This is the first of a two-part series on residential schools in Canada. In part one, we will examine the subject from a national perspective, while in part two, we will narrow our focus to southern Ontario.
I hope to start the discussion by addressing some facts that you may not currently know or perhaps are perhaps unclear about. This article is a result of my research on the subject over the past months and is intended as a primer to the history.
The research and documenting of our collective histories is a process that I have relished over the years. I have written about the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, Prohibition, and a variety of local fires and floods in my past articles on NewmarketToday, but this article is the saddest recollection that I have done in this series.
Recently, popular movements have arisen across Canada to remove statues and the names from public buildings of historic figures responsible for Canada’s complicated relationship with the Indigenous Peoples. Canada’s first prime minister stands at the centre of this discussion. The new negativity focuses largely on his policies toward “Indians,” as the First Nations were then known. To give this article more perspective, I include references to.
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.
Recently, popular movements have arisen across Canada to remove statues and the names from public buildings of historic figures responsible for Canada’s…
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.”