Looking beyond the data

 

General intelligence (g factor) as a function of alleles associated with educational attainment (Education polygenic score). (Fuerst et al. 2021, p. 165)

Among non-Hispanic European Americans, cognitive ability shows a positive correlation with Amerindian admixture. The reason is to be found in the history of European settlement.

 

 

We know that cognitive ability differs among human populations, but are those differences innate? Or are they purely cultural? The question is difficult to answer because a purely cultural difference can, over time, become innate. If you are better able to meet the demands of your culture, you will probably live longer, have more offspring, and pass on many of your characteristics. Thus, over succeeding generations, those heritable characteristics will become more and more widespread in the gene pool, and they will increasingly determine certain abilities that were initially created by culture.

 

This is a recurring problem when we try to distinguish between cultural and genetic determination. The two often run parallel to each other, and we can seemingly rule out the existence of genetic determination by showing that cultural determination runs in the same direction.

 

But there is another recurring problem in our efforts to distinguish between culture and genetics. We lack the proper tools. For a long time, we could only infer genetic influences by using twin studies or adoption studies. 

 

Things have changed with the advent of a new tool: genomic data. Specifically, we can now:

 

·         Measure ethnic ancestry in mixed populations, as opposed to using self-report or inferring from skin color.

·         Measure the genetic component of cognitive ability, by using genetic variants associated with educational attainment. Although these variants explain only 11-13% of the variance in educational attainment among individuals, they explain a much higher percentage of the variance among populations (Piffer 2019). This is because genetic variants within the same population are exposed to the same pressure of selection and will thus vary in the same direction. They act, so to speak, as “weathervanes” that tell us the strength and direction of selection in that population.

·         Measure skin color, by looking at the relevant genes. We can thus control for the effects of “colorism” in mixed populations, i.e., discrimination in favor of lighter-skinned individuals.

 

In my last post, I described how Bryan Pesta used these tools to understand differences in mean cognitive ability between African Americans and European Americans (Lasker et al. 2019). To that end, his research team looked at cognitive ability among African Americans in relation to European admixture and in relation to genetic variants associated with educational attainment.

 

They made several findings: 1) among African Americans, cognitive ability correlates with European admixture; 2) the correlation is modestly reduced, but not eliminated, when controlled for parental education; 3) controlling for skin color has no effect; and 4) the correlation seems to be largely explained by genetic variants associated with educational attainment.

 

The same data source was then used by Fuerst et al. (2021) to investigate cognitive ability not only in European Americans and African Americans but also in Hispanic Americans. The research team thus looked at cognitive ability in relation to Amerindian admixture, and not just in relation to European and African admixture.

 

Most of their findings are similar to those of the first study:

 

·         Among Hispanic Americans, cognitive ability shows a positive correlation with European admixture and a negative correlation with African admixture and Amerindian admixture.

·         Among Hispanic Americans, the correlations are reduced but not eliminated by controlling for parental education. Controlling for skin color has no effect.

·         The above correlations are partially explained by variants associated with educational attainment, but not by skin color.

·         Among non-Hispanic European Americans, cognitive ability shows a positive correlation with Amerindian admixture.

 

The last correlation may seem curious. Keep in mind that the data came from residents of Pittsburgh and that the native peoples of the Eastern U.S. intermixed mostly with early settlers of British, Dutch, or French origin. There is much less Amerindian admixture among the descendants of later immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The correlation may thus be due not to Amerindian admixture per se but rather to variation in cognitive ability among Europeans.

 

Until the eleventh century, mean IQ was relatively low throughout Europe, perhaps hovering in the low 90s. It then rose during late medieval and post-medieval times through the expansion of the middle class. There was in fact a broad mental and behavioral change: "Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving" (Clark 2007, p. 166; see also Clark 2007, 2009a, 2009b). More people could better understand probability, cause and effect, and another person’s perspective, whether real or hypothetical (Rinderman 2018, pp. 49, 86-87; Oesterdiekhoff 2012). As the "smart fraction" grew in size, a point was reached when intellectuals were no longer voices crying in the wilderness. They were now numerous enough to form learned societies and collaborate in projects of various sorts (Frost 2019b, pp. 175-176).

