Unmarked or Mass Graves? Epidemic or Genocide?

Some Historical Context on Canada’s Residential Schools

By Michelle Stirling

International and domestic media have had a field day covering the announcements of unmarked graves at residential schools. The news reports often quickly slip from ‘unmarked’ to ‘mass’ graves, dialing up the emotional angst as the latter phrase implies an intentional act of genocide over an act of negligence, or simple lack of maintenance of once-marked graves in abandoned cemeteries where wooden crosses or markers disintegrated over time. Likewise, the graves announced in the press were ‘discovered’ by the use of Ground Penetrating Radar, a technology that only sees anomalies below the surface, but not what is there, or if there is even a coffin; it cannot identify a body.

Canada has done a great deal of work for decades, trying to document the testimony of former students of residential school, including a detailed report about missing children and unmarked burials, but there is little record of this in the international media reports. In other words, the fact that there are unmarked graves and missing children is not news to Canadians and has not been for decades. Graveyards were part of the design of such institutions of the time, for practical, not nefarious reasons.

On July 19, 2021, the New York Times ran a touching story of former residential school students in the US and their sad experience, referring to recent reports of unmarked graves in Canada, but curiously failed to mention that the US was running Indian Wars from 1622 to 1924, with a genocidal intention of wiping out US aboriginal people or subduing them by force. By contrast, at the same time Canadians were making treaties with First Nations people and sending the Mounties (RCMP/NWMP) west to stop the genocide of the Blackfoot nation at the hands of US whisky traders who had made an incursion into Southern Alberta. For the most part, Canadians had had peaceful trade relations with aboriginal people since the early days of European contact.

Canada’s Maclean’s magazine of July 16, 2021 enlisted Turkish-based journalist Adnan R. Khan to write “Coming to terms with a national shame” with the opening line “The lessons from other countries that have had to confront mass graves are clear — shining a light into our darkest corners is the only way forward”. He then jumps the shark to compare the unmarked graves of Canada’s residential schools, with mass graves due to gruesome foreign intertribal wars, and then on to compare them with the German Holocaust, referring to his German wife’s experience. Somehow he never mentions that at the time that Canada was putting aboriginal children in schools to teach them European skills like English, reading, writing and math, and placing sick aboriginal people in tuberculosis sanatoriums to save their lives, Germany had an ongoing public euthanasia program from 1900 to 1945, wherein sick or people deemed ‘defective’ or a problem for society were gassed in carbon monoxide chambers. These were ordinary German citizens, and this was public policy long before the actual Holocaust. He also doesn’t mention that many Germans have a deep fascination for North American Indians, born of the entirely fake stories about the Noble Brave “Winnetou” written by Karl Mays. In fact, across Germany there are Karl Mays dress-up clubs where grown men culturally appropriate traditional aboriginal attire for their meetings; many have tipis set up in their backyards. Some Indian artefact museums in Germany hold human scalps of aboriginal people and are reluctant to return them to Canadian aboriginal tribes for proper burial.

In a recent Toronto Sun op-ed of July 16, 2021, Warren Kinsella takes residential school conspiracy thinking to a whole new and ridiculous level. In it, Kinsella seems to believe that the people like myself who are insisting on a fact-based discussion about residential school graveyards are somehow equivalent to White Supremacist neo-Nazis. This Kinsella conspiracy theory is taken to even greater heights as he questions, at the end of his commentary, why would people be buried in unmarked graves unless there was something to hide.

Clearly, Kinsella has little grounding in history.

It has taken me a while to gather the strength to write this article because I am aware that it is a painful topic for former students and descendants of residential schools, and a contentious issue in society. But the topic has become so distorted and so lacks historical context, that I feel I must speak up. I have written about the topic of reconciliation and historical context before, some years ago. This commentary will expand on some of the issues of public health at the time. Former residential school students (referred to in the media as survivors) and descendants, the media and general public, should be made aware of some of the background of these residential schools and the context of epidemics, disease, and public health care of the time. Residential schools had graveyards because many people, especially children, died of what are treatable causes today, prior to the development of modern medicine, advanced public health care and antibiotics. Deaths of children were also high because the field of pediatric medicine did not develop until into the 1930s.

