No human remains found 2 years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Canada

[Szdfan]

Both the Where Are the Children Buried and Paul Racher cite Peter Bryce, a physician whose reports on the apalling high rates of death among Native children at residential schools due to unsanitary conditions were suppressed by the Canadian government.

In a 1907 report Bryce cited an average mortality rate of between 15% and 24% among the schools' children and 42% in Aboriginal homes

It sounds like the residential schools were lifesavers, and cut the mortality rate in half or a quarter.

You skipped the last half of that sentence--

In a 1907 report Bryce cited an average mortality rate of between 15% and 24% among the schools' children and 42% in Aboriginal homes, where sick children were sometimes sent to die.

As well as the next sentence --

Bryce noted that the lack of certainty about the exact number of deaths was, in part, due to the official reports submitted by school principals and "defective way in which the returns had been made."

[Szdfan]

It is clear that communicable diseases were a primary cause of poor health and death for many Aboriginal people during the 19th and early 20" Centuries. Some children might have contracted disease at home prior to attending school, but others were likely infected within crowded, often unsanitary, and poorly constructed residential schools. It is also likely that significant numbers of chronically ill children died within a few years after school discharge.

Last I checked, communicable diseases were a significant cause of poor health and death amongst all peoples in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This wasn't some conspiracy against First Nations/Native Canadians/Native Americans/Indian/Aboriginal/Métis/Inuit/Eskimo/whatever you want to call them people.

From Where Are the Children Buried

Bryce also provided a national context for the school's death rates. Using the statistics for the Shingkwauk Home in Ontario, the Sarcee school in Alberta, and the Cranbrook school in British Columbia for the period from 1892 to 1908, he calculated an annual death rate, from all causes, of 8,000 deaths per 100,000. (He included deaths at school and "soon after leaving" in making this calculation.) By comparison, according to Bryce, the 1901 Canadian census showed a death rate, from all causes, for those between five and fourteen years of age, of an equivalent of 430 per 100,000. TRC statistical rescarch reported elsewhere demonstrates that this pattern of much higher death rates compared to children within the general Canadian population persisted as late as 1945. Thereafter, the death rate among Aboriginal children attending residential schools declined to levels more consistent with the general population.

[Josh]

Wait, so which is it?

Formerly the complaint was that children were dying, unaccounted for, at these residential schools.

But now the complaint is the children were "sent home to die", and apparently they were dying at home. If that's the case, though, they weren't lost, and they weren't in unmarked or mass graves - or if they were, it wasn't the residential school's fault.

It also says "where sick children were sometimes sent to die". That doesn't mean the 42% figure is all children "sent there to die". This sounds more like there were repeated epidemics affecting these populations.

Canada has since then set up an elaborate health care system to try to serve these populations that has a higher level of service than the rest of the country gets. I'm not quite sure what the complaint is here.

We now know that warehousing large numbers of people from poor backgrounds doesn't make outcomes better, but back then people didn't know that. They thought they were doing the right thing.

[Falco Knotwise]

Both the Where Are the Children Buried and Paul Racher cite Peter Bryce, a physician whose reports on the apalling high rates of death among Native children at residential schools due to unsanitary conditions were suppressed by the Canadian government.

Okay, thanks for checking that. Some parts I “skimmed over” and missed.

Well, I’m certainly not arguing against Dr. Bryce, only pushing back against the idea (which I’ve heard before) that the poor conditions were an intentional plot to “genocide” the indigenous people — not unless they planned on genociding all the staff who worked along with them, died of the same diseases, and were buried in the same cemeteries.

[Bootstrap]

Both the Where Are the Children Buried and Paul Racher cite Peter Bryce, a physician whose reports on the apalling high rates of death among Native children at residential schools due to unsanitary conditions were suppressed by the Canadian government.

Okay, thanks for checking that. Some parts I “skimmed over” and missed.

Well, I’m certainly not arguing against Dr. Bryce, only pushing back against the idea (which I’ve heard before) that the poor conditions were an intentional plot to “genocide” the indigenous people — not unless they planned on genociding all the staff who worked along with them, died of the same diseases, and were buried in the same cemeteries.

Is anyone saying that?

FWIW, you can read Peter Bryce's reports online, e.g. here: https://archive.org/details/1906v40i12p ... 0/mode/2up .

Peter Bryce also wrote a booklet later on in 1922. It's a short booklet, telling his side of it:

The story of a national crime : being an appeal for justice to the Indians of Canada; the wards of the nation, our allies in the Revolutionary War, our brothers-in-arms in the Great War

[Falco Knotwise]

Both the Where Are the Children Buried and Paul Racher cite Peter Bryce, a physician whose reports on the apalling high rates of death among Native children at residential schools due to unsanitary conditions were suppressed by the Canadian government.