 

Western Europe was where the middle class began to expand, and that was where the expansion would have its greatest impact, not only demographically but also behaviorally and cognitively. Gregory Clark (2009a) has shown that the English, even in the lower classes, are largely descended from people who were middle-class several generations earlier. The same is likely true elsewhere in Western Europe. We should therefore see a cognitive gradient between the Western European core and its periphery, as can indeed be seen between northern and southern Italy. When Piffer and Lynn (2022) looked at genomic data from that country, they found a north-south gradient in alleles associated with educational attainment. That difference corresponds to historical differences in economic development. By the 18th century, the South had already fallen behind the North; its middle class had remained small and economic relations were still structured by paternalism and familialism (De Rosa 1979).

 

All of that leads to an interesting corollary: the IQ gap used to be smaller between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. On the one hand, European mean IQ had probably remained in the low 90s until late medieval times. On the other hand, mean IQ may have been in the upper 80s among those Black African groups that Europeans had first encountered, particularly the Nubians. By the time of Classical Antiquity they had reached a high level of material culture, social complexity and State formation.

 

A smaller IQ gap would be in line with an observation by Jason Malloy. He noted that blacks were often described in the ancient world as having large penises but not as being less intelligent. Indeed, I have found only two Greco-Roman texts in which the writer disparaged Black Africans as being unintelligent. One of them is of doubtful authenticity, and both come from Late Antiquity (Frost 2019b). By then, blacks in the Roman world were increasingly slaves who came from farther within the African interior. Thereafter, a stereotype of low intelligence is regularly attested in Middle Eastern and European sources.

 

 

References

 

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.

 

Clark, G. (2009a). The indicted and the wealthy: surnames, reproductive success, genetic selection and social class in pre-industrial England.  http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/Clark%20-Surnames.pdf     

 

Clark, G. (2009b). The domestication of man: The social implications of Darwin. ArtefaCTos 2: 64-80. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277275046_The_Domestication_of_Man_The_Social_Implications_of_Darwin

 

De Rosa, L. (1979). Property Rights, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth in Southern Italy in the XVIIIth and XIXth Centuries. Journal of European Economic History 8(3): 531-551.

 

Frost, P. (2019a). The Original Industrial Revolution. Did Cold Winters Select for Cognitive Ability? Psych 1(1): 166-181. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010012   

 

Frost, P. (2019b). Why that stereotype and not the other? Evo and Proud, July 28. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2019/07/why-that-stereotype-and-not-other.html

 

Frost, P. (2021). Commentary on Fuerst et al: Do Human Populations Differ in Their Mental Characteristics? Mankind Quarterly 62(2). http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2021.62.2.9   

 

Fuerst, J., E.O.W. Kirkegaard and D. Piffer. (2021). More research needed: There is a robust causal vs. confounding problem for intelligence-associated polygenic scores in context to admixed American populations. Mankind Quarterly 62(1): 151-185. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Fuerst/publication/354767141_More_Research_Needed_There_is_a_Robust_Causal_vs_Confounding_Problem_for_Intelligence-associated_Polygenic_Scores_in_Context_to_Admixed_American_Populations/links/614bc1dfa595d06017e4c017/More-Research-Needed-There-is-a-Robust-Causal-vs-Confounding-Problem-for-Intelligence-associated-Polygenic-Scores-in-Context-to-Admixed-American-Populations.pdf

 

Lasker, J., B.J. Pesta, J.G.R. Fuerst, and E.O.W. Kirkegaard. (2019). Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability. Psych 1(1):431-459. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010034  

 

Oesterdiekhoff, G.W. (2012). Was pre-modern man a child? The quintessence of the psychometric and developmental approaches. Intelligence 40, 470–478. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2012.05.005

 

Piffer, D. (2019). Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and Intelligence Inferred from Gwas Hits: A Replication of Previous Findings Using Recent Data. Psych 1(1):55-75. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010005

 

Piffer, D., and R. Lynn. (2022). In Italy, North-South Differences in Student Performance Are Mirrored by Differences in Polygenic Scores for Educational Attainment. Mankind Quarterly 62(4), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2022.62.4.2   

 

Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive Capitalism. Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations, 1st ed.; Cambridge University Press.

John Fuerst's latest paper

 

The Igbo used their location on the Niger Delta to become traders between the coast and the interior. In the 18th century, they were already described as high achievers with a strong commercial sense. Cognitive ability seems to be higher in populations that specialize in trade, probably because the cognitive demands are likewise higher.

