By Greg Szymanski,
Dec 2, 2010
I have covered the story about Pastor Kevin Annett and the atrocities committed against Native Canadians including mass murder and genocide for the last 5 years.
The story is heartbreaking.
How anybody could sit in a pew of a Roman Catholic Church or the United Church of Canada after fully understanding this story is beyond comprehension.
During the last five years, I have covered this story perhaps more than any journalist in America.
What I found was appalling.
First, the media has turned a blind eye.
Second, most readers forget about the story minutes after they read it.
Third, Annett receives little support but has found his life threatened on numerous occasions by the authorities.
Fourth, the Vatican is trying to double talk its way out of complicity again for instigating and perpetuating mass murder and genocide, something they have specialized in for hundreds of years.
Fifth, most of the hypocritical Christian community does nothing – even praises the Vatican ecumenical movement — and is of course too busy to deal with the killing of innocent children since their snooty noses are dug deep in the Bible, reciting Bible verses to make themselves feel good.
That’s just a handful of disappointments this story brings forth. I assure you there are many, many more.
However, if you are unfamiliar with what I am talking about, here are a few words from Pastor Annett to fill you in:
The time has come to end our complicity in mass murder.
Our exposure of the Canadian genocide has simultaneously indicted the social order that gave rise to it. Euro-Canadian Christian society as a whole stands condemned in the dock alongside those persons who ran the Indian residential schools, sterilized and murdered children, spread smallpox, and dug mass graves.
Despite their best efforts to ignore this fact and contain the whole matter with pseudo “apologies”, the Canadian government and its partner Catholic, Anglican and United churches now face the same kind of historical reckoning that Nazi Germany did after its defeat in 1945: an awakening to their own criminal nature.
On April 20, 2007, Canada and those churches suffered a fundamental moral defeat in Parliament, when the first cabinet minister in Canadian history publicly acknowledged that untold thousands of children had died in Christian Indian residential schools.
The extent of this defeat has yet to be appreciated by most Canadians, or even indigenous people. But its impact is nevertheless reverberating throughout every level of society and undermining the very basis of Canada ’s existence.
The question now is how to draw the larger conclusions of this defeat in order to reinvent Canada from the top down, and the bottom up, with a basic purpose: the establishment of a decolonized, secular, and genuinely democratic federation of sovereign nations: The Republic of Kanata.
Shedding the Past, Creating a Future
Canada has never been allowed to become a sovereign and democratic nation because of its historical role as a resource base and captured market for first the British and then the American empire. That dependency required that Canada remain frozen as a colonial, church-dominated, semi-feudal society: a condition that has caused the sustained genocide of indigenous peoples and the destruction of their lands, and now threatens the lives of all of us.
The two attempted democratic revolutions in our history – the abortive rebellions in 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada, and the Metis Insurrection of 1885 in the Red River basin – had as their common aim the ending of an Imperial oligarchy and the creation of a democratic Republic in which aboriginals and Europeans could co-exist equally. The crushing of both rebellions ensured that oligarchy and apartheid would remain the political norm in Canada.
And yet, the same vision of freedom that propelled these revolts had been first offered by the eastern Six Nations to the arriving Europeans through the “Two Road Wampum” Great Law of Peace, in which both cultures would share the land and not seek to dominate or conquer the other.
That offer was rejected not by Europeans as a whole, but by the religious and commercial elites who ran the foreign policy of both the French and British Empires, especially during the European Religious Wars of the formative 17th century.
Time and again, the Catholic and Protestant churches subverted peaceful relations between whites and natives, and among aboriginal nations such as the Huron and Iroquois, as part of their plan to exterminate all non-Christian peoples and take their land. In the words of the Jesuit missionary Jean Brebeuf,
“There can be no peace or parity between the savages and Christians. This is required by our Faith and the fur trade.”
Canada as we know it has arisen on the basis of this basic philosophy of Christian Superior Dominion.
There is still no equality between natives and non-natives in Canada because of an apartheid Indian Act that relegates “Indians” to a separate and inferior status, and holds most of them in a state of permanent sickness, landlessness and poverty on their own lands. Such permanent internal colonialism is required by the foreign and domestic corporate interests that run Canada as a fuel pump and watering hole.
Quite simply, in a neo-colonial regime like Canada , where “the Crown” legally owns all the land, native people must continue to be killed off, legally and methodically, for such theft to continue. A constant aboriginal death rate twenty times the national average is the deadly proof of this regime.
This genocidal reality will never change in Canada as it is presently constituted, since the maintenance of natives, and the poor generally, as a disempowered cash cow for others to exploit is an institutionalized part of Canadian society.
The nine billion dollar Indian Affairs industry requires a sick, dependent aboriginal populace, and a compliant class of collaborating native elites to administer this sickness. For the resulting totalitarian control of native people at every level is precisely what resource-hungry corporations need to take the last remnants of oil, timber, minerals and water from what is still aboriginal land.
Such a structurally criminal regime cannot be tinkered with or reformed, resting as it does on the oppression of most of the population, whether native or non-native. The existence of Canadians as “subjects of the Crown” under the ultimate authority of one person – a Governor-General accountable only to a foreign monarch – amounts to a state of legal slavery utterly repugnant to democracy and sovereignty.
“The only way to reform a colonial system is by dismantling it” said the great Irish nationalist, Bernadette Devlin. And the key to dismantling the Canadian oligarchy is to establish responsible government by severing ties with the English monarchy and creating a federated and secular Republic of sovereign indigenous nations with full public ownership of the economy, the land, and all its resources.
In short, every vestige of the system that spawned genocide in Canada needs to be abolished, if we are serious about ending its legacy and doing justice to aboriginal people and residential school survivors.
We believe that the original vision of the Two Road Wampum is still possible to enact in our land: of equality and living justice between all our nations. But to build this dream, we must first dismantle that which has prevented it.
A Program for Ending Genocide
Legal genocide in Canada has rested historically on three pillars: a colonial political oligarchy under the authority of the English Crown; a powerful, unaccountable and state-protected religious oligarchy in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and later, the state-created United Church; and a foreign-controlled, dependent economy.
To dismantle the root causes of genocide in Canada, we must replace all three of these systems, through a process of active de-construction and reconstruction: undoing what caused the wrong and building an altogether new political and social regime in its place.
To commence, our general aim must be the following steps of “decolonization and de-construction” in order to lay the basis for a true democratic and secular Republic:
Here is the most recent story from Annett sent to the Arctic Beacon today for republication.
Read it and weep, as they say.
But I doubt many so-called booked learned Christians will because they will be too busy arguing at Bible sessions to worry about a trivial thing like mass murder of children.
Also, at your next Bible session make sure you praise the Pope’s ecumenical movement since it is so wonderful we are all getting together in peace and unity.
Three Stories, Three Children: On the Requiem Road
By Kevin D. Annett
www.hiddenfromhistory.org
The elderly native man stares at the white woman across the table of the greasy spoon in Kamloops, British Columbia, where they both wait for a bus. It is November 25, 2010.
His name is George.
“I lived my whole life on our reserve, just south of Calgary. As a young boy, I got taken to the Catholic residential school north of us. That’s where I got all these.”
The man lifts his shirt and reveals deep scars on his chest and arms. Another deep furrow runs across his head.
“But that wasn’t the worst. It happened one night in winter. Cold as hell, and blowing hard. These three little girls from our reserve had all been raped by the head priest. The oldest girl was only seven. The others must have been five or six. The eldest one said to the others they had to run away. They was just in little cotton nightgowns, no shoes or nothing. But they escaped and ran off into that blizzard.”
The man looks down and shakes his head.
“They didn’t get more’n a mile. I was on the search team that found ’em. All three of ‘em were still holding each other’s little hands, lying face down in the snow. When we reached ‘em, the priest, the guy who’d raped them, got all mad and started cursing, like he was mad at them.
