“The trip to the residential school often started with an ominous knock on the door.” That is a quote from the executive summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report of 2015.  A painting by Ken Monkman that was on display in the Winnipeg Art Gallery showed this well. It was the start of what by the UN analysis was genocide—i.e. the forcible removal of children from their families. That is considered genocide. Not the same as Nazi genocide, but all genocides are different. We should remember that. Often we don’t.

These were acts of unforgivable and despicable arrogance that often created horrendous trauma for the children. Much of this trauma created post-traumatic stress that in turn ruined the lives of the children and their children. It flowed from generation to generation like a poisoned stream.

Monkman’s painting shows a small wooden house: a simple bungalow with multicoloured tiles stretching to roof. Dense bush and open fields flank the home to the east, and to the west, dark and foreboding clouds form in the sky.

Three children run from the home at full sprint. Their backs are turned to the viewer as they race for the bush in the distance. Birds look as ominous as those in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds. The scene they are fleeing — the one transpiring in front of the house — is pure chaos. Terror is immanent. It soaks right through the paint. It touches us as viewers.

Seven Mounties are dressed in traditional clean red uniforms  mainly used for ceremonies. One of them stands on the house’s front porch with his arm extended to the side, pointing at three children trying to escape. Their backs face us. Will they escape? This can’t end well.

The other police officers are spread out in front of the home.  One of them stands to the side holding a rifle. Why does he hold a rifle? What does he need that for? The others are snatching Indigenous children away from their wailing mothers. Perhaps they think of them as savages. Two priests and two nuns help carry out the kidnappings. Who are the savages in this painting?

In the centre of the frame is a mother wearing a long blue dress. She lunges forward, reaching out for her child, who is being carried off by a bearded priest in an ominous black robe  with a large wooden crucifix dangling from his neck. Think about that—a child kidnapped from his loving mother and delivered by police into the arms of a priest in a black robe. We know what happened after such events.  The horror runs deep.

One mother’s fingers  clasp air while her child eludes her.  Two Mounties restrain her, grabbing her dress her arm and her  hair, taking hold of anything they can to separate her from her child. What would you think if you were that mother?  What would you have done? Would you have been destroyed for life? The Mounties are committing a crime authorized by law. It is a national crime. A shame on the country.

The mouth of one mother is open. You can see the deep horror in her face. Her face is frozen in to a scream like the painting by Edvard Munch. She is fighting against all odds to save her child.  There is nothing that can be done.  Law and power are not on her side. There are other mothers too, fighting to save their children. Perhaps they will succeed. Perhaps not.  Perhaps the children fleeing to the bush will escape their would-be captors. What do you think?   At least one mother seems to have given up hope.  It seems certain. Her child will be taken. How do you fight the law?

The children look terrified.  The law and religion are after them and they mean them harm. They don’t see any “good intent” around them. Only terror.

In Manitoba today I read about 7 Conservative politicians who as far as I know never uttered a word about such horrors. But today they are horrified at the lawless destruction of property. That concerns them deeply. Today they claim that people should be held  accountable for pulling down a couple of statues of 2 English queens. Some people have also set fire to churches. I condemn that too. Let me be clear, I don’t advocate destruction of property, whether public or private, but is this really the most important thing we should worry about right now? Is this what we should be horrified about?

I also saw a post on Facebook today that  said: “Be thankful, we only come for your statues, when you came for our children.’  The “crimes” hardly seem comparable. What do you think?

Dr. Peter Bryce who was non-indigenous prepared a series of annual reports for the federal government in the early part of the 20^th century, warning them in one of those reports that the schools in Manitoba and the Northwest Territories had very high rates of tuberculosis because of overcrowding and poor ventilation. He found that nearly 25% of students in residential schools died there.  In some cases even more died. Dr. Bryce  knew there was a reason for this, but he did not, as Manitoba Judge Giesbrecht did, use it as an excuse for why so many indigenous children were dying. There was a reason why so many were dying. Dr. Bryce demanded that the government find an “immediate remedy.” But, of course, the government did not act. As Amy Dempsey reported in the Toronto Start and reprinted in the Winnipeg Free Press,

“Bryce felt certain that the public, hearing his account of conditions in residential schools, would demand change from the government. That didn’t happen. The story faded from the headlines and the public consciousness.”

Although the public lost interest, as they so often do unless the story leads to dramatic violence, it did catch the attention of government officials at the federal department of Indian Affairs like the by now infamous Duncan Campbell Scott, who ensured that life for Dr. Bryce became difficult at the department because he was standing in the way of civilizing the natives. As Dempsey said, “Bryce was sidelined for being a whistleblower and ultimately pushed out of public service.” As Dempsey also  reported,

“Bryce faced career repercussions for speaking out. The government suspended funding for his research, prevented him from speaking at international conferences, and blocked him from positions within the federal civil service. Forced into retirement in early 1920s, he wrote a tell-all book lamenting that this ‘trail of disease and death has gone on almost unchecked.’”

