Residential schools: How half-truths (at best) morph into outright lies
Examining the exaggerated death rate of Canadian Indian Residential Schools
By Pim Wiebel (an anonymous researcher and former Indian Residential School teacher)
The Honourable Marc Miller, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, never misses an opportunity to give his enthusiastic stamp of approval to any new claim made in the perennial quest for evidence of residential school wrongdoing. Two days after Williams Lake First Nation announced on January 25, 2022, the “discovery” near the St. Joseph residential school in B.C. of “93 potential unmarked graves”, Mr. Miller embarked on a tweetstorm that encapsulated his thinking, or, shall we say, his habitual presumptions, on residential school-related matters.
Among Miller’s tweets on January 27 was the following: “As early as 1909 (1909!!!), Dr. Peter Bryce estimated that the death rate from all causes for those attending residential schools was 18 times higher than that of non-Indigenous people in Canada of the same age [the curious exclamation marks are Miller’s, not mine].”
The “18 times higher” assertion is based on a report that Peter Bryce, Indian Affairs chief medical officer, prepared for the Department in 1909. In looking at mortality in three residential schools – Shingwauk in Ontario, Sarcee in Alberta, and Cranbrook in B.C. – Bryce found that during the period 1892 to 1908 the schools had a death rate of 8,000 per 100,000.[1] If Bryce’s finding for the three schools reflected the overall mortality rate across all of the 60 to 70 residential schools operating in Canada during that time period, the rate in the residential schools would indeed have been approximately 18 times higher than the 430 per 100,000 that Bryce reported for Canada’s general school-age population.
However, the evidence shows that Bryce's "8,000 per 100,000" death rate was an overstatement for the three schools he studied, and a gross exaggeration of the overall rate for all of Canada’s residential schools operating in the 1892 to 1908 period.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) published a graph showing the overall annual death rate for each year the residential schools were in operation from their inception until 1965.[2] The average annual residential school death rate in the 1892 to 1908 period was approximately 1,700 per 100,000, about one-fifth of 8,000 per 100,000.
Moreover, a detailed analysis of Bryce’s 1909 report on Shingwauk, Sarcee and Cranbrook, and of a similar report he wrote on schools in Alberta two years earlier, reveal that his methodology was flawed and yielded an exaggerated mortality rate.[3]
Miller’s “as early as 1909 (1909!!!)” rant suggests implicitly that the residential school death rate only worsened after that time. The TRC death rate graph, however, shows a precipitous decline in the residential school death rate beginning at the start of the 1900s and continuing for 50 years until it reached zero or near zero. It should be noted, also, that the TRC graph is based on death numbers that may have been overstated.
(A word on Peter Bryce: Bryce is conferred near sainthood status among today’s Indigenous leaders and others for his pointed criticisms of the early residential schools’ health and safety record. Bryce, however, had many critics who noted his frequent use of hyperbole in bringing attention to problems. Bryce expressed ideas that would be considered abhorrent today; for example, that integration into white society and the “admixture of white blood” with “its inherited qualities” would result in a healthier Indigenous population.[4] Perhaps the most inconvenient truth for Bryce’s obsequious admirers is that he was an ardent advocate for the expansion of the residential schools and the establishment of an overseer Board composed of representatives from the churches.[5])
Marc Miller is not alone in propagating the skewed mortality data. Whether knowingly, or out of sheer ignorance, the legacy media, health agencies, Indigenous organizations, and much of academia bandy the “8,000 per 100,000” death rate and “18 times higher” assertion ad nauseam.
In a paper prepared for the TRC report, Dr. Scott Hamilton wrote, “Bryce also provided a national context for the school’s [sic] death rates. Using the statistics for the Shingkwauk [sic] Home in Ontario, the Sarcee school in Alberta, and the Cranbrook school in British Columbia for the period from 1892 to 1908, he calculated an annual death rate, from all causes, of 8,000 deaths per 100,000.”[6]
The TRC presented Dr. Hamilton’s statement as axiomatic in Part 1 of its History. But elsewhere in the same document, they presented the graph that I discussed earlier, which shows an average annual residential school death rate of 1,700 per 100,000 during the years 1892 to 1908.
