Dear Dr. Bryce: Letters to late residential school whistleblower express gratitude, pledge action

For someone who died nearly 90 years ago, Dr. Peter Bryce sure gets a lot of mail.

Bryce was the chief health inspector for the Department of Indian Affairs who, in the early 20th century, tried to alert the nation to the atrocious conditions in residential schools — where abuse, malnutrition and especially tuberculosis were taking a deadly toll on the children forced to attend the institutions.

His warnings were largely ignored, and he was branded a troublemaker and pushed into retirement from the public service. In 1922, Bryce published his own pamphlet about the schools titled The Story of a National Crime. He died a decade later.

"One of Dr. Bryce's greatest laments is that ... the work of saving these children's lives did not get done in his lifetime. He died feeling like he was a failure," Cindy Blackstock told CBC's Ottawa Morning on Monday.

Blackstock, a professor at Montreal's McGill University and executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, has been working toward righting that historical wrong. She was the driving force behind a garden of orange flowers, windmills and other ornaments that has sprouted up around Bryce's gravestone in a quiet corner of Ottawa's Beechwood Cemetery.

Over the summer, Blackstock noticed visitors to Bryce's grave were leaving letters, poems and drawings for him, so she erected a simple orange mailbox to keep them out of the rain.

Now, Beechwood staff check the mailbox regularly and remove the contents for safekeeping. According to the cemetery's Nick McCarthy, the letters are eventually handed over to the Bryce family.