As retired judge Brian Giesbrecht writes in an essay for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, published July 27, 2021: “But countless untended and too often forgotten burial sites exist in Canada from coast to coast that contain the bodily remains of people from every ethnic group. In many cases, the wooden crosses that were routinely used to mark the graves of the poor have long since turned to dust, and the cemetery sites have returned to nature. This is particularly true on Indian reserves, where tending cemeteries is not a usual cultural practice for many. And, many residential schools burned down, or were abandoned, and their cemeteries were not maintained. It is also the responsibility of individual families, and not the government or church, to provide markers and maintain graves. Not all indigenous families participate in that admittedly colonialist Christian practice. Simply put, there are unmarked graves all over the country.”

Historians typically compare the difference in culture and style of development of Canada and the US in two simple phrases. Canada — Mission then Mountie outpost. USA — Saloon then Boot hill. So, it is no surprise that the Canadian government employed various religious orders to develop residential schools in order to attempt to meet their treaty obligations of providing education to indigenous children, or that the RCMP “Mounties” would be called upon to enact the enrollment. Both groups were present in the distant West and North, and both had existing relationships with aboriginal people and often spoke their languages.

Maclean’s Magazine print edition (Cover title: “The Real Black Mark when it comes to Canada’s military”) ran four emotional articles about residential schools and unmarked graves. None of them mentioned the word ‘tuberculosis’ (TB). Until the 1960’s, TB was the largest cause of death for all Canadians. Indeed, in this short video about the history of the Lung Association of Canada, it is emphasized that there was no public health care for anyone in Canada, and that TB and polio epidemics were the drivers for creating one. Chief Dan George has a brief cameo in the video, lauding the Lung Association’s work.

And who was on the front line of treating TB? Christian Churches.

Zilm and Warbinek (2006) write of the BC history: “Church organizations were the first to bring nurses to B.C. communities. The Sisters of Saint Ann initiated nursing services in Victoria in 1858 during the B.C. gold rush. Other gold rush centres opened small hospitals, most of them community supported rather than financed through churches. As the two West Coast colonies grew, the capitals at Victoria and New Westminster developed larger hospitals. After Florence Nightingale established her school of nursing in 1860, many Canadian hospitals, including those on the west coast, opened schools based on this model. Some graduates then established small private hospitals in their homes, often specializing in care of “consumptives” (patients with pulmonary TB). Unfortunately, few archival records exist of these entrepreneurial nurses. In Vancouver, the Anglican Church founded a hospital under Sister Frances Redmond in Vancouver in 1887 and the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) established a small tent hospital in 1886 when the city was designated the terminus for the railway.”

For those not familiar with Canadian history, many of the early Christian missionaries (and early Mounties like Colonel Macleod — who the Blackfoot people named “Stamixotoken” (Bull’s Head)) mastered local aboriginal languages and even created written alphabets (syllabics) and dictionaries, often translating Biblical passages or school texts. The early missionaries in the Canadian West, like Rev. George McDougall, also took in orphaned aboriginal children. A descendent of Rev. McDougall told me that his ancestor adopted 17 orphaned Blackfoot children; their parents had died of smallpox.

Indeed, the smallpox epidemic of the 1870s wiped out thousands of aboriginal people who had no natural immunity to the virulent disease as it swept across North America. Yet today, with modern sanitation, good food supply, excellent public health standards and the smallpox vaccine, the disease has been declared to have been eradicated.

Likewise, despite the furor over residential schools in the west, few people know that there were residential schools dating back to 1620 in pre-Confederation Canada, as discussed in Robert Carney’s (1995) “Aboriginal Residential Schools Before Confederation: The Early Experience”. He notes that the Jesuits had adopted a more Amerindian approach to interpersonal relations than that of the European view of children that was prevalent at the time:

“Some of the lessons learned by seventeenth century French missionaries concerning the efficacy of aboriginal residential schools were apparently remembered by the Jesuits when they took up aboriginal schooling again in the 1840s. They followed certain pedagogical principles in what could be described as bush or wilderness schools. These principles included “tact, infinite patience and gentleness,” — in effect a rejection of the European idea of childhood, “which always saw the man in the child” and which regarded childhood “as a period of preparation, obedience, as discipline, often of a harsh character.”

Carney, a University of Alberta professor and former Catholic residential school principal and regional administrator was a historian who knew the material in depth. He disputed what he felt was a rather simplistic view of residential schools in this commentary on the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal People.

Side note: Robert Carney was the father of Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy on Climate Change. In this 2014 article, Robert Carney was quoted as saying that northern residential schools tried to maintain aboriginal wilderness life. By contrast, his son Mark Carney, appears to be selling First Nations the modern-day version of ‘glass beads’ — carbon credits and such-like, which entail “the lack of delivery of an invisible substance to no one.” But I digress.