(Map of Niger - Wikicommons)

 

 

 

I was asked to comment on a recent study by John Fuerst, Emil Kirkegaard, and Davide Piffer. This study is well worth reading. It provides the strongest evidence to date for differences in mean cognitive ability between human populations, specifically by showing how cognitive ability correlates with alleles for educational attainment and with degree of European / African / Amerindian ancestry in European Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans. Also worth reading is a related paper by John Fuerst, Meng Hu, and Gregory Connor.

 

The following is the abstract of my commentary:

 

Human populations may differ genetically not only in their anatomy but also in their mental characteristics. Our species is not too young for such differentiation. In fact, human genetic evolution has proceeded faster over the past 10,000 years than over the previous million. With the rise of farming, and social complexity, humans were no longer adapting solely to a limited range of natural environments. They were adapting to an ever-widening range of cultural environments, each of which imposed its demands on mind and body.

 

Thus, mental characteristics do not have the same adaptive value in all environments, and differences in adaptive value will lead, over time, to genetic differences. Are the latter large enough to explain IQ differences between human populations? That question has led to studies of people who are ancestrally diverse but raised in the same environment, such as transracial adoptees. Unfortunately, the environment can never be fully equalized. We should measure genetic differences directly, and a promising step in that direction has come with research to identify alleles associated with educational attainment. There is no need to identify all of them, just a large enough sample. These “witnesses” can then be questioned to determine the strength and direction of natural selection, and its consequences.

 

Also promising is the study of IQ and ancestry in ethnically mixed groups. This research instrument is not without problems. Large continental populations often have high-achieving minorities who may contribute disproportionately to the founding of new groups or to admixture with old ones. In addition, natural selection can alter the distribution of alleles within a new group, even after a few generations.

 

References

 

Frost, P. (2021). Commentary on Fuerst et al: Do Human Populations Differ in Their Mental Characteristics? Mankind Quarterly 62(2): 366-380.

http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2021.62.2.9

https://www.academia.edu/73260728/Commentary_on_Fuerst_et_al_Do_Human_Populations_Differ_in_Their_Mental_Characteristics

 

Fuerst, J., Hu, M. & Connor, G. (2021). Genetic ancestry and general cognitive ability in a sample of American youths. Mankind Quarterly 62(1): 186-216.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Fuerst/publication/354766492_Genetic_Ancestry_and_General_Cognitive_Ability_in_a_Sample_of_American_Youths/links/614bbacaa595d06017e4bdbc/Genetic-Ancestry-and-General-Cognitive-Ability-in-a-Sample-of-American-Youths.pdf

 

Fuerst, J., Kirkegaard, E.O.W. and Piffer, D. (2021). More research needed: There is a robust causal vs. confounding problem for intelligence-associated polygenic scores in context to admixed American populations. Mankind Quarterly 62(1): 151-185.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Fuerst/publication/354767141_More_Research_Needed_There_is_a_Robust_Causal_vs_Confounding_Problem_for_Intelligence-associated_Polygenic_Scores_in_Context_to_Admixed_American_Populations/links/614bc1dfa595d06017e4c017/More-Research-Needed-There-is-a-Robust-Causal-vs-Confounding-Problem-for-Intelligence-associated-Polygenic-Scores-in-Context-to-Admixed-American-Populations.pdf  

Post-mortem of a moral panic

 

Cemetery of the Kamloops Aboriginal Community (Rouillard 2022). Over time, wooden markers crumble away, and even graveyards end up abandoned and forgotten.

 

 

A year ago, ground-penetrating radar revealed 215 anomalies in an orchard behind the former Kamloops Residential Indian School. There had, in fact, been rumors of secret burials at that location, and the anomalies seemed to confirm those rumors:

 

The chief of a neighbouring nation, Michael LeBourdais, says his uncle, a boarder in the 1950s, told him that boys were forced to fight and the winner, or loser, was then forced to go dig holes in the orchard where the alleged graves were found. His uncle seemed convinced that they were graves. "Dig a hole, someone disappears. Dig another hole, someone disappears," he told her. Chief Harvey McLeod, from another nearby nation, also a former student of the school, says a lady confessed to him, sobbing, "I was one of the people who buried them." (Lisée 2022).

 

The media didn’t take long to pick up the story and ignite a firestorm of indignation over the “mass grave.” In the weeks that followed, a dozen churches were burned to the ground and many more were vandalized (Wikipedia 2022a; Dzsurdzsa 2021). Although most of them were Catholic, presumably because the school had been run by a Catholic religious order, the wave of arson also included two churches that were Anglican and another that was Coptic (!). The destruction was openly supported by many Canadians, including some in leading positions. The executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association, Harsha Walia, retweeted a news item about the burning of two more Catholic churches and added: “Burn it all down.” She later clarified her statement, saying it was "a call to dismantle all structures of violence, including the state, settler-colonialism, empire, the border etc." She nonetheless resigned (Smith 2021).

 

Prime Minister Trudeau remained silent for a week before saying that church burning was “not the way to go.” He added: “We must work together to right past wrongs” (Malone 2021). 

Is there really a mass grave?

What wrongs, exactly, were done at the Kamloops school? Last August I wrote a post on the subject and made a few points.

 

First, there is no “mass grave.” The burials would have taken place over a long span of time from the opening of the school in 1890 to its takeover by the federal government in 1969. The radar survey initially found 215 sites that might be graves. That figure was later lowered to 200 “potential burial sites.” Even if we accept that all 200 were, in fact, burials, that number would still be consistent with the death rate of Indigenous communities at the time. According to the 1906 annual report of the Department of Indian Affairs, "the Indian population of Canada has a mortality rate of more than double that of the whole population, and in some provinces more than three times."

 

Second, at least initially, the death rate was relatively low among the students at that school. If we look at the annual reports for the Kamloops residential school (which are available online for its early years), we see that the first nine years had no deaths at all. Then from 1899 to 1913 there were 12, for an annual death rate of 1.34%. The causes were pneumonia (2 deaths), tuberculosis (1), consumption (1), pulmonary disease (1), hemoptysis (1), rheumatic fever (1), meningitis (1), “took place at her home” (1), heart disease (1), measles (1), and diarrhea (1). The first five were probably all tuberculosis. The deaths began to happen three years after a doubling of enrolment, probably because of the higher risk of infection by other pupils.

 

A death rate of 1.34% is comparable to the death rate of young people in Indigenous communities at that time. It is also far below the estimates put forward by Jeff Rosenthal in a study for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

 

Last January, this question was thoroughly examined in an article written by Jacques Rouillard, a history professor at the Université de Montréal. He made several points.

 

·         In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated that 3,200 Indigenous children had died at residential schools. That estimate, however, was based on two overlapping data sources. Because many students were counted twice, the estimate may be inflated by as much as one third.

 

·         The Commission estimated that the death rate at residential schools from 1921 to 1950 was twice as high as that of Canadian youth in general. That estimate is probably inflated (see previous point) but is still comparable to the death rate on reserves at the time. The cause of death was usually tuberculosis or influenza. During the 1950-1965 period, residential schools had a death rate comparable to that of Canadian youth in general. The improvement was probably due to the advent of streptomycin and other new antibiotics during the 1940s.

 

·         The Commission identified the names of 51 children who had died at Kamloops Residential Indian School between 1915 and 1964. Rouillard was able to find information on those deaths from records at Library and Archives Canada and from death certificates at the British Columbia Archives. Two of the deaths had been reported twice. Of the 49 children who actually died, there were records for 35 of them:

 

Seventeen died in hospital and eight on their own reserves as a result of illness or accidents. Four were the subject of autopsies and seven of coroners’ inquests. As for burial sites, 24 are buried in their home Indian Reserve cemetery, and four at the Kamloops Indian Reserve cemetery. For the rest of the 49 children, information is either missing or requires that the complete death certificate in the B.C. Vital Statistics Agency be consulted. This is a far cry from the unverified claim that authorities overlooked or somehow covered up their deaths, or that the parents were not informed, or the remains never returned home. Most were informed and most were returned home. (Rouillard 2022)

 

·         Kamloops Residential Indian School was located on the Kamloops reserve. As Rouillard notes, “is it really credible that the remains of 200 children were buried clandestinely in a mass grave, on the reserve itself, without any reaction from the band council until last summer?”