The legacy media, for its part, took the 8,000 per 100,000 statistic and contorted it beyond recognition. Inexplicably, and without a shred of evidence, they morphed the figure from an all-cause death rate for the period 1892 to 1908, into a tuberculosis death rate in the 1930s and 40s.
In April 2007, The Globe and Mail carried an opinion piece in which it was stated, “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 percent of the rate afflicting children in the residential schools during the 1930s and 1940s.”
These claims, made in Canada’s “most authoritative” newspaper, are simply preposterous. A tuberculosis death rate graph in the TRCs Summary of the Final Report shows that residential school mortality from tuberculosis in fact averaged about 150 per 100,000 in the 1930s and declined to zero or near zero by the end of the 1940s.[7] The residential school rate was therefore not more than 10 times higher than that in the reserves, but many times lower.
The 2007 G&M opinion piece cited Health Canada as its source. I have been unable to find such an assertion in any Health Canada document that predates the G&M piece.
The claim did, however, appear in a Canada Public Health Agency report issued in 2018 by chief public health officer, Theresa Tam. Whereas the G&M opinion piece stated that the TB death rates in the 1930s and 40s were “as high as 8,000”, Tam went further, suggesting that they “exceeded 8,000”. (The source footnote references a Canadian Public Health Association CPHA) URL that gives an “access denied” message when opened. I made an inquiry to the CPHA and was informed that the document was a 2010 centennial publication that was removed because the information was “no longer up-to-date” (found to be in need of some post-TRC revisionism, perhaps?). The footnote also includes the deleted document's title. A search of that title leads to another CPHA document named, “This is Public Health: A Canadian History”. That article discusses tuberculosis and Aboriginal health, but does not mention a residential school death rate.)
As I discuss below, “8,000 per 100,000” is repeated profusely elsewhere in the media and literature. I have sought clarification on the source from a number of the authors and publishers, but have not received responses, with the exception of the one from the CPHA. Presumably, the topic is one to be avoided.
The spread of the misinformation reached tsunami proportions after the announcement of the “discovery” of unmarked graves and bodies at the Kamloops school in May 2021.
Freelance journalist Jeremy Appel led the charge with an article that was widely published, beginning with an appearance in Alberta Native News on July 17, 2021. Appel wrote, “According to the Canadian Public Health Association [presumably referring to the “This is Public Health” document mentioned above], TB death rates in First Nations communities in the 1930s and ‘40s were 700 per 100,000, some of the highest ever recorded in a human population. But in residential schools, they were astronomical — 8,000 per 100,000 children.”
Appel went on to link the false TB death rate with the charge of residential school genocide: “Two experts in tuberculosis [Lena Faust, a PhD student at the McGill International TB Centre in Montreal, and Courtney Heffernan, manager of the Tuberculosis Program Evaluation and Research Unit at the University of Alberta] say the mass death from TB at residential schools was no accident, but the result of deliberate neglect that was part of Canada's broader genocidal project.” And then, for even greater effect, Appel injected the discredited claim of bodies discovered at the Kamloops school: “...it’s unknown how many of the children whose remains were uncovered from unmarked graves in the past two months died as a result of TB [emphasis added].” (This article was published two days after the investigators publicly confirmed at a media event that no remains had been uncovered.)
Appel’s story was picked up by the Toronto Star, Saskatchewan Today, and CTV News online, among others.
The “statistic” made its way into publications and websites around the world, including the Independent in the UK and WebMD. The Guardian was somewhat more “guarded”. In a June, 2021 article it stated the 8,000 figure, but did not repeat the 1930s and 1940s time frame or the assertion that the number applied to the death rate from TB only.