None of the foregoing context appears in mainstream media stories about the residential schools. For non-Canadian readers, it should be noted that there are more than 600 distinct aboriginal tribes in Canada, so the issues and impacts related to residential schools can vary greatly by tribe, geographic location, and period of time.

TB was reportedly endemic to aboriginal people, at least on the plains. Scrofula, a glandular swelling that is a precursor for TB, had been identified in aboriginal people by Captain John Palliser when he surveyed the border (1857–1861) between what would become Canada and the US. Bison are carriers of TB, but early Plains Indians ate a rather hardy ‘keto’ diet of buffalo and led open air, nomadic lives, which likely meant TB did not fully manifest itself until their diet drastically changed with the near total decimation of the buffalo by about 1870, and the switch to a carbohydrate rich (if meagre) European diet. Living in stationary camps on reserve, in cramped and squalid conditions with large numbers of family members and poor diets meant TB rapidly became an epidemic.

As noted above, tuberculosis was the greatest killer of all Canadians until the 1960s. In BC, Zilm and Warbinek (2006) report that: “In the late 1910s and early 1920s, TB was still of epidemic proportions in B.C…. in 1922, the death rate for Asians was 440 per 100,000 and for the “white population” was 78 per 100,000; the figure for First Nations people in B.C. may have been up to 20 times higher (Norton, 1999).”

Indeed, the Truth and Reconciliation final report about residential schools states (pg 93) that: “From those cases where the cause of death was reported, it is clear that until the 1950s, the schools were the sites of an ongoing tuberculosis crisis. Tuberculosis accounted for just less than 50% of the recorded deaths….”

The report lists several other respiratory conditions that were prevalent causes of death which combined account for a total of some 66.1% in the named register.

To reorient myself to the public health situation of the early 1900s, I watched the excellent PBS documentary “The Forgotten Plague” which documents the ravages of tuberculosis on individuals and society. The documentary shows that initially people did not know how TB was transmitted. Most people and doctors thought TB was hereditary and this myth continued long after medical experts knew it was transmitted by a germ, discovered in 1882 by Robert Koch.

Ironically, once Koch’s discovery became part of the mainstream medical assessment of people, “The Forgotten Plague” documentary explains that those with TB who had previously been accepted in society, once diagnosed, were ostracized.

As noted in Moffat et al (2013): “Before the discovery of antituberculosis drugs, those suffering from TB were institutionalized in TB sanitoriums for a “rest cure,” which was the dominant means of TB treatment at the time. Once admitted to the sanitorium, patients were often required to stay for extended periods of time — months, or even years. Treatment included rest, relaxation, emphasis on proper nutrition, and exposure to fresh air and sunshine. Sanitoriums also performed an important infection control purpose in that they removed the infectious individual from healthy society (Long, 2007).”

Many of the people interviewed in “The Forgotten Plague” are former sanatoria patients; most of their family members had died of TB before they were fortunate enough to get treatment — that was the situation at the turn of the century. One of the speakers in the documentary reports he was in a sanatorium for 12 years before being released as healthy.

The Truth and Reconciliation residential school report is very critical of the fact that children who were infected with TB were brought to residential schools, thus infecting others. It is difficult to determine today whether those children may have been sufferers of Latent TB — whose condition would not have been identified as there are no external symptoms. The children may have been taken from a high-risk TB home situation, only to have Latent TB develop and infect others at the school, as the stressful circumstances, isolation and poor diet may have led to the disease taking over the body. Children of about age 5 and under are unable to mount an effective immune response to TB.

The Truth and Reconciliation residential school report also refers to an ‘unnamed register’ of deaths. “Unnamed” seems ominous and indicative of a lack of care, however it could refer to a loss of continuity of identity if individuals were transferred in or out of the school for health reasons.

Moffat et al (2013) in “Sanitoriums and the Canadian Colonial Legacy: The Untold Experiences of Tuberculosis Treatment” note that “within the context of TB, public health officials were granted the authority to coercively institutionalize the affected, forcibly removing infected individuals and placing them in sanitoriums (Shedden, 2011)”. Due to the long treatment periods, contact with family, culture and heritage was lost. One aboriginal testimonial in Moffat reads: “My brother went to the sanitorium and stayed there for seven years because he was allergic to the medication. It took seven years for the tuberculosis to go dormant. I never knew my brother. My older sister has no memory of him. My siblings never met their brother until he was thirteen. He was a total stranger. That’s the emotional part — that we had a brother we never knew.”