 

·         There is no reason to believe that the 49 children were not given a decent burial. It was common practice to mark Indigenous graves with wooden crosses, which in time would decompose and crumble away:

 

According to historian Jim Miller of the University of Saskatchewan, “the remains of children discovered in Marieval and Kamloops had been buried in cemeteries according to Catholic rites, under wooden crosses that quickly crumbled.” “The wooden cross was a Catholic burial marker for the poor,” confirms Brian Gettler of the University of Toronto. (Rouillard 2022)

 

But how could there be 200 burials when only 49 students died at the school? When the initial estimate of 215 “potential burial sites” was revised downward to 200, we were told that identification of such sites was difficult because of disturbances in the ground due to tree roots, metal, and stones (Rouillard 2022). The figure of 200 sites is thus very approximate. The real figure will remain unknown until the site is excavated and the remains examined. Why hasn’t that been done? As Jean-François Lisée notes in his comments on Rouillard’s article: “Why wasn't the site immediately designated a crime scene? Why weren't our best crime scene experts sent there?”

 

The inaction, in itself, says a lot.

 

I suspect there is an abandoned graveyard behind the school. It probably contains the remains of students who had to be buried on the school grounds because of disease and/or because the student came from another reserve and could not easily be transported home. Most of the burials probably date from the school’s early years, after which there may have been a few isolated burials—unborn babies that some of the female students had naturally or deliberately miscarried (some students were as old as sixteen). Although the Catholic Church does perform burials in such circumstances, the service is simple and done with none of the publicity that comes with a regular funeral—hence the rumors of secret burials, which through telling and retelling became grotesquely magnified.

 

We have no first-hand or even second-hand accounts, but there are rumors of abortions at the school:

 

Another survivor in the book, Eddy Jules, spoke of abortions and a furnace.

 

"All of us that were going to school would hear the clang, and we would say, 'Oh, that's so and so's friend, and they gave her an abortion,'" said Jules, noting the strangeness of "fire in September or October or November when it's not cold."

 

[…] "Some survivors talked about infants who were born to young girls at the residential schools, infants who had been fathered by priests, were taken away from them and deliberately killed — sometimes thrown into furnaces, we were told," said Sinclair. (Barrera 2021)

 

Please note that this is hearsay. It is less verifiable than the allegations of Satanic ritual abuse in American preschools back in the 1980s. Those allegations at least had the support of first-hand accounts … by children, of course. Preschool teachers had their lives ruined by bizarre stories that proved to be totally unfounded, including stories that featured flying witches, underground tunnels, and travel in a hot-air balloon (Wikipedia 2022b).

 

References

 

Barrera, J. (2021). Lost children. The threat of death was part of life at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. So why is it so hard to determine how many children died there? CBC News

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/kamloops-residential-school-children-dead

 

Dzsurdzsa, C. (2021). Update: A map of the 68 churches that have been vandalized or burned since the residential schools announcement. True North, August 23

https://tnc.news/2021/08/23/a-map-of-every-church-burnt-or-vandalized-since-the-residential-school-announcements/

 

Frost, P. (2021). Canada’s moral panic. Evo and Proud, August 4

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2021/08/canadas-moral-panic.html

 

Lisée, Jean-François. (2022). Mysteries of Kamloops (translation). Le Devoir, February 5

https://www.dorchesterreview.ca/pages/mysteries-of-kamloops

 

Malone, K.G. (2021). Politicians, Indigenous leaders say burning churches not the way to get justice. CTV News, June 30

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/politicians-indigenous-leaders-say-burning-churches-not-the-way-to-get-justice-1.5492144

 

Rouillard, J. (2022). In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found. Dorchester Review. January 11

https://www.dorchesterreview.ca/blogs/news/in-kamloops-not-one-body-has-been-found

 

Smith, C. (2021). B.C. Civil Liberties Association executive director Harsha Walia at centre of social media firestorm. The Georgia Straight, July 5

https://www.straight.com/news/bc-civil-liberties-association-executive-director-harsha-walia-at-centre-of-social-media

 

Wikipedia. (2022a) 2021 Canadian church burnings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Canadian_church_burnings

 

Wikipedia (2022b). McMartin preschool trial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

Canada's moral panic

 

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930 (Wikicommons, Archives Deschâtelets-NDC)

 

 

Last May, ground-penetrating radar revealed the existence of 215 unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, apparently the remains of Indigenous children who had once lived there. A moral panic swept across Canada. How could so many children have died at a boarding school? The answer seemed obvious:

 

Turpel-Lafond also has questions about how these children died given the rampant sexual and physical abuse documented in residential schools.

