As Canada’s residential school system gathered homicidal force in 1909, two formidable bureaucrats wrestled for control of its direction in backroom Ottawa. Dr. Peter Bryce, the crusading chief medical officer of health in the Department of Indian Affairs, wanted the federal government to admit that tuberculosis was out of control in the country’s Indigenous school population, and commit to a wide-ranging effort to improve student health even if.
The news that the graves of 215 children had been discovered near the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia came as shock to me, my family and to every First Nation person across the country. As shocking as it was, it was also knowledge we had known about our entire lives. I am a child of residential school survivors and the trauma my parents faced
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The news that the graves of 215 children had been discovered near the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia came as shock to me, my family and to every First Nation person across the country. As shocking as it was, it was also knowledge we had known about our entire lives.
I am a child of residential school survivors and the trauma my parents faced as a result of this inhumane period of history has affected me and generations of my people. Both my parents attended residential school with my father Marius and his siblings going to St Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany and my mother Susan flying off to a residential school in Fort George, Quebec on the other side of James Bay.
The news that the remains of 215 children had been discovered near the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., came as shock to me, my family…
SASKATOON More than 100 years ago, a Canadian doctor tried to sound the alarm on residential schools but historians say he was silenced by government officials. Indigenous advocates working to reclaim his legacy now say a great deal can be learned from his example. In the early part of the 20th century, medical health officer Dr. Peter H. Bryce repeatedly warned his superiors at the Department of Indian Affairs of the rampant spread of tuberculosis killing Indigenous children in residential schools. He spent months examining dozens of schools in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta and found unsanitary conditions, poor health practices, buildings that were prone to fires, and a lack of ventilation. In a damning report to the government in 1907, initially hidden from the public by his bosses, he wrote “it’s almost as if the prime conditions of the outbreak of epidemics had been deliberately created.”