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2This book is dedicated to the more than 50,000 children who died in Indian residential schools operated jointly by the government of Canada and the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada and to those who continue to suffer and die from the consequences of these crimes. Any part of this book may be reproduced, photocopied, recorded or transmitted for non-commercial purposes, provided that acknowledgment is made of its author. For more information about the author or this works sponsoring organizations, or to order copies, please see these sites: www.hiddenfromhistory.org http://canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org Or contact the author at: email@example.com ph: 250-591-4573 (Canada) Published on Occupied Territory of the Squamish Indigenous Nation September, 2010 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 31able of ConLenLs In Memoriam..................................................................................................................................6 Authors Note.................................................................................................................................7 Preamble..........................................................................................................................................9 Part One: A Chronology of the Crime: Genocide in Canada in the Modern Era.................................12 Introduction: What is Genocide and from where does it come? ..........................................24 Genocide as a Religious Ideal: Christendom in Practice........................................................31 Christian Genocide in the New World and Canada...............................................................34 Genocide in Canada in the Modern Era ...................................................................................44 Legitimizing the Crime by Re-Defining it: Sabotage at the United Nations.......................48 Taking Action: International versus Sovereign Justice ..........................................................52 Part Two: Evidence of Intentional Genocide and other Crimes at Indian Residential Schools and Hospitals in Canada, according to the Original Definition and Criteria of Genocide established by Raphael Lemkin (1944) .....................................................................................56 A Long View of Genocide, and its Evidence within Canada................................................57 The First Definition: A Philosophy of Sanctioned Conquest and Extermination ..............58 The Second Definition: The plan to deliberately imprison and destroy Indigenous Nations within Indian Residential Schools..............................................................................59 A. The issue of Intentionality.............................................................................................59 B. Assaulting, De-humanizing and Killing Indians .......................................................68 1. Homicide in Indian residential schools...........................................................................78 Deliberate Exposure to Diseases...................................................................................88 2. Imposing Measures to Prevent Births and Procreation ..............................................102 Sterilizations ..................................................................................................................102 Murder of Newborns and Forced Abortions............................................................108 Segregation and Breeding Out Practices ...............................................................110 The Eugenics Imperative .............................................................................................111 Eugenics against Native People Today .....................................................................114 Missing People ..............................................................................................................120 3. Forcibly Transferring Children from One Group to Another...................................128 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 4 4. Inflicting Conditions Designed to cause the physical destruction of the Group over time..................................................................................................................139 The Ongoing Consequences........................................................................................163 5. Causing Bodily and Mental Harm..................................................................................167 Stockholm Syndrome Revisited..................................................................................172 Massive Trauma and Experimental Mind Control ..................................................174 6. Destroying indigenous institutions, worldview and livelihood..............................180 Part Three: Summary of the Evidence concerning Genocide in Canadian Indian Residential Schools ....................................................................................................................191 Recommendations Arising from these Findings...................................................................194 A Comprehensive List of Crimes Committed in Canadian Indian Residential Schools and Hospitals ...............................................................................................................196 List of Residential Schools and Indian Hospitals..................................................................200 Statement of Aims for the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State.......201 War Crimes in Nazi Germany and Canada: A Comparison...............................................203 Testimonies of Residential School Survivors.........................................................................205 Appendix 1: Stolen Land and Genocide: The Case of Lot 363 and the Ahousaht People............................................237 Appendix 2: Genocide and the Founding of British Columbia: Recent Evidence........270 Appendix 3: An Early Whistle Blower: Dr. Peter Bryces 1922 work A National Crime and its description of massive mortality rates in Indian residential schools (not numbered) ...................................................................275 Appendix 4: The Campaign of Official Cover up and Misinformation The Role of the RCMP, the churches and a compliant Media.....................................3O8Appendix 4(a): Canadas Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the Final Stage of Official Cover up and Indemnification......................................318 Appendix 4(b): A Note on Reconciliation: Its Actual Meaning as Re-subordination................................................................................................325 Appendix 5: The Historic June, 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal: Its Findings and Eventual Sabotage ........................................................................................328 Appendix 6: The Silencing of Eyewitnesses to residential school crimes: The Case of Harry Wilson...................................................................................344 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 3Appendix 7: Ongoing Crimes of Child Trafficking and Official Complicity.............35O Appendix 7(a): Memorandum on the Organized Disappearance, Torture, Exploitation and Murder of Women and Children on Canadas West Coast: A Summary from Eyewitnesses (not numbered) .................362 Appendix 8: List of Mass Graves at or near former Indian residential Schools and hospitals across Canada submitted to the media by Kevin Annett and the FRD on April 10, 2008 ......................................................378 Appendix 9: Extracts from the Vatican Document Criminales Solicitationas, silencing victims and perpetrators of rape and other abuse within the Roman Catholic church 1962 This policy is still in effect.................................................................................................................350 Supplementary Documents......................................................................................................3 Conclusion: What Then Must Be Done? Who Then Must We Be? --Reinventing Ourselves ................................................................................ Taking Action: What You Can Do........................................................................................... Declaration of Conscience Form..............................................................................................418 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................42O Biographical Note on the Author ............................................................................................424Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 6In Memor|am To the memory of these indigenous men and women who died of probable foul play after publicly confronting Catholic and Protestant churches for their Crimes against Humanity. Chief Louis Daniels, Anishinabe Nation, died May 16, 2010 Elder Phillipa Ryan, Cree Nation, died April 26, 2010 Johnny Bingo Dawson, Nishgaa Nation, beaten by Vancouver police and died December 6, 2009 Elder Nora Bernard, Mik Maq Nation, murdered December 27, 2007: Nora was the first plaintiff in a residential school lawsuit Elder Harriett Nahanee, Pacheedaht Nation, died February 24, 2007 after mistreatment in a Vancouver jail Harriett was the first eyewitness to describe a killing in a residential school Elder Virginia Baptiste, Osoyoos Nation, died suddenly in hospital in January 2004 after publicly charging the Roman Catholic church with mass murder Joe Sylvester, Cowichan Nation, died January 2003 Charles Wayne Gibson, Cowichan Nation, died October 2002 Archie Frank, Ahousaht Nation, died January 26, 2000 Witness to murder at Ahousaht residential school Willie Sport, Ahousaht Nation, January 24, 2000 Jimmy Johnson, Pacheedaht Nation, died June, 1992 after assault by Catholic band council chiefs And to the memory of the more than five hundred missing aboriginal women on the west coast of Canada. Earth, cover not their blood! Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 7Author's Note The stories, documentation and other evidence in this book are based in part on the living testimonies of nearly three hundred survivors of thirty eight separate Indian residential or hospitals across Canada. These accounts were offered freely and unconditionally in open public forums, or in private interviews, between December 1995 and July 2010. Full permission to quote and re-print these accounts was obtained from every contributor, in either writing or on video. This evidence is held in trust by The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State, through the common consent of the survivors themselves. All documents, letters, photos and other evidence were obtained from public records of the Department of Indian Affairs (the RG 10 series) held in the microfilm section of the Koerner Library, University of British Columbia, from newspaper archives, and from the public internet or private collections. I wish to thank and honor all of the survivors of Indian residential schools for their courage and willingness to speak out, by which the world has learned about the genocide inflicted upon them, their nations, and the land. And may we equally honor and acknowledge the untold tens of thousands of children who suffered and died in the Christian death camps, and who still await recognition - so that their memory may never fade, and their murderers may one day face justice. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 8 Im Irene Favel. Im seventy five. I went to residential school in Muscowequan from 1944 to 1949, and I had a rough life. I was mistreated in every way. There was a young girl, and she was pregnant from a priest there. And what they did, she had her baby, and they took the baby, and wrapped it up in a nice pink outfit, and they took it downstairs where I was cooking dinner with the nun. And they took the baby into the furnace room, and they threw that little baby in there and burned it alive. All you could hear was this little cry, like Uuh!, and that was it. You could smell that flesh cooking. C8C 1own Pall lorum, 8eglna, !uly 3, 2008 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 9reamb|e to nidden No Lonqer by Kevin D. Annett If James Joyce is right, and history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken, then it is also true that victory belongs to those who can remember. Twenty years ago, soon after my ordination as a clergyman in the United Church of Canada, I first began to hear stories of what my church had done to innocent children in its Indian residential schools. Like most people, I didnt believe the accounts of murder and torture I was hearing. And if I had have kept my ears and heart closed to these tales, I would have been spared an enormous personal loss and liberation. But fate, and choice, forced me not only to listen, but give voice and a platform to hundreds, and then thousands of indigenous men and women whose stories you will read in these pages. And as a result, the face of Canada has been changed forever. But the ones you wont hear from are the more than 50,000 children who died from beatings, starvation, rape and torture, or being deliberately exposed to tuberculosis and left to cough their lives away in squalor and terror: all at the hands of Christian men and women who have never been prosecuted for their crimes. These murdered children lie in nearly-forgotten graves across Canada, or their ashes are scattered on sea and land after they were incinerated in residential school furnaces, to hide the crime that killed them. But they have not vanished, and their day is coming, thanks in part to the work and campaigns associated with this book. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 10 I wrote the first version of this book ten years ago now, at a time when nobody in Canada, or anywhere else, was publicly talking about murdered children at Indian residential schools. Now, if not respectable, at least the issue has become a matter of some discourse, even in the cloistered and censoring halls of academia and government. But whats most remarkable about the revelation of this little matter of genocide is that its occurred in the face of enormous opposition and repression: the kind that, until now, has ensured that those slaughtered children would remain out of sight and mind. I thank my own persistence for this miracle, and the courage of survivors who have stepped forward to tell the truth and indict the guilty, despite the efforts of all the Kings Men and their self-appointed truth and reconciliation commissions to protect the perpetrators and silence the witnesses. But the miracle hasnt stayed confined to Canada. This past year, the truth of the Canadian Holocaust has finally won a hearing among politicians and media in Europe, and men and women in America, Ireland, England, Australia and elsewhere who have suffered identical tortures from the Roman Catholic Church and others, and who have faced the same obstacles to justice and fill disclosure. The truth is that the same culture of religious conquest that caused the residential school inferno in Canada swept across Europe centuries before Columbus ever set foot in the Americas - and only now is the world tearing the mask off the lie that murdered so many millions of people in the name of Jesus Christ. Protesting recently with survivors of brutal Catholic orphanages and sweatshops outside the Irish Parliament, or in vigil for the disappeared at the Vatican under the harassing stare of the Italian state police, I finally began to realize the enormity of what I have been uncovering since 1995 - and how many souls now look to this work and to my efforts. What I am part of now is a centuries old epic battle to recover the soul of my own people, and overturn the lie in Christian garb that has caused more suffering and death than any institution in human history. For the genocide of native people in Canada and the Americas is part of the same mad sickness that destroyed traditional peoples across Europe, Africa, Australia and Asia and which now threatens the life of our planet, and our species. At the risk of being misunderstood, I would venture to call this battle a spiritual one, for behind the beguiling appearance of things lies an older and untold story Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 11 about how it is that we came to conquer, mutilate and destroy one another, again and again: and the unseen forces that are responsible. In 1987, a defrocked priest named Fidel who labored among Mayan refugees, and who was eventually killed by a landowners gunman in Chiapas, Mexico, told me that, like him, I would one day have to choose between Christ and the church; and that in that choice, whenever I was confused, I should simply go to the poorest child and ask her what I should do. Ive tried to do so, and honor the fallen and the still suffering children whom we call aboriginal, in preparing this book. But my effort will mean but a struggling seed unless it finds soil in the minds and will of you, the readers, who must act on the responsibility given to you by what you will learn in these pages. It isnt an easy task, to peer beneath the appearance of things into the awful truth, and be changed by what you encounter. Its simply a necessary one. And I hope that the knowledge in these pages will equip and inspire you to engage in this battle to stop the slaughter of the innocents, and bring an end to the reign of those and that which is causing these crimes. Carry it on. Kevin Annett / Caoimhin Bochanan Ui Niall on Occupied indigenous land September 1, 2010 www.hiddenfromhistory.org Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 12 art Cne: A Chrono|ogy of the Cr|me: Genoc|de |n Canada |n the Modern Lra 1850: The indigenous nations of eastern Canada have been decimated by smallpox and other diseases deliberately introduced by Europeans to barely ten percent of their pre-contact numbers. Indian tribes west of the Great Lakes remain mostly untouched by this plague, except on the west coast, where Europeans are beginning to settle. 1857: The Gradual Civilization Act is passed in the Legislature of Upper Canada, designed to legally eradicate all indigenous nations through enfranchisement, in which land title and nationhood are abolished. 1859: Roman Catholic missions are established at Mission, British Columbia (B.C.) and in the Okanagan by Oblate Bishop Paul Durieu, who with Jesuit helps craft a plan to exterminate non-Christian Indian chiefs and replace them with Catholic-controlled leaders. This Durieu Plan will serve as the model for later Indian residential schools. 1862-3: A major smallpox epidemic among B.C. interior Indian tribes is introduced by Anglican missionary (and future Bishop of Norwich and member of the House of Lords) Rev. John Sheepshanks, who inoculates hundreds of Indians with the disease. Sheepshanks is acting under the direction of the provincial government and the fur trading Hudsons Bay Company, which sponsors the first Protestant missions among Indians. More than 90% of Interior Salish and Chilcotin Indians some 8000 or more people - will die as a result of this germ warfare. 1869-70: The failed uprising by the Metis (mixed blood) of the Red River basin in the central plains under Louis Riel prompts the newly-established Canadian government to establish its sovereignty from sea to sea through a national railway system and massive European immigration onto Indian lands in the west. 1870: The Crown of England establishes a clergy reserve system whereby Catholic and Anglican missionaries are given hundreds of acres of land stolen from indigenous nations, especially in western Canada. 1873: The Royal North West Mounted Police, the forerunner of the modern day Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), is established as a national para-military force with absolute jurisdiction across Canada. Its mandate includes removing all native people onto reservations and clearing a swath of Indian Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 13 free land fifty miles on either side of the westward-expanding Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). 1876: Under the influence of former Prime Minister, and CPR lawyer, John A. MacDonald, Canada establishes the Indian Act, which reduces all Indians and Metis to the status of non-citizens and legal wards of the Canadian state. Henceforth, natives are imprisoned on reserve land, denied any legal status or civil rights, and cannot vote, sue in court, own property or conduct any actions on their own behalf. Their status as legal wards of the state remains unchanged to the present day. 1886: The CPR is completed, linking Canada from coast to coast and opening the door to massive European immigration. The same year, all west coast traditional native ceremonies are outlawed, including the potlatch system and indigenous languages. 1889: The federal Department of Indian Affairs is established. Indian industrial schools are sanctioned by the federal government, which, in partnership with Catholic and Protestant churches, jointly funds and establishes internment camps for all native children across Canada. 1891: The first medical report of massive deaths in these schools caused by rampant and untreated tuberculosis is issued to the federal government by Dr. George Orton in Alberta. Ortons report is ignored. 1905: Over one hundred Indian boarding schools are in operation across Canada, two thirds of them run by the Roman Catholic church. Massive European immigration and germ warfare have reduced the indigenous populations in the west to less than five percent of their original number. 1907: Dr. Peter Bryce, Chief Medical Officer for the federal governments Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), conducts a national tour of Indian boarding schools to study health conditions. Bryces subsequent report to DIA Assistant Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott documents that over one-half of all the children in these schools are dying because of tuberculosis being deliberately introduced among them by staff. Bryce also claims that the churches running the schools are deliberately suppressing evidence and statistics of these murderous practices. November 15, 1907: Dr. Bryces report is quoted in The Ottawa Citizen and The Montreal Gazette. 1908-9: Duncan Campbell Scott suppresses Dr. Bryces report and refuses to act on its recommendations, which include removing the churches from their operating the Indian schools. Bryce issues a more complete report of the Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 14 enormous death rates in the schools, and Scott commences a smear campaign against Bryce which eventually causes him to be barred from the civil service. November 1910: Despite Bryces findings, Scott institutionalizes church control over the Indian boarding schools through a contract between the federal government and the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist churches (the latter two being the forerunners of the United Church of Canada). This contract authorizes the schools and provides government funding and protection for them, including the use of the RCMP as the police arm for the schools. March 1919: Despite soaring death rates in the Indian boarding schools (now called residential schools), under church pressure, D.C. Scott abolishes all federal medical inspection of these schools by terminating the position of Head Medical Inspector. April 1920: A federal law is passed making it legally mandatory for every Indian child across Canada seven years and older to be incarcerated in Indian residential schools. Non-cooperative native parents face imprisonment and heavy fines. The number of deaths due to tuberculosis among aboriginal people will triple in the following decade. Spring, 1925: The United Church of Canada is established by a federal Act of Parliament to Canadianize and Christianize the foreign born and heathens. The church is a financially supported arm of the English Crown, and inherits all the residential schools and stolen native land held by the Methodist and Presbyterian churches. 1927: A British Columbia law strips all aboriginal people of the right to hire or consult a lawyer, or represent themselves in court. The same law makes it illegal for any lawyer to assume aboriginal clients. 1928: The Sexual Sterilization Act is passed in the Alberta legislature, allowing any inmate of an Indian residential school to be involuntarily sterilized at the decision of the Principal: a church employee. At least 2800 aboriginal men and women will be made infertile under this law. 1929-30: The government of Canada relinquishes legal guardianship over Indian children in residential schools to the church-appointed school Principal. 1933: An identical Sexual Sterilization Act is passed in the British Columbia legislature. Three sterilization centers are established in heavily-populated native communities: at the R.W. Large (United Church) hospital in Bella Bella; at the Nanaimo Indian Hospital; and at the Charles Camsell (United Church) Indian Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 13 Thousands of Indians will be sterilized at these facilities until the 1980s. February 1934: An attempt by the Canadian government to abolish residential schools is defeated as a result of public pressure brought by Catholic and Protestant church officials. January 1939: Cowichan native children are used in medical experiments conducted by German speaking doctors at the Catholic Kuper Island residential school on Vancouver Island. Several children die as a result. The RCMP suppresses inquiries into the deaths and the German Catholic order running the school, the Montforts, is replaced by the Oblates. 1947-8: Canadian diplomat (and future Prime Minister) Lester Pearson helps to redefine the United Nations Genocide Convention to make it inapplicable to Canadian Indian residential schools. Enabling legislation to allow its use within Canada is blocked in Canadas Parliament. 1946-52: Hundreds of Nazi and SS doctors are granted citizenship and immigration to Canada under Project Paperclip, and work at Indian hospitals and other facilities under CIA and military sponsorship, including the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal. Their research includes trauma-based mind control programs, sterilization techniques and pharmacological drug testing on native children, orphans, and many others. 1956-8: Survivors of one such program at the Lincoln Park Royal Canadian Air Force base in Calgary, Alberta describe a doctor with an SS tattoo number on his arm torturing children to death, including aboriginal children brought by RCMP officers from local reserves and residential schools. Similar crimes are described by survivors of programs at military bases at Suffield, Alberta, Nanaimo, BC, and at the Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital at Thunder Bay, Ontario. 1962-71: Thousands of aboriginal children are deliberately stolen from their families under a government-sponsored sixties scoop program of aggressively destroying native families and continuing the cultural genocide found in residential schools. Many children die in foster homes and in Indian hospitals where they are secretly sent and experimented on, and their cause of death is concealed. 1969: Indian Affairs Minister Jean Chretien affirms a genocidal assimilationist policy of cultural and legal extinguishment of native nations in a federal White Paper tabled in Parliament. 1970: Widespread aboriginal resistance to the White Paper, and a revolt of native parents at the Bluequills Catholic Indian residential school in St. Pauls, Alberta where they take the Indian Agent hostage and demand the removal of nuns and Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 16 priests from the school forces the government to begin turning over Indian education to local band councils. 1972: In anticipation of the ending of the residential schools, the Indian Affairs department orders the destruction of all personal files of Indian people, including original land and property deeds. As a result, the written evidence of land holdings and genealogy of countless native families is destroyed, disrupting Indian land claims. 1975: A majority of Indian residential schools have been closed or turned over to band councils to operate. Nevertheless, many of the abuses and crimes against children in these native-run schools continue, at the hands of aboriginal staff. (The last residential school will close in 1996). Summer 1978: Red Power, an affiliate of the American Indian Movement (AIM), occupies Indian Affairs offices in Vancouver and publishes records of sterilizations at west coast Indian hospitals. Red Power calls for an abolition of the Indian Act, reservations and the puppet Indian band councils. 1980: In response, the federal government establishes the so-called Assembly of First Nations (AFN) as a state-funded collaborating body consisting of self-appointed and unelected chiefs from across Canada. The AFN refuses to support indigenous sovereignty or any call to investigate deaths and crimes in Indian residential schools. October, 1989: Nora Bernard, a residential school survivor from New Brunswick, commences the first lawsuit against the Catholic Church and government of Canada for harm she suffered at a school. Nora will be murdered in December, 2007, just prior to Canadas apology for Indian residential schools. 1990: In response, Liberal party and government insider Chief Phil Fontaine of the AFN presents the first official spin on Indian residential schools by referring to abuses in the schools while avoiding mention of more serious crimes. Spring 1993 January 1995: Native eyewitnesses to murders at the United Churchs Alberni residential school speak publicly of the deaths of children at the school from the pulpit of Rev. Kevin Annett at St. Andrews United Church in Port Alberni, B.C. When Annett challenges a secret land deal in stolen native land between his church, the provincial government and church-funder, MacMillan-Bloedel Ltd., he is fired without cause and eventually expelled from the church without due process. December 18, 1995: The murder of Indian children at the Alberni residential school receives press coverage for the first time, at a protest organized by Rev. Kevin Annett, in The Vancouver Sun. Eyewitness Harriett Nahanee tells reporters Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 17 how she witnessed Rev. Alfred Caldwell kick Maisie Shaw, age 14, to her death in 1946. December 20, 1995: Another eyewitness to murders in United Church Indian schools goes public: Archie Frank from Ahousaht describes Rev. Alfred Caldwell beating a child, Albert Gray, to death. The RCMP refuses to investigate either incident. February 1, 1996: The first lawsuit by Alberni Indian residential school survivors is brought against the United Church and federal government. February 3, 1996: The United Church begins internal proceedings to permanently expel Rev. Kevin Annett from church ministry and his livelihood. Annett will be finally expelled in March, 1997, at the only public delisting of a minister in church history, at a cost of $250,000. 1996 1998: Kevin Annett begins documenting and making public hundreds of eyewitness accounts of crimes in Indian residential schools, combining first hand testimonies with archival documentation from the University of BC (UBC) library. He begins a doctoral degree at UBC, but sees the breakup of his family, and loses his children in a divorce and custody battle initiated and funded by United Church lawyers. June 12-14, 1998: Kevin Annett organizes the first independent Tribunal into Canadian Indian residential schools, under the auspices of the United Nations affiliate IHRAAM (International Human Rights Association of American Minorities). The Vancouver event documents that every act defined as genocide by the UN Convention of 1948 occurred in Canadian residential schools. None of the thirty four church and state officials subpoenaed by IHRAAM attend or respond. The Tribunal recommends to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, that a full inquiry into Canadian residential schools be launched, but Robinson does not respond. June 20, 1998: The Globe and Mail is the only Canadian media to report on the IHRAAM Tribunal. Autumn 1998: IHRAAM official Rudy James states that the Tribunal was internally sabotaged by operatives, including Jim Craven, Amy Tallio, Kelly White, Dean Wilson and others in the pay of the RCMP and native chiefs linked to the United Church. IHRAAM judges are silenced, and only Kevin Annett and judges Royce and Lydia White Calf issue reports about the findings of the Tribunal. September 1998: BC Supreme Court Justice Brenner rules that the United Church and government of Canada are equally liable for harm caused by their employees at the Alberni Indian residential schools. The Brenner decision sparks Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 18 thousands of lawsuits by aboriginal survivors against the government and Catholic, Anglican and United Church. October 27, 1998: After the sudden deaths of two natives suing the United Church, lawyers for the church admit that the latter has engaged with the government in a joint cover-up of crimes at the Alberni Indian residential school since at least 1960, and that church officials and staff kidnapped children into that school. (The Vancouver Province) January 1999: The IHRAAM Tribunal and murders in Canadian residential schools are reported for the first time outside Canada, in the pages of the British magazine The New Internationalist. The magazines coverage of these crimes and Kevin Annett is silenced the same year by legal threats from United Church lawyers. A general public smear campaign against Kevin Annett is launched, under the direction of United Church officers David Iverson and Brian Thorpe, and Sgt. Paul Willms and Inspector Peter Montague of E Division of the RCMP. March 1999: In response to the IHRAAM Tribunal and growing lawsuits by survivors, the Canadian government announces an Aboriginal Healing Fund (AHF) of $350 million. The AHF, however, does not aid survivors but state-favored native chiefs, and is used as a hush fund. Recipients of the fund must agree never to sue the government or churches. More than half of it is consumed in administrative costs. April 26, 2000: Health Canada officials admit that their department conducted involuntary medical and dental experiments on children in Indian residential schools during the 1940s and 50s, including deliberately denying them dental care and essential food and vitamins. (The Vancouver Sun) Autumn 2000: Facing more than 10,000 lawsuits from survivors, the churches successfully lobby the government to enact legislation to limit the scope of lawsuits and assume primary liability for residential school damages. Courts in Alberta and the Maritimes deny survivors the right to sue the churches for violation of their civil rights and for genocide. September 3, 2000: Kevin Annett and native people form the non-governmental Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada. The Commissions mandate is to continue the investigative work of the IHRAAM Tribunal into residential schools, publicize the evidence of genocide in Canada, and launch political actions to bring Canada and its churches to justice. February 1, 2001: Kevin Annett publishes his first book on the Indian residential schools, entitled Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, containing testimonies from survivors and documentary evidence of intentional genocide in the schools and adjoining Indian hospitals. Efforts by the United Church to Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 19 prevent its publication fail, and over 1,000 copies are circulated throughout the world, mostly to residential school survivors. Summer-Fall, 2001: Judicial decisions across Canada restrict the claims of survivors and prevent them from suing the churches for any issues beyond tort offenses of physical and sexual abuse. In Vancouver, Kevin Annett establishes a weekly program on Co-op radio called Hidden from History, where he and survivors begin airing the evidence of killings and other crimes in Canadian residential schools. (This program will be unilaterally cancelled and Kevin banned from the government-funded radio station in August, 2010, after Kevin airs evidence of government and police involvement in the murder of women in B.C.) Spring 2002: After a massive and fraudulent public scare campaign by the churches that they face bankruptcy because of pending residential school lawsuits, the government assumes full liability for damages, including for compensation payments, despite rulings of Canadian courts that both church and state are equally liable. Many lawsuits are annulled or lumped into class action suits contained and limited by government-allied lawyers like those of the Merchant Law Group. May 2002: Kevin Annetts second book, Love and Death in the Valley, is published by Author House in the United States. Kevin and his network begin holding public vigils and protests outside churches in Vancouver. Kevin expands his lecturing and organizing into eastern Canada and the USA. April 2004: After receiving a Spanish version of Kevin Annetts book Hidden from History, five Mayan indigenous groups in Guatemala issue a denuncia, or public demand, to the Canadian government to answer charges of genocide. The government refuses to address genocide in its response, and the Mayans begin to lobby at the U.N. for an investigation into crimes in Canadian Indian residential schools. April 15, 2005: Kevin Annett and The Truth Commission commence an annual Aboriginal Holocaust Remembrance Day in Vancouver outside downtown Catholic, Anglican and United churches, calling for these churches to repatriate for a proper burial the remains of children who died under their care. The churches do not respond. Autumn 2005: Eyewitnesses disclose to Kevin Annett locations of mass burial sites near former Indian residential schools across B.C. In response, Annett and survivors form Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (FRD), with supporters in Winnipeg and Toronto. Kevin Annett, Lori ORorke and Louie Lawless commence production of the documentary film Unrepentant with natives on Vancouver Island. The film is based on Kevins work and books, and Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 20 is the first film ever to document genocide and murder in Canadian Indian residential schools. October 2006: Unrepentant is released at Canadian and U.S. film festivals and on the internet. Thousands of DVD copies begin circulating throughout the world and among natives. The film wins Best Director of a Foreign Documentary at the New York Independent Film Festival. January 2007: Unrepentant wins Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, and receives over 100,000 viewings on the internet. Kevin and the FRD network commence high profile occupations of government and church offices in Vancouver. Similar occupations spread to Toronto and Winnipeg. The Canadian media begin reporting Kevins work for the first time in years. April 15, 2007: The FRDs Third Aboriginal Holocaust Memorial Day is commemorated in seven Canadian cities. Native Member of Parliament Gary Merasty hears of the events and repeats the FRD demand by asking the federal Minister of Indian Affairs, Jim Prentice, to begin a repatriation program to return children who died in Indian residential schools. April 19, 2007: Jim Prentice addresses the missing residential school children in a Parliamentary speech, and announces the creation of a Missing Childrens Task Force, which is never convened. April 24, 2007: Based on interviews with Kevin Annett and his network of survivors, The Globe and Mail prints a front page article confirming the fifty percent death rate in residential schools and implies that murders occurred in the schools. June 2007: Gary Merasty, M.P., retires from politics and begins working for Cameco, a uranium company in Saskatchewan tied to the Liberal party. Jim Prentice is removed as Minister of Indian Affairs. September 2007: The government announces the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to investigate the residential school history, yet denies compensation to more than half of all survivors. Those eligible are entitled to minimal compensation, and in return are forced to indemnify the churches from any legal action or wrongdoing, and are bound by a legal gag order. January March, 2008: Kevin Annett and the FRD mount escalating protests and church occupations, demanding that criminal charges be brought against the churches responsible for the deaths of residential school children. FRD elder and Squamish Nation chief Kiapilano issues a formal eviction notice to the Catholic, Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 21 Anglican and United Churches on his traditional territory: all of the city of Vancouver. February 2008: The Harper government declares that, although enormous numbers of deaths occurred in Indian residential schools, no criminal charges will be laid against the churches responsible for the schools. June 11, 2008: Under growing pressure, Prime Minister Steven Harper issues a formal apology for Indian residential schools, while seeming to belittle the extent of mortality in the schools by stating simply some died. But other party leaders refer to mass graves near the schools. October 2008: Documents obtained by reporters through Freedom of Information show that the governments supposed Missing Childrens Task Force has never convened, and never intended to publicize any of its research into burial sites or dead children at the residential schools. January 2009: Unrepentant has received over a quarter of a million viewings on the internet and wins a third award, Best Canadian Documentary, at the Creation Aboriginal Film Festival in Edmonton. The government announces that TRC Commissioners will be appointed by the churches that ran residential schools, will have no power to subpoena or compel disclosure, cannot lay charges or allow names of wrongdoers to be named, and will not grant immunity to anyone who testifies before them! March 2009: Kevin Annett and the FRD call on survivors to boycott the TRC and announce their plan to convene an independent inquiry to counter the TRCs official whitewash of residential school crimes. Kevin is invited by European groups to commence a speaking tour in the fall. October 2009: Kevin Annett speaks in a dozen cities in Ireland, England and Italy and airs his documentary Unrepentant, which has been translated into French, Italian and German. On October 11, Kevin conducts a memorial service and symbolic exorcism outside the Vatican in Rome, in honor of children killed in Catholic Indian residential schools. The event receives widespread media coverage. The next day, a tornado strikes the centre of Rome and the Vatican. December 6, 2009: A leader of the FRD in Vancouver, school survivor Johnny Bingo Dawson, dies after a severe beating by police. A coroners report is issued five months later, and its stated cause of death does not match the accompanying toxicology report. February 2010: Widespread exposures of child abuse and cover-up in the Roman Catholic church break into the news. Pope Joseph Ratzinger is found to have organized and ordered the concealment of these crimes and has aided and harbored known child raping priests, in a Vatican document known as Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 22 Criminales Solicitations (see Appendix 9). Legal actions begin to have Ratzinger subpoenaed and even arrested. April 2010: Kevin Annett conducts a second speaking tour of Europe and makes contact with church abuse survivors groups in Ireland, Germany, Italy and England. He conducts a second exorcism and protest outside the Vatican, and meets with Italian politicians in the Chamber of Deputies. His work is reported even more widely on national TV, radio and newspapers in each nation. June 15, 2010: The FRD announces the launching of an international coalition to unite all victims of church torture: The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS). Eight organizations from Ireland, USA, Australia, Thailand and England affiliate to it. But since December, six members of the FRD have died suddenly, including two elders who led occupations against the Roman Catholic church in Vancouver. August 1-3, 2010: Unrepentant is broadcast to over 10 million European viewers on German and Swiss television networks. Kevin Annetts new book, Unrepentant: Disrobing the Emperor is released in London. But on August 9, Kevins nine-year long program Hidden from History on the government-funded Vancouver Co-op Radio is suddenly cancelled without cause or due process. September-October, 2010: Kevin Annett and ITCCS members speak and rally in London, Dublin, Geneva, Rome and elsewhere, demanding sanctions against the Vatican for its crimes against humanity. Upon his return to Canada, Kevin delivers a 2000 signature petition to the Canadian Parliament, demanding that the federal tax exempt status of the Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada be revoked, and that these churches be legally dis-established. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 23 It is to the British race, which is sending the light of Christ unto the dark heathen races, to whom God is granting mastery of the world. - From The Final Report of the Centennial Conference of the Protestant Missions of the World, London, 1888 People never do evil so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 24 Introduct|on: What |s Genoc|de and from where does |t come? When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations then you must destroy them totally Deuteronomy 7: 1-2 The eradication of foreign people is a good and lawful thing, meritorious, and divinely honorable. - Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626, Chancellor of England Genocide, from the Greek, means to kill a people. The term was coined by a Polish refugee, Raphael Lemkin, who lost fifty members of his family to the Nazi death camps after fleeing to America. Lemkin was a jurist who helped draft the Nuremburg Declaration and post-war human rights conventions, including the much-quoted but rarely-enacted United Nations Convention on the Crime of Genocide (1948). He had a very broad notion of the crime. In his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin wrote, Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. To Lemkin, anything that a conquering group does to the conquered which tries to cause their eventual demise is genocide, including the banning of their language, disrupting their normal family patterns, or placing children of the conquered group in the homes of others so that the children forget who they are. Obviously, this kind of sweeping sense of the crime caused huge potential problems to the very nations that conquered Nazi Germany, including Canada and the United States, who for centuries had been doing just such cultural eradication against indigenous nations across their own continent. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 23 Not surprisingly, Lemkins broad understanding of genocide never survived post-war political realities. Thanks to pressure brought by Canadian and American diplomats at the United Nations, genocide became redefined to mean primarily the physical killing of a people. In this way, the new understanding of genocide de-emphasized those aspects of the crime that might indict western governments and their partner churches, including for what was occurring at that very time in Indian boarding schools in both Canada and the United States, as well as in Australia, South Africa and many other settler states. The efforts by western regimes to wipe out indigenous peoples language, identity and nationhood clearly fell under Lemkins definition of genocide. But more than post-war political expediency prompted this kind of revision of Lemkins understanding of genocide. The truth is that the crime of genocide has emerged from within the very religious and philosophical fabric of European culture, and originated with the rise of Christian empire, or Christendom, in the fourth century. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 26 To quote author Richard Rubenstein, The culture that made the (Nazi) death camps possible was not only indigenous to the West but was an outcome of its fundamental religious traditions ... that insist upon the dichotomous division of mankind into the elect and the reprobate. (The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future, 1978) The religious traditions Rubenstein refers to emerged from out of a Greco-Judeao-Christian culture that equated ones own faith and virtue with the conquest and destruction of other peoples. Its two main roots are in the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophy, both of which were foundational to the establishment of Christianity and its churches. In the Bible, the Old Testament god Yahweh cannot tolerate other gods or beliefs, or the people who profess them, and instructs his followers to destroy all such people. (Deuteronomy 7) Indeed, in the Biblical tradition, spiritual integrity and purity are only possible through the waging of violence against other beliefs, since co-existence with other religions constitutes an act of apostasy, or betrayal of ones own faith. Yet this attitude originates from a more basic belief within Judaeo-Christianity that one is made holy, or sanctified, through the blood offering of another. In this tradition, sanctification is a violent act, coming from an ancient tribal practice of setting apart and cleansing (qadash in Hebrew) an animal or person in order to sacrifice them to the gods. We are made holy, in short, by the ritual slaughter of others. Without understanding this core paradigm in western culture, we cannot grasp the religious and psychological basis of genocide in our history, and the hold it continues to exert on our minds and our practices. Indeed, from this foundational concept has arisen all genocidal practices. This intertwining of holiness with ritual sacrifice and killing is deeply embedded in western thinking. Indeed, even the term used to apply to the so-called chosen people of God in the Old Testament is qadar, from the same root word used in sacrifice: For you are a people holy (qadar) to the Lord God (Deuteronomy 7:6): in effect, an entire people are made holy by being set apart and prepared for sacrifice. Obviously, in a culture that makes ritual cleanliness and sacredness inseparable from ritual killing and sacrifice, murder and divine action will also be indistinguishable. And whatever is pure and innocent will be a candidate for extermination. The fact that Christianity created an enormous substitute sacrifice in the symbol of Jesus Christ did not diminish the power and hold of this concept of equating spiritual purification with killing. For, indeed, with the further substitution of the Catholic Church for Christ, and the equating of the one with the other, the Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 27 practice of making oneself or ones people holy through the slaughter of others reached new heights. The most blatant example of this was expressed in the papal doctrine of indulgence, which arose on the eve of the first Crusades in 1095. Pope Urban declared that any act of violence, murder or conquest committed by those in the service of God that is, the church - restored the perpetrator to a state of original grace and freed him of all of his sins. As in Hebrew beliefs, one was sanctified through the sacrificial killing of others. According to Williston Walker, The indulgence was commonly understood to wipe away all ones former sins and to restore one to a state of spiritual innocence long before it acquired its function of financing the papacy. In its essence, it was seen as a purifying act. (A History of the Christian Church, 1959) This notion that Crusading was a form of sanctification and existential cleansing was transferred onto any conquest authorized by the church, including the colonialism of the sixteenth century and beyond. The conquest of non-Christian peoples (termed Saracens and pagans) that was sanctioned and made legal in the Papal Bulls Romanus Pontifex (1455) and Inter Catera (1493) fell under the legitimating laws of Crusade, and from the beginning was conceived as a massive sanctifying of all of Christendom. Genocide, in short, was good for the soul of Christian Europe and for all those whom it conquered, according to papal understanding and laws. And this belief was reinforced not only by the obvious hunger for land, gold and power that accompanied every missionary, but by the philosophical basis of European culture as a whole, extending back to Greek, and specifically Aristotelian philosophy. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 28 The Inter Catera Papal Bull of 1493 (Alexander VI, Rome) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 29 Aristotle, as one of the philosophical fathers of Christianity whose beliefs shaped Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and most major church theologians, taught that humanity was naturally divided into inherently superior and inferior classes of people, and that the duty and very nature of the strong was to rule over and subjugate the weak. Moreover, this domination was also a moral one, in that the strong were naturally more virtuous than the weak. The latter were thus in no position to question or challenge their subordination. When combined with a Christian religion that equated its own spiritual health with the conquest and slaughter of others, this notion of natural superiority and virtue of the strong produced a monster that Cherokee scholar Steven Newcomb has termed Christian Superior Dominion: the belief and practice that Christians have an inherent primacy over non-Christians, whose rights are diminished and impaired by the simple fact that they are not believers in Christ! To quote Steve Newcomb, In the words of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who faithfully voiced centuries of Christian Superiority in 1824, As infidels, heathens and savages, the Indians are not allowed to possess the prerogatives and rights belonging to absolute, sovereign and independent nations. (Pagans in the Promised Land, 2008) If this belief of the primacy of Christians over pagans caused the dispossession and genocide of millions of native people the world over, its roots lay deep within European Christian culture, and specifically in Christendom: that lethal synthesis of the church of Rome with the Roman Empire that occurred during the fourth century. Christianity as we know it a state-sponsored and protected religion with legal and corporate status did not exist before the year 312, when Roman Emperor Constantine removed proscriptive laws against Christians. In truth, the Christian religion is not the creation of Jesus Christ, but of Constantine, who invented the entity called the Roman Catholic church when he granted it legal incorporation in the year 317. From then on, church Bishops became imperial advisors and trustees, and the Roman army marched into battle under the so-called Christian emblem, the Labarnum, symbolizing the union of church and Empire. Realistically and factually, Christianity was born in the fourth century in Rome, not three hundred years before in Palestine. This fact is suggested by the absence of any literary or archaeological evidence of Jesus or his movement, the continual reference of historians, Christian and pagan, to the birth of the church under Constantine, and the emergence of the Latin Vulgate Bible only after the establishment of the Constantinian Church that would become known as the Vatican. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 30 Perhaps even more convincing is the fact that the Church of Rome, and all Christian churches since then, actively repudiated the core teachings of the one called Jesus of Nazareth - non-violence and love of ones enemy in favor of the Imperial ethic of just war devised by Bishop Augustine in the decades right after Constantine. This rejection of Christ by Roman Catholicism is symbolized in the churchs early adoption of an official image of a murdered Christ impaled on a cross, and displayed itself in every papal endorsement of Holy Wars of conquest and extermination that followed. Considering its origin as a wing of Empire, it is hardly surprising that the Roman Catholic church became that Empire as Rome decayed during the fifth century. As such, the church inherited not only the terms and symbols of the Roman Empire, but the aforementioned philosophy of Christian Superior Dominion and sanctification through slaughter from Greco-Hebrew traditions, armed now with the full means of Empire. As early as the years 401-417, the head of the church of Rome, Pope Innocent the First, declared the papacy to be the supreme head of all worldly authority, and as such, could establish and depose any government, conquer any kingdom, and rule over all peoples of the earth, whether Christian or not. A deadly force had entered the world: an Empire imbued with divine self-justification, claiming total authority over humanity, and believing that it was superior to all other faiths and sanctified as such by the conquest and destruction of the latter. It was this force known as Christendom that formulated and enacted the plague known as European Genocide. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 31 Genoc|de as a ke||g|ous Idea|: Chr|stendom |n ract|ce If the unbeliever still does not repent, it is the task of the church to save the community by expelling the heretic from the world by death. - Thomas Aquinas, 1267 There is but one Holy Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation. Both the spiritual and the material swords are in the hands of the Church. The spiritual is wielded by the Church, the material for the Church. It is thus necessary for salvation for every creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff. - Pope Boniface VIII, 1302 To invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery - Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex, 1455, authorizing the conquest of the non-Christian world Christendom is the theory and practice of universal Christian Empire: that all of humanity must come under the authority of the Roman papacy, or perish. Like all tyrannical newspeak, the term is a shortened version of its fuller meaning: Christian domination. The root meaning of dom in this context becomes very important: originating from the Sanskrit term domanus, or he who subdues, the Latin word dominium was applied generally to any party that has conquered another, including to the Roman notion of deity, property and law. Thus, domini, or sacred ruler, applied to god as a conquering being who rules by force; dominion is the lawful regime established by a conqueror, and so on. In the Roman world into which Christianity was born, conquest gave to the victor absolute power and ownership over the conquered, who lost his status, rights, property and land, and was reduced to absolute and perpetual slavery. And so when the Christian church achieved political power and became a state, it arrogated to itself absolute dominion over all people, believers and non believers alike. This supremacy was purely fictional, of course, and was reinforced by a forged document known as the Donation of Constantine by which the latter was supposed to have transferred the lands and political authority of the Roman Empire to the Catholic church and Pope Sylvester I in the fourth century. The Donation was actually written in the ninth century, but its forged nature didnt stop the papacy from using it to justify its claims to power over all worldly kingdoms: especially as the papacy sought to extend its control over its main adversary, the eastern Roman Empire and its Orthodox church, just prior to the First Crusade in the 11th century. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 32 Using the liberation of the Holy Land from Islam as the pretext for this power grab, the papacy launched its first genocidal endeavor with Pope Urbans declaration of Indulgence to all those who attacked Saracens and pagans as enemies of the church, in the year 1095. Relying on the same laws and justifications that it would use centuries later in its conquest of the New World, the church stated that all crimes committed on Crusade would be absolved and the perpetrators spiritually cleansed and purified by their conquest of unbelievers. Papal authorization of wars of conquest came fast and furious after the precedent of the First Crusade. Sixty years later, in 1155, the only English Pope, Adrian IV, issued the papal bull known as Laudabiliter, which sanctioned the invasion and conquest of Ireland by the English King Henry II. In a scenario identical to what would befall American indigenous nations, King Henry justified his invasion of a "free and unoffending" people by discovering" that Irish needed the benefits of civilization and the reform of their religion, for which they would willingly lose their independence. As every Christian land was claimed as the property of the papacy, Henry had to seek permission of the Pope before invading his territory. Similarly, fifty years after Laudabiliter, Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 against a dissident church, the Cathars of southwest France, in which more than 100,000 people were slaughtered by papal armies. Christian genocide within Europe grew on what it fed on following the Cathar holocaust. Within a year of the ending of the Albigensian Crusade, in 1227, Pope Gregory IX established the first Inquisitional courts across Europe to try and kill Christian dissidents. The use of torture in these courts was authorized by papal laws in 1252. By 1326, the scope of the Inquisition was broadened to include persecution of witches, and the greatest mass murder prior to colonialism began, in which over ten million people, mostly women, lost their lives at the hands of the church. By the following fifteenth century, the church was looking for new lands and people to conquer, and with Portuguese discoveries in Africa began the papacys most devastating genocidal efforts. In 1455, in his papal bull Romanus Pontifex, Pope Nicholas V granted permission for all non-Christian lands and kingdoms anywhere in the world to be conquered, and their people enslaved, by Christian kings. As with the subsequent bull called Inter Catera, issued in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI, which divided the entire world between Spain and Portugal and negated the authority of all kingdoms and rulers in those lands, these acts were founded on a basic principle: that the Pope already owned these lands by divine right as well as by the Donation of Constantine legal fiction - and could assign them to whomever he wished, since non-Christian peoples had lost the right to their own land or themselves by the fact of Christians discovery of them. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 33 This so-called Discovery Doctrine would eventually become the basis for all European conquest and occupation of the New World, and is still upheld in North American courts of law to justify the stealing of indigenous land. Such a process of negating non-Christian peoples was based on an ancient Roman legal practice called Res Nullius, meaning no-ones property. Prior to invading a foreign land, Roman Emperors legal agents would declare that land nullius, or devoid of ownership, in order to open it for conquest and theft by Rome. The enemies of Rome were thus declared to be legal and political non-entities, nobodies, whose vacant land could then be occupied. The Christian church of the fifteenth century extended this notion to apply even more widely to any non-Christian people, so that under a legal doctrine dubbed by papal lawyers as Terra Nullius, or the land of no-one, any heathens, pagan infidels or unbaptized persons were nullified, deprived of political and legal identity, and their lands thrown open for discovery, conquest and new ownership by European kings, under the authority of the Pope. As a result, tens of millions of indigenous people around the world were exterminated in the greatest genocide in human history, led and legitimated by the Church of Rome and its Protestant cousins. Clearly, this enormous crime was a direct outgrowth of the most foundational teachings and practices of Christendom, and for that very reason, it was not considered criminal or wrong. As nullified enemies in a holy war, non-Christian peoples acquired a limited humanity only once they submitted to their own conquest and were enslaved: a reality that continues to the present day. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 34 Chr|st|an Genoc|de |n the New Wor|d and Canada It was the deliberate practice of our friars to take the savage babies and baptize them, whereupon their little heads and brains were dashed upon the ground, so that they would immediately reach heaven and not backslide into heathenism. - Bartolomeo de Las Casas, A Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies, 1542 It is expedient that there be no peace at all between our Huron brothers and their neighbors, for this is what is required by the Faith and the fur trade. - Jean de Brebeuf, Jesuit missionary, New France (Canada), 1642 Spain was the worlds super-power of the sixteenth century, and its domination of world trade and the newly-discovered western hemisphere forced other nations to the periphery of the immense massacre and land grab known as The Age of Discovery. In reality, this was an era of Christian imperialism, occurring alongside huge religious wars between Protestant and Catholic powers in Europe that spilled over into the New World. Rising nations like England were forced north by Spanish hegemony into what is now Canada and northeast America, where rich fisheries and fur-bearing animals became as lucrative as the gold of Middle America. King Henry VII granted to explorer John Cabot a charter to conquer heathens and savages in precisely the same language as the Catholic papal bulls, but the invasion of the northern lands went slower because of the rivalry of the French. By 1600, when the Spanish had destroyed most of the Mayan and Aztec peoples, and had worked to death more than a million Caribs, Arawaks and other island natives in their gold and silver mines, France and England had only begun to gain footholds on the eastern coastlines of the north. This was not for want of trying. When French explorer Jacques Cartier first encountered the peaceful Miq maq natives of modern day New Brunswick in 1534, his crew subjected them to salvos of cannon fire filled with sulfur, lead, broken glass and rocks. The French then attacked and burned their villages, and demanded of the survivors all their wealth and their women. Such civilized behavior by Cartier did not stop him from commenting, This people can be called savage (sauvage untamed), for they must be the poorest people on earth: all together, they have not the value of five sous among them. And yet they share whatever they have with each other and live in a true community of goods. They are utter strangers to distinctions of property, for what belongs to one is equally anothers They surely are better Christians in that sense than are we. (Stanley Ryerson, The Founding of Canada: Beginnings to 1815 , 1960) Indeed, it was precisely their Christ-like manner that targeted such people for extermination by the Christian church. For Indians were considered as Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 33 heretical as dissenting Christians. As early as 1509, leading European jurists like Martin Fernandez de Encisco had declared, The king of Spain has every right to send his men to the Indies to demand their territory from these idolaters because he received it from the Pope. If the Indians refuse, he may quite legally fight them, kill them, and enslave them, since as unbelievers, they have no worth above that of any heretic. ("Suma De Geografia Que Trata De Todas Las Partidas Del Mundo, 1518) Legally and morally, anyone outside Roman Catholicism was placed in the same category of nullius by the church, devoid of rights, nationhood or existence, since they were in a state of mortal sin by the fact of their different beliefs. Thus, every group of church missionaries sent among indigenous people in the Americas (as in Asia and Africa) was always accompanied by at least one Holy Inquisitor who had the power to try and condemn to torture and death any non-Christian among the Indians. Under the Spaniards and the French, inquisitional courts were often established to try Indians. Nearly 900 heresy trials were held against Indians in Mexico during the sixteenth century. In one Auto da Fe (Act of Faith, the formal name for the Inquisition) held in Mexico in 1570, over 3,800 Indians were convicted and hanged or burned alive for heresy. According to an eyewitness at this massacre, The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties ... They built a long gibbet, long enough for the toes to touch the ground to prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles... then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive.( From American Holocaust by David Stannard, 1994) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 36 The Spaniards told the Indians that they had a disease that only gold could heal. They demanded that the Cuban cacique (chief) Hatuey reveal the location of the gold. He denied that he had any hidden gold and as a result he was ordered to be burned alive. When the cacique was bound to the post, a Franciscan friar ... told him some of the matters of our Faith, which the chieftain had never before heard. . . . The padre told the cacique that if he wished to believe these things, he would go to Heaven ... but if not, he would go to Hell and suffer eternal torment and sorrow. The cacique ... asked the friar if Christians went to Heaven, and was told that the good ones did. The cacique, without further thought, said that he did not wish to go to Heaven but to Hell, so as not to be with Spaniards or see such cruel people. (Bartolomeo de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, p. 45) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 37 Such religious terrorism was no less active in lands seized by England, France or the Dutch, to the north of Spanish America. For example, after the arrival of the first Jesuits in New France (now Quebec) in 1611, that order declared open warfare on the Indian nations allied with the rival English, and even any neutral Indian nation, like the Algonquins. As a major actor and investor in the fur trade, the Jesuits stood to profit by eliminating Indian nations that diverted furs into English hands. And so, by 1640, the Jesuits had agreed to a plan with Governor Montmagny of New France to hunt down and exterminate all non-Christian Algonquins. The Jesuit black robe missionaries spread smallpox, firearms, and alcohol among the Algonquins of eastern Canada so effectively that over three quarters of them were wiped out within a generation. The disease spread to neighboring tribes, with the result that even French allies like the Hurons were hugely de-populated and made virtually extinct by the year 1700. The English as well relied on germ warfare as a chief weapon against hostile native tribes, as described by British General Geoffrey Amherst in July, 1763, in a letter to a subordinate regarding the local Miq Maqs: You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try every other Method that can serve to Extirpate this Excerable Race. I should be very glad (if) your scheme for hunting them down by Dogs could take effect I would rather chuse the liberty to kill any savage that may come in our way, than to be perpetually doubtful whether they are Friends or Foes (http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/lord_jeff.html) In 1749, the Nova Scotia legislature passed a series of Scalping Proclamations which rewarded ten pounds sterling to anyone who delivered the scalp of a male Miq maq Indian to a local magistrate. Five pounds was offered for the scalp of a woman or child. As among the Spanish, Indians who converted to Christianity were generally spared outright murder by the French and English, who usually enslaved them. Indian slavery was instituted by both nations during the fur trade wars of the 1600s, and continued until well into the 19th century. By 1761, over one tenth of all registered burials in Montreal were those of Indian slaves, who were called Panis (a derivation of the name for American Pawnee Indians, who also faced enslavement). Much of early Halifax and Montreal was built by both Negro and Indian slaves, although the colonial authorities preferred the latter because of their cheap availability. (Ryerson, ibid) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 38 Letter from General Jeffrey Amherst to his subordinate Colonel Henry Bouquet (16 July 1763) General Jeffery Amherst Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 39 Scalplng roclamaLlon passed ln Lhe nova ScoLla LeglslaLure, 1736 Whereas, notwithstanding the gracious offers of friendship and protection made by us, in His Majestys name, to the Indians inhabiting this Province, and the Treaty of Peace concluded with the tribe of the Mickmacks, bearing date, the 22nd November, 1752, the Indians have of late, in a most treacherous and cruel manner, killed and carried away diverse of His Majestys Subjects in different parts of the Province. For these causes, We, by and with the advice and consent of His Majestys Council, do hereby authorize and command all Officers, Civil and Military, and all His Majestys Subjects, to annoy, distress, take and destroy the Indians inhabiting different parts of this Province, wherever they are found; and all such as may be aiding or assisting them, notwithstanding the Proclamation of the 24th of November, 1752, or any former Proclamation to the contrary. And we hereby promise, by and with the advice and consent of His Majestys Council, a reward of thirty Pounds for every male Indian Prisoner, above the age of sixteen years, brought in alive; or for a scalp of such male Indian twenty-five pounds, and twenty-five pounds for every Indian woman or child brought in alive: Such rewards to be paid by the Officer commanding at any of His Majestys Forts in this Province, immediately on receiving the Prisoners or Scalps above mentioned, according to the intent and meaning of this Proclamation. Governor Charles Lawrence Source: mikmaq.com (Miq maq Nation) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 40 After the English conquest of Canada in 1759, their Indian allies like the Mohawks and Iroquoian peoples signed treaties with England which ostensibly recognized their nationhood. In reality, then as now, all lands were understood to be owned by the Crown and merely occupied by Indians. Even victorious Indians like the Six Nations found themselves decimated by European diseases and fenced on to restrictive reserve lands, under laws which denied them either nationhood or citizenship within what would become Canada. Further, the Crown had granted the Roman Catholic church absolute hegemony in Lower Canada (Quebec) to operate schools, hospitals and civic life in return for ensuring a domestically tranquil populace. This power allowed the Catholic Jesuit order to establish the first boarding schools among Indian nations, during the 1820s: a practice soon copied by the Anglican church in Upper Canada (Ontario), where the first Indian boarding school, the Mohawk Institute, was established in Brantford in 1832. This religious assault on native people was accompanied by a legal one. In 1842, the Bagot Commission, set up jointly by the Vatican and its subsidiary, the Crown of England, began the process of outright cultural genocide against Indians by recommending the establishment of industrial schools among native children where they would learn industry and agriculture, forget their languages and customs, and be wiped out as nations. Acting on this report, the legislature of Upper Canada passed the Gradual Civilization Act in 1857, which laid the basis for the present-day apartheid Indian Act, which segregates Indians into a sub-class of non-citizenship as legal wards of the state in perpetuity. The 1857 Act eradicated native nationhood by offering a limited enfranchisement to Indians who could still not vote, own property or be citizens under the law once they surrendered title to their land. This Act was an enormous blackmailing of the surviving native peoples of Canada, compelling them to either accept permanent serfdom and self-destruction through enfranchisement, or to remain as permanent outsiders prey to slaughter and displacement. It was also a green light to white settlers to disregard the rights and territories of native populations, who now had no inherent right to their own land. The fact that this occurred just as an expanding railway and canal system was opening up vast areas of land west of Lower Canada for European settlement was hardly accidental. As in South Africa, the establishment of a settler nation-state in Canada in 1867 sped up and institutionalized the overt genocide of indigenous peoples. