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The Government of Canada recently apologized to our First Nations' people for its residential school policy, which effectively suppressed the linguistic, cultural and spiritual practices of their pupils, with the ultimate aim of assimilation. Federal underfunding coupled with harsh discipline, exacerbated by the presence of abusive staff in some schools, also served to demoralize students and compromise their resistance to disease.
The apology has been a long time coming. A century ago, Dr. P.H. Bryce, then-chief medical officer for Canada's departments of the interior and Indian affairs (1904-1921), revealed that Aboriginal children were being decimated in his Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba and the North West Territories.1 A few years later he made an embittered and passionate plea for restitution.2
Bryce entered public health in the decades when the science of microbiology began providing a powerful tool for monitoring environmentally caused diseases. He kept statistics on health and disease as an essential means for identifying problems and their roots, although in the residential schools he had considerable trouble obtaining accurate information. However, what he did find was that, of the 1537 pupils who attended Canada's 15 residential schools between...