“That’s when I saw the oldest girl start moving. She weren’t dead. But when the priest saw her move she told me to just leave her there. He turned away from her and left her there, dying in the snow.”
The man is about to continue when his bus arrives.
“I couldn’t leave her there …” he begins. He turns to his wife, who has sat next to him the entire time, nodding sadly.
“We gotta go” he says to the white woman.
Far to the west, a day later, William Combes shuffles into the Ovaltine café on Vancouver’s hastings street skid row with his few belongings stuffed in a backpack. He nods and smiles at me, for we haven’t seen each other in weeks.
“I been drinking again, really bad” he begins apologetically, for he knows how much I rely on him, and how he relies on that reliance.
“The memories again?” I ask.
“Yeah, but it’s like now, I ain’t got nowhere to talk about it. Not now, with your radio show gone. That was the way I got by, talking on the show …”.
I nod, remembering with more than anger how his lifeline was severed so brutally. I say quickly,
“I’ve got a new show, a blog radio program. You have to come on it.”
He looks at me wearily, then reaches into his bag and extracts a nearly-empty bottle and swigs from it. We let the minutes tick by, hoping for something.
Finally William says,
“Remember when the Queen came to our school? How she took away those ten kids?”
“Yeah, I checked on that. She was definitely in B.C. in the fall of ’64.”
“I remembered their names. Some of ‘em. The boys.”
I pull out my notepad.
“There was Harvey and Ralph Parker – Metis boys from Lytton. They were in the group taken away by the Queen and Philip, after the picnic at dead Man’s Creek. Five other boys went, and three girls. They were all in the smart group in school.”
The ten children were never seen again.
“Are you remembering anything else William?” I asked.
He nods sadly.
“George Adolph and Ralph Arnuse, they were with me that day, they saw the kids taken away. And how she made ‘em all kiss her foot.”
“What?”
“The Queen had on these white gloves, and she put out her foot and told all those ten kids they had to kiss it. They all did.”
William shuddered and started coughing.
“I started talking about it the next day in school, said it wasn’t right. Then the nun told me if I said anything against the Queen I’d get killed for it.”
I stopped jotting notes and looked at him carefully.
“There’s more, isn’t there?”
The man nodded.
“I seen Brother Murphy throw that epileptic boy off the fire escape, three stories up. Murphy did that to a bunch of kids.”
“How many?”
William screws up his eyes and stutters,
“Happened all the time. I’d say fifteen. Twenty.”
“He killed that many kids?”
“Sure. Nobody survives that kinda fall. Murphy burned a few of them in the school furnace. I saw him do it once.”
William wouldn’t eat anything that day. I managed to get some oatmeal into him but he quickly threw it up into a urinal.
That night, waiting for a bus on Hastings street and sheltering from the rain, I encountered Josephine, an aboriginal prostitute I’ve known for years. Somehow, she’s still alive, although tonight she was bleeding from a new wound to her forehead.
“Eduardo did it. I still owe him.”
She sat next to me in the bus cubicle, watching warily for the Guatemalan pimp and drug dealer who rules a two block stretch of Hastings as his personal fief. The cops don’t go near him. Rumor has it that he used to be a political activist in his homeland. Now he murders people.
“Killed Francine by jumping on her head, over at the Patricia” recounted Jo to me once, years ago.
“She owed him fifty bucks. Made the mistake of telling him off.”
Jo was cold that night, and I offered her my coat. She smiled shyly and declined.
“Are you safe?” I asked.
She just tilted her head at the stupidity of the question, but being native, said nothing.
After a few minutes, she stood and prepared to leave me, but mumbled,
“You be careful Kev. Nobody’s talking nowadays. We been told not to.”
“Told by who?” I asked.
She looked frightened for the first time. A cop car drove by, and slowed down. She hurried away into the wet night.
