{"id":11905,"date":"2016-03-30T06:59:33","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T13:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=11905"},"modified":"2018-05-18T13:15:29","modified_gmt":"2018-05-18T20:15:29","slug":"camosun-instructor-working-on-documentary-about-great-grandfather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2016\/03\/30\/camosun-instructor-working-on-documentary-about-great-grandfather\/","title":{"rendered":"Camosun instructor working on documentary about great-grandfather"},"content":{"rendered":"

Camosun Digital Communications teacher Andrew Bryce is working on a documentary about his great-grandfather Peter Henderson Bryce, who was heavily involved in the welfare of indigenous peoples at the beginning of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2011 my mom passed away and left me a whole box of family genealogy records,\u201d says Bryce. \u201cAs I went through them I started seeing references to my great-grandfather, Peter Henderson Bryce, so I started looking him up on the internet and discovered what a character this guy was. What really stood out to me was that he had played a key role in documenting health abuses in residential schools in 1907.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bryce says his great-grandfather had a very interesting life and did a lot for Canada\u2019s development, but it was a different time\u2014talking about health abuses in residential schools didn\u2019t necessarily make him a popular guy.<\/p>\n

\"Camosun\u2019s<\/a>
Camosun\u2019s Andy Bryce with pictures of his great-grandfather (photo by Jill Westby\/Nexus<\/em>).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cEarly in his career he developed a public health policy for the province of Ontario, and it was copied by the other provinces and a few states in the US,\u201d says Bryce. \u201cHe was kind of big man on campus at that time, and he was quoted a lot in newspapers up until about 1907, and then he kind of disappears. You don\u2019t really see too much from him; what happened was his reputation really took a hit because he was contradicting the main narrative of the day. A lot of people didn\u2019t believe him, and he kind of disappeared from the history books.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he told people about his great-grandfather\u2019s story, Bryce consistently got the same feedback: that he had to get Peter Henderson Bryce\u2019s story out there. After reconnecting with his extended family and finding out about the many interesting legacies that his family had, he realized there was definitely a story to be told. So, in the fall of 2014, Bryce began to talk with a friend who runs local production company Gumboot Productions about doing a documentary. Gumboot agreed that it was a good idea and began working on it immediately.<\/p>\n

Their first big shoot was at a naming ceremony for the Waakebiness-Bryce Institute for Indigenous Health,\u00a0 a public health institute for the study of indigenous issues at the University of Toronto.<\/p>\n

Their second shoot took place when it was decided that a historical plaque would be put on Peter Bryce\u2019s grave in Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy family and I wrote the historical plaque, and then we had this great big ceremony,\u201d explains Bryce. \u201cWe had the head of the Assembly of First Nations, Perry Bellegarde, there. We had a commissioner from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Marie Wilson. We had Sheila Fraser, who used to be the federal government\u2019s auditor general, and a lot of historians, as well as my family and a number of survivors from residential schools.\u201d<\/p>\n

After gathering some material and getting their story out a bit more, the team was approached about doing a short video for Grade 7 and 8 students, which they agreed to do; that piece will premiere at Royal Oak Middle School on April 1. But the film work doesn\u2019t stop there.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe still have the larger documentary to do,\u201d says Bryce. \u201cThat\u2019s still on the books, and we are planning a shoot for May of this year, and beyond that we need to get some funds. We need a whole whack of funds to finish the film off, and certainly we\u2019re going to try to sell it to broadcasters and get it into festivals and stuff, but our real goal is to get it into libraries and educational institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Camosun Digital Communications teacher Andrew Bryce is working on a documentary about his great-grandfather Peter Henderson Bryce, who was heavily involved in the welfare of indigenous peoples at the beginning of the 20th century. \u201cIn 2011 my mom passed away and left me a whole box of family genealogy records,\u201d says Bryce. \u201cAs I went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,163],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus","category-march-30-2016"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11905"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15964,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11905\/revisions\/15964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}