 

"There may be reasons why they wouldn't record the deaths properly and that they weren't treated with dignity and respect because that was the whole purpose of the residential school ... to take total control of Indian children, to remove their culture, identity and connection to their family" (Dickson and Watson 2021)

 

The school had been run by a Catholic order, and the following weeks saw dozens of Catholic churches set afire across Western Canada, to the acclaim of tweets from journalists and lawyers — "Burn it all down!" The Prime Minister waited several days before saying that such destruction is "not the way to go."

 

Is the moral panic justified? To answer that question, let me break it down into two parts:

 

1. Were the children buried without "dignity and respect"? Were these "mass graves"? Were the graves "unmarked"?

 

2. Was the death rate at Kamloops Residential School abnormally high? How does it compare to the death rate of Canadian Indigenous people at that time and to Canadians in general at that time?

 

Burial without dignity?

 

Many news reports have used the term "mass graves" The reader is left with the impression that large numbers of bodies were hastily buried, as in Cambodia under Pol Pot … In reality, the children were buried over a long span of time, from the opening of the school in 1890 to its takeover by the federal government in 1969. Moreover, the initial estimate of 215 has since been revised downward to 200 "potential burial sites" (RCI 2021).

 

Just as inaccurate is the term "unmarked grave." When graves were found behind another residential school, one of its former pupils, Sophie Pierre, pointed out that the site had long been known to be an abandoned graveyard:

 

According to Pierre, wooden crosses that originally marked the gravesites had been burned or deteriorated over the years.  Using a wooden marker at a gravesite remains a practice that continues to this day in many Indigenous communities across Canada. (MacVicar 2021)

In the past, it was common to mark a grave with a wooden cross, especially if the deceased had left no money for the purchase of a stone marker. This was particularly true for Catholics, for whom cremation was not an option.

 

Abnormally high death rate?

 

The death rate at the Kamloops school, and at Indian residential schools in general, is said to have been abnormally high:

 

The deadliest years for Indian Residential Schools were from the 1870s to the 1920s. In the first six years after its 1884 opening, for instance, the Qu'Appelle Indian Residential School saw the deaths of more than 40 per cent of its students. Sacred Heart Residential School in Southern Alberta had an annual student death rate of one in 20.

 

But despite occasional efforts at reform, even as late as the 1940s the death rates within residential schools were up to five times higher than among Canadian children as a whole. (Hopper 2021)

 

The above figures come from a study by Jeff Rosenthal (2015). I haven't been able to locate it (it was not published in a journal), but I will attempt my own study. Did the Kamloops residential school have an unusually high death rate?

 

To answer that question, we need to know not only the total number of deaths (i.e., the 200 burials) but also the sum of the annual enrolments over the 80 years of the school's existence. The enrolment was published each year in the annual report of the Department of Indian Affairs until 1939. For that period, the total is 5,829 pupil-years. For the period from 1940 to the school's closure in 1969, we have to use guesswork. There were 345 pupils in 1939, and enrolment peaked at 500 in the early 1950s (Favrholdt 2020). If we assume an average of 400 pupils per year for 1940 to 1969, we get a total enrolment for the school's existence of 17,829 pupil-years. The annual death rate was therefore, on average, 1.1%.

 

That is much less than Rosenthal’s estimates. On the other hand, we know that the Canadian death rate fell dramatically during the twentieth century, initially through improvements in sanitation and then after the 1940s through the use of streptomycin and other new antibiotics. Would we get a higher death rate if we confined our calculations to the school's early years? This is, in fact, part of Rosenthal's argument: the death rate was high at residential schools before 1950, and not during their entire existence.

 

We know the death rate at the Kamloops school during its early years. The deaths were noted in the annual reports of the Department of Indian Affairs for the first twenty-four years of the school’s existence. The first nine years saw no deaths at all. Then from 1899 to 1913 there were 12, for an annual death rate of 1.34%. The causes of death were given as pneumonia (2), tuberculosis (1), consumption (1), pulmonary disease (1), hemoptysis (1), rheumatic fever (1), meningitis (1), “took place at her home” (1), heart disease (1), measles (1), and diarrhea (1). The first five were probably all tuberculosis. The deaths began to occur three years after a doubling of the enrolment, probably because of the higher risk of infection by other pupils.

