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he goal of Canada’s Indian residential school system, after all, shared that of its U.S. Indian boarding school counterpart: “Kill the Indian, and save the man.” More than 150,000 children were taken from their homes between 1883 and 1997, often forcibly, and placed in distant boarding schools where the focus was on manual labour, religious instruction and cultural assimilation. The TRC Final Report concluded that the Indian Residential School system was an attempted “cultural genocide,” but the escalating number of recovered unmarked graves points to something even darker. Given that more than 1,300 graves have been identified using ground-penetrating radar at only four of the 139 federally run residential schools, the current official number of 4,120 students known to have died in the schools will end up being only a fraction of the actual total.
Apologists for the residential school system have argued in recent weeks that the children buried at these schools largely died of diseases like tuberculosis (TB) and that the schools did the best they could to provide education and medical care to First Nations, Inuit and Métis children during a time when their communities were being devastated by similar diseases. But even a cursory reading of the historical literature on residential schools shows just how wrong this line of thinking is.
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The reality is that the conditions in the schools themselves were the leading contributor to the often-shocking death rates among the students. In 1907, Indian Affairs chief medical officer Peter Bryce reported some truly disturbing findings to his superiors. After having visited 35 government funded schools in western Canada, Bryce reported that 25 percent of all children who had attended these schools had died; at one school, the number was 69 percent. While Bryce reported that “the almost invariable cause of death given is tuberculosis,” he by no means saw this as natural or inevitable. Bryce, instead, placed the blame for these appalling death rates on the schools themselves, which were poorly constructed, lacked proper ventilation and frequently housed sick students in the dormitories alongside their healthy classmates.
Bryce wasn’t alone in sounding the warnings about the schools. Throughout the system’s 100-plus-year history, school inspectors, school principals, medical officials and Indian agents repeatedly issued warnings about the unhealthy conditions in the schools. This archival record details the schools’ inadequate medical facilities, nonexistent isolation rooms and lack of school nurses. It also documents perennially overcrowded and dilapidated buildings with poor ventilation and insufficient heating as well as the woefully inadequate nutrition provided to students.
The issue of food and nutrition, in particular, speaks to the ways in which the poor conditions in the schools undermined student health. As residential school historian J.R. Miller has written, “‘We were always hungry’ could serve as the slogan for any organization of former residential school students.” The TRC collected haunting testimony from survivors, including Andrew Paul, who described his time at the Aklavik Roman Catholic Residential School in the Northwest Territories: “We cried to have something good to eat before we sleep. A lot of the times the food we had was rancid, full of maggots, stink.”
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/canadas-residential-schools-were-a-horror/?amp=true