Okay, thanks for checking that. Some parts I “skimmed over” and missed.

Well, I’m certainly not arguing against Dr. Bryce, only pushing back against the idea (which I’ve heard before) that the poor conditions were an intentional plot to “genocide” the indigenous people — not unless they planned on genociding all the staff who worked along with them, died of the same diseases, and were buried in the same cemeteries.

Is anyone saying that?

Yes, I had read that on the internet before, so I was skeptical of the claims at all at first. Nonetheless, I don’t doubt the conditions were as bad as the reports says they were, just the claims they were part of some intentional genocide plot.

[Bootstrap]

Is anyone saying that?

Yes, I had read that on the internet before, so I was skeptical of the claims at all at first. Nonetheless, I don’t doubt the conditions were as bad as the reports says they were, just the claims they were part of some intentional genocide plot.

OK, thanks. I don't think this was anything like an intentional genocidal plot.

Is anyone in this thread saying that?

FWIW, Wikipedia also discusses Peter Bryce. Here are the most interesting paragraphs. It also contains links to the things he wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bryce

In 1904 Bryce was appointed the Chief Medical Officer of the federal Departments of the Interior and Indian Affairs.[1][4] His 1905 and 1906 annual reports emphasized the abnormally high death rates for Indigenous peoples in Canada. In 1907 he wrote a "Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories" describing the health conditions of the Canadian residential school system in western Canada and British Columbia. This report was published without its recommendations, as Bryce discussed in his 1922 book The Story of a National Crime: Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1904 to 1921.

Bryce wrote that Indigenous children enrolled in residential schools were deprived of adequate medical attention and sanitary living conditions. He suggested improvements to national policies regarding the care and education of Indigenous peoples.[5][6] In a 1907 report Bryce cited an average mortality rate of between 15% and 24% among the schools' children and 42% in Aboriginal homes, where sick children were sometimes sent to die.[7]: 9  Bryce noted that the lack of certainty about the exact number of deaths was, in part, due to the official reports submitted by school principals and "defective way in which the returns had been made."[8]: 405 

He appealed his forced retirement from the Civil Service in 1921 and was denied, subsequently publishing his suppressed report condemning the treatment of the Indigenous at the hands of the Department of Indian Affairs that had been given the responsibility under the British North America Act.[9]

[Bootstrap]

Here's an 18 page booklet by Peter Bryce that is short and better written than what I linked to before - probably the best thing to look at.

This is the "suppressed report" that he was not allowed to publish while he was still working for the Canadian government.

https://archive.org/details/storyofnati ... 2/mode/2up

[Falco Knotwise]

Is anyone in this thread saying that?

Szdfan brought it up.

Regarding Canada, Paul Racher, former president of the Ontario Archeologist Society, argued that the term "genocide" was appropriate to describe the residential schools --

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-re ... -and-abuse

I agree the government didn’t improve conditions, and they should have, but I think they neglected to out of selfishness and ignorance not because it was a genocidal plot.

If that happened today the health department would jump all over it, and make them clean it. Back then they didn’t know what we know today, and some believed Dr. Bryce was exaggerating what effects dirty conditions had on sickness. They apparently didn’t want to pay for it.

Today they wouldn’t get away with it.

[Szdfan]

Is anyone in this thread saying that?

Szdfan brought it up.

Regarding Canada, Paul Racher, former president of the Ontario Archeologist Society, argued that the term "genocide" was appropriate to describe the residential schools --

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-re ... -and-abuse

I agree the government didn’t improve conditions, and they should have, but I think they neglected to out of selfishness and ignorance not because it was a genocidal plot.

If that happened today the health department would jump all over it, and make them clean it. Back then they didn’t know what we know today, and some believed Dr. Bryce was exaggerating what effects dirty conditions had on sickness. They apparently didn’t want to pay for it.

Today they wouldn’t get away with it.

Genocide doesn't require a Wannsee Conference-type meeting where the top brass coldly decide on a "Final Solution" type plot or conspiracy to eradicate another racial or ethnic group. The UN Genocide Convention defines any of the five acts below "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

These acts are:

• Killing members of the group Article II(a)
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group Article II(b)
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction Article II(c)
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group Article II(d)
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group Article II(e)

Arguably, the removal of Native children from their families and sending them to Indian Residential Schools on the other side of the country in order to assimilate them fits this definition of genocide. Certainly, there are cases where native families voluntarily sent their children to residential schools, but there is also overwhelming evidence that the Canadian and American governments forcibly removed children from their families and sent them to these schools, often run by religious groups. To the extent that the Catholic Church and other groups participated in and enabled the forcible removal of native children with the intention to "kill the Indian and save the man," they participated in genocide.