Business As Usual: How Media Misleads On The Rez Tragedy

Canadians planning to ignore this Canada Day 2021 to protest the indigenous residential school story are missing a key fact. One of the glories of this allegedly tainted nation has been the right to a salty opinion (although prime minister Justin Trudeau is hot to end that).

So citizens are entitled to drape themselves in liberal guilt and recriminations. Certainly the Reconciliation commission gave them ample emotional fodder about children being removed to the Rez homes and the heartbreaking problems of abusive officials. 

Citizens are also free to say you can’t undo the past, so let’s solve the problems of today’s Indigenous population. An opinion is a democratic right.

But we are now told that reporters should only tailor stories to suit the current zeitgeist created by “discovering” residential school burial grounds. Sorry, media don’t have the latitude to join SJW parades or Don Cherry fan clubs. The responsibility of a free press is to educate the public to the issues, balance the arguments and restore historical perspective. (This is doubly difficult in Canada where the PM has bought off most corporate media with slush funds.)

All you need to know about today’s hyper-liberal Canadian press is that Rogers Media has PSAs during Blue Jays broadcasts promoting a 50/50 draw to benefit “survivors” of the residential schools. To hammer the point, Rogers shows pictures of innocent indigenous children. (There are also Rogers’ Hockey Night In Canada hosts wearing lapel ribbons and flags flying at half mast for dead children.)

For an alien just arriving on earth the message is unmistakable: today’s “racist white people” caused the deaths of hundreds of indigenous children from the 1880s, many buried a century or more ago in cemeteries near the former residential schools. Translation: #WhiteManBad

Most Canadian media have joined Rogers, echoing their sophist PM who tells his NGO pals that his nation is irredeemably and systemically racist.  The goal of this agitprop is not education, but agitation on an extremely complicated issue. Again, #WhiteManBad.  It’s easier that way.

The job of a journalist, however,  is not to follow exploitive political narratives but to ask uncomfortable questions. If it offends you to hear uncomfortable questions on a progressive issue then you don’t understand true journalism. Perhaps the media need to first explain  “How did we get here? Why did we have Rez schools?”

Good question. While Trudeau says racism, the most likely answer is tuberculosis. For almost the entire time the Rez schools operated TB was a deadly killer, particularly of native children. Canadian child mortality in 1880 was 269 per 1000 children— many from the dread killer. By 1940 it was still 100 per 1000.

In his 1922 paper “A National Crime, A Record of the Health Conditions Of Indians in Canada 1908-1922” researcher Dr. Peter. H. Bryce documents that when he inspected the children awaiting moves to Alberta residential schools before WW 1 NOT ONE was free of TB. He reported TB infections started in infancy, before the young people were sent to the schools. In short, the children went in sick and died later in the hands of the church-run Rez schools.

From the time the Canadian government took control of the “Indian” territory officials wrestled with how to protect the natives from TB and a range of other health problems. (Education was another wound: In 1922, just 30 percent of the indigenous children in villages had any education.)

Typical of that time, officials in Ottawa connected the disease with the “Indian” way of life and believed that, as the native culture would never withstand the industrialized state, it  must be helped to transition. (In the end they transferred the file to religious institutions.) In this misbegotten theory they were not unlike the early suffragettes who advocated for sterilization, lobotomies and end to immigration from non-favoured nations (but who, unsurprisingly, get no criticism from Trudeau or the leftist media).

Which does not excuse the coverage. The cemeteries attached to the schools have been variously described “crime scenes” or “mass burials grounds” by contemporary media vultures. There is good reason to criticize the lack of documents so far from the religious order that ran the homes.  But the death rates in the Saskatchewan and BC cemeteries, sad as they are, are in-line for Boyce’s report in 1922 when annual under-six death rates in Canada were a staggering 268 per 1000. 

A 2020 CBC article quotes death rates of 50 percent in the rez schools in the late 1800s, but we also have no data— or media curiosity— on how many children who remained in native villages also died. Was it more or less? Did children in schools have a better health outcome?  Also the media has played up “unmarked” graves when, in fact, young children’s graves were traditionally unmarked till the modern age, and as such may be harder to identify.

Again, the media is too busy exploiting grief to answer basic questions. How does the residential-school death rate compare to those in church-run orphanages of the same eras? Were children who died in villages buried in a different fashion?  The media have made much of the children being seized by the governments of the time. To modern eyes it seems a brutal process. But for many indigenous families in 1900 the opportunity for medicine, three square meals a day, a roof over their heads, clothing and education was seen as a significant amerlioration.

Bryce’s passionate pleas to improve natives’ health were shelved by successive federal governments, and control of the schools was left with religious organizations till the 1960s. With heavy-handed results. Indigenous activists revere Bryce for his battles on their behalf going back to the first days of the 20th century with the governments of the day over health issues for “Indian” children. Rightly, he wanted the health of pupils to be a bigger concern for federal officials— not sloughed off on churches. The activist Cindy Blackstock tends Bryce’s grave in Ottawa.

But as professor Ian Dowbiggin pointed out in his 1997 book Keeping America Sane , Bryce's report actually recommended the expansion of the residential school system to cope with health and education issues. He wanted the state to control more, not fewer, of the children. Bryce was also one of the most outspoken critics of immigrants in the early 1900s, calling them "defective" or "degenerate". He claimed that the government inspectors should have weeded out most of them and deported them. 

Finally, the blanket coverage of the residential school tragedies has allowed Canadian media to ignore more pressing issues plaguing Trudeau’s federal government, such as burning churches, violent indigenous gangs that run drugs and contraband. (Many of the gang members have been found to have fetal alcohol syndrome.) Or the real causes of the missing-women scourge that devastates communities. Or income disparities within many native nations.  TB continues to ravage Native communities—(31 times higher) and Inuit communities (186 times higher) than the rest of Canada.)

All of which the PM promised to address when he ran for office. Outside of screaming “genocide” at the UN, he has done little more than fire his high-profile justice minister Jody Wilson Raybould, an indigenous icon. And refuse to fire his Indigenous portfolio minister, Carolyn Bennett, for her attacks on Wilson Raybould as a lazy placeholder interested in her pension.

The problems of today are solvable. Those of the residential schools are history. But the media has the equation backward. And shuts up anyone who dares to think differently. Until they accept their responsibility for worsening the indigenous file conditions can never improve

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx