RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS: INVESTIGATION

Natives died in droves as Ottawa ignored warnings

Tuberculosis took the lives of students for at least 40 years

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

BILL CURRY AND KAREN HOWLETT

OTTAWA -- As many as half of the aboriginal children who attended the early years
of residential schools died of tuberculosis, despite repeated warnings to the federal
government that overcrowding, poor sanitation and a lack of medical care were
creating a toxic breeding ground for the rapid spread of the disease, documents
show.

A Globe and Mail examination of documents in the National Archives reveals that
children continued to die from tuberculosis at alarming rates for at least four decades
after a senior official at the Department of Indian Affairs initially warned in 1907 that
schools were making no effort to separate healthy children from those sick with the
highly contagious disease.

Peter Bryce, the department's chief medical officer, visited 15 Western Canadian
residential schools and found at least 24 per cent of students had died from
tuberculosis over a 14-year period. The report suggested the numbers could be
higher, noting that in one school alone, the death toll reached 69 per cent.

With less than four months to go before Ottawa officially settles out of court with
most former students, a group calling itself the Friends and Relatives of the
Disappeared Residential School Children is urging the government to acknowledge
this period in the tragic residential-schools saga - and not just the better-known
cases of physical and sexual abuse.

Last week, Liberal MP Gary Merasty wrote to Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice
asking the government to look into the concerns. Mr. Prentice's spokesman, Bill
Rogers, told The Globe that departmental officials have been asked to meet with
native groups.

Some of their stories, including tales of children buried in unmarked graves beside
the schools, are told in a new documentary by Kevin Annett, a former United Church
minister, titled Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide.

Mr. Annett, as well as some academics, argue that the government's handling,
combined with Canada's official policy of removing children from their homes for 10
months each year to attend distant schools, does indeed fit the United Nations
definition of genocide.

The UN definition, adopted after the Second World War, lists five possible acts that
qualify as genocide, of which killing is only one. The fifth act is described as "forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group."

But transcripts of debates in 1952 of the House of Commons external affairs

committee, reviewed by The Globe, show public servants advised politicians not to
enshrine a definition of genocide into law, despite Canada's promise internationally
to do so.

In 2000, four years after the last residential school closed, the government finally
adopted a limited definition of genocide, excluding the line about forcible transfer of
children. But courts have rejected native claims of genocide against Ottawa and the
churches because Canada had no law banning genocide while the schools were
operating.

"It's another crime," said Roland Chrisjohn, a professor of native studies at St.
Thomas University who has written extensively on the subject. "Canada can't define
genocide to suit its own purposes."

Few argue that the policy was genocidal in the Nazi sense of deliberately killing
people. Rather, the focus was on killing native culture in the name of assimilation,
said John Milloy, a Trent University professor.

"The purpose of the [federal government's] policy is to eradicate Indians as a

cultural group," said Prof. Milloy, who has had more access to government files on
the subject than any other researcher. "If genocide has to do with destroying a
people's culture, this is genocidal, no doubt about it. But to call it genocidal is to
misunderstand how the system works."

Whatever the definition, there is no disputing the deadly swath tuberculosis cut
through native schools.

Dr. Bryce followed up his 1907 report with a second one two years later, this time on
the toll TB was taking in Alberta residential schools. He recommended that Ottawa
take over responsibility of the schools from church control.

The Globe has uncovered letters in the archives showing that many others issued
similar warnings. Just a few months after Dr. Bryce's 1909 report, the department's
Indian agent for Duck Lake, Sask., wrote to his Ottawa colleagues: "The department
should realize that under present circumstances about one-half of the children who
are sent to the Duck Lake boarding school die before the age of 18, or very shortly
afterward."

Another document published in 1914 shows Dr. Bryce's findings were accepted by
Duncan Campbell Scott, the most influential senior Indian Affairs official of the
period. "It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who
passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they
had received therein," Mr. Scott wrote in an essay.

