INQUISITION NEWS: Kevin Annett: Riding the Groundswell

Kevin Annett: Riding the Groundswell: A Report On My Recent Speaking Tour

By Kevin Annett – Eagle Strong Voice

ITCCS.org

April 1st, 2011

For five weeks starting in late February, I visited fifteen cities across Europe and Canada, and spoke at twenty four public gatherings: in bookstores, community centers, among indigenous people on their traditional lands, and even to a packed Opera House in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The tour was scheduled as a book launch for my just-released “Unrepentant: Disrobing the Emperor”, but it quickly became much more than that: as I helped survivors of church torture picket Catholic churches as far away as Copenhagen and Toronto, and served a Public Summons on Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper in Ottawa, and received new endorsements for our International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS) from indigenous groups here in “Canada”.

What was common, however, was that everywhere, I encountered the same courage and determination in people who I met, and a growing groundswell of support for our campaign to end the reign of terror against our children, our rights, and our planet.

Frankly, my head is still spinning from my tour, so I hope I capture the essentials of what I experienced, and the enormous change that is shifting our world, symbolized perhaps by the earthquakes that rock our planet daily.

Since the tour, I am more hopeful than ever about the future of our work. For one thing, the crowds at our events keep getting bigger: at venues where I had previously spoken, the attendance was twice the size than previously. I was interviewed on national media in Slovenia and Denmark, and local media all over England and Canada. But most important, many more people stepped forward at these events to sign up with our campaign.

As is expected, the attempts to undermine and sabotage our work also increased, primarily in Canada, where gatherings in Brantford and Hamilton were the target of misinformation and smear campaigns aimed at me. This was undoubtedly due to the fact that the area is a center of native activism and support for my work. Fortunately, the organizers at these events spotted the signs and helped diffuse the lies and keep our events on track.

In this regard, one of the more amusing incidents happened in Hamilton, during the waning days of my tour, when the local police informed the organizers of my talk at Mohawk College that an “undercover” cop from their “hate crimes” division would be present at my lecture to monitor what I said. In response, many of you wrote to the Hamilton police challenging this obvious intimidation tactic, and I myself asked the head cop in question whether his department was also investigating the churches that murdered local native children with the same interest.

He hasn’t replied to me.

During that same week, I was delighted to speak to a wonderful class of Catholic high school students near Toronto, many of whom want to sign up with our work to hold their own church accountable for its ongoing crimes against children. Their support, like that of traditional Catholic college students in Cork, Ireland where I won a public debate with a Vatican official last year, indicates how much the church is a trembling house of cards, behind its image of solidity.

It was also a high point on my tour when I was presented with the Two Row Wampum Belt by elders of the Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk) Nation near Montreal, and, as part of their endorsement of our ITCCS, was authorized by them to bring the message of the Two Row Wampum to my people. This Belt was the original treaty of equality between Europeans and the Mohawks which was abrogated and violated by the English Crown. Undoing the genocide of residential schools involves, I believe, the re-establishment of the Two Row Wampum, and the dis-establishment of the Crown of England and its false jurisdiction.

I am resuming the next phase of my tour in mid April – hey, two weeks is plenty of rest for me! – when I return to Ontario, and then back to London, England on May 7. I will be based in London throughout the summer and into the fall months, and will travel from there all over Europe and North America.

During those months, I will be helping organize our September Tribunal in London and building up the networks that will sustain our campaign, especially among groups of survivors all over Europe. We have a promise of support from politicians in Italy and Ireland, and from the same German-based media group that has broadcast our film Unrepentant to over 10 million viewers since August. We also recently received a generous financial offer from a donor to sustain our campaign and pay for travel costs.

We now have five local groups in Canada, two in Ireland, five in England, one in Australia, and two each in Denmark and Slovenia, that endorse our ITCCS hearings in the fall, and most of which will be holding forums of their own to coincide with the Tribunal. In these gatherings we will be composing the indictments by which we will bring to common law trial and sentencing those persons and institutions that planned and continue crimes against children, the earth and indigenous people.

We have a growing legal advisory team that will be guiding this aspect of our campaign, but we also look to indigenous elders and survivors of genocide in many countries to help determine the course of our work. We are part of an enormous work in progress, the future of which is in your hands.

In that regard, I have reprinted below recent you tube postings of events related to my tour, including the endorsement from the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake near Montreal.

I want to end by thanking all of you for your tireless efforts at hosting me and making the recent tour possible, and for preparing for the months ahead. More news and details are forthcoming.

As a survivor of the first residential school in Canada near Brantford said to me at my last public talk this week, as she embraced me,

“I didn’t want to trust you because you’re a white man. But after listening to you I don’t think that anymore. I’ve been waiting for what you’re doing my whole life and I ain’t gonna be silent anymore about they done to us.”