Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

102 • Truth & Reconciliation Commissionto the transformation of our schools into hospitals or sanatoriums.” 375 There were alsoregular reports that schools could not afford to hire needed nursing staff. 376 IndianAffairs officials continued to be critical of the quality of care provided by school infirmariesat the end of the 1950s. 377 Complaints from principals make it clear that intothe late 1960s, there were still severe limitations on the range of health services beingprovided to residential school students. 378General Aboriginal health care was never a priority for the Canadian government.Tuberculosis among Aboriginal people largely was ignored unless it threatened thegeneral Canadian population. 379 In 1937, Dr. H. W. McGill, the director of IndianAffairs, sent out an instruction that Indian health-care services “must be restricted tothose required for the safety of limb, life or essential function.” Hospital care was to belimited, spending on drugs was cut in half, and sanatoria and hospital treatment forchronic tuberculosis were eliminated. 380The high death rates led many parents to refuse to send their children to residentialschool. In 1897, Kah-pah-pah-mah-am-wa-ko-we-ko-chin (also known as Tom) wasdeposed from his position as a headman of the White Bear Reserve in what is nowSaskatchewan for his vocal opposition to residential schools. In making his case for aschool on the reserve, he pointed to the death rate at the Qu’Appelle industrial school,adding, “Our children are not strong. Many of them are sick most of the time, many ofthe children sent from this Reserve to the Schools have died. 381Death casts a long shadow over many residential school memories. Louise Moineattended the Qu’Appelle school in the early twentieth century. She recalled one yearwhen tuberculosis was “on the rampage in that school. There was a death every monthon the girls’ side and some of the boys went also.” 382 Of his years at the Roman Catholicschool in Onion Lake, Joseph Dion recalled, “My schoolmates and I were not long inconcluding that the lung sickness was fatal, hence as soon as we saw or heard of someonespitting blood, we immediately branded him for the grave. He had consumption:he had to die.” 383 Simon Baker’s brother Jim died from spinal meningitis at the Lytton,British Columbia, school. “I used to hear him crying at night. I asked the principal totake him to the hospital. He didn’t. After about two weeks, my brother was in so muchpain, he was going out of his mind. I pleaded with the principal for days to take himto a doctor.” 384Ray Silver said that he always blamed the Alberni school for the death of his brotherDalton. “He was a little guy, laying in the bed in the infirmary, dying, and I didn’tknow ’til he died. You know that’s, that was the end of my education.” 385 The death ofa child often prompted parents to withdraw the rest of their children from a school.One former student said her father came to the school when her sister became ill atthe Anglican school at Aklavik, Northwest Territories. “He came upstairs and there wewere. He cried over us. He took me home. He put her in a hospital, and she died.” 386