But one of the documents obtained by The Globe reveals Mr. Scott's department
rejected the doctor's recommendations because the government did not want to
upset the churches that ran the schools.

The residential schools were an extension of religious missionary work. They

started receiving federal support in 1874 as part of Canada's campaign to assimilate
aboriginals into Christian society by obliterating their language, religion and culture.
Well over 100,000 native children passed through the schools, most of which were
closed in the mid-1970s.

The tuberculosis problem was symptomatic of the deplorable living conditions for the
thousands of children uprooted from their communities and placed in the care of
strangers. Tuberculosis is one of the deadliest infectious diseases, entering the body
through breathing and infecting the lungs. It can then spread to the central nervous
system, bones and joints, according to the Canadian Lung Association.

In May, 1930, at the Shubenacadie Residential School in Nova Scotia, officials

were coping with an outbreak of tuberculosis seven months after the facility opened.
But it was the arrival several years later of James Paul, a new student with an
advanced case of tuberculosis, that raised the ire of the school's visiting physician.

"Evidently somebody has mistaken our residential school for a TB sanatorium," D.

F. MacInnis says in a letter to Indian Affairs.

Later, Dr. MacInnis wrote to the school principal: "We are apparently getting all the
advanced TB cases and syphilities in the three provinces shipped into our school and
apparently there is no way left for us to keep them out. It is very unfair to the
children who are clean and well."

Although most students from this period are no longer alive, some who attended
later recall sharing sleeping quarters with dying children.

"I've known some students that died there and I don't know how they died. All we
know is we had their funeral service," said Harry Lucas, 66, who attended Christie
Indian Residential on Vancouver Island from 1948 to 1958.

"There were quite a few grave sites there that I always questioned. We were able to
sleep next to a person that was dying. They didn't put them away in separate rooms.
That was always kind of spooky for me."

Ted Quewezance, the executive director of the National Residential School

Survivors Society, attended Gordon Residential School and St. Philip Residential
School in Saskatchewan from 1960 to 1969. He said he has spoken to thousands of
former students across Canada.

"We'd see [funerals] monthly," he said. "We were never able to ask what they were.
It's no different right across the country. There's even some graves unmarked. Kids
were buried at the school, but now we're talking about how do we bring our
survivors home? "
The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared Residential School Children claims
thousands of children are buried in unmarked graves near the schools. Many of their
stories are contained in the documentary by Mr. Annett, who says he was ousted
from the United Church in 1995 after raising concerns about the church's residential-
school history.

(The United Church rejects Mr. Annett's version of events, pointing to a three-week
termination hearing in which several witnesses said he was a confrontational figure
who was a poor manager of his Port Alberni church.)

James Scott of the United Church said there is relatively little solid information on
deaths at the schools because archivists have been so focused on researching claims
of living former students.

"My sense is that the more we find out about [the schools], the deeper our
understanding of the catastrophic impact of the residential schools on aboriginal
people, on their families and their culture," he said.

Bede Hubbard of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said the Roman
Catholic Church, which ran most of the schools, noted that previous research has
shown the churches made many pleas to Ottawa for more money to improve
standards.

"I didn't realize that the rates of tuberculosis were that high. In the 1930s,
tuberculosis was rampant in Canada itself, so it shouldn't be surprising then that it
was also a problem in the residential schools."

Prof. Milloy of Trent University is the only outsider to have accessed the locked vault
of Indian Affairs records through his role as a senior researcher for the 1996 Royal
Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.

In 1999, he published his research in a book titled A National Crime: The Canadian
Government and the Residential School System. Prof. Milloy expressed discomfort
with the campaign of Mr. Annett and others to introduce language such as genocide
and "aboriginal holocaust."
What government and church records do show, he said, is that the deaths were
primarily due to the policy of paying churches on a per-capita basis to run the
schools. Numerous letters indicate that because of the funding policy, churches
would admit sick children and refuse to send ailing ones home. Pleas to the
department for more funding fell on deaf ears.