In September, 2022, the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases published an article, co-authored by the above-mentioned Courtney Heffernan at the University of Alberta, that stated, “As predicted by Bryce, without interventions to improve conditions, an overall TB mortality rate of 8,000/100,000 population in the residential school system was seen in the 1930s compared to rates of 51–79/100,000 population in the country overall for the same decade [Bryce is now not only a saint, but a clairvoyant as well].” Two sources for the statement are cited: the above-mentioned report from Theresa Tam; and a document that indicates in graph form an annual Canada-wide TB death rate of 51–79/100,000 in the 1930s, but does not mention a residential school death rate .
The International Journal piece continues, “At the time of writing this article (May 2022), Canada is confronting the one year anniversary of the recovery of remains in an unmarked grave outside the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia [emphasis added].” Co-author Heffernan must, or should have known in May 2022, that no remains had been recovered.
I recite this litany of disinformation only to show how the untruths have grown and fed on themselves. There is a vicious circle of spurious assertions in which facts arising out of actual research are ignored. Such is the state of mainstream journalism and historical investigation in Canada.
The death rate lie is just one of many myths that the legacy media and activists such as Marc Miller use to buttress the now obligatory charge that the residential schools willfully and genocidally acted against the health and well-being of the students. In another of his January 27, 2022 tweets, Miller alleged that the “horrific death toll” in the residential schools was caused by “overcrowding, unsanitary living conditions and starvation”. The implication here is that the schools were agents not merely of cultural genocide, as the TRC alleged, but of actual physical genocide.
Miller is woefully ignorant of the residential school history, as well as of the historical context. There is no doubt that some of the earliest residential schools were shoddily built and posed risks to health and safety. Such conditions were not unique to residential schools, however. As late as 1919, the Dominion Council of Health found that nearly half of rural schools in Canada were “unfit to raise swine in”, with little heat in winter and devoid of playgrounds.[8]
The suggestion that Indian Affairs and the residential schools wantonly neglected the health and safety of the students (and coincidentally of the staff, who, after all, lived in close quarters with the students), is unfounded. In the decade beginning in 1911, nearly 30 residential schools were renovated or constructed to meet a number of health and safety specifications agreed between Indian Affairs and the schools (to his credit, Peter Bryce was at the forefront in suggesting improvements). Among the changes were the installation of new ventilation systems and “the best modern sanitary appliances”, as well as the addition of sleeping rooms in which tubercular students would “have the advantage of the fresh air cure.”[9] The Indian Affairs education budget grew nearly threefold over the decade, largely to cover the associated construction costs.
(Interestingly, Bryce, who served as Ontario secretary of health before joining Indian Affairs, had made similar recommendations to the Toronto Public Schools in 1898. In an article in the Globe newspaper, he decried the uncontrolled spread of tuberculosis among Toronto school children, blaming it on poor ventilation and heating, and inadequate space in the city’s school buildings. It was not until 16 years later, in 1914, that the City of Toronto finally built a school that met at least some of his recommendations.)
Bryce was troubled by the practice of admitting tubercular children into the residential schools. In examining the students on enrollment waiting lists he found that, “In no instance was a child awaiting admission to school found free from tuberculosis”, and concluded that “it was plain that infection was got in the home primarily.” (Bryce blamed unsanitary conditions for the rampant spread of the disease in the reserves.) The schools followed through on Bryce’s subsequent recommendation that children be screened for tuberculosis and enrolled only if found to be TB-free.
The annual TB death rate in the residential schools declined precipitously as a result of the reforms – from about 600 per 100,000 in 1911, to approximately 100 per 100,000 ten years later.[10] The residential schools administered new TB drugs as they became available – the BCG vaccine in the 1930s, and the much more effective successor drugs beginning in the late 1940s. By mid-century, the TB death rate in the schools had fallen to zero or nearly zero.[11]
TB mortality in the residential schools was consistently much lower than among the general First Nations population. Peter Bryce reported in 1906 that the TB death rate in Canada’s “native population” was 3,450 per 100,000.[12] The annual rate in the First Nations population remained at over 100 per 100,000 well into the 1950s.[13]
As part of his study on residential schools in Alberta in 1909, Bryce looked at general mortality in the reserves. Astonishingly, he found that only 60% of the fathers of residential school students, and 70% of the mothers, were still living.[14] The percentage of deceased children in the families ranged from 26% at the Sarcee school, to 49% at the Blood school. These percentages included all of the children in the families – children who never attended a residential school (including infants and other children who died before reaching school age), and children who died after their discharge from a residential school.
