Dr. Peter Bryce and Duncan Campbell Scott believed in assimilating the country’s Indigenous peoples into majority white culture, but had different ideas about how it should happen.
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.