Bryce wrote that Duncan Campbell Scott, a high official with Indian Affairs, and others like him, were counting on the ignorance and disinterest of the Canadian public. They were right. Canada did not want to know the truth. And it certainly did not want the truth broadcast. It did what it could to shut him up. Will Canada continue to ignore what it has learned about its history, or will that now change? Time will tell. Each of us can make a difference to how Canada deals with what it has learned.

There are some bright lights in this dark story. Dr. Peter Bryce, a physician working for the federal government, at great cost to his own career, spoke out about the horrendous conditions in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. Eventually that led him into conflict with government officials who did not want the bad news so he was driven out of government.

When Dr. Peter Bryce was preparing his report for the federal government in 1906 he had given the principals of various residential schools a questionnaire regarding the health of their aboriginal students. He got responses from 15 different schools and found that of the 1,537 pupils in their schools “nearly 25 percent are dead.” Remember these were young children who had a long life expectancy and 25% were dead!  Dr. Bryce also reported about 1 of those schools where 69% of the ex-pupils were dead.

Dr. Bryce recommended that the federal government take over the schools, as clearly the churches had failed. It could hardly have been clearer that this was the right conclusion. Yet the federal government, notwithstanding death rates of 25% fatalities decided that the plan should be rejected because “it was viewed as too costly.” The lives of aboriginal children were not worth much.

Briefly, the federal government actually increased funding to the schools, but that fell by the wayside during the Depression. Soon the schools were again underfunded. As the TRC reported, “underfunding created by the cuts guaranteed that students would be poorly fed, clothed, and housed.  As a result, children were highly susceptible to tuberculosis.”

In one report Dr. Bryce said, “We have created a situation so dangerous to health that that I was often surprised that the results were not even worse than they had statistically proven to be.”  25% fatality rate is not high enough?

Dr. Bryce called residential schools “a national crime.”  Some have called it genocide. Who disagrees with that?

According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC ) report of 2021,

“For Aboriginal children, the relocation to residential schools was generally no healthier than their homes had been on the reserves. In 1897, Indian Affairs official Martin Benson reported that the industrial schools in Manitoba and the Northwest Territories had been hurriedly constructed of poor materials, badly laid out, without provision for lighting, heating, or ventilation.” In addition, drainage was poor, and water and fuel supplies were inadequate. Conditions were not any better in the church-built schools.”

The TRC reported how schools were selected without proper regard for either water supply or drainage. “Students’ health depended on clean water, good sanitation, and adequate ventilation.  But little was done to improve the poor living conditions that were identified at the beginning of the twentieth century.” Schools also were frequently not just dilapidated but “acute fire hazards,” according to R.A Hoey, not some left wing radical, but a man who had served as Indian Affairs Superintendent of Welfare and Training.  He said schools were generally of faulty construction and often failed to meet the minimum standards in the construction of public buildings, particularly institutions for the education of children.”

These were dreadful conditions for children to live in, but they were ideal conditions for diseases such as tuberculosis and others to flourish. Then, we must remember, Canada required many indigenous people to send their children to these schools. They could be imprisoned for disobeying this requirement. Children were often rudely yanked out of loving homes and sent to these fire traps “for their own good.”  What kind of good is that?

Imagine taking children from homes where they were loved to what were called residential schools or even industrial schools. Think about it.

Judge Brian Giesbrecht said it was time for indigenous people to move on. I know that sentiment is shared by many Canadians. It is very common among privileged Canadians.

Such statements are not just disingenuous, but also plain old fashioned ignorant. Compare this with the wisdom, understanding and deep empathy of my cousin Lori—one of the good people who are not blinded by privilege—who posted it on my blog. I am reposting it because I fear too many did not read it.

“Even though my maternal family was starved, beaten and most of them, including my grandfather, killed by Stalin, and, my grandmother, mother and her siblings , mere children, were forced to walk from Ukraine through Poland to reach Germany where they were imprisoned in forced labour and concentration camps and starved again, and even though the Canadian government who took them in as immigrants and made them pay back their passage, and the Canadian Government took away my people’s right to speak their own language and ignored their signed treaty to provide schooling in their own language, which led to me never being able to learn and speak my own language, and even though those events have coloured every minute of my entire life, I cannot pretend to understand the enormity of the experiences of indigenous Canadian people who endured these sorts of tortures and more, AND DID NOT HAVE THE ADVANTAGE OF WHITE SKIN or European heritage to give them even one advantage in their recovery from their experiences.
I can understand and support the healing efforts now being made by indigenous culture, and hope that someday we will stand together as a world culture without doing evil to one another.”

I wish more people like Judge Giesbrecht and other white people were as wise as Lori.