Now, more than a century later, Canada still has a very long way to go in securing health equity for its Indigenous people. It is a modern-day national crime that tuberculosis, long-ago eradicated in most of the country, continues to afflict Inuit at a rate 300 times greater than the Canadian-born, non-Indigenous population, and First Nations living on reserve at a rate 40 times higher.
It is equally disturbing that First Nations children and youth living on-reserve today experience higher levels of mortality than existed in the residential schools in most years after 1950. During the period 2010-2013, the average annual death rate for on-reserve males ages 10-14 was 29.32 per 100,000, and for females it was 42.09.[15] In the 15-19 age group, the respective rates were 152.02 and 114.95. These rates were from 3 to 5 times higher than those in the general Canadian child and youth population – levels of disparity similar to those that existed between the residential schools and the Canadian school-age population during Peter Bryce’s times.
In Manitoba, the disparities are even greater. From 2013 to 2017, the average death rate among Manitoba’s on-reserve First Nations population ages 1 to 19 (which excludes deaths in the most vulnerable group – infants under one year of age) was 91.08 per 100,000, nearly five times the rate for all other children and youth in the province.
The search for the culprit in First Nations’ social and economic malaise seems to inevitably end with the finger pointed squarely at the residential schools. The residential schools, however, were a relatively small player in the scheme of Indian education in Canada. Many Canadians accept as true the declaration that the former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Murray Sinclair, made at the United Nations in 2010: “For roughly seven generations nearly every Indigenous child in Canada was sent to a residential school.” In fact, fewer than one-third of Indigenous children were enrolled in residential schools over their 113-year history. The vast majority attended day or provincial schools, and, sadly, many did not attend any school at all. After the federal government began implementing a policy of gradual closure of residential schools in the early 1960s, the proportion of status Indian children enrolled in residential schools fell dramatically. By 1968, it had fallen to 13 percent.[16] From there, the decline continued steadily until the last school closed its doors in 1996.
It is not generally appreciated that by several key measures, residential school students fared better as adults than their peers who did not attend. A large-scale survey of the First Nations population conducted in 2008, found that they were 20 percent more likely to obtain a diploma from a trade school, community college, or university, and 12 percent more likely to complete an undergraduate degree.[17] They were significantly more likely to be employed in the labour market and less likely to rely on government transfers.[18] Due to the implementation of stringent nutritional standards after the mid-1950s, former residential school students were taller and less obese as adults than had they attended other kinds of schools.[19] These outcomes are particularly remarkable in light of the fact that orphans and children from highly disadvantaged backgrounds were given priority for enrollment.
Blaming the residential schools for everything that is awry in First Nations communities today is simplistic and misinformed, and serves only to distract from a serious and honest analysis of what is working, and what is not.
Which brings us back to Marc Miller.
Miller and his camp disregard the deeper and more complex factors that are driving First Nations dysfunction. They overlook the possibility that the perpetual focus on the “sins” of the past may be fostering an ethos of stultifying victimhood and robbing First Nations people of a sense of forward-looking optimism. They fail to consider whether the current regime, in which over 600 scattered, “sovereign” First Nations exist under the apartheid construct of the Indian Act and are sustained for the most part by external resources, may be damaging to the sense of agency that is needed for individuals and communities to progress.
