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In the news business it’s called ‘burying the lead’ — a common rookie mistake. It means you’ve got all the facts for an important story, but you haven’t put them at the top where they’ll get maximum attention.

And here was a real clunker. As I was doing online research, trying to sort out why Canadian journalists — myself included — have done such a lousy job covering aboriginal affairs for so long, I ran across a 108-year-old example of a buried lead.

It was on a website named canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org, hidden away in a compilation of archival records and old newspaper clippings about the mistreatment and abuse of aboriginal children in residential schools.

There I saw a short four-paragraph story that ran in the Nov. 15, 1907 edition of what was then called the Ottawa Evening Citizen. The lead was about a report by Dr. P.H. Bryce, the chief medical officer of the “Indian department,” warning that pupils being admitted to residential schools needed better screening for contagious diseases.

It wasn’t until the second paragraph that readers were told that aboriginal pupils in church-run boarding schools in Manitoba were dying of tuberculosis in staggering numbers. Dr. Bryce had found that at 15 schools an average of about 25 per cent of a student population of 1,637 children “are dead.”

The doctor reported that officials at one school kept shoddy records, but it appeared that as much as 69 per cent of its pupils had died.

These children were dying of TB because of the filthy conditions at the schools.

The third paragraph of the short news report said: “Dr. Bryce’s description of the schools shows them to be veritable hotbeds for the propagation and spread of this disease. In fact in only one school which the medical inspector visited was attention paid to the most ordinary requirements of ventilation of the dormitories.”

Yes, the lead was buried. But the facts were still there in black and white. “Nobody told us” is no excuse.

The people in my line of work have a lot to account for in this regard. Our sins are largely sins of omission. Too often we failed to see coverage of aboriginal people as part of our mandate. Too often we didn’t go after the story unless a public official handed us a report. The people in my line of work have a lot to account for in this regard. Our sins are largely sins of omission. Too often we failed to see coverage of aboriginal people as part of our mandate. Too often we didn’t go after the story unless a public official handed us a report.

I’d like to think that, today, editors would order teams of reporters and photographers to get on the next flight to Winnipeg to cover the Manitoba school deaths story.

Big black headlines would scream from the front pages of every daily paper in Canada, the residential schools scandal would lead every newscast, angry questions would be raised in the House of Commons.

Well, something like that did happen last week when part one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report on the horrors of the residential school system was released. We all noticed — for a couple of news cycles, at least.

But what happened in 1907 when Dr. Bryce’s report to the “Indian department” came out? Not much. There was no immediate public outcry. No royal commissions. Almost no media followup. The politicians of the day were not held to account.

The residential schools system continued for another eight decades. Children were raped and abused by their teachers and by clerics. More than 6,000 students died of disease or physical abuse, or in school fires and other catastrophes. Many are buried in unmarked graves.

Why are non-aboriginal Canadians only now paying attention to what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission appropriately describes as a “cultural genocide”?

The people in my line of work have a lot to account for in this regard. Our sins are largely sins of omission. Too often we failed to see coverage of aboriginal people as part of our mandate. Too often we were slow to react when an influenza epidemic or some other public health crisis afflicted remote aboriginal communities. Too often we didn’t go after the story unless a public official — like a Dr. Bryce, or a quasi-official organization like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — handed us a report.

We’re easily distracted by trivia and the daily political circus acts at City Hall or on Parliament Hill. It’s easier to be a stenographic reporter than to actually spend time at a reserve talking to people. It’s cheaper for our news organizations to pay the cab fare from the newsroom to Queen’s Park than to charter a bush plane to get to a northern reserve.

Early in my reporting career the editors at the Toronto Star sent me to cover an inquest on the remote Sandy Lake reserve, about 600 kilometers northwest of Thunder Bay. People in the community were dying of the common flu.

In the brief time I was in Sandy Lake I learned that the community had many other related problems — with nutrition, education, water, housing, and so on. But I was there to cover an inquest — an official event — and when it wrapped up I was on the next plane south.

I thought to myself that someone probably should go back to Sandy Lake some day to report on those other problems. Well, that someone should have been me.

Sandy Lake was in the news again 35 years later, in 2009, when an outbreak of a dangerous disease was spreading rapidly through vulnerable northern aboriginal communities at three times the rate of infection in Canada’s general population. About 120 people were infected in Sandy Lake. It was flu again.

Jeff Sallot is one of Canada’s most experienced and respected political writers. He worked for The Globe and Mail for more than three decades, much of the time as a political journalist based in Ottawa. He started his career in political journalism at The Toronto Star when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister. He taught journalism at Carleton University for seven years until he retired in 2014.

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