Lurid tales of murder carried out against students by employees at Canada’s Indian Residential Schools have been circulating for years now, even though none has ever been formally investigated, much less proven. Still, the stories keep proliferating and getting more gruesome the further removed they are from their occurrence..This is not to imply the absence of cases of residential school staff members using excessive force to discipline students or in other ways betraying the trust placed in them for the care of the children. It would be astonishing if such things had never occurred in a school system that employed many thousands of workers spanning a period of more than 100 years, not the least because harsh punishment and sexual exploitation were common in non-indigenous boarding schools during the same era. Nevertheless, invoking unfounded allegations of homicide to bolster the outrageous claim of residential school genocide is not only misguided, but also wickedly wrong..Among the latest of the macabre tales is one concerning students at the former Blue Quills Indian Residential School (IRS) on the Saddle Lake Indian Reserve in Alberta. The students are said to have been purposely infected with tuberculosis by feeding them tainted milk. This claim was recently uttered by Leah Redcrow, executive director of the Reserve’s Acimowin Opaspiw Society (AOS), an organization funded by Library and Archives Canada, whose mission is to look for any unmarked burial sites of deceased Blue Quills IRS students..According to Redcrow, in a Jan. 24, 2023 CBC news item titled Tainted milk led to deaths of Alberta residential school children, based on an AOS report, “We feel that these children [at Blue Quills] were being deliberately infected with tuberculosis.”.This horrendous accusation demands careful examination..It is well-known that most children who died while enrolled at (but not necessarily while residing in) residential schools across Canada during the first half of the 20th century had succumbed to tuberculosis. But the suggestion the Blue Quills school, or any other residential school, “deliberately infected” students is an unfounded slander if only because it stands in stark contrast to known Department of Indian Affairs and residential school policies and practices regarding the health of the students..Indian Affairs and the residential schools across Canada invested heavily in measures to abate tuberculosis and other diseases. In 1911, the schools began renovating existing buildings and constructing new ones to meet stringent health standards agreed to by the Department. From 1911 to 1921 alone, nearly 30 residential schools were renovated or newly constructed to the required specifications. The improvements included providing greater per-pupil cubic air space, installing better ventilation systems, equipping facilities with “the best modern sanitary appliances,” and building separate sleeping rooms where tubercular students could benefit from the “fresh air cure.” Indian Affairs increased its education budget threefold over the period, in large part to cover the associated costs..This resulted in Blue Quills often being given positive assessments of its facilities. Indian Affairs stated in its annual report for the period ending March 31, 1912: “The dormitories, dining room, classrooms and other apartments are commodious, well furnished, ventilated and kept in a clean and tidy condition. Outside fire escapes, fire drill and other precautions are taken to safeguard the lives of the children from the danger of fire… All our children have enjoyed perfect health during the year.”.An inspection report from December 1920 states, “There's also an infirmary for the isolation of the sick… Everything was scrupulously clean. The pupils had a clean and healthy appearance.”.During the 1930s and 1940s, the residential schools carried out ambitious TB vaccination campaigns, administering the most advanced vaccines as they became available. By mid-century, the rate of death from tuberculosis and all other causes in the residential schools fell to zero or near zero..It is absurd on its face to suggest staff at Blue Quills were indifferent, or worse, to the health of the students. They understood diseases such as tuberculosis were transmitted primarily through person-to-person contact. They lived in close quarters with the students, and thus had a strong self-interest in keeping students healthy. There is no doubt, moreover, the people who chose to work in residential schools, often in cold and isolated places, were, with few exceptions, motivated by an altruistic concern for the well-being of the children..While general conditions in the residential schools were not ideal, as they were not ideal in many Canadian residential facilities like orphanages, training schools, and TB sanitoria for non-indigenous children during the same historical period, they bore no resemblance to the concentration camp-like descriptions portrayed in the media and Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports. The Indian Affairs’ annual report for 1912 (cited above) offers insights into student life at Blue Quills:.“Girls, as well as boys, are supplied with different games: reading, singing, outdoor exercises, drives and music. The boys have a brass band. The girls have a mandolin club… They each have their own playground and are always supervised by a Sister... [T]he programme of studies laid down by the department is followed and the progress is fair…. [A]ttendance is very regular ... [T]he boys assist at gardening and other light and useful work ... and last winter they learned to knit their own mittens. The girls are trained in domestic work, including baking, cooking, sewing, knitting … [T]he flower garden was a delight to the children and all those who had the pleasure of seeing it … We often see [ex-pupils] as they like to come back to their Alma Mater, and also delight in reading newspapers, reviews, & c., in a room at the rectory.”.All these facts give the lie to any cynical notion that “deliberate infection” would have taken place at Blue Quills or at any other residential school..Still, admirers of China’s “basic dictatorship” will be delighted to learn the China Daily, a news site scholars described as effectively controlled by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, published a short version of the Blue Quills story a day after the tainted milk “news” broke in the CBC and elsewhere in the media. China Daily titled their piece, Investigators uncover evidence of genocide in Canadian residential school and reported that “Leah Redcrow … believed that many of the children at the school died after they were forced to drink unpasteurized milk that was contaminated with bovine tuberculosis.”.To its credit, the CBC story contained comments from Dr. Keith Warriner, a professor of food safety at the University of Guelph, saying that it wasn't until around the early decades of the 20th century that people accepted and associated raw milk with tuberculosis and that federally, the pasteurization of milk only become mandated in 1991. But to its shame, our very own socialist version of the China Daily failed to contextualize the AOS report in any other way..Hymie Rubenstein is the editor of The REAL Indian Residential Schools Newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology at The University of Manitoba. With extensive files from researcher Pim Wiebel.