"That's why there's so many kids sleeping in so few beds in so many dormitories
across the country," Prof. Milloy said. "It 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.' It's the fact that the feds won't spend any money on this, and that's what it
leads to."

As for Dr. Bryce, the man who first sounded the alarm, he was shuffled to another
department. The position of chief medical officer was terminated and the government
appears to have made no further effort to gather statistics on deaths at the schools.
Ottawa did not take over control of all schools until 1969.

In 1922, after he retired, Dr. Bryce penned a diatribe against Ottawa's lack of
response to his reports.

The title: The Story of a National Crime.

A history of shame

EARLY YEARS

Print Format above article

Author: Bill Curry And Karen Howlett

Geography: Canada;
Byline: BILL CURRY AND KAREN HOWLETT
Source:
Organization:
Subject: Native People; Indians; aboriginal rights; public health; residential schools; children;
tuberculosis; deaths; child abuse; government; political; human rights
Persons:
Words: 1795
Page: A1
Ownership: Staff Writer
Ottawa orders panel to probe TB deaths

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission will look at why Indian

Affairs did so little about the safety of native children

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

BILL CURRY

OTTAWA -- Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice is ordering a new Truth and
Reconciliation Commission to expand its mandate to include an investigation of
deaths and disappearances at Canada's native residential schools.

The commission is being established as part of the government's multibillion-dollar

settlement with former students. It will travel the country hearing and documenting
stories from those who attended and worked at the schools.

The minister surprised native leaders by also striking a special task force inside his
department that will call in church and aboriginal leaders to examine internal records
dealing with child deaths at the schools.

The minister faced questions in the House of Commons yesterday following a Globe
and Mail report highlighting how Indian Affairs officials repeatedly ignored warnings
that children were dying in residential schools at rates as high as 50 per cent in
the early years of the system.

The federal government issued a "statement of reconciliation" in 1998,

acknowledging that the school system contributed to a loss of culture and that sexual
and physical abuse took place. But the statement made no mention of the alarming
death rates in the schools.

"It is unimaginable to any parent that your child would go away to school and not
return," he told reporters yesterday. "It is one of the saddest chapters in Canadian
history. And obviously it will be incumbent on all of us to come to grips with it."
Phil Fontaine, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, welcomed Mr.
Prentice's proposals but increased the pressure on Ottawa to issue a full apology for
the century of assimilationist policy.

Mr. Fontaine, who was one of the first former students to go public with a personal
story of abuse, described the federal policy yesterday in a way he has avoided until
now.

"We're dealing with an issue that meets the definition of genocide," he said.

Mr. Fontaine said his office has carefully reviewed the United Nations Convention on
Genocide, which the House of Commons endorsed in 1951.

The definition provides five separate criteria for genocide, of which killing is only one.

He specifically cited the definition's fifth act: "forcibly transferring children of the
group to another group" - a criterion the Canadian government left out when it
formally adopted a limited definition of genocide in 2000.

Mr. Fontaine said he had avoided such language because he had hoped negotiations
would lead to a full apology, but the government's resistance is causing him to speak
more forcibly.

"We're not saying there is a deliberate program of killing children," he said. "The fact
is, thousands of children died through gross negligence, they knew about it and they
did nothing about it."

Mr. Prentice has been taking heat from native leaders for the past month since he
declared that Canada will not issue an apology as part of its settlement with
residential-school survivors.

Manitoba Liberal MP Gary Merasty, whose mother and other Cree relatives attended
residential schools, called in the House yesterday for an official apology.

"There are good stories, there's no doubt," he said later. "But, unfortunately, the
vast majority of these experiences were extremely negative. I hear people talking
back home that young people died and sometimes the parents wouldn't know for
months, even a year."
Jean Crowder, the Indian Affairs critic for the NDP, expressed concern that the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission won't hear from the many former students who are
elderly and now live in remote villages.