 

After 1913, we have to use guesswork. The death rate may have risen with further increases in enrolment during the late 1920s to eight times the original level. Nonetheless, it could not have risen much. If we assume a maximum death rate of 1.7% between 1926 and 1950, followed by a lower rate of 0.55%, we already get a total of 199 deaths—almost the same number as the number of graves behind the school:

Could we nudge up the maximum of 1.7% by nudging down the 0.55% death rate for 1950-1969? Not really. We have age-specific mortality of Alberta Indians for 1974-1978: an average of 0.38% for ages 5 to 14 (Millar 1982). For Indigenous Canadians as a whole the crude death rate fell from 10.9 in 1960 to 7.5 in 1970 (Piché and George 1973). If we extrapolate back in time by increasing the average of 0.38% by 45%, Indigenous children 5-14 years old in 1960 would have had an estimated death rate of 0.55%. The actual death rate was probably higher, since we are extrapolating back in time from 1970, and not from 1974-78.

 

A maximum death rate of 1.7% is far from Rosenthal’s estimates. Moreover, the total of 200 burials would include deaths from the Spanish flu of 1918-19, an event for which the school could hardly be held responsible. How many children died then? The Department of Indian Affairs stopped publishing health data on the Kamloops school after 1914, but the 1919 annual report did describe the ravages of the Spanish flu in British Columbia:

 

The most serious setback to the health of the Indians of British Columbia during the year was the epidemic of Spanish influenza which was particularly severe in the Kamloops and Lytton bands, the former having a death-roll of 194 up to the first week in December, 1918, and the latter of over 100 in the months of October and November. (Indian Affairs 1919, p. 52)

 

How does an annual death rate between 1.34 and 1.7% compare to the average annual death rate of Canadian children at that time? Before 1921, the government did not regularly publish age-specific mortality. We have that kind of data only from that year and from succeeding years, as well as from 1881:

The school's death rate of 1.34% from 1899 to 1913 seems to have been two to three times the Canadian average. This is, in fact, the same excess mortality we see for Canadian Indigenous people in general at that time. According to the 1906 annual report of the Department of Indian Affairs, "the Indian population of Canada has a mortality rate of more than double that of the whole population, and in some provinces more than three times" (Indian Affairs 1906, p. 275).

 

After 1913, the gap would have widened between the death rate at the Kamloops school and the Canadian average, perhaps because of an increase in the school’s death rate but much more so because of the sharp drop in the Canadian death rate. Death rates fell more slowly in Indigenous communities, and not just at residential schools. Chief Medical Officer Peter Bryce blamed a "lack of sanitary knowledge" among formerly nomadic peoples that previously had no need for such knowledge due to the small size of each band and its continual relocation from one place to another:

 

That the one dominating cause of the excessive mortality everywhere is this lack of sanitary knowledge or of how to live in houses, and that the death-rate is due to the same cause, tuberculosis, which has operated with the same fatal effect amongst all people living in the same stage of civilization when once introduced among them.

 

[T]he prevalence of tuberculosis amongst the bands is not due to insufficient food, though doubtless poorly preserved and badly cooked food may tend to lessen individual resistance; but it is due directly to infection introduced by one member of a family into a small, often crowded, house, and there, as dried sputum collects on filthy floors and walls, is spread from one to another so certainly and at times so rapidly that one consumptive has in a single winter infected all the members of a household as certainly and rapidly as if he had had small-pox.

 

[F]rom such houses infected children have been received into schools, notably the boarding and industrial schools, and in the school-room, but especially in the dormitories, frequently over-crowded and ill-ventilated, have been the agents of direct infection.

 

[C]hildren infected in the schools have been sent home when too ill to remain at school, or because of being a danger to the other scholars, and have conveyed the disease to houses previously free.

 

[O]wing to the simple habits of the Indian, common to all people at their stage, visiting from house to house is a chief feature of the day's occupation, and the sick, are visited or go visiting, and through their expectorations serve to steadily spread the infection. (Indian Affairs 1906, pp. 275-276)

 

I quote Peter Bryce at length because the Truth and Reconciliation Commission cited him as a source for its criticisms of the residential school system. Bryce's argument, however, was that the residential schools would not have become a secondary source of infection if the home communities had not been a primary source.

 

Conclusions

 

1. There was no "mass grave." The burials took place over a long period stretching from 1899 to the 1960s.

 

2. The graves are today "unmarked." At the time of burial, however, they probably had wooden markers, which have since decayed and disappeared.

 

3.  To account for the 200 graves, there is no need to assume the high annual death rates put forward in Jeff Rosenthal's study, certainly not one out of twenty pupils.

