Dr. Peter Bryce was Canada’s chief public health official. For decades, he tried blowing the whistle on the deplorable conditions he found in the country’s residential schools, facilities he described as being almost designed to cause the most suffering

It has now been a month since Canadians donned their orange shirts and paused to remember the many children who never came home from residential schools, and in many cases, to acknowledge the trauma that still faces those who did survive.

The days leading up to Sept. 30, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, held many discussions. From mainly non-Indigenous people, the question was often a form of “why didn’t more people know?” about the deplorable living conditions and frequent deaths Indigenous children in residential schools.

While Indigenous people are well aware of the treatment residential school children receiving and of the high mortality rate at many of the schools, the fact is, at the time the schools were most active, it was known. It is just that no one with the power or authority to make changes did so.

How did authorities know? They heard it from Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce in 1907, who was the chief medical officer under the Ministry of the Interior and Indian Affairs at the time. He tried again in 1915. And again in 1922.

A pioneer in public health and sanitation policy in Canada, Bryce was a champion of hand-washing, physical distancing and the isolation of patients battling virus or bacterial...

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