Moffat also presents testimony that children who recovered from TB, when they returned to the reserve and their families, were often bullied as ‘fatty’ or mocked for their pale skin, a symptom of the disease and due to lack of outdoor activity. TB treatment primarily consisted of a highly regimented schedule, very substantial meals along with resting outdoors in the fresh air. Though the food was probably welcome in a time when many people suffered malnutrition, the forced bed rest, imposed upon aboriginal children by people who did not speak any aboriginal language and whose customs were completely foreign to aboriginal family life on the reservation must have been torture for the children who were incarcerated in sanatoriums.

Jetty (2020) explains that “Some young children who recovered from TB were sent directly from TB sanatoria to residential school, adding to their trauma…Families may not have been informed about the well-being or whereabouts of children taken to sanatoria. Some children died, and families may not have known where they were buried. Children who returned to their home communities may not have understood the language, skills or social norms anymore.”

This kind of experience of loss of family connection was not unique to aboriginal people in Canada’s residential schools.

In “Stigma and silence: oral histories of tuberculosis”, Kelly (2010) recounts the isolation, loneliness, and disconnection to family of Irish tuberculosis sufferers who, as children, spent years in recovery in sanatoriums. In Raymond Hurt’s “Tuberculosis sanatorium regimen in the 1940s: a patient’s personal diary” (2004) one gets a glimpse of the extreme regimentation of a sanatorium (albeit in the UK), and how once diagnosed, that individual faced rejection from her husband, and was separated from her 15-month-old baby, all in an effort to save her life and prevent her family from being infected.

Likewise, regarding those who died of TB while at the residential schools, as victims of a contagious disease they were buried with haste. TB generated tremendous social stigma then as now. Historically, rather than expose a family to being socially ostracized for having a TB victim in the family, individuals might be buried without a marker. (I cannot say if this was the norm in residential schools; it did happen in broader society.) In terms of markers, certainly, unless people were wealthy in those early days, the common grave marker was a simple wood cross or headboard.

In the early days of Canada, death was common for all — including infants and children off reserve as reported by Matthews (1997). In 1891, of 117 deaths in Alberta, 65 were under 15 years of age. Also, he notes this sad story — “The newspaper report of a baby death in 1904 ends with this: “Mr. and Mrs. Graham have been most unfortunate with their children, having lost four within the last three years.””

Matthews also explains that in order for a body to be shipped to relatives, there had to be a coroner’s certificate. Likewise, if a body was to be shipped any distance, it would need to be embalmed. (I didn’t know that embalming developed out of the US Civil War, where people wanted the body of their loved ones shipped to them.) Matthews work relates to Alberta; I do not know if these were the terms elsewhere in Canada. In light of the fact that some residential schools were rather remote, and operating budgets were very small, it is unlikely that either coroner or undertaking services would have been available or affordable for shipping bodies home. The Truth and Reconciliation report, Volume 4, discussed in detail the issue of costs of shipping bodies versus local burial and that victims of contagious disease required a sealed casket — a significant expense in those times — and that families would have to pay for those costs.

There were/are laws under the Quarantine Act against shipping victims of contagious conditions anywhere, so as not to introduce a disease vector elsewhere.

In the 1950’s, a third of the Inuit population were infected with TB. The Canadian government made concerted efforts to provide treatment for these people, even if the methods were heavy-handed and heartless by today’s standards. “When tuberculosis epidemics spread among northern Inuit communities in the 1950s and 1960s, thousands were transported to southern hospitals and sanatoria for treatment.” If the Canadian government had been intent on wiping out aboriginal people, such efforts to heal people of TB would not have been done. Even today in aboriginal communities, TB is a serious problem. This is partly because the social stigma of TB means victims and their families may avoid treatment, rather than face community rejection.

It is also known that many aboriginal children also suffered from violence and sexual abuse at residential schools. This is painfully well documented in the Truth and Reconciliation reports.

In parallel with Canadian aboriginal testimony, Kelly (2010) in interviews with Irish TB survivors, found that many people had been unable to talk about their experience with anyone. The Irish survivors also describe their family relations as broken. In interviews with Susan Kelly, while finally talking about their experience, some TB survivors were overcome by suppressed memories of sexual abuse. She writes: “In studies in America, polio survivors report ‘having been sexually abused at three times the rate of the general population of people who were children in the ‘50s’. Dr Frick a psychologist specialising in polio sufferers, in the New York Times writes, ‘If there was a paedophile in the family or on a hospital staff and a child was unable to run away, you can guess what might happen’. There were many children with tuberculosis who were also unable to run away.”