 

4. The school had no deaths at all during its first nine years. For the next fourteen years, it had an annual death rate of 1.34%—in line with the annual death rate of Canadian Indigenous people at that time. The gap between the school’s death rate and the Canadian average then widened. First, the school’s death rate may have risen to 1.7% because of the growth in enrolment and a corresponding growth in opportunities for infection. Second, and more importantly, the Canadian death rate fell dramatically during the early to mid-twentieth century. The gap then narrowed after the 1940s with the introduction of streptomycin and other antibiotics.

 

To reduce the school's death rate to a level below that of the pupils' home communities, the school would have had to impose medical screening on incoming students, particularly for tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases. This was one of Peter Bryce's recommendations. However, a reliable test for latent TB would not be developed until the 1940s. Bryce also recommended increased ventilation of the dormitories, but that measure would have been possible only in summer. At that time, the most effective measures against TB were preventive: regular hand washing, daily bathing, no spitting, etc. Those measures took decades to inculcate into Euro-Canadians, and it would have taken just as long to incorporate them into Indigenous culture.

 

Yes, there was a vaccine against TB, but it did not enter widespread use until the late 1920s and did not prevent primary tuberculosis infection. In hindsight, the best preventive measure would have been to cap school enrolment at thirty pupils, in order to reduce the number of possible hosts for TB and other infectious pathogens.

 

The Kamloops Indian Residential School was not a death camp. The risk of death was about the same there as in the pupils' home communities. Nor was there a "mass grave." The burials took place over the eight decades of the school’s existence. The “unmarked graves” originally had wooden markers, which decomposed and disappeared over the years. The graveyard itself was abandoned with the closure of the school in 1969.

 

The residential school system was wrong but it was wrong for other reasons.

 

References

 

Canadian Human Mortality Database (2021). Department of Demography, Université de Montréal

http://www.bdlc.umontreal.ca/CHMD/prov/can/can.htm

 

Collection of Canadian Life Tables, 1801-2011

https://www.prdh.umontreal.ca/BDLC/data/pdfs/CAN.pdf

 

Dickson, C., and B. Watson (2021). Remains of 215 children found buried at former B.C. residential school, First Nation says. CBC News, May 27

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-eml%C3%BAps-te-secw%C3%A9pemc-215-children-former-kamloops-indian-residential-school-1.6043778

 

Favrholdt, K. (2020). Kamloops History: The dark and difficult legacy of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Kamloops This Week, October 7

https://www.kamloopsthisweek.com/community/kamloops-history-the-dark-and-difficult-legacy-of-the-kamloops-indian-residential-school-1.24215330

 

Hopper, T. (2021). Why so many children died at Indian Residential Schools At some schools, annual death rates were as high as one in 20. National Post, May 29

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/newly-discovered-b-c-graves-a-grim-reminder-of-the-heartbreaking-death-toll-of-residential-schools

 

Indian Affairs (1890-1969). Annual Report. Ottawa

https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/first-nations/indian-affairs-annual-reports/Pages/introduction.aspx

 

MacVicar, A. (2021). 'We knew it was there': Former B.C. chief says unmarked graves near Cranbrook need more context. Global News, July 1

https://globalnews.ca/news/7996606/cranbrook-residential-school-graves-chief/

 

Malcolm, C. (2021). Six things the media got wrong about the graves found near Residential Schools. True North, July 12

https://tnc.news/2021/07/12/six-things-the-media-got-wrong-about-the-graves-found-near-residential-schools/

 

Millar, W.J. (1982). Mortality patterns in a Canadian Indian population. Canadian Studies in Population 9: 17-31.

file:///C:/Users/Peter/Downloads/16124-Article%20Text-36783-1-10-20120119.pdf

 

Piché, V., and M.V. George. (1973). Estimates of vital rates for the Canadian Indians, 1960-1970. Demography 10(3): 367-382.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/10/3/367/172082/Estimates-of-vital-rates-for-the-Canadian-Indians

 

RCI (2021). Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc release final report on unmarked graves at former Kamloops residential school. RCI, July 15

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1809374/tkemlups-te-secwepemc-release-final-report-on-unmarked-graves-at-former-kamloops-residential-school

 

Residential Schools in Canada (2021). In The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools

 

Rosenthal, J.S. (2015). Statistical Analysis of Deaths at Residential Schools (282 pages including tables and graphs). Statistical analysis conducted on behalf of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada, for their report "Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future"