Truth has long been available

Re: PM shows little enthusiasm for report, June 4

The 150-year Canadian policy of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families and communities and herding them into distant schools amounted to nothing less than a “cultural genocide,” according to the Truth and Reconciliation report.

John Duncan, while Stephen Harper’s minister of Aboriginal Affairs, said the schools were merely “education policy gone wrong.”

The grotesque conditions and brutality of the residential schools was well-known by Canadian government officials as early as 1909, as revealed in a commissioned report by Peter Bryce, chief medical officer of the Ontario Health Department.

The report was ignored and hidden from public scrutiny, despite revealing an average residential school death rate of between 30 and 60 per cent. It reported children were malnourished, living in squalid, stark conditions and systematically exposed to other children with tuberculosis. Bryce accused church officials of deliberately killing students through their actions and inactions.

In Alberta in 1928 and B.C. in 1933, acts were passed allowing for the forcible sterilization of residential school students. It has been estimated as many as 3,000 children had this procedure.

Recently, a report surfaced showing that in the 1940s and 1950s malnourished aboriginal children in residential schools were used by government researchers in medical experiments that systematically kept them on starvation diets, denying them milk, nutrients, vitamins and dental treatments to measure health outcomes. The truth about the reserve system and residential schools has been available for decades. JOHN L. REBMAN Chilliwack