The Chief Medical Officer was silent in Canada’s residential schools

Content Warning

: This story deals with the neglect and abuse suffered by children in Canadian Indian residential schools. People affected by the school can call the Canadian Residential School Crisis Line at 1-866-925-4419 for support.

September 30, 2021 – The discovery in recent months of more than 1,300 unmarked graves at the sites of former local residential schools in Canada has brought an ugly chapter of the country’s history back into the spotlight. Residential school survivors are sharing their stories at events across the country as part of the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on September 30th. The new federal holiday honors the missing children and survivors of residential schools, their families, and their communities.

E Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the residential school system in 2015, found that about half of the registered deaths were attributed to tuberculosis (TB).

Most TB deaths in schools occurred in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when TB was a major public health issue in Canada and there was no reliable medication treatment. But that doesn’t mean the deaths were imminent or unexpected, says Elizabeth Rea, MD, an associate medical health officer at Toronto Public Health and a member of the steering committee for Stop TB Canada.

“Risk factors for TB were known in the medical community at the time,” she says.

Deadly rates of tuberculosis

Those conditions – accumulation, poverty, malnutrition and poor ventilation – were the norm in indigenous communities and, in particular, residential schools, which contributed to disproportionate rates of tuberculosis.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the annual death rate from tuberculosis in indigenous populations was about 700 per 100,000 people – about 20 times higher than in the general population – but in residential schools, it was an astronomical 8,000 per 100,000.

The Canadian government was aware of this inequality and its cause. In 1907, Peter Bryce, MD, chief medical officer at the Department of Indian Affairs, investigated schools and reported that it was “almost as if the main conditions for the outbreak of the epidemics had been deliberately created,” and he pushed for the system to be revised to improve conditions.

But Bryce – who was president of the American Public Health Association in 1900 and drafted Canada’s first Public Health Act, which continued to be used as a model throughout North America – was ignored by the government. His report was printed, his funding cut and he was eventually expelled from public service.

A National Crime: Reported

“The government did not dismiss his findings, they simply chose not to help, to let these children die,” says Cindy Blackstock, PhD, executive director of the First Nations Society for the Care of Children and Families of Canada.

Bryce was not the only signalman, according to Blackstock; many people at the time knew about the problem and realized it was wrong. When his 1907 report came out, he sparked angry newspaper headlines and lawyers’ suggestions that the government was guilty of manslaughter.

But all of this had little impact on government policy. In response to Bryce’s report, Duncan Campbell Scott, head of Indian Affairs, wrote: “higher than theirs. but that alone does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is heading towards a final solution to our Indian problem.”

Although the last residential school was closed in 1997, the effect the system had on survivors and their families is ongoing. TB is still a serious public health issue in indigenous communities, especially those in the Arctic, but the history of neglect and abuse in TB’s residential schools, hospitals and sanatoriums has left a legacy of distrust of medicine to Indigenous people, says Tina Campbell, a registered nurse and TB counselor at the North Inter-Tribal Health Authority.

Cross-Generative Trauma

The damaging legacy of schools goes beyond caring for TB, says Angela White, executive director of the Indian Society of Residential School Survivors and member of First Nation Snuneymuxw. Survivors often turn to alcohol, drugs, or suicide to cope with their trauma, which in turn causes many of the same problems in future generations.

“Survivors have been holding ugly truths for a long time, and that leads to other things that are not always healthy,” she says.

Bishops of Canada apologized for the church’s role in school abuse and pledged $ 30 million to support indigenous reconciliation projects for residential school survivors.

The country is moving in the right direction toward reconciliation with indigenous peoples, White says, but progress is slow and government actions rarely live up to its promises. For their part, survivors want to make sure the next generation does not need to experience what they have gone through.

“They want to break the cycle and end their healing journey,” she says.