The current government’s go-to solution – exponentially increased spending on “Indigenous Priorities” and one-off money settlements – is aggravating the culture of dependency. The results are discouraging. The unprecedented expansion of government largesse over the past several years has run concurrently with astounding increases in Indigenous incarceration, growing suicide and child foster placement, a widening life expectancy gap, a stubborn poverty disparity, and the continuing presence of diseases long-ago eradicated elsewhere in Canada and the developed world.
Although the government’s spendthrift ways are proving futile and even counterproductive, it is clear that they are only in their infancy. The recent residential school day-scholar settlement portends much more of the same. Under the settlement, hundreds of First Nations, and thousands of individual band members who purportedly lost their languages and cultures[20] despite returning to their families at the end of each school day, will receive a total of $2.8 billion (2,800 million dollars) in compensation. After the announcement, Marc Miller stated, “It marks the first time Canada is compensating bands and communities as a collective for harms related to residential schools…Reconciliation isn’t free. This is a lot of money…Is it enough? I think only time will tell, but we know there’s a heck of a lot more to do.”
In his “Story of a National Crime”, Peter Bryce, without irony, referred to Indians as “wards of the nation”. Are the Honourable Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and company informed by a similar mindset in advancing their “Indigenous Priorities”? Are they in fact harming the very people they claim to be helping?
___
Thanks for reading. For more from this author on Indigenous Issues read Integration, Forced Assimilation, or Genocide
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[1] Michelle M. Robinson, Dying to Learn: Infectious disease and Death Among the Children in Southern Alberta’s Indian Residential Schools, 1889-1920, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, 2008, p. 31
[2] Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 4, 2015, Graph 3, p. 17
[3] Michelle M. Robinson, Dying to Learn: Infectious disease and Death Among the Children in Southern Alberta’s Indian Residential Schools, 1889-1920, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, 2008, pp. 18-35
[4] Dominion of Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended June 30 1906, Ottawa, 1906, p.434
[5] P.F. Bryce, The Story of a National Crime, Ottawa, Canada, 1922, p. 4
[6] Dr. Scott Hamilton, Where are the Children buried?, Dept. of Anthropology, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, pp. 3-4
[7] Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015, Graph 5, p. 92
[8] Christopher Rutty, PhD, and Sue C. Sullivan, This is Public Health: A Canadian History, p. 2.8
[9] Dominion of Canada Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended March 31 1911, Ottawa, pp. 40-41
[11] Reconciling for the Future
[12] Megan Sproule-Jones, CBMH/BCHM, Volume 13, (1996), p. 206
[14] Michelle M. Robinson, Dying to Learn: Infectious disease and Death Among the Children in Southern Alberta’s Indian Residential Schools, 1889-1920, Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, 2008, pp. 29-30
[15] Randall Akee and Donna Feir, First People Lost: Determining the State of Status First Nations Mortality in Canada using Administrative Data, University of Victoria, (February 2018), p. 28
[17] First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC) (2012). First Nations Regional Health Survey (RHS) 2008/10: National report on adults, youth and children living in First Nations communities. Ottawa: FNIGC. Table 17.3, p. 205
[18] Donna L. Feir, The Long Term Effects of Forcible Assimilation Policy: The Case of Indian Boarding Schools, University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C., Department of Economics, (November, 2013), p. 435
[20] That residential school students were robbed of their traditional languages is yet another myth. The 2015 First Nations Regional Health Survey found that former residential school students were 50 percent more likely to be fluent in a traditional language than those who did not attend a residential school, and youth who had a parent who attended a residential school were twice as likely to be fluent than youth who had no familial history of residential school attendance.
"The claim did, however, appear in a Canada Public Health Agency report issued in 2018 by chief public health officer, Theresa Tam. Whereas the G&M opinion piece stated that the TB death rates in the 1930s and 40s were “as high as 8,000”, Tam went further, suggesting that they “exceeded 8,000”."
So covid wasn't Tam's first rodeo - she has precedent in greatly exaggerating diseases in order to further false government narratives.
A very articulate, authoritative and well researched article that unfortunately will never be read by the intransigent masses most in need of enlightenment.
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.”― Gustave Le Bon