Combine such horrors with the sheer geographic isolation of most residential schools, the inherent isolation of immersion-style language learning, the distances that made family visits impossible, then many more graves, some unmarked, came from suicides and self-harm. In early times, suicide victims were buried in unmarked graves as the person’s last, desperate act was seen as blasphemous.

Likewise, we know from testimony and some school records that many lives were lost when able-bodied children tried to run away from schools and ended up dying in hostile terrain or drowning in deep water.

As for mass graves? Indeed, there will be a few mass graves found due to Spanish Flu epidemics. From the Truth and Reconciliation report, “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials” Volume 4 we read: “Several of the schools were overwhelmed by the influenza pandemic of 1918–19. All but two of the children and all of the staff were stricken with influenza at the Fort St. James, British Columbia, school and surrounding community in 1918. Seventy-eight people, including students, died. Initially, Father Joseph Allard, the school principal, conducted funeral services at the mission cemetery. But, as he wrote in his diary, the “others were brought in two or three at a time, but I could not go to the graveyard with all of them. In fact, several bodies were piled up in an empty cabin because there was no grave ready. A large common grave was dug for them.”

Regarding the brutal treatment, it is astounding that corporal punishment, such as the strap, was only outlawed in Canadian public schools in 2004. It had been outlawed in the 1980s in the UK, where caning was the norm for those who violated school rules. My late father had attended a British boarding school in the 1930s. His hands were caned black and blue, his left hand tied behind his back, and he was made to stand in the corner and be mocked by his peers for the heinous crime of being left-handed.

The residential school and sanatoria experience was traumatic and life-changing for all participants, but it does not meet the definition of genocide; the schools intended to provide language, math and reading skills to make participation in broader society possible and the sanatoria intended to return people to a state of health.

Perhaps some of this historical context will help former students and descendants make sense of what happened and why. This is not an excuse; it is simply historical context. References to studies of other populations like the Irish TB former students or US TB and polio victims is provided to further support the testimony of aboriginal people who suffered brutality and abuse at Canadian residential schools.

Some people are calling for the exhumation of remains or other kinds for reclamation. I empathize with the deep sense of loss of those who do not know where their loved ones are buried. My own child is buried in an unmarked grave far from me, as is my grandfather, who was a decorated World War I veteran and an aviation pioneer in Scotland and Canada. When my thoughts turn to them, the sense of loss and emptiness is disorienting, incomprehensible at times. But that is how it was and that is how it is, for me. I choose to press on and honor their memories in other ways than looking back.

I am deeply concerned that other major aboriginal issues in Canada, like sufficient, good quality housing and clean drinking water on reserves, and treatment of existing and on-going TB infections in some aboriginal populations — the needs of the LIVING — are being upstaged by the media cacophony about the dead, and particularly the media inferences of mass graves and genocidal intent. It would be nice if the important issues like clean water and proper housing that would enhance the health and life of present-day people could get headline news.

It is sad and annoying to me that mainstream media reporters seem reluctant to do any additional research on these stories to set historical context. Their hyped-up coverage must surely further torture the broken hearts of those people who are already suffering. This click bait news is also driving a rift between Canadians, driving rage in those who do not know this history, leading to the vandalization and burning of churches (54 as of this writing), and on the other hand, creating resentment in people who do know this history or who at least know the claim of genocide is unwarranted. Present day Canadians who had no role in the residential schools are being smeared in the international press in a manner that is inconsistent with the historical facts. This will not lead to reconciliation or practical solutions for the real needs of aboriginal people in Canada and will destabilize what had been growing and friendly partnerships between many aboriginal people and off-reserve society in Canada.

I hope this post might help some people have a better understanding of the times.

Michelle Stirling researched, wrote, and co-produced 41 x ½ hr historical shows about Southern Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Hugh Dempsey, then curator of the Glenbow Museum. She also researched and wrote a 6 hr. mini-series (unproduced) about the North West Mounted Police and their trek west to stop the genocide of the Blackfoot Nation by whiskey traders. Stirling is a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists and the AAAS.

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Thanks for reading. For more on unmarked graves and Indian Residential Schools, read The Unknown Truth Of Canada's Residential School System

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