Education Without Oppression — the 2018-19 Atkinson series — examines the continuing marginalization of Black and Indigenous students in Canada. It analyzes the challenges and breakthroughs nationally and in the cities of Baltimore, Md.; Lucknow, India; and Napier, New Zealand.“Education is what got us into this mess, but education is the key to reconciliation.”— Justice Murray SinclairEDMONTON—If the activist Cindy Blackstock were to have her way — and she did have her way on this one — Peter Henderson Bryce would be hailed as a Canadian hero. Bryce, a white man, was a doctor-turned-whistleblower on residential schools whose deeds stand in defiance of common wisdom that the racism in Canada’s past were simply a reflection of values prevalent at that time.Bryce was the federal chief medical officer who raised the alarm on the disastrous state of residential schools in 1907 when he found the schools had child mortality rates ranging from 25 to 69 per cent. His findings were ignored by the government. He continued to criticize the Department of Indian Affairs and went on to publish his findings in the Evening Citizen (now the Ottawa Citizen). Funding for his research was withdrawn, and eventually, he was forced out of public service.In 1922, Bryce wrote a book, titled The Story of a National Crime: Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1904 to 1921.When he died 10 years later, he was buried in a nondescript grave at Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa.In April, while speaking to a First Nations, Métis and Inuit education gathering in Edmonton, or Treaty Six territory, Blackstock contrasted Bryce’s “moral courage” with the “moral cowardice” of his nemesis, Duncan Campbell Scott. Scott, the deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs, not only dismissed Bryce’s findings but in 1920 made attendance at residential schools compulsory. Sc ...
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