100 years apart, but together for Indigenous children

Advocate who’s battling Ottawa in court takes inspiration from doctor who raised alarm in 1907

OTTAWA—Last week, Cindy Blackstock stood beside the grave of a man who, more than a century ago, sounded the alarm about children dying in Canada’s residential schools.

Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, a non-Indigenous medical doctor and civil servant, warned the federal government in 1907 that poor ventilation and overcrowding was fuelling the spread of tuberculosis in residential schools across Western Canada, and that children were dying at alarming rates. His report demanded an “immediate remedy,” but the government did not act.

Blackstock, a child welfare activist and

McGill University professor, had come to his grave at a pivotal moment in her own battle. She was about to take on the federal government in court — again — over systemic discrimination against First Nations children.

“I feel a kinship with him in many ways, even though we’re 100 years apart,” said Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, and a member of the Gitxsan First Nation.

“I always think he must have felt like he was screaming into silence. And sometimes I feel that way, too.”

Bryce was sidelined for being a whistleblower and pushed out of public service. He died in 1932, when he was 80. His gravestone sits under a canopy of trees in Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery, a grand 160-acre resting place with hiking trails, extravagant gardens and tombstones dating to the 19th century.

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.

The question on Blackstock’s mind as she visited Bryce’s grave last week was: Are people finally ready to act?

For 14 years, Blackstock has been fighting the federal government on behalf of First Nations children. The legal battle started in 2007 when she filed a human rights complaint alleging the government was discriminating against them by underfunding the child-welfare system.

This past week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government moved forward with a controversial legal challenge, seeking to overturn two Canadian Human Rights Tribunal rulings that found, among other things, the government had wilfully and recklessly discriminated against First Nations children by underfunding child welfare services, which incentivized removing them from their families.

The government does not deny the discrimination, but considers the tribunal’s award of $40,000 for each victim or their family an “overreach of jurisdiction.”

Blackstock, along with lawyers representing the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, the Assembly of First Nations and other groups, made their arguments last week in Federal Court.

Blackstock had hoped the government would back down from this fight amid calls from opposition leaders and the public to do so, especially after news in late May that the remains of 215 Indigenous children had been discovered on the grounds near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School — a stark reminder of historical injustices that persist today.

Many of those children might have lived if Canada had heeded Bryce’s warnings, Blackstock said.

And more may suffer, she added, if we fail to address problems that persist today.

Bryce’s “greatest lament was that the work did not get done,” she said. “And so that’s the question for all of us: Are we going to get the work done this time?”

Arriving at the cemetery days before she returned to court, Blackstock walked carefully down a steep grassy hill to reach Bryce’s grave. “Someone has been here since I came last time,” she said. There were new gifts placed on top of the headstone — tobacco pouches, dried flowers, small rocks carried from communities across the country. Blackstock had recently placed pinwheels around the grave, “to represent the joyousness of children,” she said. “And to let them know that this was a

person who was looking out for them.”

Blackstock first visited the grave in 2008, a year into her court battle with the federal government and the day before then-prime minister Stephen Harper made a formal apology to residential school victims. At that time, the only regular visitors were Bryce’s family members. Blackstock wanted to change that.

She started by sprucing the place up. She brought a garden shovel and dug a few inches into the earth around the headstone to create a small flower bed, unaware that doing so was against cemetery rules. The garden stayed. Planted around it are red geraniums, a lavender bush, healing plants like echinacea. An orange plaque amongst the flowers bears the words “Every Child Matters,” a gift from a high school class.

Blackstock developed a relationship with Bryce’s family and is now the caretaker of his grave. She shares his story widely and has turned the burial site into a place of learning and reflection. School groups make trips to learn about Bryce. “When they come, we blow bubbles,” Blackstock said, removing a tube from her bag and waving the wand in the spring breeze to demonstrate. “Each bubble represents the dreams of a child.”

Blackstock visits the grave often. She trudged through snow after the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal victory in January 2016 and read excerpts from that 226-page ruling to Bryce. With a smile, she added: “Then I went over the hill and read it to Duncan Campbell Scott.”

Buried at Beechwood are some of Canada’s most notorious historical figures, including Scott, a poet and public servant who oversaw the residential school system and whose professional

goal was to “get rid of the Indian problem.”

Scott, deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs, was Bryce’s nemesis.

He thwarted Bryce’s efforts to improve health conditions in residential schools and halted funding for his annual reports, said the historian John Milloy.

“Bryce went up against a disinterested public and a very determined civil servant,” Milloy said. “He wasn’t the only one that Duncan Campbell Scott chopped off at the knees.”

Milloy, with Blackstock and others, worked with Beechwood a few years ago to update Scott’s graveside plaque with a more complete account of his life’s work. The historical profile now acknowledges his leadership role in the “assimilationist” Indian residential school system and cites the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Committee report, which found that the institutions “amounted to cultural genocide.”

In 1907, as medical inspector to the Department of the Interior and Indian Affairs, Bryce

visited 35 residential schools in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. What he found shocked him: defective sanitary conditions, poor ventilation, inadequate air quality. Administrators had limited understanding of how disease spreads and minimized the “ever-present danger of infection,” he wrote in a report.

Surveys collected from some of the schools showed that 25 per cent of Indigenous students had died of tuberculosis, while at one school 69 per cent of former pupils were dead.

His report, which came at a time before bureaucratic jargon, makes a blunt case for immediate remedy: “We have created a situation so dangerous to health that I was often surprised that the results were not even worse than they have been shown statistically to be.”

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

In a letter from that time, Bryce wrote that people like Duncan Campbell Scott were “counting upon the ignorance and indifference of the public to the fate of the Indians.” Bryce believed there would be an “awakening of the health conscience of the people” — that the public would ultimately hold the government accountable.

There was no such awakening. The story faded from headlines. The public moved on. The government did little to change. Blackstock has seen that pattern repeat throughout history. Decade after decade, Indigenous

children have been taken from their families, through residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, the child-welfare system. The public outrage comes in waves, but fades before there is real change.

That is why the story of Bryce is so important to Blackstock. “He puts a red-hot poker stick into the myth that people back then didn’t know any better,” she said.

“We have this way of erasing these people who were of that period who were speaking up against this inhumanity.” Focusing on the past, she said, allows us to avoid the major issue: “We are the people of this period. We know better. And the question is whether we’re going to do better.”

Will change come? Blackstock believes so. The younger generation gives her hope.

When she began her court battle with the federal government in 2007, there was little interest in the hearings. In 2009, a high school class showed up. That group went back and told others about it. More students came.

By 2012, “the courtroom was so full we’d book them in in shifts,” she said.

Blackstock believes we are moving further away from the “ignorance and indifference” Scott counted on and closer to the “awakening” Bryce hoped for. “If we educate children, then they grow up knowing these injustices and not making excuses for them,” Blackstock said.

Over five days in court last week, lawyers representing the federal government and First Nations children made their arguments. Days or weeks from now, when the decision comes in, Blackstock will once again walk down the grassy hill to Bryce’s grave to share the news of what she is convinced will be a win for children.

“(Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce’s) greatest lament was that the work did not get done. And so that’s the question for all of us: Are we going to get the work done this time?” CINDY BLACKSTOCK

CHILD WELFARE ACTIVIST/MCGILL UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR