This is a scathing report detailing the effects of genocidal policies carried out by the Government of Canada towards First Nations in the first two decades of the 20th century. Dr. Bryce, a medical doctor and respected public health expert, published it shortly after he was forced to resign his rôle as reporter to the Indian Affairs Department. His report on the health conditions in the Canadian residential school system in western Canada was suppressed while he was employed as a civil servant.

Bryce was horrified by the conditions that he found, and yet his findings were repeatedly ignored by the government. He concludes that the very high incidence of tuberculosis among First Nations in the Prairies was encouraged by the Canadian colonial government as a deliberate policy to destroy indigenous communities.

Dr Bryce's courageous stand, written as an appeal for justice to the First Nations and parliament of Canada a century ago, gives the lie to Canadian popular myth that residential schools were not (somehow) a tool to enact genocide. The fact that “we didn't know” was deliberate: officials such as Duncan Campbell Scott — poet and genocidaire — feigned sympathy in public, yet continued to carry out policies of deliberate neglect in order, in his words, ‘to get rid of the Indian problem’.

(NB: The book refers to a Dr W. A. Roche. This is a typo, and should refer to Dr. William James Roche MP [1859–1937], Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs, 1912–1917.)