Kahtou 0004
Apr 2000

by Rev. Kevin D. Annett

"I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our Indian schools to spread infectious disease. The mortality rate among students often exceed 50%. this is a national crime." Dr. Peter Bryce, Ontario Health Commission, in his report to Department of Indian Affairs Superintendent Duncan Scott, May, 1909.

"We couldn't begin to investigate all the deaths at the Alberni residential school. It would be too huge an investigation." Constable Gerry Peters, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Vancouver, October 3rd, 1997 "Doctor Darby, the United Church missionary in our village, told me in 1952 he was being paid by the Department of Indian Affairs for every Indian he sterilised." Ethel Wilson of Bella Bella, B.C., to a Human Rights Tribunal, Vancouver, June 13th, 1998.

In March of this year, a United Nations Human Rights panel declared what many of us have known for years: that Canada is in violation of International law for its treatment of Native Peoples, and that the condition of Aboriginals 'is the most pressing human rights issue facing Canadians.' At least among its Caucasian citizens, and so-called 'world opinion', Canada has not been considered to be among the ranks of genocidal nations which have slaughtered 1000's of its native people: until recently. But now, many eye-witnesses to murder, torture, sexual sterilisation and medical experiments at Indian residential schools have come forward publicly to reveal a long, hidden history of international genocide by church and state in Canada.

I have worked with dozens of these eye-witnesses, and many other survivors of the residential schools, for years now, but most recently as an advisor with the first Independent Tribunal into the schools that was held in Vancouver in June, 1998 under the auspices of an affiliate of the United Nations. Our work has opened a Pandora's Box of not only crimes against humanity, but evidence of a concerted cover-up and misinformation campaign by the government, churches, police and even elements of the 'official' Indian leadership which spans decades.

Nearly one-half of all the Native children who were forced by law to attend Canadian residential schools died in that system - at lest 50,000 souls - until the last school was closed in 1984. Yet, while acknowledging this death rate, the Canadian government and its police arm, the RCMP, continue to insist that no intentional killings occurred in the schools, despite the growing number of eye-witness reports to the contrary.

"My sister Margaret was murdered, thrown from a window by a nun at the Catholic school on Kuper Island," stated Bill Seeward of Nanaimo, British Columbia to our Tribunal investigators in 1998. "The nun got away with it, naturally. That went on all the time."

Speaking of the United Church residential school in Port Albernie, BC, Harriet Nahanee of Vancouver told reporters in 1995, "Reverance Caldwell kicked my friend Maisie Shaw to her death down a flight of stairs on Christmas eve, 1946. I heard him screaming at her, and then that terrible thud. I was hiding under the stairs, I saw her lying still, with her eyes open. But then her body disappeared and no-one ever saw her again. Now the Mounties are saying she died of 'pneumonia'."

Rather than the action of the "bad apples", or isolated lunatics, the deaths of residential school children were in fact intentional acts of genocide designed to eradicate a people. According to Mabel Sport of Vancouver Island. "I was forced to sleep in the same bed with kids who were dying of tuberculosis. That was the Christie residential school around 1942. They were trying to kill us off, and it nearly worked. They did the same thing at Protestant Indian schools, three kids to a bed, healthy ones with the dying." Mabel's statement corroborates Indian Health Inspector Dr. Peter Bryce's claim to the federal government, in 1909, that "the conditions are being deliberately created in our Indian schools to spread infectious disease." The response to Bryce's report to Duncan Campbell Scott, the top Indian Affairs officer in Canada at the time, is significant."

"It is readily acknowledged that Indian children by habituating so closely in the residential schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages.

"But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem." *(DIA Superintendent D.C. Scott to BC Indian Agent-General Major D. McKay, April 12, 1910; emphasis is mine).

Scott's unsubtle statement that Canadian government policy was to purposely kill off Native children is consistent with the mortality rate of over 40%, and the brutal practices of staff at the schools. For only intentional genocide can explain the deaths of more than 50,000 Aboriginal children. No such logical consistency characterises today's desperate attempts by the Canadian government and mainline churches to explain away their own history of murder. All the perpetrators of this crime are pretending it didn't really happen. If one believes the government, the RCMP, the Catholic, Anglican and United churches, and their loyal friends in the media, residential schools were mostly about a series of unfortunate "physical and sexual abuses" which are now being acknowledged and 'healed' with some money and therapy. But 50,000 corpses must go missing in the process.

The RCMP is working overtime to keep these corpses hidden. This state police force, which abducted Native children for the residential schools and hunted down run-away students, is now, absurdly, the agency 'investigating' wrong-doing at the residential schools. Kind of like Richard Nixon conducting the Watergate inquiry!

Only one man has ever been convicted as a result of the RCMP's four-year long 'investigation'. Perhaps this poor record is because RCMP officer have spent most of their time refusing to interview eye-witnesses to murders, like Harriett Nahanee, and publicly disparaging them.

Even more ominously, the RCMP has issued fabricated death certificates in the case of at least one dead child - Maisie Shaw - has publicly lied about its knowledge of murder at residential schools and its own mandate regarding such homicide, and actually admitted last year that it assist the United Church of Canada in 1960 in suppressing evidence of atrocities at its Alberni residential school and keeping stories of murder out of the media. Unfortunately, this campaign of cover-up and subterfuge is being assisted by elements of the state-funded Native leadership, and indeed would not be as successful as it has been in fogging the issue of murder and genocide without such help from 'government Indians'.

Local Tribal Council officials in BC have silenced their own people who witnessed killings, destroyed evidence, and even publicly supported the RCMP's contention that 'no children were killed at residential schools'. This collaboration extends, as well, to the national level of Indian politics. On his own initiative, without consulting any of his Assembly of First Nations colleagues, AFN President Phil Fontaine accepted the 'apology' of Indian Affairs Minister Jane Stewart last year for the residential school 'abuses', despite Stewart's refusal to attend the June, 1998 U.N. Tribunal or acknowledge that genocide had occurred in the residential schools.

"The residential schools were our Holocaust" says Alberni school survivor, and eye-witness to murder, Harriett Nahanee. "Just like with the Jews under Hitler, it produced two kinds of people: slaves and sell-outs. And the sell-outs are still in charge. When they were kids at the Albernie school, they were the ones who got an apple for informing on other children who spoke their own language. Now they're getting even bigger payoffs for selling off our ancestral land to logging companies for a dime, or for protecting murders and paedophiles. Our biggest enemy now isn't the whites, it's our own people who have been made into the white man's dog."

Such collaborators were present at our Tribunal last year, when vital testimony about the planned genocide was offered publicly for the first time, along with testimonies that linked present-day Native officials with drug trafficking and paedophile rings in British Columbia. For example, while the United Church ignored the summons issued to it to attend the Tribunal, it paid the airfare for four of its Native members from Bella Bell, BC to attend the same event, monitor the testimonies, and intimidate eye-witnesses into silence. One of these "church Indians' even physically threatened myself and other Tribunal organisers and offered money to at least two Tribunal judges.

None of this should surprise any student of colonialism. Neither Cortes nor any Christian missionary could have advanced a foot into the New World without 'dividing and conquering' Aboriginals and turning them against their own people. That policy has been institutionalised in Canada's segregation of Natives into 'status' and 'non-status' Indians, and in the six billion dollar a year Indian Affairs budget, which is a huge payoff to the assimilated Native elites who administer their own genocide. Meanwhile, off-reserve Indians in Canada continue to die at third-world levels of poverty and violence, and, when grouped as a Nation, have a standard of living ranking sixty-fourth in the world, below that of Brazil.

This continuing genocide, and the division of Canadian Indians into 'assimilated and expendable', was created in the residential school system, which was the single most effective genocidal instrument of church and state in Canada. Neither the Canadian establishment as a whole, nor its churches and police arm, nor the Native elites who learned long ago how to wait for crumbs from their master's table, have an interest in revealing the truth of the residential school horror. For such revelation would not only threaten their privileges, and their continued theft for Native lands and resources; it would also expose their complicity in the drug trafficking, child sex trade, and mafia-like violence and corruption that is endemic in Canadian Native communities.

The work of our Tribunal has brought smears, lies and death threats upon its organisers and eye-witnesses from these forces; but it has also set in motion a movement that will one day topple the shaky house of cards that is neo-colonialism in Canada today. Our work is not only for the spirit and the memory of our 50,000 murdered children; it is for the majority and fear in one of the richest nations of the world.

As Harriett Nahanee told our Tribunal, "I used to be a victim. Now I'm a threat." May the same be said of all of us, and of our still-suffering brothers and sisters.

Copyright © Kevin D. Annett, 1999

(Rev) Kevin Annett is a former United Church minister who was fired without cause from his Port Alberni church in 1995 after he helped unearth evidence of murders at the local residential school, and of illegal sales of Native land by the United Church of Canada. He has worked as a counsellor and advocate in numerous residential school healing circles in British Columbia, and served as the advisor to the first international Tribunal into Canadian Residential Schools, held in Vancouver, BC in June, 1998 under the auspices of the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities (IHRAAM), a United Nations affiliate. Kevin is presently completing a book on the Canadian Holocaust and his work with the Tribunal, and is working closely with Native and human rights organisations around the world to bring charges of genocide against the Canadian government, the RCMP and mainline churches at the United Nations.

(Rev.) Kevin Annett, BA,MA,MC Community Minister and Consultant PO Box 372, Ganges Saltspring Island, BC V8K 2W1 email: kevin_annett@hotmail.com Originally printed in the American Indian Review - Summer, 1999