Tag Archives: Adam Green

Digging for Peter Bryce’s Spiritual Roots

mt-pleasant-presbyterian-church-copy

Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church

Here we were in Ontario in late May and the temperature was over 30 degrees, but inside the church, it was cool.  Peter Campbell and I were in Mount Pleasant, Ontario to interview a local historian and get some footage of Peter Bryce’s hometown for the film Finding Peter Bryce, and we were looking for a stained glass window that was tied to the Bryce family.

Peter Bryce grew up in a far different Canada than the one we live in today.  In an era without computers, televisions, and radios the church fulfilled not only a spiritual role, but it gave everyone an identity, and in a time when most people lived in small communities the church all but defined who you were.

“The social aspect of the church in those days was enormous,” says local historian Bill Darfleur.  “A lot of what we now see as society’s responsibility in social welfare, employment and those sorts of things, those roles were filled by the church.  So, your boss would be in the same congregation as you. It was very important.”

“Religion for the average Canadian in the late 19th century is the centerpiece of their life in a way that we don’t understand today,” says historian Adam Green. “People got their identity from their religion, more than their language, more than ethnicity and to some extent more than their national background.”

Peter Bryce’s parents arrived in Mount Pleasant in 1843, and George and Catherine Bryce took a leading role in the Presbyterian congregation.  The book, The Heritage of the Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church, has a section on the Bryce family.

George Bryce was one of the first and most devoted members of the church.  He was the first president of the Board of Managers and was also one of the church trustees who signed the indenture for the purchase of the two lots where the church is located.  He was among the faithful who helped build the church.

George Bryce’s commitment rubbed off on his children.  His eldest, George Jr., studied theology at Knox College (University of Toronto) and was ordained as a minister of the Presbyterian Church in 1871. He moved to Winnipeg shortly after to establish Knox Presbyterian Church and serve as its minister.  He also played a major role in the education system of Manitoba.  He founded Manitoba College, and assisted in founding the University of Manitoba.  So, while Peter Bryce is known for his work in the mostly secular world of public health, his personal influences included a heavy dose of Protestant religion, along with a classical liberal approach to life.

“The one life lesson that I managed to tease out (from research on Bryce) was this notion that when you encounter somebody that is not like you, you don’t cast them off, you bring them into ‘the circle,’” says Green. “There was this missionary state of mind that your job, being someone who was educated, was to bring that light to the masses. For the time, it is an open-minded way of looking at the world.”

Bryce’s religion led him to the Social Gospel, a group of people who felt the church’s role was to help those who were struggling in the new industrial economy of the late 19th century.  From the Social Gospel we get political leaders like J.S. Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas, and it was the Social Gospel which made public health not just a career, but a calling for Peter Bryce.

bryce-window-single-shot

Photo Courtesy of June Adlam

Peter Campbell and I never did find the correct window on that hot spring afternoon.  We had snuck in after another event, and the organizers were waiting to lock the doors and go home.  The next day, we missed our connection with June Adlam from the church so we never got a shot of the window.  But June and I connected through email, and she sent me a CD with photos of the Bryce window.  According to the The Heritage of the Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church, the window was erected in 1904 to honour Peter Bryce’s parents.  The inscription underneath is “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” and the window depicts the story of the Good Samaritan. It seems Peter Bryce’s persistent advocacy for the Indigenous came from a far deeper place than just the science of public health.

The documentary film Finding Peter Bryce is currently in post-production but it needs funding to be completed.  If you are interested in contributing, you can give through our partners, the Canadian Public Health Association and receive a tax receipt in return.  Go to How to donate to the Film to find out more. Click here to see the promotional trailer.   If you have other questions, suggestions or thoughts, please contact me at andyj.bryce@gmail.com

Peter Bryce Debunked the Myths of His Time

It is easy to stand back from the story of Peter Henderson Bryce, and wonder just what all the fuss is about.  After all, as my second cousin David put it, “He was only doing his job.” It is the summer of 2014, the day after a Bryce family reunion where I had met dozens of other descendants of Peter Bryce – people I didn’t even know existed just a few months before.  We are sitting around the remains of breakfast when the topic comes up.  In today’s context, the actions of Peter Bryce seem relatively innocent; he was asked to go out and report on the conditions in residential schools and make recommendations to the government about a course of action, and that’s just what he did.

A year after that breakfast, Peter Campbell and I are interviewing Marie Wilson at a ceremony to unveil a plaque in Peter Bryce’s honour at Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa.  Her very presence at the ceremony means that indeed there was something very special about what Peter Bryce did.

“What is heroic about doing what you should be doing?” asks Wilson.  She was one of three commissioners on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  She heard thousands of hours of testimony from residential school survivors, and read over the information and evidence gathered by the Commission.  “What is heroic about doing the right thing?  What is heroic about practicing your profession to the best standards you have sworn your career to?

“It’s heroic because the circumstances and the political framework of the day would not allow him to do the normal right thing,”

Dr. Adam Green agrees; in the late 1990s he was working on his Masters’ degree at Queen’s University when he ran across Peter Bryce.

“I am looking in one class at the early Canadian labour movement; I’m in another looking very much at what is called state formation in the early 20th century.  Ultimately in doing research for two different papers, I come across Peter Bryce and this is because on one hand he is producing material on immigration and manpower, and on the other hand he is also working on the Aboriginal file,” says Green.  We are interviewing him in the dining room of his suburban Ottawa home.  Now Adam Green is a researcher for the federal government who also teaches courses in history at the University of Ottawa.  All around us, just out of camera shot, are high chairs and kids’ toys.  His life has moved on since researching and writing about Peter Bryce, twenty years ago.

“I was shocked that I actually found somebody who was perfectly at the centre of all of this,” says Green.  “From a very human angle he’s turning science into something that is debunking every major myth you can think about in the early 20th century. “

Adam Green’s thesis Humanitarian, M.D.: Dr. Peter H. Bryce’s Contributions to Canadian Federal Native and Immigration Policy, 1904-1921 is probably the most comprehensive look at Peter Bryce available today, and I was lucky enough to find it on my first search.  I clearly remember the winter evening I spent reading the thesis, and waking up a few nights later to refer to it, because something in the thesis had infiltrated my dreams.  I am thrilled to be interviewing him.

“As much as he’s being scientific about it, he’s being very human and saying ‘forget about all of the myths and urban legends, here’s what the hard evidence tells me,’” says Green. “’The evidence tells me that Aboriginals are not by their nature unsanitary, and new immigrants from the steppes of Russia are not unsanitary.’  So while he’s delivering cold hard facts, he’s also flying in the face of what the commonsense knowledge was of new immigrant populations and of Aboriginals and it would be the reverse of what almost every Canadian thinks at the time.”

As we pack up at Adam’s house I remember my parents’ lessons about integrity: “Don’t follow the crowd. Do the right thing.  Stand up for yourself.”  I chat with Adam and help move equipment before driving to our next interview. It is a pretty normal scenario, one I’ve played out dozens of times.  But on the inside I feel different; I feel like now I am more complete.  Now I know where those lessons came from.

 

The documentary film Finding Peter Bryce is currently in post-production but it needs funding to be completed.  If you are interested in contributing, you can give through our partners, the Canadian Public Health Association and receive a tax receipt in return.  Go to How to donate to the Film to find out more. Click here to see the promotional trailer.   If you have other questions, suggestions or thoughts, please contact me at andyj.bryce@gmail.com