Ms. Crowder is also calling on Ottawa to issue a full apology as part of the
settlement.

"There's no good reason for not apologizing. We've already admitted a legal liability
by compensation. I don't get it. It would go such a long way with helping people
move on with the next chapter of their lives."

Print Format above article

Author: Bill Curry

Geography: Canada;
Byline: BILL CURRY
Source:
Organization: Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Subject: residential schools; Native People; Indians; aboriginal rights; children; government;
political; statements
Persons: Jim Prentice; Phil Fontaine
Words: 642
Page: A4
Ownership: Staff Writer
Children left 'angry at the world'

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

KAREN HOWLETT AND BILL CURRY

INDIAN BROOK, N.S. and OTTAWA -- On the morning of March 12, 1933, Josephine
Smith, a 12-year-old student at the Shubenacadie Residential School in Nova
Scotia, collapsed from acute appendicitis while at mass.

She died three days later.

D.F. MacInnis, the school's attending physician, was alarmed that no one had alerted
him earlier that the child was severely ill with what turned out to be peritonitis. In a
handwritten letter to the Department of Indian Affairs, he asked what length the
government would go to "cover up the criminal negligence of one of its employees."

Yesterday, The Globe and Mail documented the toll that tuberculosis took on children
at residential boarding schools, despite repeated warnings to the federal government
that overcrowding and a lack of medical care were creating a breeding ground for the
disease's spread. But the tragic case of Josephine Smith is indicative of a wider
issue: the oppressive conditions that prevailed in these institutions during much of
the last century, when neglect, cruelty and abuse were part of everyday life for many
children.

A settlement between Ottawa and former students, expected in four months, has
spurred native groups and activists to tell stories of the children's experiences. The
federally funded Legacy of Hope project is holding sessions across the country to
document them.

More than 100,000 native children passed through the schools from 1874 until the
mid-1970s, when most closed their doors.

The survivor stories reveal that former students still struggle with the legacy of this
dark chapter in Canadian history - and the Shubenacadie school experience was all
too typical.
Noreen Bernard, now 50, told The Globe she was "angry at the world" when she left
the school, located just north of Halifax and run by the Roman Catholic Church. She
did not feel she belonged to her native community in Indian Brook or to white
society. She said the experience left an entire community dysfunctional.

"I don't want my kids to say they're survivors," she said. "I want them to say they're
Mi'kmaq and they're proud of who they are."

A Globe review of documents in the National Archives and interviews with former
students reveal a pattern where, no matter what happened, those in charge of the
school known as "Shubie" were not at fault.

Calls by Dr. MacInnis for an investigation into Josephine's death went unheeded.
Rev. J.P. Mackey, the school principal, said in a letter to Indian Affairs that it was not
apparent just how ill the child was, and the government accepted his explanation.

"On Saturday, she was as active as any other child in the school," Father Mackey
wrote. "We had no reason to think that her condition was any more serious than the
others."

In May, 1934, another student, Mary Madeline Bernard, also died from peritonitis.

"I know from my experience with the Josephine Smith case," Dr. MacInnis wrote,
"that it is futile to report those cases to Dept. as they probably feel that they [the
students] go to heaven and that it is not worthwhile trying to keep those poor Indian
children alive."

Children often did chores unsupervised in the kitchen and laundry room, sometimes
with disastrous consequences. Father Mackey reported to Indian Affairs in May,
1930, that two girls, Briget Moloney and Annie Pennall, got their hands caught in the
dough mixer in "some unexplainable way." Annie ended up having a finger
amputated.

"This accident is regretted, but it would appear that it was entirely the girls' own
fault," an Indian Affairs official wrote.

Children were also harshly punished.

In her book, Out of the Depths, former student Isabelle Knockwood writes about the
formal inquiry into 19 boys who were thrashed with a strap made from harness
leather and placed on a diet of bread and water for four days over $53.44 that was
stolen from a cash box.

Father Mackey denied the boys had received excessive punishment, even though
some of them still had marks on their backs three months later.

