"It suffices for us to know … that of a total of 1,537 pupils reported upon, nearly 25 per cent of ex-pupils are dead, of one school with an absolutely accurate statement, 69 per cent of ex-pupils are dead, and that everywhere the almost invariable cause of death given is tuberculosis."

With these words, Dr. Peter H. Bryce, chief medical officer of the Canadian Indian department (of the early 20th century), warned his superiors of the staggering toll the residential school system was taking on aboriginal populations in Manitoba and the Northwest.  Dr. Bryce’s report, completed after he visited 15 schools, was quoted in an article on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen, the Canadian capital’s major daily, exactly one hundred years ago today, on 15 November 1907. With this article’s publication, it thus became public knowledge that a generation of aboriginals within Canada was dying at a staggering rate – a rate that some would later call genocidal.

The Ottawa Citizen article gained new currency due to the efforts of Kevin Annett, a former United Church minister who was fired from his job at about the same time as when he began digging into the Church’s troubled history with the Canadian residential school system.

Annett notes that the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide lists five possible acts, "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," as constituting genocide, of which "[k]illing members of the group" (that most of us associate with the Nazi extermination of European Jews) is one. Another act identified in the Convention, however, is "[f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group," and this, he says, applies to the Canadian case. Moreover, Annett argues that school administrators intentionally kept healthy pupils in the same poorly ventilated dorms as those sick with tuberculosis, thereby showing an ‘intent’ to spread the disease and kill more students.

Still, others who have looked into the residential schools issue closely, such as John Milloy of Trent University (who was hired by the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples to study government archives) disagrees with Annett’s ‘genocide’ label. In a recent article in the Globe and Mail, he is quoted as saying that what transpired at the residential schools "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.’" Instead, Milloy argues that the high death rate was a result of poorly funded schools, which led administrators to simply stuff as many students – sick or healthy – into the building in order to qualify for as much ‘per capita’ governing funding possible.

Regardless of which explanation of history is correct, Dr. Bryce’s report shows that aboriginal children in the Canadian residential school system suffered tremendously and died in great numbers. It thus seems fitting to take note of the 100th anniversary of the publishing of Dr. Bryce’s rarely remembered findings in a mainstream newspaper, given that the legacy of the suffering he brought to light continues to the present day.

Following his reporting on the dangerous situation faced by aboriginal children in residential schools, Dr. Bryce was removed from his position in the Indian department. Much later, in 1922, he published a short book, entitled The Story of a National Crime, in which he lambasted the Indian department for not responding to his concerns. Unfortunately, this work is little known in the mainstream and rarely, if ever, mentioned in official school curricula, despite its obvious significance.

The Canadian Government recently launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to "[a]cknowledge Residential School experiences, impacts and consequences", amongst other goals. We will thus surely hear more about the abovementioned suffering in the residential school system through the hearings process and so not have to resort to articles published 100 years ago to have a sense of what happened. Indeed, what happened to North America’s original settlers should be an issue that concerns all Canadians – not just aboriginals. It is something that we should grieve collectively. And, certainly, it is an issue that won’t go away until all the ghosts of the past are confronted.