Gary Geddes
Why are so many surprised about the findings at the Kamloops and Marieval Indian Residential Schools? Indigenous folks have been telling us this was happening for the last hundred years. They sent letters to the government of John A. Macdonald and to his deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, about missing children and conditions in the schools, but no one paid any attention.
© Provided by Edmonton Journal Edmonton Indian Residential school, Edmonton, Alberta. 1924.
What’s so troubling is that all the information needed to have made such claims credible and worth investigating is there in the historical record. Start at the top. John A. bragged in Parliament that he was keeping Indians near starvation level to save money. And many of those same Indians died from neglect, lack of food, or food that was rotten.
Go down the chain of command a notch to Scott and you find him ignoring the complaints and dismissing Indians as fat and lazy. When Dr. Peter Bryce was sent out in 1907 to assess the health of students in the residential schools of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, he reported back to Scott that conditions were so appalling the death rate in several schools was in the 40-60-per-cent range.
Scott shelved the report and made the good doctor’s life very difficult, but six years later he would admit: “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.” Why they did not live is left unmentioned, as if to imply it was a result of their own failings and alleged higher susceptibility to disease. However, their “education” was killing them.
His cynical comment delivers exactly the average death-ratio provided earlier by Bryce, who had also warned him the government could well be charged with manslaughter for creating such deplorable conditions. Not in the habit of listening to reason when it came to his pet project, Scott wrote: “It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem.” If the reference to a “final solution” doesn’t send chills down your spine, the cavalier dismissal of those appalling conditions should.
Video: Kamloops Nation sees itself on forefront of residential school truths (The Canadian Press)
While interviewing elders for Medicine Unbundled, I kept hearing about the disappearance of children and family members, including the hundreds of Inuit children and adults taken by ship or plane from the north to hospitals in Quebec, Hamilton and Edmonton. Without warning or proper explanation, without careful recording of names and home place, many were never to be seen again by families, their deaths and place of burial remaining a mystery.
I received several emails from Eleanor James Robertson in Winnipeg, about her aunt Christina Grieves, a beauty and a family legend, who at age 15, was sent to Ninette Sanatorium with TB and died a year later. Her relatives received no explanation for the cause of death or indication of where Christina was buried. Other patients claimed she was in good health and that the surgery was minor. Was it an abortion or involuntary sterilization that was botched? I spent some time in the Manitoba Archives looking for answers but drew a blank. In an email, Eleanor said: “It’s quite sad how many Aboriginal people died in these institutions without any care for the families who lost loved ones. They believed that we were savages, so ‘what is another loss?’ ”
It’s more than sad; it’s criminal. George Muldoe from Kispiox in B.C. was an inmate at the United Church-run Edmonton Residential School near St. Albert, where he was drafted at age 13 to dig graves for bodies arriving regularly from the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital, no easy task in dead of winter. He recalls carrying the tiny coffin of an infant to be buried with no marker in one of the haphazardly placed graves. George knows the names on the memorial plaque represent only a small portion of those buried in the surrounding area. He tried to tell this story for more than 25 years, but no one was interested or prepared to believe him. Now his phone is ringing off the hook.
While I was having trouble with my research, Songhees elder Joan Morris said: “The problem I have with white people is they don’t know how to listen.” The comment was directed at me as well as others. Non-Indigenous ally Hugh Brody adds a further dimension to this observation: “Listening is difficult; hearing, even more so.”
After the Truth and Reconciliation hearings we started to listen. Perhaps now we’ll actually begin to hear.
Gary Geddes is the author of Medicine Unbundled: A Journey Through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care and The Resumption of Play.
What’s so troubling is that all the information needed to have made such claims credible and worth investigating is there in the historical record. Start at the top. John A. bragged in Parliament that he was keeping Indians near starvation level to save money. And many of those same Indians died from neglect, lack of food, or food that was rotten.
Go down the chain of command a notch to Scott and you find him ignoring the complaints and dismissing Indians as fat and lazy. When Dr. Peter Bryce was sent out in 1907 to assess the health of students in the residential schools of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, he reported back to Scott that conditions were so appalling the death rate in several schools was in the 40-60-per-cent range.
Scott shelved the report and made the good doctor’s life very difficult, but six years later he would admit: “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.” Why they did not live is left unmentioned, as if to imply it was a result of their own failings and alleged higher susceptibility to disease. However, their “education” was killing them.
His cynical comment delivers exactly the average death-ratio provided earlier by Bryce, who had also warned him the government could well be charged with manslaughter for creating such deplorable conditions. Not in the habit of listening to reason when it came to his pet project, Scott wrote: “It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem.” If the reference to a “final solution” doesn’t send chills down your spine, the cavalier dismissal of those appalling conditions should.
Video: Kamloops Nation sees itself on forefront of residential school truths (The Canadian Press)
While interviewing elders for Medicine Unbundled, I kept hearing about the disappearance of children and family members, including the hundreds of Inuit children and adults taken by ship or plane from the north to hospitals in Quebec, Hamilton and Edmonton. Without warning or proper explanation, without careful recording of names and home place, many were never to be seen again by families, their deaths and place of burial remaining a mystery.
I received several emails from Eleanor James Robertson in Winnipeg, about her aunt Christina Grieves, a beauty and a family legend, who at age 15, was sent to Ninette Sanatorium with TB and died a year later. Her relatives received no explanation for the cause of death or indication of where Christina was buried. Other patients claimed she was in good health and that the surgery was minor. Was it an abortion or involuntary sterilization that was botched? I spent some time in the Manitoba Archives looking for answers but drew a blank. In an email, Eleanor said: “It’s quite sad how many Aboriginal people died in these institutions without any care for the families who lost loved ones. They believed that we were savages, so ‘what is another loss?’ ”
It’s more than sad; it’s criminal. George Muldoe from Kispiox in B.C. was an inmate at the United Church-run Edmonton Residential School near St. Albert, where he was drafted at age 13 to dig graves for bodies arriving regularly from the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital, no easy task in dead of winter. He recalls carrying the tiny coffin of an infant to be buried with no marker in one of the haphazardly placed graves. George knows the names on the memorial plaque represent only a small portion of those buried in the surrounding area. He tried to tell this story for more than 25 years, but no one was interested or prepared to believe him. Now his phone is ringing off the hook.
While I was having trouble with my research, Songhees elder Joan Morris said: “The problem I have with white people is they don’t know how to listen.” The comment was directed at me as well as others. Non-Indigenous ally Hugh Brody adds a further dimension to this observation: “Listening is difficult; hearing, even more so.”
After the Truth and Reconciliation hearings we started to listen. Perhaps now we’ll actually begin to hear.
Gary Geddes is the author of Medicine Unbundled: A Journey Through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care and The Resumption of Play.
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