Thrashings were part of everyday life. Doreen Bernard's mother, Nancy, told The
Globe she was so desperate to escape a beating by three nuns when she was 11, she
stood on a second-storey window ledge.

"I was going to jump," she said.

The nuns retreated, only to return later that night after she had gone to sleep. One
nun strapped her bare buttocks, she said, while the other two held her down.

In 1992, the Archbishop of Halifax, Austin Burke, apologized for the suffering caused
in the Shubenacadie school.

Print Format above article

Author: Karen Howlett And Bill Curry

Geography: Canada;
Byline: KAREN HOWLETT AND BILL CURRY
Source:
Organization:
Subject: Native People; Indians; residential schools; aboriginal rights; child abuse; children
Persons:
Words: 764
Page: A4
Ownership: Staff Writer
t
The lost children of our schools

Saturday, April 28, 2007

The myth of Canada's residential schools for native children holds that the schools
had a paternalistic purpose, and that even after all is revealed about them -- the
physical and sexual abuse, the forced relocation of children, the ban on speaking
native languages -- Canada meant well. The country was simply limited by the
assimilative vision of the times.

That myth may at last fall when Canadians take a close look at the abysmally high
death rates among children, from tuberculosis and other causes, at the schools. They
did not die in one great epidemic; they died over many years -- at least 40 -- as the
federal government ignored warnings from its own medical advisers.

The full story of those deaths has not entered the Canadian consciousness. The
Canadian Encyclopedia says nothing about tuberculosis under "residential schools"
or "native education." When the Canadian government apologized in 1998 for sexual
and physical abuse at the schools, it said nothing about the deaths of children. This
winter, Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice said he will not apologize to aboriginals
for the government's role in overseeing the largely church-run residential schools
because "fundamentally, the underlying objective had been to try and provide an
education to aboriginal children." Dead children do not learn.

The country ought to come to terms with this terrible episode in its history. Good
intentions do not soften a criminally negligent implementation. If anything, the
supposed good intentions make matters worse. They constitute a promise. If the
federal government and the churches that directly ran the schools looked the other
way while native children died en masse, the promise was not kept. If the promise
was repeatedly avowed even as it became clear that large numbers of children were
dying, the promise was a lie, a trick, a concealment.

Was that the case? As The Globe's Bill Curry and Karen Howlett reported this week,
documents in the National Archives show the government received disturbing
warnings of high death rates that it does not appear to have acted on. In 1907, Peter
Bryce, the chief medical officer in the Indian Affairs Department, reported that one in
every four students at 15 Western Canadian residential schools had died from
tuberculosis over a 14-year period. At one school, seven in every ten died. Dr. Bryce
published a book in 1922 excoriating the government for continuing to allow healthy
children to be exposed to sick ones. John Milloy, a Trent University professor who
has done extensive research on the residential schools, said the churches were
paid on a per-capita basis to run the schools, and would therefore accept ill children
and refuse to send home those who became sick. As late as 1936, the government
was still being urged by the Canadian Tuberculosis Association to segregate or
remove stricken children, and survey the schools each year to track the extent of the
disease's spread.

How many aboriginal children died from tuberculosis at the schools? Health Canada's
website reports a death rate as high as 8,000 per 100,000 during the 1930s and
1940s -- decades after Dr. Bryce's warnings. To put that in context, the death rates
from tuberculosis on native reserves were, says Health Canada, among "the highest
ever reported in a human population" -- and at 700 per 100,000 people, they were
less than 10 per cent of the rate afflicting children in the residential schools during
the 1930s and 1940s.

What did Canada know and when should it have acted? The answers should emerge
through the work of a task force announced by Mr. Prentice this week in response to
The Globe articles. That task force will take a long overdue look at records of child
deaths in the residential schools. Its work will be overseen by the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission that will travel across Canada holding hearings about the
residential schools.

National myths die hard. Children die all too easily.