The myth of Canada's residential schools for native children holds that the schools had a paternalistic purpose, and that even after all is revealed about them -- the physical and sexual abuse, the forced relocation of children, the ban on speaking native languages -- Canada meant well. The country was simply limited by the assimilative vision of the times.
That myth may at last fall when Canadians take a close look at the abysmally high death rates among children, from tuberculosis and other causes, at the schools. They did not die in one great epidemic; they died over many years -- at least 40 -- as the federal government ignored warnings from its own medical advisers.
The full story of those deaths has not entered the Canadian consciousness. The Canadian Encyclopedia says nothing about tuberculosis under "residential schools" or "native education." When the Canadian government apologized in 1998 for sexual and physical abuse at the schools, it said nothing about the deaths of children. This winter, Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice said he will not apologize to aboriginals for the government's role in overseeing the largely church-run residential schools because "fundamentally, the underlying objective had been to try and provide an education to aboriginal children." Dead children do not learn.
The country ought to come to terms with this terrible episode in its history. Good intentions do not soften a criminally negligent implementation. If anything, the supposed good intentions make matters worse. They constitute a promise. If the federal government and the churches that directly ran the schools looked the other way while native children died en masse, the promise was not kept. If the promise was repeatedly avowed even as it became clear that large numbers of children were dying, the promise was a lie, a trick, a concealment.
Was that the case? As The Globe's Bill Curry and Karen Howlett reported this week, documents in the National Archives show the government received disturbing warnings of high death rates that it does not appear to have acted on. In 1907, Peter Bryce, the chief medical officer in the Indian Affairs Department, reported that one in every four students at 15 Western Canadian residential schools had died from tuberculosis over a 14-year period. At one school, seven in every ten died. Dr. Bryce published a book in 1922 excoriating the government for continuing to allow healthy children to be exposed to sick ones. John Milloy, a Trent University professor who has done extensive research on the residential schools, said the churches were paid on a per-capita basis to run the schools, and would therefore accept ill children and refuse to send home those who became sick. As late as 1936, the government was still being urged by the Canadian Tuberculosis Association to segregate or remove stricken children, and survey the schools each year to track the extent of the disease's spread.
How many aboriginal children died from tuberculosis at the schools? Health Canada's website reports a death rate as high as 8,000 per 100,000 during the 1930s and 1940s -- decades after Dr. Bryce's warnings. To put that in context, the death rates from tuberculosis on native reserves were, says Health Canada, among "the highest ever reported in a human population" -- and at 700 per 100,000 people, they were less than 10 per cent of the rate afflicting children in the residential schools during the 1930s and 1940s.
What did Canada know and when should it have acted? The answers should emerge through the work of a task force announced by Mr. Prentice this week in response to The Globe articles. That task force will take a long overdue look at records of child deaths in the residential schools. Its work will be overseen by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that will travel across Canada holding hearings about the residential schools.
National myths die hard. Children die all too easily.