The Men for No Seasons

History will break your heart.

As a rather solitary and bookish boy growing up in southwestern Ontario some 5 decades ago, I always found myself drawn to historical figures who seemed “heroic” and “larger than life.” It is easy to see the appeal. Most children never feel anything but the opposite of those two adjectives. And so, like many  others, escape meant stretching my imagination towards different times and places.

That wasn’t an easy thing to do in the 1970’s. I like to tease my children that high speed internet service was unreliable in the farm country near Bothwell, Ontario in the 1970s. The statement is 100% true, but only because the World Wide Web was some two decades away from being invented. The idea of television on demand was in about the same condition at the time, so all that was left to us was books. Sadly for me, my thrifty and pragmatic father didn’t spare much thought for books or indeed anything that wasn’t directly required to keep his livestock (and perhaps his family) alive. Thankfully, despite a certain wiliness for his profession, he was at the complete mercy of any salesman who came to our door. Indeed, all any of them needed to do was to suggest that they were sorry for bothering such a hard working man and that they could see he was clearly not in the market for anything extravagant; which is to say that we looked like we didn’t have any money (which was true). This was how we ended up with the complete assortment of Watkin’s ointments, liniments, and salves and a Filter Queen vacuum cleaner that could suck up golf balls and was more expensive than any home appliance we had ever owned. It was also how we came into the possession of the complete set of Grolier’s New Book of Knowledge encyclopedia.   

In its pages, I was delighted to read about the exploits of heroic figures like Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart, Sir Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein (Alas, always men. Insert scorn here). It was only much later in life, when I had access to less “burnished” versions of the historical record that my illusions about these men were shattered. Yes, Alexander was a brilliant general, but he was also a heavy drinker who, according to contemporary scholar Dicaearchus, “was quite excessively keen on boys.” King Richard’s lion-heartedness seems to have extended to rape, butchery, and sadism.  Newton harboured ferocious resentments against his rivals and, in the pettiest of fashion, used his position at the Royal Society to punish them, sometimes even after they were dead. And Albert Einstein - a man so brilliant that anyone over past century to come up with a good idea could reasonably expect to have their family call them “Einstein” to tease them – was every bit as wretched a husband and father as he was a brilliant mathematician.   

A familiar refrain of the apologists for the complex personalities of history is that they were people “of their time” which is to say that they should not be scrutinized through a modern moral or ethical lens. That may be broadly true. It is hard to escape the times we live in and the socially-constructed categories by which we organize the world around us. And yet, there are some who do, magnificently so even, and despite the pressures of their times.

In 1904, Dr. Peter Bryce, was appointed the Chief Medical Officer for the Canadian Departments of the Interior and Indian Affairs. According to his entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia, at this time it was popularly felt that immigrants and minorities suffered from poor health because of their racial inferiority. Bryce challenged this and used his role at Indian Affairs to undertake the “systematic collection of health statistics of the several hundred Indian bands scattered over Canada.” In 1907, he released a report pointing out that an alarming number of Indigenous children were dying in Canada’s residential schools. He cited an average mortality rate of between 14% and 24% (annually) and noted that the lack of certainty about the exact number of deaths was due to poor record-keeping by the school operators. Poor ventilation and abysmal standards of care from untrained and underfunded school and government officials were identified as the primary cause of death. Significantly, Bryce noted that the health care funding granted to all Indigenous peoples in the entire Dominion of Canada was approximately one third of that which was devoted to just the population of Ottawa. Bryce’s report was leaked to the press and on Nov. 15, 1907, The Evening Citizen (later The Ottawa Citizen) ran a front-page story under the headline “Schools Aid White Plague — Startling Death Rolls Revealed Among Indians — Absolute Inattention to the Bare Necessities of Health.” The news was a great embarrassment to the government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

In 1913, however, Bryce was to meet his match in the form of Duncan Campbell Scott, a man thoroughly “of his time.” Scott has found immortality in the history books as one of Canada’s Confederation Poets, which is to say one of the small group of Canadian writers, born around the time of Confederation, who rose to renown between the late 1880s and the 1920s. But it was in his role as Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs between 1913 and 1932, that the poet made his most “concrete” contribution to the world. Scott, an active and eager bureaucrat concerned with currying the favour of his superiors, felt fervently that the best way to rid Canada of its “Indian Problem” was to make sure that all the Indigenous peoples living within its borders were thoroughly assimilated. As he put it:

“I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic…” (National Archives of Canada, Record Group 10, volume 6810, file 470-2-3, volume 7, pp. 55 (L-3) and 63 (N-3).)

In 1914, Scott demanded that Bryce cease compiling annual reports on behalf of the Department as they were both expensive to produce and unlikely to affect policy. Over the next several years, Scott worked hard to ensure that Bryce’s attempts to improve the health of residential school children went nowhere. In 1921, frustrated and embittered by the apathy of the government, Bryce was forced into retirement. In 1922, he published a booklet entitled “The Story of a National Crime: Being an Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada. The Wards of the Nation. Our Allies in the Revolutionary War. Our Brothers in Arms in the Great War.” In it (which you can read in its original form here: https://caid.ca/AppJusIndCan1922.pdf), Bryce relates his repeated attempts to improve the healthcare outcomes of Indigenous children and the extraordinary lengths the government (and particularly Scott) went to ensure that he was thwarted. It makes for sad reading.

Bryce died at sea in 1932 on his way to the West Indies. Scott went on to be President of the Royal Society of Canada from 1921 to 1922. He was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal in 1927 for his contributions to Canadian literature. He became a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George and received honorary degrees from the University of Toronto and Queen's University. He died in 1947 was designated a Person of National Historic Significance in 1948. Ironically, both he and Bryce were buried at Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa; one, a “man of his time” in the worst sense of the expression, the other a shining example of the timelessness of courage.