Canadians Misled on Residential Schools Deaths

It is 423.

That is the total number of documented deaths of Indigenous children who died while attending the 134 residential schools that operated in Canada from 1883 until the last one closed in 1998.

(An additional 409 “unnamed” deaths are recorded, but the TRC Report acknowledges the fact that many, or all, of them are likely duplicates of the named deaths).

So, where did those other numbers come from?

The 3,201 is the total of the named deaths (423), the unnamed deaths (409) and a guess by the TRC that all the former students who died within one year after their attendance at a residential school died as a result of their attendance at residential school. (see chart above)

An investigation into the death records of the children who died within one year of their residential school attendance quickly shows that the number is an overestimation. For example, some of those deaths were from accidents that occurred where the child lived on their home reserve, and had nothing to do with residential schools. Some occurred after illnesses contracted on their home reserve, and not at school.

But of even more significance, there is no good evidence that the children who died at, or within one year of attendance at a residential school, contracted their illnesses (usually tuberculosis) at the residential school. How many of those children would have died if they had not attended is simply unknown.

An unrelated example might be helpful to illustrate this point: English poet, John Keats, was one of the millions of adults and children who died of tuberculosis in previous centuries, before antibiotics were discovered. He died at age 25. Although he contracted the disease in England, he died at a residence in Rome. It would obviously be absurd to blame Keat’s death on that Roman residence or on Rome.

It is equally absurd to blame a residential school for killing a child if that child had arrived at the school already infected with tuberculosis. Only if the child was not infected when he arrived at the school could the school and system be blamed. We simply don’t know how many children arrived at the schools already infected and how many were infected at the schools.

However, the findings of the chief medical officer of the time, Dr. Peter Bryce, suggest that most of the children contracted tuberculosis on their home reserve. Bryce supervised the tuberculosis testing of Indian children from eight Indian reserves when they first arrived at a residential school. Incredibly, every one of those children entering residential school for the first time tested positive for tuberculosis. This is proof that they contracted their tuberculosis on their home reserves. In all probability those children’s’ tuberculosis would have progressed and killed them even if they had stayed home.

Their report(see page 253).

Bryce’s investigations also found that a stunning 92.5% of all Indian students beginning their attendance at both day and residential schools tested positive for tuberculosis. Poor malnutrition, crowded housing, lack of basic hygiene in their prairie reserve homes all contributed to the shockingly high tuberculosis rates.

On some western reserves the death rate from tuberculosis was a staggering 9%. These were the reserves that the students came from, so it should surprise no one that some died.

Bryce is remembered as the brave doctor who blew the whistle on the bad tuberculosis conditions at residential schools that prevailed in the early 1900s. He is that.

But he also blew the whistle on the even worse tuberculosis conditions on the reserves where the students came from. The unfortunate children who died of tuberculosis while attending a residential school represent a tiny fraction of the many thousands of reserve residents who died of tuberculosis, but never saw a residential school.

It is simply not known how many of the 3201 children died because they attended a residential school, and how many would have died if they had stayed home. The only things we can say for certain about the number “3201” is that it is an exaggeration, and a guess.

As for the other numbers that have been advanced, such as 4,100 and 6,000, these are simply the original 3201, with additional names arbitrarily added by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR — the successor to the TRC) at the request of anyone who wanted to commemorate an ancestor who had once attended a residential school. So, Helen Betty Osborne, who was murdered years after her residential school attendance, and a former student who died at the age of 86, are two of the people named on that list.

Their deaths had nothing to do with residential schools. The NCTR “Memorial Register” is meaningless as an information source, and more closely resembles a Coutts Hallmark card.

And what about even larger numbers that indigenous activists have claimed? Former TRC Murray Sinclair claimed that “15-25,000, maybe more”, children died at residential schools; former National Chief RoseAnne Archibald said that “thousands, tens of thousands” were deliberately killed; Tk’emlups Chief Roseanne Casimir said “215” were secretly buried at Kamloops.

