffering in the residential school system through the hearings process, and so not have to resort to articles published 100 years ago to have a sense of what happened. Indeed, what happened to North America’s original settlers at the hands of white settlers should be an issue that concerns all Canadians – not just aboriginals. It is something that we should grieve collectively. And, certainly, it is an issue that won’t go away until all the ghosts of the past are confronted.