There is no credible evidence to support any of these wild claims The most likely inspiration for those numbers come from the fabulist, Kevin Annett, who was taken quite seriously by Canada’s mainstream media, including the Globe and Mail, and by Canadian university indigenous studies departments (despite his preposterous claims that 50,000 and more students were killed in every conceivable way, and were “buried between church walls all over Canada”).

All of these numbers have been bandied about in a manner that suggests a deliberate attempt to confuse and mislead. Unfortunately, the claims are believed by many Canadians, as attested to by the hundreds of churches that have been torched since the claims started to appear.

And the church burnings didn’t start after the Kamloops claim was made on May 27, 2021. The numbers of burnings indeed spiked in 2021, but they started after the TRC commissioners — and particularly their executive director (and more recently, “special interlocutor,” Kimberly Murray) — began to spread misinformation about “thousands” of “missing” and “disappeared” children.

Why did these highly paid people make these reckless claims? We now know that the entire TRC “missing children” project was inspired by former MP Gary Merasty’s viewing of Kevin Annett’s documentary “Unrepentant.” Kimberly Murray and the TRC commissioners seized on that opportunity to launch their fanciful “Missing Children” project, despite having no mandate from the federal government to do so.

And is it Kimberly Murray who is mainly responsible for inserting Kevin Annett’s “missing” and “disappeared” children conspiracy theory into the Truth and Reconciliation process, as researcher Nina Green suggests?

After all, Murray has claimed credit for writing and editing the entire TRC Report. She was instrumental in pushing the “missing children” theory from the outset.

And a reading of Murray’s expensively produced mishmash of a report certainly seems to reveal a deliberate attempt to confuse the reader with the conflation of real numbers, invented numbers, and conspiracy theories.

Who is chiefly responsible for the dissemination of the “thousands of missing children” myth is not clear. What is clear is that those responsible have succeeded in confusing the public by mixing bogus numbers with the real ones. Most Canadians now believe, contrary to the clear historical evidence, that illicit deaths and burials took place at residential schools.

Returning to the numbers that have some validity that are set out in Volume 4 of the TRC Report, it is clear that the TRC’s “3201” — namely, the number of children who died at, or within one year, of attending a residential school — is definitely not higher than could be expected, given the high death rates on the reserves where the children came from.

It would therefore have made sense for the TRC to compare school death rates with reserve death rates. But they didn’t do that. Instead, the TRC commissioners compared the residential school death rate with the death rate at mainstream schools across Canada.

This was the wrong comparison. The death rate on reserves was many times higher — from 40-290 times higher on some reserves — than in mainstream Canada. The meaningful comparison was obviously the one between the death rate at residential schools, and the communities from whence the children came. Instead, the commissioners based the entirety of Volume 4 on exaggerated numbers, and a false comparison.

Why did they use the wrong comparison? Why did they exaggerate numbers?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that this was deliberately done to create an artificial “missing children” issue where a real issue did not exist. They literally invented a bogus issue that has seriously divided Canadians, and resulted in ongoing expenditures that have seriously compromised Canada’s economy for generations.

The reality is that there was nothing sinister or nefarious about the deaths from disease of residential school students. Those deaths are just a sad reality of the times. Death was everywhere.

No one was “disappeared”; there were no “thousands of missing children,” as alleged by Kevin Annett, Murray Sinclair and Kimberly Murray.

The deaths of children who died from the diseases of the day were properly documented, and the children were all given Christian burials — most on their home reserves. And those residential school deaths represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of Indians who tragically died of European-introduced diseases.

Unprincipled opportunists created and spread the myth that thousands of indigenous children went missing, or were “disappeared,” from residential schools. Incompetent politicians, and a biased CBC, cemented that myth in the minds of well-meaning Canadians.

Numbers were manipulated.

Canadians have been gamed.

Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.