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 41 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Act_to_encourage_the_gradual_Civilization_of_the_Indian_Tribes_in_this_Province,_and_to_amend_the_Laws_respecting_Indians 1he Cradual ClvlllzaLlon AcL, upper Canada (CnLarlo), 1837 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 42 Within the decade following Confederation, Canada created the legal and police systems to contain native populations as part of their long-term extermination: the Royal North West Mounted Police (forerunner to the RCMP) in 1873 and the Indian Act in 1876. Both of these institutions were designed to force Indians off their lands onto reservations, and eventually, into residential schools, to clear the path westward for the expanding Canadian Pacific Railway, created in 1881 to solidify Canada east to west through massive immigration and settlement. The Indian Act is a cage around every aboriginal person in Canada, and is legislation which has altered little in 130 years. It is the kind of race-based discriminatory law that has been banned by international human rights conventions since 1945, yet for some reason is allowed to persist in Canada. Under it, native people are dependent slaves on their own land, under the control of one man: the federal Minister of Indian Affairs. The opening words of the Indian Act declare that aboriginal people occupy land the legal title to which is invested in Her Majesty, that is, the Crown, which defines who and who is not an Indian under the law. Indians on reserves cannot own their own land, elect free and independent governments, conduct their own business affairs or even provide adequately for their children. The Act even denies Indians the right to refuse hospitalization or medical treatment, or move about freely. Under section 35 of the original Act, church or government agents could remove any Indian from their home using any force necessary: a provision which allowed native children to be kidnapped into residential schools, hospitals or any other place, and gave such agents the right to harm or kill their parents if they resisted. Under the same provision, troublesome or defiant Indians could be expelled from their own land and separated forever from their family and culture. After 1927, Indians were not allowed to hire lawyers or even represent themselves in a court of law. Until 1966, a special pass, identical to those issued under apartheid in South Africa, was necessary for any Indian to leave their reserve. No Indian could vote in Canada until 1960, and native women not until the 1970s. Even more telling is the fact that Indians on reserves are considered mere occupants of the land, and are granted temporary certificates of occupancy rather than deeds or titles to their homes or land. As transient squatters, they can be evicted at will by the government. And their band councils are mere puppet bodies that can be dispersed at any time by the Minister of Indian Affairs. Yet only by living in such imprisoned serfdom can Indians receive any government funding, since off-reserve natives are not entitled to such assistance. These racist provisions are possible in a society that still views aboriginals as uncivilized beings who are thus because of their non-Christian origins: a Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 43 description actually contained in government legislation like the Evidence Act of British Columbia. This Act, revised in 1960 and still in effect, describes who is eligible to give evidence in a provincial court. Under Section 12, Chapter 134 of the Act, an aboriginal person or native of mixed blood is described as an uncivilized person, destitute of the knowledge of God and of any fixed and clear belief in religion or in a future state of rewards and punishments Remarkably, this modern Canadian law declares, as did Columbus, that if you do not believe in a Christian God and a universe of heaven and hell, you are not civilized, and your word cannot be trusted in court. Like the Income Tax Act of Canada, which denies charitable tax exempt status to any organization which is militantly anti-Christian, such laws demonstrate the fallacy that church and state have ever been separate in Canada. The same two-headed hydra of Crown and Pulpit has held Indians, and all citizens, in a semi-feudal dependency for centuries. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 44 Genoc|de |n Canada |n the Modern Lra I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our Indian boarding schools to spread infectious diseases. The death rate often exceeds fifty percent. This is a national crime. - Dr. Peter Bryce to Deputy Superintendent for Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, April 12, 1907 A quarter of us never survived the boat trip to residential school, not the way we was starved and beaten by the Mounties. How many kids bodies got pitched overboard Ill never remember. And then half of those who survived never made it out of the school. Most of us who did just drank ourselves to death. Thats why you never see many of us around. - Willie Sport, survivor, Alberni (United Church) Indian Residential School, March 8, 1998 Genocide has three general phases regarding any targeted population: Conquest, Containment and Annihilation. By the time Canada was linked by rail as one nation, in 1886, it was well into Phase Two of its genocide of native peoples. Canadas vastness meant that the overt conquest of Indian nations there spanned four centuries, from the first French landfall on its eastern shores in the early 1500s to the final smallpox war that depopulated west coast tribes during the early twentieth century. Unlike most examples of genocide, the prolonged conquest and eradication of Indians in Canada and the United States makes the process perhaps less historically visible than the rapid extermination of most of the Jews of Europe in a dozen years under Hitler. The Canadian Holocaust occurred in waves, and was led and organized primarily by the Catholic and Protestant churches, under the guise of education and religion. These unique aspects, and the apparent destruction of records and evidence of the crime, have helped to camouflage the murderous nature and intent of this homegrown genocide. Nevertheless, it is clear from government archives and missionary accounts that there remained no free roaming, uncontained aboriginal tribes anywhere in Canada by about 1910. By this year, all Indians were imprisoned by law on reservations and their children incarcerated in church run and government sanctioned Indian residential schools. These schools Christian internment camps is a more accurate term for them had operated as church facilities across Canada since the early 19th century, but starting in 1889, the federal government licensed and funded them. By 1910, over one hundred of the schools existed, most of them in the west, and mostly operated by the Roman Catholic church. And over half of the children were dying in these schools every year from untreated and deliberately introduced diseases, primarily tuberculosis. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 43 Phase Two of the Canadian Genocide Containment manifested in the Three Fold Punch of the Indian Act, Indian reservations, and the Indian residential school system. And key to the successful containment of any subject population is their loss of historical memory, of who they are, and their consequential reduction to a state of mental slavery and dependence. This was indeed the primary aim of the residential schools, as part of the underlying purpose of stealing the lands and resources of the indigenous nations. Yet like the holocaust of Jewry by the Nazis, the aboriginal equivalent in Canada occurred under a fog and night deception. Under the guise of educating the savage, the residential schools functioned as secret killing centers to de-populate strategic areas of Canada targeted for rapid European settlement and resource extraction. The bare proof of this lies in three pieces of hard evidence: 1. The size and consistency of the mortality rate in these schools, which averaged between 40% and 60% every year for over a half century (1900-1960), along with the situating of the schools on or near valuable lands and resources; 2. The abolition of all medical inspection and the imposing of mandatory attendance in these schools for all Indian children during the very peak period of this huge mortality, between 1920 and 1930, and 3. The legislation of involuntary sterilization laws and the transferring of legal guardianship over Indian children to the churches running these centers during exactly the same period. All of these actions by the federal government in league with the operating churches, the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United churches of Canada, indicate a clear intent by these institutions to establish and maintain enormous death rates among aboriginal children away from public scrutiny and health inspection, and under a protective legal umbrella. In addition, a general indication of genocidal intent is the continued maintenance of native people in Canada under special legislation the Indian Act which legally segregates them from mainstream society in a special, inferior category of citizenship: an essential feature of any genocidal regime. In the course of the operation of the Indian residential schools, Containment became outright Annihilation: Phase Three of the genocidal process. During the years 1890 and 1996, when the last residential school closed, between 50,000 and 100,000 children died within the system, and countless others perished afterwards and continue to die because of the intergenerational effects of that system. As the following sections in this book will elaborate, the crimes perpetrated on children in these schools involved every act defined as genocide by international human rights conventions, including murder, torture, beatings, starvation, gang Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 46 rape, forced labor, involuntary sterilizations and medical experimentation, and over forty other such criminal acts. Canadas Royal Commission into Aboriginal People in 1997 declared that the Indian residential schools were the single major cause of the massive death rates within the aboriginal world: an ironic discovery, considering the historic role of the same government in causing such an enormous mortality, in partnership with the churches. As early as 1891, Indian Agents and medical inspectors had warned successive Canadian governments about the residential school killing fields operating under church sanction, and they were repeatedly ignored: a fact only recently acknowledged by the mainstream media. Natives Died in Droves despite warnings to Ottawa described an April 24, 2007 front page story in The Globe and Mail newspaper, which discusses a May, 1907 report by Indian Affairs inspector, Dr. Peter Bryce. Although not referred to in the Globe article, the Bryce report showed that half the children were dying in western residential schools because of a standard practice by staff of deliberately housing healthy children with those dying of tuberculosis, and then not treating them. This was hardly news. A century before, on November 15, 1907, both The Ottawa Citizen and The Montreal Gazette had reported Dr. Bryces findings of an average fifty percent mortality rate, claiming that as many as two-thirds of Indian children were dead in one Alberta school because of staff practices. Then, as now, the stories caused no flutter of protest or action by either the Canadian public or its government. Besides an obvious racist indifference by White Canada to the fate of Indians, the very honesty of Bryces report may have been why. For in it, Bryce clearly stated that children were being deliberately killed by staff in residential schools and that the churches were hiding the evidence of these killings, and of the huge death rate. Bryce recommended that the authority of the Catholic and Protestant churches over the residential schools be abolished, and that the government assume control of Indian education. Bryces employer, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, flatly refused Bryces recommendations on the grounds that the churches would not have it. Scott buried the report and drove Bryce out of the civil service, and then actually enshrined church control over the residential schools a few years later in a contract with church officials, signed in Ottawa in November, 1910. Later, at the request of the churches, Scott also abolished medical inspection of the schools and turned over legal guardianship of the children to the churches, even though under federal law Indians were wards of the state. By such action, Scott and his government condemned to death untold thousands of children, and applied the final blow to the destruction of Indian nations across Canada. And this, of course, was the intent of church and state all along, as Scott Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 47 himself described in a letter to an Indian agent in British Columbia on April 12, 1910: It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to disease by habituating in these schools, and that as a consequence, they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But such is in keeping with the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the Final Solution of the Indian problem. (Letter to Indian Superintendent for B.C. Major D. McKay, INAC archives, RG 10 series) A clearer admission of intent to commit genocide from a senior state official cannot be imagined: and yet this regime of church-administered mass murder has not until now been named for what it is let alone indicted. Why is this? How is it that Canada and its churches have been able to perpetrate legal genocide on indigenous nations for so long, without fear of prosecution in international courts of justice especially after World War Two, and the establishment of the United Nations Genocide Convention and other human rights codes? Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 48 Leg|t|m|z|ng the Cr|me by ke-Def|n|ng |t: Sabotage at the Un|ted Nat|ons In the wake of the horror of the Nazi Holocaust after 1945, popular outrage forced governments in the west to take some action to enshrine international laws to prevent future genocidal acts. As mentioned, Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin (1901-1959) led this effort at the United Nations, but quickly met political opposition to his broad definition of genocide, particularly from the United States and Canada. (See Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention by John Cooper, 2008) In brief, Lemkin had originally defined genocide as any act that caused the eventual destruction of a people, including cultural efforts to eradicate a peoples language, identity or nationhood, as well as displacing them from their homeland: a definition that could easily be applied to North Americans treatment of their aboriginal peoples. Armed with this broad view, Lemkin wrote an initial Draft Declaration in October, 1946, and won sponsorship for it at the U.N. from Cuba, India and Panama. It also won initial support from the United States, which in hindsight appeared to be a way for that nation to situate itself on the sub-committee to re-write the Draft that had been established by the Legal Committee of the U.N. General Assembly. Sometime between October of 1946 and the final approval of the new version of the Draft in the General Assembly on December 11 of that year, the sub-committee altered the definition of Genocide provided by Lemkin to make it inapplicable to crimes occurring domestically in North America and other countries and to shift the emphasis in the U.N. documents definition of genocide away from the action itself to its intentionality. The chairman of the sub-committee, Charles Fahy, was a lawyer for the U.S. State Department and the American delegate to the U.N. One of his first acts, according to Lemkin, was to try to change the word genocide to extermination: an attempt that failed. (Cooper, ibid) As Lemkin describes in his unpublished autobiography Totally Unofficial Man: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, in the wake of the Americans attempt, Fahy dispatched the Canadian U.N. delegate, Dana Wilgress, to try to win Lemkin over to the United States position: that a revised version of the Convention was needed one that de-emphasized cultural genocide and left ambiguous the application of the Convention to national legal systems. In short, Canada and the United States with the support of Great Britain wanted to make the Convention not only inapplicable to themselves and their own acts of genocide, but have it remain a general statement that could not be implemented in their own domestic legal and political systems. One of the ways they eventually did so was by shifting the focus in the definition of genocide Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 49 from an action to an intention, which created enormous ambiguity and gave any criminal regime a huge loophole through which to escape prosecution. For example, in Lemkins original opening sentence in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), he stated simply and boldly, By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. But in the final Genocide Convention, passed by the U.N. General Assembly, Lemkins statement was altered to read, In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group Lemkins original definition automatically condemns any practitioner of certain acts. But the U.N. Convention only allows such prosecution if it can first be established that there was an intention to commit those acts. Yet how can the intent of genocidal regimes to wipe out certain groups be established beyond a reasonable doubt? Thanks to the pressure brought by these Big Three nations (USA, England, Canada), this loophole became part of the redefinition of genocide that protected nations like these three and others from prosecution for their genocide of foreign or indigenous peoples. The final debate on the convention defeated Lemkin and excluded most of his definitions of cultural genocide from the final draft, in order to narrow the notion of genocide to physical destruction. As well, it left it up to each individual nation to decide whether or not to enact enabling legislation to allow the Convention to be applied to crimes within their own borders. In justifying its actions, the Canadian delegation wrote unconvincingly in a September, 1948 External Affairs publication: Canadian opposition to the inclusion of cultural genocide in the convention was prompted by the consideration that it was neither within the Economic and Social Councils terms of reference, nor properly included in a convention designed for protection of human life. This narrow attitude that safeguarding a peoples culture had no connection to saving their lives reflected the re-conceptualizing of genocide foisted by Canada, the USA and Britain on the United Nations: namely, that this crime consisted in essence of the outright physical extermination of a people, and that destroying the culture or social life of a group was not genocide. The Canadian government took advantage of the new restricted and emasculated version of the Genocide Convention in order to ensure that even this diluted sense of genocide could never be applied to its own actions within its borders. It did so by blocking any domestic enabling legislation to apply the Convention within Canada. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 30 Speaking in Canadas House of Commons on May 21, 1952, External Affairs Minister (and future Prime Minister) Lester B. Pearson actually argued that such legislation was unnecessary in Canada: I am further of the opinion that no legislation is required by Canada at this time to implement this convention, inasmuch as I cannot conceive of any act of commission or omission occurring in Canada as falling within the definition of the crime of genocide contained in this convention. (Hansard, Spring Session 1952, House of Commons, Ottawa) Later that week, Pearson commented again, echoing a statement by a Parliamentary human rights committee, The concept of genocide must be limited to physical destruction of a group, since otherwise, it is an offense to transfer children from one group to another in order to destroy them. Could it then not be argued that the proposals to impose integrated education upon the children of Doukhobors or Indians, for example, might fall within this prohibition? Clearly, this must not be considered to be a crime. In other words, we dont want to be tried for genocide, even though its happening here; so lets just redefine genocide to get ourselves off the hook! Not surprisingly, while ratifying the Genocide Convention in principle in 1952, Canada did not pass any enabling legislation related to the Convention at that time, and didnt do so until the spring of 2000. But the latter law, called The Crimes Against Humanity Act, actually prohibits the prosecution of any crime of genocide that happened within Canada if it occurred before the year 2000! By such self-serving actions, while posturing as a champion of human rights outside its own borders, Canada has consistently protected itself from being prosecuted for actions within the country that have been clearly recognized as genocidal by the world community: like transferring children to another group, preventing births, causing deaths, and the long term destruction of a group, and other acts that were planned and occurred in Indian residential schools. It is therefore not surprising that psychologically, mainstream Canadians have not been capable of recognizing that what happened to native children in these schools constitutes genocide, since their understanding of the latter has been conditioned to not recognize it when it occurs in their own country. Nevertheless, this attitude does not lessen or restrict the guilt and liability of Canada and its Christian churches for their proven crimes against humanity. Under domestic laws, genocide was legal in Canada, as it was in Nazi Germany. But under the principle of post ipso facto justice employed and established at the Nuremburg Tribunals after World War Two, even if a crime was legal under the laws of one country at the time they were committed, it still constitutes a crime under international law. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 31 The issue is not whether Canada and its churches are guilty of genocide a fact which these pages will demonstrate - but how will the matter be pressed. For who will place an existing and legitimate regime on trial for its crimes? Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 32 1ak|ng Act|on: Internat|ona| versus Sovere|gn Iust|ce In a regime that sanctions murder, there can be no regret, and no apology. - Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance Political and religious regimes and institutions plan and commit genocide and crimes against humanity, and yet only individuals can be tried for such crimes, under present international law. While this contradiction remains, genocide will never be effectively prosecuted or halted. If it is criminal institutions and mindsets which must ultimately be put on trial, one cannot imagine doing so from within either. For as we have discussed, European genocide emerged from the very soil and substance of Christendom, and expresses its inherent and most fundamental belief and practice: namely, that the conquest and destruction of other peoples is a necessary act of faith and civilization. Extermination is not named or recognized for what it is in the European genocide tradition, but rather, goes by the term civilizing or assimilating lesser peoples. Land theft is equated with progress, rape and torture with abuse, and the destruction of the earth itself is called development. As Nuremburg prosecutor Robert Jackson often remarked, it is not psychopaths who run death camps, but logical and sane individuals who think a certain way, and who are caught in a system that sanctions and legitimates mass murder. So today, logical and sane paid minions of church and state argue how a few words of apology and a few dollars can somehow resolve an evil that has never stopped; or that the very institutions that planned and carried out the extermination of whole nations are bodies that can understand and heal their victims. It has long been obvious that justice and disclosure for residential school survivors in Canada are impossible within the latters judicial and political system. Courts at every level of the country have continually ruled that the issue of genocide within Canada is ultra vires, or beyond their jurisdiction and competence, and that, to quote one Alberta Supreme Court judge, The Crown cannot be put on trial. Lawyers who have tried doing so, and named the Crown and its allied churches as co-conspirators in a crime against humanity like Henry Bear of the Maliseet native nation in Tobique, New Brunswick - have been harassed and even disbarred, and their cases ruled inadmissible. This domestic barrier to real change seems to fulfill the criteria for international intervention, in which all domestic legal remedies must be exhausted before a body like the International Criminal Court (ICC) can intervene, investigate, and lay charges. Unfortunately, the ICC and similar bodies have proven as unresponsive and indifferent to the documented reality of genocide in Canada as the latters courts perhaps because of the truth expressed by one European Parliament official who observed to the author in April, 2010, Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 33 Every major power is guilty of stealing land and killing indigenous people, somewhere in the world. So who wants to open that whole can of worms? Those few of us, native and white, who have fought long and hard to document and publicize the criminal regime called Indian residential schools are not people with money, or overt influence. We cannot mount international legal challenges against Canada, or hire forensic specialists to survey mass graves and prove the slaughter. All we have is the truth and our own capacity to speak it. If we are to create a real option for survivors of this genocide and their families, it must come from within our own communities. For our experience until now has been that once we act publicly, the world takes notice, and responds. It is for that reason that early in 2008, indigenous elders on Canadas west coast declared that the churches that caused the residential school Holocaust were not welcome on native land, and must leave it. On March 4, a legal eviction order was filed and registered in the British Columbia Supreme Court, which gave the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada thirty days to vacate land of the indigenous Squamish people: an area encompassing all of Vancouver. This eviction notice was ignored by these churches, so that under Canadian and common law, they and their nearly 300 church and office buildings in Vancouver are presently in a state of illegal trespass on land they never legally acquired from the Squamish people. This eviction was more than a proclamation of sovereignty by the Squamish traditional elders. It was also a practical lesson for residential school survivors in overcoming the mental dependency and reliance on the very institutions that murdered their people. It was a way to seize the initiative from a holocaust-denying culture and say: you are now on trial for genocide. For what accompanied the eviction was a second public statement from Squamish elders, on April 3, 2008: namely, that they had no confidence in Euro-Canadian courts to bring to trial for genocide the churches and government of Canada, and therefore, the elders were establishing traditional courts of law to do so. (Media advisory of Chief Kiapilano at www.hiddenfromhistory.org, Updates) It was not coincidental that barely two months later, Prime Minister Steven Harper stood in Parliament and issued the first public apology for Indian residential schools in Canadian history. For once we show the Empire that we do not need it, and begin placing it on trial rather than go to it cap in hand for crumbs, then its regime must respond, and scramble for legitimacy. We therefore believe that only community initiatives based on direct exposure of the crimes, and the criminals, will place the system that caused this genocide on trial, and dis-establish the institutions and worldview responsible. It is towards this end that we gather the evidence and perspectives contained herein, and hope that others will use what we have written as a weapon in this struggle. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 34 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 33 The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not allow any of them to live This is what you are to do to them: break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their trees and burn them in the fire. For you are a people chosen by the Lord over all others on the face of the earth. - Deuteronomy 7: 1-2, 5-6, The Bible Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 36 art 1wo: Lv|dence of Intent|ona| Genoc|de and other Cr|mes at Ind|an kes|dent|a| Schoo|s and nosp|ta|s |n Canada, accord|ng to the Cr|g|na| Def|n|t|on and Cr|ter|a of Genoc|de estab||shed by kaphae| Lemk|n (1944) By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. (my emphasis) - Raphael Lemkin, from his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) The understanding of genocide has been so ravaged by revision, political misuse and sabotage since Raphael Lemkin first conceived it that we must avoid simply applying the existing United Nations definition of genocide to what happened to indigenous people. Rather, we need to return to the broad spirit of the term, and augment it with what we have learned about the origins and manifestation of that crime in the world, if we are to do justice to the crime and its victims, and to the promise of its eradication. For this reason, in this section of our study, we will apply our broad historical-political-spiritual sense of genocide to what occurred in Indian residential schools and hospitals, rather than be restricted by the formal and legalistic understanding of the crime imposed by nations and international bodies which themselves are complicit in the crime. That understood, it is nevertheless vital to state that even by the existing, restricted definitions of genocide contained in the United Nations Convention on the Crime and Prevention of Genocide (1948), every act known as genocide under this Convention has been proven to have occurred, deliberately and systematically, in Canadian Indian residential Schools. For instance, under Section Two of that Convention, five acts constitute genocide. These are: Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 37 a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. As will be demonstrated, these acts were common and rampant in Indian residential schools and hospitals for well over a century. A Long V|ew of Genoc|de, and |ts Lv|dence w|th|n Canada We begin with this new working definition of the crime of genocide: 1. Genocide is a philosophy of divinely or morally-sanctioned conquest and extermination of others which manifests in a plan to destroy those others. 2. This plan involves the deliberate and systematic destruction of the essential foundations of the life of targeted groups, with the aim of exterminating the groups over time, by assaulting, dehumanizing and killing its members, transporting their children to other groups, annihilating their political and social institutions, families, culture, language and worldview, religion, personal security and liberty, health and dignity, economic livelihood and land ownership, and the capacity to produce life and creating conditions which over time will cause their ultimate destruction. 3. Emerging from within the worldview and culture of the conquering power, and expressing its core values, this plan is not accidental or periodic, but inherent and institutionalized, and does not cease until final extermination is achieved. It is the general position of this study that all three of these definitions of genocide manifested within Canada since the beginning of the European presence, according to exhaustive personal testimonies, archival evidence, legislation and written documentation. It is also our position that every act related to the aim of genocide began with the arrival of Europeans, occurred within Indian residential schools and hospitals across Canada between the years 1889 and 1996, and that this genocide is continuing. Let us examine this evidence in detail, according to each of these definitions. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 38 1he I|rst Def|n|t|on: A h||osophy of Sanct|oned Conquest and Lxterm|nat|on The philosophy that morally and legally sanctioned the conquest of indigenous people by European powers within Canada, and all of the Americas specifically, Christian Supremacy was outlined generally in the Introduction to this section (What is Genocide? and Genocide as a Religious Ideal). The remarkable durability of this philosophy, and its persistence to the present day, arises from the fact that it emerged from and expresses a core value of western civilization: namely, the equation of virtue, truth and spiritual wholeness with the conquest and destruction of others. This foundational philosophical belief of Hebrew-Greco-Roman culture combined with the Roman Catholic churchs claim of literal ownership of the entire world to create a monstrous hybrid known as Christendom: an Imperial system that was a sort of spiritualized version of the Pax Romana. And at the heart of that system burns the idea that Christians are a superior group of people whose rights and faith supersede and subordinate those of all non-Christians on our planet. This belief system provided the enormous sanctioning of the colonialism and genocide that began within Europe during the eleventh century, and spread overseas in the sixteenth century. It has on its hands the blood and suffering of tens of millions of people for the simple reason that its declared purpose was the destruction of those people. That destruction came in many forms, as outlined by Raphael Lemkin and in our own definition of genocide. Yet whether in the shape of outright killings, or as the more subtle destruction of losing ones language and family at the hands of pious missionaries, the aim was always the same: to exterminate any vestige of difference, of any other model of belief or culture. Still does this aim continue, albeit in secularized form, in the wests imposition of a corporate capitalist system on our entire planet with the same zeal, intolerance and violence of any Conquistador or Jesuit. The obsession of our culture with developing (destroying) nature and its inhabitants arises directly from the foundational Christian belief in a fallen world sanctified and made right by conquest of Others and their uniform salvation. It is for this reason that our study of what engendered Christendoms genocide in the world applies so directly to our modern experience of a global economy rapidly exterminating not only indigenous people, but our entire species, and the planet itself. Specifically, however, our concern is to apply our understanding of the philosophical basis of Christian Genocide to how the latter created and Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 39 maintained the crimes within Indian residential schools in Canada and North America; and how it continues to conceal those crimes. In that regard, it is clear from an examination of the evidence that it was the philosophy of Christian Supremacy and papal domination that established and fueled the Indian residential schools, and sustained them for over a century, despite aboriginal resistance and a continual acknowledgment by governments that children were dying en masse in these church-run schools. The best indication of this fact is found in the evidence of how genocidal crimes manifested within the Indian residential schools and hospitals of Canada. 1he Second Def|n|t|on: 1he p|an to de||berate|y |mpr|son and destroy Ind|genous Nat|ons w|th|n Ind|an res|dent|a| schoo|s A. The issue of Intentionality Raphael Lemkins original statement defining genocide made no mention at all of the issue of intentionality regarding the crime: genocide simply meant the destruction of a group, and the act of destruction itself clearly implied and demonstrated an intent to do so. Modern governments and churches that are implicated in regimes of genocide, however, have heavily emphasized the issue of intentionality, as did their diplomatic agents at the United Nations during the drafting of the 1948 Convention on Genocide, as a safeguard against their own prosecution. Relying on legal formalism in that any crime must contain both the act and an underlying intent these regimes scuttled the direct logic and justice of Lemkins view and replaced it with the existing United Nations Convention, which states that genocide involves the intent to destroy any national, ethnic, racial or religious group. (my emphasis) In other words, according to the United Nations Convention, the act of destruction itself is not a crime of genocide unless it can be proven beyond doubt that the intent to do so was also present. Proving intent, as any lawyer knows, is always difficult, since it requires inferences about a persons state of mind. But in the case of visible and obvious crimes, especially those committed by a government or other power, intent is not necessary to prove, since it can be assumed on the basis of the act itself. For as Nuremburg prosecutor Robert Jackson observed, No regime that wages wars and crimes against other peoples can be relied upon to record their aims and intentions in any detail, since the purpose of their actions are inherent in the acts themselves and require no justification For the defense to demand proof of intent in regards to their own actions is spurious and misleading, since intent is a mental attitude with which an individual acts, and therefore it cannot be directly proved but Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 60 must be inferred from surrounding facts and circumstances. In the case of a criminal regime, the proof lies not in assumed attitudes but in the corpses and ruination caused by that regime. (Summary of Chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert Jackson to the First Nuremburg Tribunal, September 30, 1946) We therefore believe that intentionality, in relation to the crime of genocide, is a politically motivated issue, arising from the need for guilty parties to find legal loopholes through which they can evade prosecution for their crimes. In reality, the bare existence of crimes of genocide indicates an inherent intentionality, which manifests in the consistency, ruthlessness and institutional complicity associated with the crimes themselves. Echoing the Nuremburg legal process, then, it is not necessary to prove the intent behind genocidal acts or regimes, for by its very nature, genocide intends to exterminate whole groups of people, especially since it arises not from a random, individual act but from carefully planned programs and ideologies which are openly declared. Nevertheless, even if intentionality was an issue to consider and prove regarding genocide committed against indigenous people in Canada, there is ample evidence that every level of government and the churches than operated Indian residential schools deliberately intended to kill, torture, rape, de-populate and otherwise inflict acts of genocide on generations of indigenous children and their families. This evidence falls into two categories: Direct and Implied intentionality. Direct intentionality to cause acts of genocide in residential schools is indicated first and most clearly in the official report from government medical officer Dr. Peter Bryce, who, in the spring and summer of 1907, and again in 1909, conducted official inspections of Indian residential schools in western Canada, where most of the schools lay. Dr. Bryce produced a scathingly honest report whose findings were suppressed and never acted on by the government of Canada, and which cost him his job and reputation. In his first official report, issued to the government in the fall of 1909, Dr. Bryce stated, I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our Indian boarding schools to spread infectious diseases. The death rate often exceeds fifty percent. This is a national crime. (November 12, 1909) To support his claim, Bryce cited evidence that in every school he had inspected, staff were regularly and deliberately housing healthy children with those sick and dying of tuberculosis, and then denying treatment and care to all of them. Bryce also claimed that school staff and their church employers regularly concealed or distorted the enormous death rate and the cause of death of so many children. (See The Story of A National Crime Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1904 to 1921 by P.H. Bryce, Ottawa, 1922) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 61 This practice was present in schools run by every church denomination, and according to the governments own records, it persisted for over fifty years. The average fifty percent death rate was documented statistically by Dr. Bryce in his second, 1909 report. (See Fig. 1) The second piece of evidence of direct intentionality is the federal Order in Council dated March 11, 1919, which abolished medical inspection in the Indian residential schools, despite the enormous death rate and unhealthy conditions found within them. (Fig. 2) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 62 Figure 1: Fifty percent death rate in Alberta Indian Residential School, 1909 Extract from Dr. P. Bryces report to Indian Affairs (RG 10 series) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 63 Figure 2: Government Order abolishing medical inspection in Indian residential schools, 1919 and subsequent rise in TB among Indians. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 64 The third piece of evidence of direct intentionality to commit genocide is the federal law of 1920 that compelled every Indian child in Canada to be incarcerated in residential schools, despite the huge mortality rate in them and the deliberate criminal actions of their staff. (Fig. 3) The fourth piece of such evidence is the transference of legal guardianship over residential school children from the federal government to the church-appointed Principals of these schools, between 1929 and 1932. (Fig. 4) And the final indication of intent to commit genocide are the laws, passed in the same period of this transference of authority over Indian children, which allowed the legal involuntary sterilization of any native in those western regions still most heavily populated with non-assimilated Indians: in Alberta in 1928, and in British Columbia in 1933. (Fig. 5) Deliberate acts of homicide, denial of medical supervision to conceal and sustain this homicide, mandatory attendance in disease-plagued and murderous establishments, absolute legal authority over all their inmates, and the legal sterilization of such inmates: these five indicators are clear proof that Canada and its churches conspired to wipe out whole groups and generations of Indians, especially children. Besides this direct evidence of deliberate genocide, intent to commit this crime is implied in the passing and maintenance of the federal Indian Act, which provides the segregation and discrimination necessary to enact genocidal practices, similar to how edicts like the Nazi Racial Purification laws passed in Nuremburg in 1935 laid the basis for the subsequent extermination of non-Aryans. In addition, the continuance of the Indian Act and the so-called foster care system which legally de-culturalizes aboriginal children within non-native families and causes further social disintegration among Indians in Canada is solid proof that the government and its agencies are still maintaining practices intended to destroy this group. An examination of the full range of crimes in the Indian residential schools and hospitals will provide even further evidence that genocide occurred as a result of deliberate planning by church and state in Canada. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 63 Figure 3: Federal law requiring mandatory attendance of native children in Indian residential schools, 1920 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 66 Figure 4: Legal guardianship over native children transferred to residential school principal, through Application Form 1933 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 67 Figure 5: Law allowing the legal involuntary sterilization of Indian residential (industrial) school inmates, British Columbia, 1933 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 68 B. Assaulting, De-humanizing and Killing Indians Unlike the present United Nations Convention on Genocide, we do not consider the physical killing of members of a group to be separate from the general assault, terrorizing and de-humanizing aimed at them, but rather as the natural outcome of such a program of institutionalized violence. As one survivor of the Christie Catholic residential school, Harry Lucas, describes so succinctly, I never understood why the nuns and priests hated us so much. As a kid, you know, you just go along in fear after the first time somebody hits you. Your mind shuts down and you start dying from the inside out: your hopes die, your memories die, and then all of you starts dying. Thats what it was all about: murder. Soul murder. The killings were just part of that. (March 14, 2005, Nanaimo, B.C.) The Indian residential schools were conceived and operated for more than a century as an enormous system of terror and control aimed at children, as part of a larger program of ethnic extermination and land theft. In the minds of colonial and church authorities, the enormity and duration of this terror was clearly required by the degree of indigenous resistance to conquest and assimilation. For example, early in the residential schools era, a prominent west coast missionary wrote to a government official, The Indians are constantly running away from our mission school and back to their savage ways. No amount of entreaties to make them stay has any effect. Their parents tend to boycott the schools because of the high number of deaths in them If things continue in this vein, we shall have no school left at all, and our hopes for these people will be for naught. We are therefore left to no recourse but to force the Indians to obey us. They must be compelled to attend our schools (from a letter of Presbyterian missionary John Ross to Major D.M. MacKay, Indian Agent-General for British Columbia, June 12, 1908 original too illegible to reproduce) Indigenous nations, of course, had already been subjected to genocidal assault by the time that the residential school system was established: a fact which highlights that systems final solution purpose, since, everywhere in Canada, residential schools were introduced when indigenous nations were at their weakest, had faced massive de-population from germ warfare, and had largely been forced off their land and socially weakened through Christianization. Residential schools were supposed to be the final blow on our people described hereditary Squamish chief Kiapilano at a public rally in Vancouver in the spring of 2008. Here in Vancouver, my grandfather was thrown out of his longhouse by the priest and RCMP one night and replaced with a Catholic Indian. Grandfather was the hereditary leader, the siem, and the church knew he opposed the residential school being built on his land. He had a dream that the school would wipe out our people by stealing the minds of the children. And thats what happened alright. (March 8, 2008) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 69 In British Columbia, residential schools arose at the low point of the aboriginal population curve, when from an estimated pre-contact level of some one to two million people, the number of Indians on the west coast had fallen by 1910 to 20,000: a killing off of 98% of the population. In this context of an unimaginably violent assault on their land, lives and culture, native peoples experience of residential school was simply the final step on a continuum of massacre that began at first contact with Europeans. One therefore cannot and should not consider Indian residential schools as a separate phenomenon from the Christian genocidal conquest that caused them. Unfortunately, but hardly surprisingly, mainstream consensus in Canada attempts to achieve precisely such a separation in its false portrayal of residential schools as a good intention gone bad. In the summer of 2008, after the media finally began reporting fifty percent mortality rates in residential schools, a government-paid apologist, Dr. John Milloy of Trent University, made the astounding and much-reported claim that these huge death rates were not the result of deliberate acts, but were caused by government under funding. (Statement by John Milloy at a public forum in Peterborough, Ontario, August 9, 2008) Despite being disproven by hard evidence, including Dr. Peter Bryces on-site report in 1907 that conditions (in the schools) are being deliberately created to spread infectious disease, Milloys claim illustrates the method of all holocaust deniers: to impute innocence to a system of brutality and murder by making actual decisions to kill appear benign. Thus, in Milloys logic, denying funds to Indian children for basic food and medicine is not a deliberate, deadly act, but proof of unintentionality and innocence by the government and churches. In reality, a major device in de-populating native communities by weakening the health and stamina of children was precisely such deliberate denial of funding for essential services to captive populaces. For example, a study of federal government expenditure on tuberculosis prevention in 1913 found that $3.39 per capita was spent annually on eliminating that disease among Caucasian populaces in Canada, while only six cents was spent per capita for TB prevention among Indians on reservations. (Department of Indian Affairs Quarterly Review, No. 114) Ironically, in his rush to exonerate Canada of intentional genocide, Milloy inadvertently spotlights the very issue that proves that Canada and its churches did indeed deliberately sought to kill off Indians: namely, the institutionalized practicing of two systems and standards of care and funding when it came to Indians, as opposed to the rest of the populace. William Wood, the newly-arrived principal of the United Church Indian residential school in Ahousaht, B.C., stated in a letter to Indian Affairs in April, 1929, Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 70 The conditions in this school can at best be described as deplorable, and seemingly designed to cause sickness and death among the students I was informed by my predecessor that Indian children do not require the same level of nutrition as white children and can survive on a piece of bread a day. (William Wood to D.C. Scott, INAC RG 10 series, R7733) This double standard of care was also applied medically. According to a Dr. C. Pitts in Fraser Lake, B.C., the son of a residential school principal, a lower standard of health care was practiced in relation to Indians in not only the local Lejac Catholic school, but generally across the province. In a letter to the local Indian Agent on October of 1935, Dr. Pitts wrote, As for the general examination you speak of, this is not done in any other school that I have any knowledge of Where is the point of this, when I know that, were I to apply the standards of health to them that is applied to children of the white schools, that I should have to discharge 90% of them and there would be no school left. (my emphasis) (See Fig. 6) This remarkable admission by an insider that as a doctor he was expected to apply a different standard when it came to the health of Indians, and in so doing, allow children to sicken and die reflects a systemic arrangement that was condoned at the highest level of power in Canada. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 71 Figure 6: Doctor admits to the existence of two standards of care regarding Indian and non-native students Dr. C. Pitts, October 1935 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 72 Another example of this arrangement of condoning sickness and death among Indian children in the schools is the statement of Deputy Superintendent for Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, when in a letter dated March 7, 1910, he legitimized the massive death rate in residential schools, and tacitly encouraged what caused it, by stating: If the schools are to be conducted at all we must face the fact that a large number of the pupils will suffer from tuberculosis in some of its various forms. The admission indiscriminately of such pupils into the schools and the failure to recognize any special treatment which could be accorded to them has no doubt led to the high death rate (Fig. 7) Significantly, this letter was in response to the submission of Dr. Bryces report, in which he documented how the actions of church and school staff were directly causing the massive death rate. In effect, the government responded to this evidence by whitewashing it and accepting as inevitable such huge mortality. As above, so below: for this national policy by the government of officially condoning genocidal practices sent a clear message to every lower level employee, including school principals and medical workers like Dr. Pitts namely, that an enormous death rate and the practices that caused it were acceptable when it came to Indians. Thus, in official correspondence concerning the Indian residential schools, statements by Indian Agents and others that the children seemed healthy or were receiving good care must be taken in the context of this two standards of care system: that is, the Indian children were healthy according to the standards applied to natives, in which an acceptable death rate of nearly fifty percent was the norm and acceptable to both church and state. We were always being told we were fine and healthy when we were sick as dogs and could barely stand recalls Delmar Johnny, a Cowichan Indian on Vancouver Island, and a survivor of the Catholic school on Kuper Island during the 1950s and 60s. They never tried to separate us from the kids with TB, ever. It was okay to let Indians run around sick, but not whites. We just came to accept that about ourselves. (March 9, 2006) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 73 Figure 7: Top Indian Affairs official justifies high death rate in residential schools Letter of Duncan Campbell Scott, 1910Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 74 Further proof of the policy by Canada of such non-intervention to save the lives and health of Indians is evident in this comment by Prime Minister Arthur Meighen in the House of Commons on June 8, 1920: the same year that attendance by all native children in residential schools was declared mandatory under the law. In response to an opposition question about the terrible sickness and epidemics raging among Indians, Meighen said, The Health Department has no power to take over the matter of the health of Indians. That is not included in the act establishing the Department. It was purposely left out of the Act. (Hansard, House of Commons Summer session, 1920, Ottawa ; my emphasis) Why would the health of Indians be purposely left out of the very legislation governing them, unless they were never intended to survive? It was the policy and practice of the government of Canada not to hospitalize Indians who had contracted tuberculosis. In January, 1938, Dr. John Poole in Fraser Lake, BC wrote a letter to Indian Agent R. H. Moore, referring to Dorothy Paul, a girl in the Lejac Catholic residential school who was sick from tuberculosis another admission that TB-infected children were allowed to remain in residential schools. In his letter, Poole refers to the practice of Indian Affairs of not hospitalizing Indians suffering from tuberculosis. (Fig. 8) Fifteen years later, a top official of the Anglican church, Trevor Jones, commented in a Globe and Mail article about the same government policy, of not hospitalizing Indians and Eskimos who had tuberculosis. (Globe and Mail, May 29, 1953, see Fig. 8a) Why would the Canadian government refuse to aid Indians dying from a disease introduced by the same government and its church partners, unless it was their intent to let the Indians die off en masse? Canadas official ideology proclaimed that Indians were a dying race and would not survive, and that massive deaths from disease were inevitable in residential schools. Behind the legitimating cloak of this belief could occur the homicide, sterilizations, germ warfare and other crimes against humanity that were daily life in Indian residential schools. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 73 Figure 8: Letter from Dr. John Poole, referring to government practice of not hospitalizing Indians suffering from tuberculosis January 1938 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 76 Figure 8(a): Ottawa let Indians die: Statement by Anglican church official Rev. Trevor Jones regarding the same government policy of non-hospitalizing Indians Globe and Mail, May 29, 1953 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 77 It is significant that the father of the Dr. Pitts who described the two standards of care system in the residential schools was Reverend F.W. Pitts of the United Church of Canada, who, as Principal of the Alberni residential school during the 1930s, allegedly exposed children to tuberculosis and caused their deaths. According to an eyewitness and survivor, Willie Sport, That Principal Pitts was trying to kill us. I was the only kid who survived. Pitts took eight of us and he fed us this canned meat. He didnt give it to anybody else. Then we all got sick with the TB. Every other boy died, but my Dad broke into the infirmary and got me out, and took me to my grandfather who was a medicine man. He sucked the black poison out of each of my lungs three times, then spit it out, I seen it. But all the other kids died, thanks to Pitts. (March 28, 1998, Port Alberni, B.C.) A church official infects and kills seven children, while his state-paid doctor son exonerates the crime, and many like it, by operating according to an unspoken law that has him look the other way when native children grow sick and die. The ease with which such a tag team operation occurred between church and state in Canada, and accounted for so many supposed deaths due to natural causes, indicates an obvious criminal conspiracy. Clearly, not only definitions of law and health, but morality itself, operate according to a double standard under any genocidal regime. Nor does this double standard fade with time, as is evident in the lower bar of justice that Canada continues to apply to Indians when it comes to their compensation for years of torture in residential schools: a limit of $10,000 on the basic common experience payment, as opposed to millions of dollars in damages regularly won by non-native survivors of the same and even milder forms of torture. Nothing is more indicative of the deliberate de-humanizing of Indians under Canadian law, religion and medical care than is such a prolonged double standard, which allows the continued assault and destruction of indigenous people to occur under an apparently democratic regime. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 78 1. nom|c|de |n Ind|an res|dent|a| schoo|s Overt killings were a common occurrence in both Catholic and Protestant Indian residential schools throughout their entire history, according to eyewitnesses and documentation. As described later in this book under the Summary of Evidence, many eyewitnesses describe seeing clergy and residential school staff beat and starve children to death, while others were thrown from windows, kicked to their death down stairs, strangled, and sodomized until they died. The first person in Canada to go public about a witnessed murder at an Indian residential school was Harriett Nahanee of the Pacheedaht nation on Vancouver Island. At a press conference given by the author in Vancouver in December, 1995, Harriett described to reporters seeing 14 year old Maisie Shaw, a fellow student at the United Church Alberni residential school, kicked to her death by Principal Alfred Caldwell, on Christmas eve, 1946. I was at the bottom of the stairs in the basement. I always went to the bottom of the stairs to sit and cry. I heard her crying, she was looking for her mother. I heard (Caldwell) yelling at the supervisor for letting the child run around on the stairwell. I heard him kick her and she fell down the stairs. I went to look her eyes were open, she wasnt moving. They didnt even come down the stairs I never saw her again. (Vancouver Sun, December 18, 1995) (See Fig. 9) The United Church later told Maisies parents that she had been hit by a train. But the RCMPs version is that she died of pneumonia. In fact, her death certificate, issued in 1946, was a crude forgery, according to mortuary officials. (Fig. 10) A second murder by Principal Caldwell was reported two days after Harrietts account was printed in the Vancouver Sun, on December 20, 1995. Archie Frank, an elder from Ahousaht, British Columbia, and a former inmate at the United Church residential school there, told Vancouver Sun reporters how he watched Caldwell beat a child for taking a prune out of a jar. The child, Albert Gray, died the next day. He got strapped to death. Just for stealing one prune, Caldwell strapped him to death. Beat the shit right out of him The day after he got strapped so badly he couldnt get out of bed. The strap wore through a half inch of his skin. His kidneys gave out. He couldnt hold his water anymore They wouldnt bring him to a doctor. I dont think they wanted to reveal the extent of his injuries. (December 20, 1995, Vancouver Sun). (Fig.11) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 79 Figure 9: First newspaper account of an eyewitnessed murder in an Indian residential school: Vancouver Sun, December 18, 1995Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 80 Figure 10: False death certificate for murder victim Maisie Shaw, claiming heart failure as cause of death BC Vital Statistics, 1946Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 81 Figure 11: Second reported murder by United Church minister Alfred Caldwell Vancouver Sun, December 20, 1995Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 82 After Albert had died, Archie Frank and another boy, Stanley Sam, were ordered by Principal Caldwell to bury him in the woods behind the school. Bill Seward, a survivor of the Roman Catholic school on Kuper Island, B.C., says his sister Maggie was pushed to her death by a nun when she was six years old. Maggie was shoved right out the window she was sitting on by a nun. Pushed right out and fell three stories. She died, but nothing was ever done about it. We werent allowed to see a lawyer or nothing. They just covered this up. (August 22, 1998, Duncan, B.C.) Diane Harris, a community health worker for the Chemainus Band near Duncan on Vancouver Island confirms Bills story, and dozens of similar accounts of murders at the Kuper Island residential school. In June, 1998, Diane stated, We regularly hear stories from our people about all the children who were killed at Kuper Island. I mean killed, not just died. A graveyard of these kids is just south of the old school building. The priests dug up part of it when they closed the school down in 1973. There are not only children but fetuses in there, aborted by the nuns themselves whenever a girl got pregnant by staff or the priests. Often the young mother would die too and get buried right next to their child. My mother, whos eighty three now, she saw a priest murder a young girl. In the early years theyd bury the kids under the floorboards. That was a common practice. Weve asked the RCMP to investigate these graves, but they always refuse, even though weve documented thirty five different murders over a seven year period at the school. (IHRAAM Tribunal, June 13, 1998) One such murder was that of Richard Thomas, a teenager from the Halalt tribe. His surviving sister, Belvy Breber, described his fate at the IHRAAM Tribunal into residential schools in Vancouver on June 13, 1998. My brother Richard Thomas was murdered at Kuper Island school in 1964. He was killed by Mr. Dunlop, the Principal, and a priest named Terry MacNamara. I got a phone call from Richard the day before he graduated and he said, Sis, when I get out of here Im gonna tell all. But they must have overheard him because the phone was right next to the Principals office, cause the next day we got a call to tell us that Richard was dead, that hed hung himself. Arnold Sylvester and some other boys saw Principal Dunlop string up Richards body in the gym after he died, to make it look like hed hung himself. But his body was all black and blue. Then Dunlop and MacNamara made all the kids walk by Richards body, and they said it could happen to them. Interviewed at the same Tribunal, Kuper Island school survivor Dennis Charlie, who went there from 1939 to 1945, told investigators, The kids were dying like flies at the school and the graveyard filled up, so they started burying the kids all over the place. Lots of unmarked graves. My own brother John was hit on the head with an iron chain by a priest and he died the same day. Nothing was ever Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 83 done for him, they let him die in his bed so the priest wouldnt get in trouble. I dont know what they did with his body. They told my parents he died of pneumonia. And they told me Id get the same if I ever told anyone.(June 13, 1998) Hundreds of such eyewitness accounts of residential school killings have been shared with the author since 1995, including by former staff members in these schools who were instructed to show no mercy towards Indian students. Marion MacFarlane, a dormitory matron at the United Churchs Alberni residential school during the early 1960s, spoke at a conference in Vancouver in February of 1998. We all had to carry a prescribed leather belt, and use it whenever a child spoke out of turn or in their language. If we didnt draw blood, we were reprimanded. Often Id see five and six year olds beaten unconscious and then thrown into closets for days without food or water. Wed open the door and sometimes find a little corpse. Then wed have the janitors get rid of the body, usually out back in the hills. There are hundreds of bodies there. (February 9, 1998, SFU Harbor Centre, Vancouver) A student at the same school, Harry Wilson of the Heltsuk nation told the author how in 1967, he found the body of a young native girl on the grounds of the school one morning and what happened to him when he reported the corpse to principal John Andrews. I found a body of a girl behind Caldwell Hall one morning. Me and two other boys were poking around for food and I saw her. She was about sixteen, all naked and covered in blood. I think she was a Haida girl from up north. I ran and told Mr. Andrews, and the RCMP showed up and got rid of the body, and told us not to tell anyone. But the next week Andrews had me shipped off to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, no reason, just gone one day. They held me there for months. I was all strapped down in a bed in a padded cell. They gave me shots all the time and these shocks to my head to mess me up. (February 9, 1998, Vancouver) Sadly, such persecution of Harry Wilson didnt stop after his leaving the residential school. When Harry tried to speak about the dead girl he found at a public meeting in Port Alberni in March, 1998, he was threatened into silence by two officials of the state-funded Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council, Ron Hamilton and Charlie Thompson, both of whom had been enforcers for the white administration at the Alberni school when they were boys. In a signed statement dated March 31, 1998, Harry states, Just before I was to give my testimony a man called Ron Hamilton came to talk to me and he said to me, I wouldnt talk about her (the dead girl) if I was you. If you say anything about it, youll be sorry. As NTC official Charlie Thompson left our Circle, he walked by me and said to me, Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 84 You have half a brain and no-one will miss you if youre found floating face down in the water. (See Appendix 6) Hazel Joseph also attended the Alberni residential school during the 1960s. She describes a cold room in the school basement where childrens bodies were stored. I first found out about it when none of the kids from my village would walk on a certain part of the playground, since it was our custom never to walk on a grave. Where they wouldnt walk was just above the tunnel that linked the school to Caldwell hall. We were told never to go down into that tunnel or wed get beaten. But one of the older girls who cleaned down there told me she saw kids bodies being wheeled into a cold room. (IHRAAM testimony, June 14, 1998, Vancouver) Interestingly, a former staff member of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council, which occupies the former Alberni residential school building, confirmed the existence of the underground storage room in an email to the author on February 1, 2001. In the spring of 1992, part of the ground next to the old Alberni residential school suddenly collapsed, revealing a big underground chamber. There was an awful smell coming out of it and a very, very bad feeling all around it. Nobody wanted to go near it. So the janitor roped off the hole and filled it in with cement the next day. Then the tribal council ordered the whole back grounds to be asphalted over. But my grandmother went to that school, and before she died, she told me about all the children who got killed there. She said she saw a boy beaten to death. She saw another little girl dragged by her hair by the Principal, down these stairs. Then her body was left lying there after she died. Granny was too scared to ever talk about it to anyone. Id say everybody knows about these killings, and all the chiefs sure do. Theyre in on the cover up. They told me never to go poking in the woods behind the old school or Id lose my job. (Author requests anonymity) Ethel Wilson of the Heltsuk Nation in Bella Bella, B.C. told the IHRAAM Tribunal how, in 1969, she saw rows and rows of tiny skeletons in the foundations of the former Anglican residential school of St. Michaels in Alert Bay, B.C. There were several rows of them, all lined up. None of them was more than two feet long. They were tearing down the old wing of St. Mikes, and I could see all those skeletons, right near the old wall. I remember how other girls told me how their babies were taken away and killed. That must have been them. (June 13, 1998) In April of 2008, the author released to the world media a list of twenty eight mass graves containing the remains of children who died in Indian residential schools across Canada. (See Appendix 8) Physical surveys, eyewitness accounts and archival information have established that these sites span a century and contain possibly thousands of corpses. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 83 The same month, Dennis Ball, a forensic specialist who conducted a brief survey of the grounds west of the former Alberni Indian residential school, confirmed the presence of mass graves in the area. The land has the classic signs of multiple burials, especially in the telltale vegetation and the presence of regular sinkholes and undulating terrain spanning an area of more than a hundred square meters. That kind of disturbance invariably means that lots of digging has been happening, over many years. Ive examined mass graves in Kosovo and what I saw behind that residential school bears all the same features. (Statement to the author, April 3, 2008) Thats where they buried lots of the kids who died confirmed Dennis Tallio, a former Alberni school student who actually discovered a childs body behind the facility in 1965. A bunch of us were playing soccer in the field next to Caldwell Hall, and somebody kicked the ball into the grass near the hill. I went looking for it and I found the remains of a small child. It was badly decomposed but I could see it was a young girl. Later I heard one of the matrons say The little squaws buried with all the others past the pipeline. Thats a good fifty feet into the hills behind the school. We were told never to go there. (Statement to IHRAAM Tribunal, June 14, 1998) Another probable mass grave site is situated on the grounds of the Catholic Kamloops Indian Residential School. William Combes, an Interior Salish man, was incarcerated there as a student from 1962 to 1964. One night in the spring of 1963, he saw a priest bury a child in the orchard just south of the main school building. A friend of mine and I were out scavenging for food, since they never fed us regular. We saw Brother Murphy dragging this bag towards a hole near the orchard. He turned it over and a small body fell into the hole, and he started throwing the dirt in. (Statement on Vancouver Co-op radio, May 24, 2010) Stories of killings and burials at Indian residential schools proliferate among natives across Canada. During the late 1950s, as a young boy, Doug Wilson of the Haida nation was on the burial detail at the United Churchs Edmonton, Alberta residential school, and at the adjoining Charles Camsell hospital. I dont know how a lot of the kids died, but I know we dug a lot of graves. Most of them were from the residential school, but they were also dying a lot in Camsell hospital. Wed wheel the bodies out in a cart and after burying them, we were told we couldnt tell anybody. Then we had to report to the hospital for treatment. I couldnt remember what happened to me there until I read your book, where it talked about shock treatment. Then I recalled how theyd give us electric shocks to the head after we buried the children, I guess to make us forget. (Statement to the author, March 12, 2004) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 86 Sylvester Green was another student at the Edmonton residential school who remembers graves near the school. In the fall of 1962, he and three other students buried an Inuit boy who was allegedly beaten to death by the school principal, a clergyman named James Ludford. There were four of us on the burial detail: me, my brother, Mel Patzie and Albert Cardinal. We dug the grave just next to the staff garden. The boy we buried was from the north, and hed been beaten so badly he died. Alfred said he saw Mr. Ludford do it. Ludford used to give us sermons on Sundays in the chapel, and he always ended them by saying, Remember. The only good Indian is a dead Indian. I see now he meant it. (Statement to the author, June 5, 2007) In south eastern British Columbia, the former Catholic residential school in Cranbrook is the site of a massive grave site containing not only residential school children but Indians who died over a century from deliberately spread diseases. Before she died suddenly in early 2004 after speaking out publicly about murders she witnessed at the St. Eugene Catholic school in Cranbrook, BC, former student Virginia Baptiste described the reign of terror there. We called the Cranbrook school boot hill, since so many of us were dying there. Half the children were dying from disease and starvation. I saw killings myself, mostly from beatings. One nun locked a little girl in a closet and just left her there to starve to death. And all of them ended up in the big grave not far from the school. But after we started making a stink about this, guess what happened? The local chief and the feds spent a million bucks to build a new golf course, right over the graves of those kids. Everybody knew what was in that ground. Now everyone wants to forget. (April 12, 2002) Helene Armstrong of the Osoyoos nation also attended the Cranbrook school, and like Virginia, saw many killings. But the crimes went deeper. I know a lot of the local Doukhobours and they tell me that the first whites into the area got the land after showing the local Indian Agent the fingertips of the Indians theyd killed off. That would have been around 1900. All of the Naramata Indians were chased out of the Arrow Lakes region by bounty hunters hired by gold mining companies. There are mass graves all over the place. One of the bounty hunters kept a diary of how many Indians hed poisoned. The Doukhobours have the diary but they arent sharing it because it names relatives of theirs who did the killings. There must be thousands of bodies between here and Nelson, more than you can count. When the kids started dying in residential school, the mass graves were already there to dump them in. (March 12, 2002) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 87 Government and police officers have disinterred these and other graves near former residential schools and destroyed the remains, according to Osoyoos elder Pierre Kruger of Penticton, B.C. We spent years documenting all the graves around here because we wanted the world to know. Our mistake was to trust the whites. In 1992, we contacted the provincial government and asked their heritage conservation branch to come and inspect the grave sites we mapped. There were more than twenty of these sites between Cranbrook and Nelson. The government people arrived on a Thursday and by Sunday theyd brought in the backhoes and wiped out most of the sites. Completely destroyed everything. Since then we dont tell nothing to nobody. (Statement to the author, April 21, 2002) Dozens of other eyewitnesses across Canada have described similar events. In Saskatchewan alone, thirteen reputed grave sites stand near former residential schools. Virtually every one of the more than 130 schools held burial sites at or near to their property, in seven of Canadas ten provinces. Many of these deaths were the result of a regime that systematically exposed native children to communicable diseases, as described and documented by Indian Affairs medical inspector Dr. Peter Bryce in his main report to the federal government in 1909. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 88 Deliberate Exposure to Diseases Killings in the Indian residential school system were not the result of unplanned or random acts of violence, but of a deliberate policy that encouraged, permitted and protected the killing of aboriginal children. And the foremost method of this policy was the systematic exposing of healthy children to communicable diseases, primarily tuberculosis, followed by denial of all treatment or aid to them. This practice was common and normative in every Indian residential school in Canada, according to inspector Dr. Peter Bryce, who was commissioned to do a health study of the schools in the spring of 1907. As described earlier, Bryce discovered that both Catholic and Protestant Indian schools had an average death rate of between 35% and 60%, and that invariably the leading cause of death is a practice of deliberately exposing children to tuberculosis. Further, Bryce found that church staff were hiding evidence of these deaths because of their complicity in forcing healthy children to sleep with and play alongside children dying of tuberculosis. I was forced to sleep in the same bed with kids with TB. I had a sick girl on each side of me in bed. The nun put me in between them every night. And shed nail the windows all shut. I used to hide under the bed so I wouldnt get sick too. I guess it worked, but lots of other girls on the dorm died from that TB when they were all healthy. (March 30, 1998) Thus did Mabel Sport of Port Alberni, B.C. describe to the author her experience in the Catholic Christie residential school on Meares Island. Mabels experience is not uncommon, but echoed by many survivors; and, when coupled with Peter Bryces documentation of the practice, is solid evidence of an intent to kill off native children under the cover of education. Delmar Johnny, a Cowchian native who lives in Duncan, B.C., was imprisoned in the Catholic school on Kuper Island during the 1950s and 60s. He regularly saw children being infected with tuberculosis. The nuns used to make us all play together, the sick and the healthy. They didnt try to separate us. Even at night on the dorm, the sick and the healthy, all together. (Statement to author, March 9, 2006) A half century before Delmars confinement at Kuper Island, Dr. Peter Bryce had witnessed the same thing in residential schools all over western Canada. And photographic proof of this consistent murderous practice is even available. In John Millers book Shingwauks Vision (1996) is a photograph depicting a class of aboriginal children at the Anglican mission school in Sarcee, Alberta in the spring of 1912. Two of the students wear bandages around their heads, and the caption states that they are suffering from active and open tubercular sores. That photograph is displayed on the following page. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 89 Eyewitnesses, documentation by Canadas top Indian medical doctor, and photographic evidence of a crime that accounted for a massive death rate in these schools for over a century: surely this is enough proof that genocide was deliberate and continual in Canadas Indian residential schools? Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 90 Proof of the Crime: Children with open tuberculosis sores made to attend class and mingle with healthy children: Anglican Indian school, Sarcee reservation, Alberta, 1912 (Shingwauks Vision by J.R. Miller)Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 91 Even more direct attempts to kill children with tuberculosis were practiced with impunity. As discussed earlier, Mabel Sports husband Willie nearly died from the deliberate poisoning of him and other boys with tuberculosis by Principal F.W. Pitts at the United Churchs Alberni residential school, in 1934. That Principal Pitts was trying to kill us. I was the only kid who survived. Pitts took eight of us and he fed us this special canned meat. He didnt give it to anybody else. Then we all got sick with the TB. Every other boy died, but my Dad broke into the infirmary and got me out, and took me to my grandfather who was a medicine man. He sucked the black poison out of each of my lungs three times, then spit it out, I seen it. But all the other ones died thanks to Pitts. (March 28, 1998, Port Alberni, B.C.) This practice of what amounted to deliberate germ warfare was common in the Indian residential schools and hospitals, particularly in the western provinces. Federally funded Indian hospitals, like the Coqualeetza Sanitarium in Sardis, B.C. and the Nanaimo Indian Hospital operated as fronts for these murderous practices, under the guise of being tuberculosis sanitariums. Rather than treating children for tuberculosis, these hospitals were the means to infect large numbers of them with the sickness and let them die untreated, or be sent back into their communities to infect others especially children of traditional native elders. Joan Morris of the Songhees Nation of southern Vancouver Island was incarcerated in the Nanaimo Indian Hospital for over six years when she was a little girl during the early 1960s. The Indian agent came and got me when I was five years old. I wasnt sick at all but he said I had tuberculosis and needed treatment. So they shipped me off to the Nanaimo Indian hospital where they used me like a guinea pig. They broke the bones in my feet. They took out parts of my lung and made me drink this bad stuff that I later learned was radioactive iodine. I came down with TB when I was in there so I believe they infected me. I saw lots of other Indian kids in there too, all of them the same: healthy when they showed up, then they got TB and a lot of them died off. The nurses just let them die. I remember the doctors there, Dr. Weinrib, Lang, Connolly and Schmidt, they were all taking notes but never helping anybody. Theyd give kids shots and theyd get sick with TB and die. (August 21, 1999) Such murderous practices began at the inception of European settlement of Canada. As discussed earlier, in 1749, British General Geoffrey Amherst who has had towns and colleges named after him kept a journal of his efforts to wipe out the Miq Maq and other east coast tribes with smallpox. In a letter he wrote to a subordinate, Major Bouquet, Amherst ordered him to take smallpox infected blankets from their army hospital and distribute them among the Miq Maqs and other tribes potentially allied with the French. Amherst instructed, Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 92 You will do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to Extirpate this execrable race. (Fig. 12) Similarly, in 1864 in the newly formed crown colony of Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island, delegations of Kwakiutl and Haida people were given presents of infected Hudsons Bay blankets after negotiating with former company director and colonial governor James Douglas. Within two years, more than half of the Kwakiutl and a third of the Haida were dead from smallpox. To quote a white commentator at the time, Alfred Waddington, as he wrote in The Victoria Colonist on June 13, 1864, Did not the whites also, about the same time, bring the small-pox to Bella-Coula where it [has] spread to Nacoutloon, and as far as the Benshee and Chisient Lakes, when myself saw the graves of perhaps 500 Indians; and was not one-third of the population carried off by that first visitation; for there was a second one of which I shall have to speak presently? And did not the white settlers communicate another contagion to those tribes, of which the second Chief at Bella Coula is now slowly dying? (http://canadianmysteries.uvic.ca/sites/klatsassin/murdersorwar/deathofaroadcrew/126en.html) See Appendix 2, Genocide and the Founding of British Columbia) According to Harriett Nahanee of the Pacheedaht Nation of Vancouver Island, In 1861 the first white mans census of our village of Clo-ose north of Victoria listed over 3,400 people there. By 1890 there were only 44 people left. Thats 98% of our people wiped out in a generation. There were so few people left that only five children went to the first residential school in Port Alberni. (December 21, 1995) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 93 Figure 12: Letter of General Amherst ordering the dissemination of smallpox-laden blankets among local Indians, Nova Scotia, 1749Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 94 By the early 20th century, Indian residential school staff had refined and routinized the practice of spreading diseases among Indians by way of the children in the schools. It was a standard practice, for instance, for children sick and even dying with tuberculosis to be admitted into residential schools, where they would infect healthy children. This practice is even admitted in letters between government and church agents. In September, 1924, the admission and discharge record for the Catholic Squamish Indian school indicates that a ten year old, Muriel Peters, Had T.B. germs when admitted. (Fig. 13) Thirteen years later, far to the north, an Indian boy named Paul Shorty was admitted to the Lejac (Catholic) school at Fraser Lake, B.C. although he has never been cured of the tubercular infection with which he was admitted, according to Dr. C. Pitts. (Fig. 14) And fifteen years after that, in February, 1952, Bernard Johnson was allowed by a senior government official to remain in the Carcross (Anglican) Indian school in the Yukon while he was still sick with tuberculosis. (Fig. 15) Thus, over a thirty year period between 1924 and 1951, tubercular infected children were being regularly admitted to B.C. Indian residential schools. The documentary record abounds with such examples. On November 6, 1919 in Mission, B.C., a Dr. Stuart who was a government-paid medical officer to Indians in Mission, B.C. was reprimanded by an Indian Affairs official for allowing children from the Catholic St. Marys residential school to be sent to their homes while infected with smallpox. The letter expressed alarm that a smallpox epidemic had broken out only among native children at the school, and that these sick pupils were being sent to their homes before their recovery one child was taken off the train with a smallpox eruption visible it is not understood why you did not take necessary precaution to stamp out the disease while it was confined to the school. (Fig. 16) What is significant is not only that a residential school doctor deliberately sent children sick with smallpox children back to their homes, but the subsequent response of the senior government minister responsible for residential schools. Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Ottawa, intervened after he heard of the complaint, exonerated the residential school doctor, and defended him against his critics. (Fig. 17) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 93 Figure 13: Record that children were admitted to Squamish Indian Residential School while infected with tuberculosis September, 1924Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 96 Figure 14: Another report that a child was admitted while infected with tuberculosis: Lejac Catholic residential school, January 1937Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 97 Figure 15: Senior government official allows a child infected with tuberculosis to remain at Carcross residential school, Yukon, Feb. 1952 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 98 Figure 16: Local doctor reprimanded for allowing smallpox-laden students from St. Marys Catholic school to be sent home Mission, BC, November 1919Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 99 Figure 17: Head Indian Affairs official D.C. Scott defends actions of the doctor in allowing smallpox to be spread to Indian villages December 1919Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 100For the top civil servant for Indians in Canada to state in writing that the spreading of smallpox among Indians was appropriate indicates that the policy of Canada and the Catholic church was simply to do so. Similarly, why would the office of Duncan Campbell Scott abolish all medical inspection of Indian residential schools in the following year when, according to Dr. Peter Bryce, over 93% of all children in western Indian residential schools were suffering from tuberculosis if the aim was not to spread and sustain such sickness among native children? These deadly practices had a real impact on aboriginal populations across Canada, and actually caused a net decrease in the number of Indians during the first decade of the 20th century and again during the 1930s. According to the governments own statistics, the number of native Indians and Inuit people fell from about 128,000 in 1901 to 105,000 in 1911: a net decrease of nearly 20%. De-population of native people also occurred two decades later. (see Fig. 18) naLlve chlld wlLh open Luberculosls sores, norLhern 8.C., 1938 hLLp://[ourneyLoforever.org/farm_llbrary/prlce/prlce6.hLml Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 101 Figure 18: The De-Population of Natives in Canada: Official Statistics Ottawa, 1971Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 1022. Imposing Measures to Prevent Births and Procreation Youre a good Christian, Ed I only sterilize the pagans. - Dr. George Darby, United Church missionary doctor, to Ed Martin of the Hesquait Nation, Bella Bella, B.C., 1952 There is no clearer indication of genocide than the existence of laws and practices which prevent births among targeted groups, either through sexual sterilizations or abortions, killing pregnant mothers or their newborn babies, or disrupting normal sexual and social relations between males and females of a group. Sterilizations Involuntary sexual sterilization of native men, women and children occurred within Canadian residential schools and Indian hospitals, and was legalized and legitimized in provincial laws passed in Alberta in 1928 and British Columbia in 1933. (respectively, Figs. 19 and 5) At least on the west coast, sterilization efforts aimed at indigenous people tended to be concentrated in areas where natives still occupied valuable lands and resources, and had resisted Christianization and assimilation. Indeed, according to eyewitnesses, one of the primary reasons for being forced to undergo sterilization as an Indian was failure to attend a Christian church, or for marrying a traditional, ie, non-Christian Indian. Sarah Modeste is a Cowichan native woman from Duncan, B.C., who was forced to undergo an involuntary sterilization in 1951 after she married her husband Freddie, a traditional elder who lived on his own land and not on the reservation. Doctor Goodbrand from the Kings Daughters Clinic in Duncan heard that I was going to marry Freddie, and it made him furious. He came to me at my home and said, Sarah, if you marry Freddie Ill have to do an operation on you. I didnt know what that meant, I was not even twenty, but it scared me and I tried avoiding him. But the next year, after Freddie and I got married and I was pregnant with our daughter, Goodbrand was the only doctor I was allowed to see, since we had to live in my folks home and we couldnt go off the reserve. So when I gave birth it was Goodbrand that delivered her. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 103 Figure 19: Sterilization of native women in western CanadaPldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 104 When I woke up I hurt really bad, and I couldnt stop bleeding. I found out later that my tubes had been tied. I couldnt have any more children after Goodbrand did that to me. But thats normal around here. That happened to a lot of our women, even in the 70s it was still going on. I remember Dr. Goodbrand telling me that he was getting paid $300 by the government for every Indian woman he sterilized. (August 12, 2000) Sterilizing traditional natives is not only a crime of the past. Near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island lives a traditional elder of the Chemainus nation who still occupies the land of his ancestors. He is a sovereigntist who does not recognize the Indian Act or Canadas authority over him and his family has paid the price. He has requested anonymity. Our family are all blue bloods, the siem of this land. Youd call us royalty I guess. The government and the missionaries have always tried to wipe us out. Thats why they sterilized both of my sons. They got my eldest son when he was just four, in 1975. The cops took him to Victoria General Hospital and they fixed him there so he couldnt be a father. The second son they fixed in 1981 when he was nine. Both times the cops grabbed them when I was away. It was Dr. Bowen-Roberts and Dr. Boaker who supervised the operation. They were both Indian Affairs doctors working for the government. Theyre friends with the Harris family on the reserve who are descended from the slaves and sellouts who the whites made the chiefs. I also heard that local doctors were sterilizing Indians right in Duncan, Dr. Styles and Dr. Henderson, right on Ingram street. Its all out in the open but nobody talks about it. (May 18, 2005) The Nanaimo Indian hospital was not only an experimental laboratory to infect Indians with tuberculosis, but a sterilization centre as well. Ethel Morris from Brentwood Bay near Victoria was only six, in 1952, when she was imprisoned in the hospital and eventually sterilized there. They brought me in and shaved off all my hair. I was put on ward C, with three other kids. They strapped me down with a canvas vest, they called it a restrainer. They kept me there like that for weeks, maybe months. I was never let outside once for maybe three years. They were doing experiments on me for sure, because after these shots that made me sick doctors would come in and poke me and scribble stuff down. They gave me this amber drink twice a day and it tasted really bitter. The nurse called it PAS. All the kids had to drink it. Later, when I was twenty, Dr. Morgan in Victoria told me I couldnt have children. He said there were all these scars on my womb. I remember this creepy old man who ran the Nanaimo hospital, Dr. Campbell, he was always prodding me in my privates so maybe he Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 103made it so I couldnt conceive. None of the others who were in the hospital can have kids either. (February 23, 2005) Another sterilization centre in British Columbia was the R.W. Large Hospital in Bella Bella, which is still in operation. Established as a United Church missionary hospital in 1929, it was overseen by Rev. Dr. George Darby sr. (1889-1962), who personally sterilized hundreds of aboriginal women, often simply because they were not Christians or werent attending church. The late Ethel Wilson described how Darby sterilized her when she spoke to investigators at the June, 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal in Vancouver. Im from Waglisla and I knew Darby well. He was the king up there and his word was law. He sterilized a lot of us, me included. He used to say to me, Ethel, you better get to church if you dont want to get the treatment. That would have been around 1949. I had my appendix out the next year and thats when Darby sterilized me. I knew as soon as I woke up that something was wrong. My gold teeth were all missing. That happened to many of our women. (June 14, 1998) Ed Martin, another resident of Waglisla, the neighbouring village to Bella Bella, also gave testimony at the IHRAAM Tribunal about George Darby. I went to Darby around 1952 to get a vasectomy, you know, cause I couldnt feed the ten kids we had and I didnt want no more. But Darby laughed when I asked him, and he said, Ed, youre a good Christian. You need to have lots of children. I only sterilize the pagans. He told me the government was paying him to get rid of the heathens. (June 13, 1998) According to a former employee of the R.W. Large Hospital, Christy White, all of the annotated records of federal payments for the sterilizations at the hospital were destroyed in early 1995, soon after the official RCMP investigation into west coast Indian residential schools commenced. An administrator named Barb Brown allegedly dumped the records into the ocean near the Bella Bella ferry dock. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 106 unlLed Church SLerlllzaLlon CenLer, 8ella 8ella, 8.C. The R.W. Large Memorial Hospital, site of sterilizations and medical experiments on native children between at least 1923 and 1969, under the supervision of Rev. Dr. George Darby sr. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 107Sterilization techniques identical to those performed by the Nazis in their death camps were practiced on natives in other regions of Canada as well. Jackson Steene, a Dene Indian living on Denman Island near Nanaimo, was made infertile as a boy by prolonged exposure to x-rays at the Anglican churchs Carcross residential school in the Yukon. There were eleven of us in our family, and none of us can have children. We were all put under the machine they had set up in the basement. We were told we were getting screened for TB, but they strapped me down on a metal table and put the x ray thing over my pelvis, and zapped me for a good ten minutes. I tried suing the church years ago but my lawyer wouldnt raise the sterilization thing in court. (October 26, 2004) Cambel Quatell, a Kwakiutl Indian from Campell River, B.C., was made infertile at another Anglican church facility, the St. Michaels residential school in Alert Bay. They did the operations in the school clinic and often in the local St. Josephs hospital. I have seven brothers and only one of us, James, can have children. We all had to drink this vile stuff and they gave us these shots that made us sick. I cant say whether it was that or an operation they did but none of the rest of us can have kids. Something went on there between 1952 and 1962 that made us sterile.(October 27, 2004) According to Edwin Black, the author of War Against the Weak: Eugenics and Americas Campaign to Create a Master Race, (2003) sterilizations in Canada were aimed at specific groups according to their religion and ethnicity, and especially at Indians: In Canada, eugenic passions became inflamed over many issues, including the birth rate of French Canadians Following the example of Americas hunt for mongrels, Alberta disproportionately sterilized French Canadian Catholics, Indians and Metis Indians and Metis constituted just 2.5 per cent of Canadas population, but represented 25 per cent of Albertas sterilized. (pp. 241-2) Forced sterilizations continue among aboriginal people. Eliza Stewart, a Gitksan woman from Terrace, B.C., was forced by a social worker to have an involuntary sterilization in 1985 while living in North Vancouver. The Ministry had already taken my daughter, and my social worker, Sally Heather, told me that if I ever wanted to see her again Id have to have my tubes tied. She said, You Indians have too many children as it is. This is for your own good. So I had it done in a hospital on the north shore. Ive never gotten over what they did to me. Ive tried suing them but nobody can find the records. The doctors dont want to talk about it. (Statement to the author, May 10, 2009) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 108Murder of Newborns and Forced Abortions Im Irene Favel. Im seventy five. I went to residential school in Muscowequan from 1944 to 1949, and I had a rough life. I was mistreated in every way. There was a young girl, and she was pregnant from a priest there. And what they did, she had her baby, and they took the baby, and wrapped it up in a nice pink outfit, and they took it downstairs where I was cooking dinner with the nun. And they took the baby into the furnace room, and they threw that little baby in there and burned it alive. All you could hear was this little cry, like Uuh!, and that was it. You could smell that flesh cooking. (CBC TV, Regina Town Hall forum, July 3, 2008 video posted at www.hiddenfromhistory.org) Many survivors of the residential schools have described witnessing the murder of newborn babies by clergy and school staff, the newborns being bred from the rape of young girls by the same murderers, or from nuns made pregnant by their molestation of young boys in the schools. George Brown is a retired aboriginal constable with the RCMP, and investigated such accounts among survivors of B.C. residential schools. In 2001, he stated to the author, This is one of the stories I heard, in Cranbrook, about a young Indian boy who was raped by a nun. Then when she had their baby, he was forced to watch as the nun participated in drowning the baby in a bucket of water. The boy then had to bury the baby and it became part of a cornerstone in some building in Cranbrook. But that was just one story. I heard more stories about children being killed and buried or burned in the school furnaces. (August 12, 2001) The Roman Catholic Indian school in Kamloops, B.C. was a sort of maximum security prison for particularly unruly or rebellious native children, who were brought from all over western Canada to be interned there. Even by residential school standards, Kamloops was a notoriously harsh and murderous place. Eddy Jules went there between 1969 and 1977, and witnessed the fate of pregnant girls and their offspring. When I was in Senior B, I used to hear about girls getting pregnant down the other end of the building. Theyd get pregnant, but they would never have kids, you know. And the thing was, theyd bring somebody in from over town whod do an abortion, I guess. We used to hear it. It used to be really scary, hearing them open up the incinerator after what was going on. Theyd open up the incinerator in the big boiler, and we would hear this big clang, and wed know they would be getting rid of the evidence Wed wonder how many kids got thrown in that incinerator. (quoted in Behind Closed Doors: Stories from the Kamloops Indian Residential School, Secwepemc Cultural Education Society, 2000) In 1964, Helen Michaud was sixteen and an inmate at the Kamloops school when she was forced to have an abortion after a priest raped her. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 109 As soon as I started showing, the nun dragged me to the infirmary for an examination. Then they aborted my baby. I was lucky, they didnt tie my tubes like they did to all the other girls. The next summer I ran away and I had my son. But theres lots of aborted babies in the graveyard south of that school. (Statement to the IHRAAM Tribunal, June 14, 1998) Local hospitals near to the residential schools were regularly used to dispose of babies born from nuns or Indian students, including St. Pauls (Catholic) hospital in Vancouver, West Coast General Hospital in Port Alberni, St. Josephs (Anglican) hospital in Alert Bay, and the R.W. Large (United church) hospital in Bella Bella, B.C. In the same way that tuberculosis hospitals provided the institutional cover for the deliberate infection of Indians with TB, regular hospitals became literal child disposal centers, especially after child trafficking out of the Indian residential schools became a lucrative trade. According to Marion MacFarlane, a former staff member at the United Churchs Alberni residential school from 1962 to 1964, We used to nickname the school The White House because of all the big shots who would show up to pick out little boys and girls. Sometimes I recognized local judges and cops, church officials. Everyone was so brazen, like they knew theyd never have to answer for anything. Theyd line up all the kids for inspection, like a regular slave auction. It was so sad. Theyd pick a kid and off theyd go, and youd often never see the little one again. Sometimes the girls would come back pregnant, and theyd be whisked off to West Coast hospital for an abortion. If the girl ever talked, shed be dealt with. If you check past the old water pipeline in the hills behind the school, youll find lots of those girls, and even some of their babies. (SFU Harbor Centre Forum, February 9, 1998) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 110Segregation and Breeding Out Practices Raphael Lemkins original definition of biological genocide included not only overt and invasive measures of preventing births, like sterilizations and abortions, but physically segregating the sexes of a targeted group at a young age and preventing their normal interaction to prevent normal relations between them later in life. Such segregation was the institutionalized norm in every Indian residential school from their inception. Embodying this genocidal aim, every residential school was constructed on a common architectural plan, an H shaped building with two isolated wings: one for boys and the other for girls. The sexes were rarely allowed to mix. Nan Johnson, who went to the Catholic Christie school near Tofino, B.C. in the early 1960s, describes, I was in that hell hole for six years and I never saw my little brother, not once. They had the boys locked away from us and if you ever tried sneaking over to their dorm youd catch hell for it. One girl couldnt bear not seeing her kin and she snuck into the boys dorm. The next morning we all had to line up and treat her to the Gauntlet. We were all given sticks and belts by the nuns and the girl had to run down the line. if we didnt beat the crap out of her it would happen to us. We made her black and blue that day. She couldnt even walk after. She was ruined by that beating. Later I heard she hung herself. (May 2, 1999) Even more severe treatment was meted out to Indian students who had sexual relations with each other. Nan Johnson remembers, Ill never forget the boy who was caught in bed with a girl I knew from a village near to ours. Sadie I think her name was. The priest dragged the boy out and stripped him naked and beat him to death with a truncheon, right there in the hallway. They locked Sadie away in a closet for days. But the boy was murdered, and all the time the priest kept yelling at us how this would happen to any of us if we slept with an Indian boy. (May 2, 1999) Besides stopping breeding among natives, missionaries and colonial agents used other means to breed out Indians. In April, 1908, Indian Agent Fred Halliday in Alert Bay wrote to Ottawa and made reference to the fact that our plan to breed out the local savages seems to be working. (INAC Archives, RG 10 series, R 7733, April 5, 1908) According to Cambel Quatell, a survivor of the Alert Bay Anglican school who has studied Halliday and his correspondence, the plan he referred to involved importing Caucasian prostitutes into the area and encouraging breeding between them and traditional Kwakiutl men, and especially chieftains. In this way, by confusing blood lines and lineages, Kwakiutl nationhood would not only be dissolved but so would any aboriginal claims to sovereign title to their own land according to their kinship. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 111The Eugenics Imperative Behind all of these measures to stop reproduction among Indians lay a unifying ideology known as Eugenics: the belief that the genetic quality of humanity can be improved by the destruction of supposed inferior groups, like mentally and physically impaired people, the morally unfit, and specific racial groups, especially negro and aboriginal people. Eugenics emerged from within the American medical and psychiatric professions in the post-Civil War years, as America swelled with immigrants and the inner cities of the new industrial era teemed with the poor. By 1880, establishment leaders were calling for measures to stop Anglo Saxon culture from being diluted by an encroaching Others. Significantly, the first American Eugenicists took their inspiration and research from European colonial doctors operating in Africa and Asia. Germany, Belgium and England in particular needed to devise a scientific and moral justification for their conquest of colonized peoples, and the soaring deaths of millions of non-Caucasians. That justification was provided by Eugenics: the belief that a genetically superior Nordic European race needed to out breed and dominate so-called inferior Negroid and Asiatic races. This philosophy struck a chord in North America, where a similar conquest of inferior races had been proceeding for centuries. Eugenics caught on like wildfire - not only among medical, financial and political elites, but social reformers like Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and judicial liberals like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who made decisions authorizing the forced sterilization of American citizens with lower IQs. (See Buck v. Bell case in U.S. Supreme Court, May 2, 1927) To quote Margaret Sanger, "The most merciful thing that a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it." (Women and the New Race, 1920) Canadian progressives also favored eugenics. It was a quasi progressive government, the United Farmers of Alberta, which enacted Canadas first sterilization laws in 1928. And NDP Premier Tommy Douglas, who ushered in Canadas first medicare system, was a strong advocate of sterilizing the unfit. Douglas obtained his Masters degree in Sociology from McMaster University in Hamilton in 1933. His thesis, entitled The Problems of the Subnormal Family, endorsed eugenics. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 112Douglas thesis proposed a system that would have required couples seeking to marry to be certified as mentally and morally fit. Those deemed to be "subnormal" because of low intelligence or moral laxity would be sent to special camps where those judged to be mentally defective or incurably diseased would be sterilized, with or without their consent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Douglas Douglas government recommended that such a program be established in Saskatchewan, but political opposition and unsavory reports from sterilization programs in Alberta and B.C. prevented it from commencing. The big funding for eugenics in North America began with John D. Rockefellers creation of the first Eugenics Foundation in 1912. Rockefeller also helped create the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, which would plan so much of Hitlers Final Solution of Jews and Slavs. The ties between American and German eugenicists were direct. Both before and after World War Two, Joseph Mengele and other Nazi death camp researchers worked actively with eugenicists in the USA and England in developing their theories of racial purification. For example, Mengeles colleague Otmar Verschuer, who assisted him in his grisly medical experimentation on Auschwitz prisoners, had worked with American eugenic research societies in the 1930s, and, after World War Two, despite his death camp record, returned to the USA to continue his research with the American Society of Human Genetics, which he helped establish in 1949. Verschuer died in affluent peace, unmolested by the government, in 1969. (Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and Americas Campaign to Create a Master Race, 2003, pp. 376-80) By 1891, the first sexual sterilization laws had been legislated in the USA. By 1920, thirty eight states had established laws to render infertile the mentally feeble, criminals and in some cases, immigrants. But in Canada, eugenics laws were applied much more broadly, and aimed specifically at aboriginal and Metis people. As mentioned, sexual sterilizations were made legal in Alberta in 1928, and in British Columbia in 1933, and allowed any child in an industrial school which included Indian residential schools - to be made infertile. More than 4000 people in Alberta alone were sterilized under this law, over half of them aboriginal; and probably many more in B.C. The Canadian laws were eventually applied far more broadly than in the USA, and besides feeble minded people, targeted the morally and socially unfit. This included unwed mothers, runaways, criminals, immigrants and Indians, since the latter, being pagans, were deemed to be on a lower evolutionary plane than whites and thus, less civilized. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 113The Canadian sterilization laws also created a Eugenics Board that could impose sterilizations on people without their consent. This became a common practice, especially in relation to Indians. Pat Taylor, a retired nurse in Victoria, B.C., worked at the Provincial Training School (PTS) in Red Deer, Alberta in 1956. She quit after less than a year because of what she witnessed there. The school scooped up lots of vagrant and runaway kids, unwed teenage moms, that kind of person. And the policy was to automatically sterilize these people if they were old enough to procreate, and do the younger kids when they reached puberty. No consent, no consultation. That included a lot of Indian kids. My impression is that the Indians were brought there, they didnt just arrive. I did see Mounties escort Indian boys into PTS a few times. I heard they were from the Indian boarding school in Edmonton. And they all got sterilized. (February 3, 2000) An Inuit man who declined to be publicly identified told the author that he was made infertile at the United Churchs Edmonton Indian residential school in 1959 because of his intelligence. I thought it was a joke but the matron told me that my marks were too high and so I had to get red tagged. Me and another boy. We had to report to the infirmary and they gave me a shot. When I woke up I had been given a vasectomy. Nobody ever told me why it happened but the matron said I should never tell anyone. (December 22, 1996) A final clue to the eugenics imperative that guided Indian residential schools is found in the connection eugenics researchers made between diseases like tuberculosis and so-called genetic inferiority. In hospitals where eugenics research was conducted, fatality from tuberculosis, and the practice of deliberately housing the sick with uninfected patients, were identical to practices in Indian residential schools. In fact, the same practice of not attending to sick children in residential schools and letting them die occurred in mercy killing hospitals run by eugenics researchers in the USA during the early 20th century. To quote Edwin Black, Quiet euthanasia of defective newborns was not uncommon Dr. Harry Haiselden, the (Chicago North side) hospital chief of staff regularly ordered his staff to withhold treatment from several deformed or birth-defected infants. Other times he would handle it personally, like the time he left a newly delivered infants umbilical cord untied and let it bleed to death. Sometimes he took a more direct approach and simply injected newborns with opiates. (Black, War Against the Weak, pp. 253-4) Such medical murder of American children in Chicago in 1915 was not uncommon, and increased when tuberculosis was involved, since according to the eugenics creed so popular among doctors, diseases like tuberculosis were caused genetically. Hence, killing off those with defective genes including Indians would halt the spread of TB and other diseases. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 114As Black describes, Tuberculosis was an omnipresent topic in textbooks on eugenics which claimed that only the submerged tenth was vulnerable. Eugenicists believed that when tuberculosis was fatal, the real culprit was not bacteria, but defective genes In tuberculosis colonies, residents continually infected and reinfected each other, often receiving minimal or no treatment (with) mortality rates as high as 40 percent. An article in Institution Quarterly admitted, We wish the parasitic strain to die out it would be an act of kindness to them, and a protection to the state, if they could be killed. (Black, pp. 255) In short, the deliberate infecting and denial of treatment to native children in residential schools, and the enormous death rate hovering near fifty percent, was not an isolated act, but part of the normal modus operandi in eugenics-driven medical practice all over North America. The aboriginal holocaust was clearly part of an even bigger genocide aimed at any supposedly inferior, targeted or inconvenient group. Eugenics against native people today A program of compulsory sterilization of women after their second child might be easier to arrange than the mass sterilization of men Alternatively, adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods can only be effective if it was uniformly applied. - John Holdren, Scientific advisor to President Barack Obama, 2009 One must take draconian measures of demographic reduction against the will of certain populations. Reducing the birth rate has proved to be impossible. One must therefore increase the mortality rate. How? By natural means: famine and sickness. -Robert MacNamara, Chair of the World Health Organizations Expanded Immunization Program, April, 1996 The campaign to exterminate indigenous and non-Caucasian populaces has never ended, but merely changed its methods. The National Indian Health Coalition estimates that since 1970, over one-third of native women living on reserves in the western United States have undergone some form of sterilization, either chemically, in vaccines, or through direct tubal ligation. (Statement of Judge Royce White Calf, IHRAAM Tribunal, June 14, 1998) Between 1986 and 1993, more than 40,000 Inuit women were given a sterilizing agent known as Heptavax, under the guise of it being a drug for Hepatitis prevention, during experimental programs operated by the US Health Department. (Note: The University of Massachusetts website that documented these experiments has been removed) In Canada, the federal government has never stopped trying to reduce the fertility of native women. In December, 1979, a Globe and Mail article described how an Indian Affairs doctor in northern Canada claimed that it was the unofficial policy of recommending sterilization of Eskimo women after their fifth child. The same article said that nurses prescribed birth control pills to Inuit mothers without informing them, and even told them the pills were vitamins. (Fig. 20) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 113The government itself has admitted that its Health department regularly used the Indian residential schools as experimental laboratories and the children there as involuntary test subjects for studies in vitamin and nutrition deprivation. (Natives Kids used for experiments, The Vancouver Sun, p. A 12, April 26, 2000) (Fig. 21) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 116 Figure 20: Inuit women sterilized, induced to take birth control pills The Globe and Mail, December 12, 1979 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 117 Figure 21: Federal health department admits to using residential school children in experiments The Vancouver Sun, April 26, 2000Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 118Lynn Sharman, a community worker in Thunder Bay, Ontario, has documented medical experiments on native women in her region. All throughout the 1950s and 60s, Cree and Ojibway women were shipped down to the Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital for lots of testing. I have a list of a few hundred of them who died there and were never reported buried. One woman told me they held her in a ward in the Hospital for years and kept inserting these devices into her. From her description of them I suspect they were experimental IUDs. I asked a medical relative of mine what that meant and he laughed and said, We all knew that if you wanted to try out a drug or anything experimental, test it on an Indian first. You have to realize that the aim has always been to stop the Indians from reproducing. The doctors around here have always been pretty explicit about that, when you press them. (January 23, 2000) Unfortunately, government agents have continued to use natives as live test subjects for medical and eugenics experimentation. In the fall of 2000, a health consultant named Candace Cooper was hired by the Sto:lo tribe in Chilliwack, B.C. to give advice to pregnant native mothers. What she encountered shocked her and cost Candace her job. Health department nurses were showing up on the reserve and literally shoving needles into the arms of newborn babies without asking permission from the parents. In one family I worked with, two babies suffered seizures and one of them died after the shots, which supposedly were flu vaccines. I tried to get them to stop and they reported me to the Medical Services Branch people, who ordered me to back off. But I wouldnt leave it alone, and I kept investigating. Four elders in their sixties died the same week after getting the flu shot, even though they were perfectly healthy. Lots of people were getting sick from it. I filed a report about this to Health Canada and with the band council, and a few weeks later I was fired without cause. What I found most disturbing was that no-one would disclose what kind of vaccine they were injecting that was causing those deaths and all the sickness. One older woman said that the same nurses had given women shots the previous year that made them miscarriage their fetuses. Im convinced that the government of Canada is committing homicide on native people under the appearance of public health. (June 9, 2002, from an interview with the author on Vancouver Co-op radio) During the same year, the same federal department, Health Canada, tested supposed experimental anti-AIDS drugs on people on the Songhees Indian reserve near Victoria, B.C. Only aboriginals were given the drug, those receiving it were not informed or asked their consent, and no follow-up treatments were offered. One of the Songhees chiefs told the author that a Health Canada official told him that his band council had no say in the matter, since under the Indian Act (s.76), no Indian on reserve can refuse medical treatment. (April 4, 2001) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 119State-funded native officials appear to be colluding in this kind of eugenics program against their own people. Not only do band chiefs regularly allow their people, on and off reserve, to be used in these experiments, but they pursue policies designed to impoverish and make sick their fellow aboriginals. Les Guerin, a maintenance worker and band member on the Musqueam Indian reserve in Vancouver, discovered in local trash bins a series of documents and minutes from meetings held between the band council and the state-funded Assembly of First Nations (AFN) during the summer of 2003. The minutes continually refer to how to implement the directives from Agenda 21 and make the reserves cost effective. Agenda 21 was a United Nations conference on human population and sustainable development held in 1992, that some have criticized as an attempt to bring about a global eugenics program against indigenous people, under the guise of development. The Musqueam documents seem to validate this. According to the minutes, dated April 23, 2003, AFN official Wendy John-Grant, who is also an employee of Indian and Northern Affairs with the federal government and who has been implicated in criminal actions at the reserve, (see Appendix 7a, Testimony #3) makes the following remarks to the Musqueam chiefs: and we have to get clear, we need to be a new level of government. The AFN is that government for First nations people now So yeah, our cost effectiveness is the issue. Agenda 21 here at home: making ourselves sustainable Weve had to streamline a lot at AFN and find out what the people want and this is what we keep hearing: get rid of the dead wood, become competitive in the global marketplace. Les Guerin, a lifetime resident at Musqueam, is clear what this means. Heres no different than any reserve: people are forced off the land and onto the streets where they die off quick, from drugs or violence. That way the chiefs profit, they get the same money with fewer people to provide for, the dead wood Wendy talks about. Its a big criminal racket run by a few families. This Agenda 21 urges Indian leaders to marginalize their own people and become corporations so the land can be bought up by outsiders. Thats how theyre doing it at Musqueam. I see every day how it happens: families are scared off the reserve and the chiefs or their goons move in to their homes. If they dont play ball the band chiefs grab their children and pimp them out. Sometimes people are even killed. That way, theres fewer people to provide medical care for, so the chiefs pocket that money or invest it somewhere. Ive seen guns, drugs, and young kids being bought and sold through this reserve and the Celtic shipyards, which is owned by Wendy and her husband Ed John. It just keeps getting worse. (Statement to the author, August 3, 2003) Any system of genocide operates under the fog and night of its own code words and esoteric language, and while the extermination of Indians in Canada Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 120was formerly called assimilation, its now referred to as sustainability and cost effectiveness to government and aboriginal bureaucrats. Indian reserves, it seems, can no longer sustain their own populations, and so are quickly de-populating them along the lines recommended by Robert MacNamara and other global eugenicists. Government policy in Canada is clearly designed to force natives off reserves, and often valuable lands and resources, and into urban poverty and desolation where they are prey to early death. Missing People The disappearance of a young white woman in northern B.C. in early 2004 alerted the media to the everyday reality of aboriginals there: the regular abduction and murder of native women and even of entire families along the infamous Route 16, the Highway of Tears. Over five hundred native women are unaccounted for since 1989, and yet the RCMP still claims that only nine have disappeared. Les Guerin has more than just a theory of what has happened to some of them. In 1990, he witnessed Dave Picton, brother of now-convicted Willie Picton, deliver bags of soil to the Musqueam reserve and bury them in a landfill site. Years later, after Picton was identified and arrested, Guerin recognized Picton on T.V., remembered the incident, and began digging in the site where Picton had buried the bags. I found lots of bones, maybe a dozen big bags full. I took some of them to a forensic guy at Simon Fraser University and his report said they were pig bones mixed up with human ones, including the skull and humerus of a young woman in her twenties. So I sent all the information to the police. Then it got weird. Nobody ever called me and no-one showed up at the site. That went on for months, so I sent the evidence to all the media. Nobody responded. I even sent it to the lawyers for Pictons victims and their families, and they did nothing with it. Frustrated, Guerin and a friend, Jim Kew, sent a report of the remains to the Vancouver Police Commissioner in November, 2004, along with a statement from Glenn Guerin of the Musqueam Housing Office that Dave Picton had been employed by the band council in 1989 or 1990 to bring land fill to the reserve. No reply was ever received from the Police. (see Figs. 22 and 23) Eventually, in early 2007, Les Guerin mailed the bone samples and the forensic report to Amnesty Internationals headquarters in London, England. The package was returned, repackaged and without comment, the next month. Thats the old tell tale sign of deep collusion commented retired RCMP officer George Brown, a former native constable who established a community task force into missing people in Vancouvers downtown eastside in 2004. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 121None of them want to look into it because the cops and feds are involved in those missing people. Ten of the last twelve women to disappear were seen being taken by Mounties out to Pictons killing farm. Picton was the fall guy for a big operation, involving drugs, child trafficking, snuff films, even organ trafficking. Thats the scuttlebutt. We know that fifty or a hundred women and some men go missing every year from Vancouvers streets. Probably more. And ninety percent of them are aboriginal. George Brown and his associates on the community task force halted their investigations after two years once they learned that policemen, politicians and businessmen were involved in the disappearances. We didnt want to get killed. One of my former bosses on the force called me up and said, George, quit screwing around before you get yourself killed. The number of missing women is nine and it stays at nine. Hell, I know of two Mounties who were working with Picton, getting big bucks providing him with victims. We documented hundreds of these missing people and kept turning up that kind of collusion.(March 13, 2006) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 122Figure 22: Evidence of human remains from body dumping site used by Dave Picton, Musqueam Indian reserve, 2004 (following three pages) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 123 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 124Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 123 Figure 23: Confirmation of Dave Pictons employment by Musqueam Indian band, 2004 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 126Before she died of pneumonia in February, 2007, after being forcibly confined in an unheated Surrey jail, Alberni residential school survivor Harriett Nahanee was investigating the child trafficking ring on her own Squamish reservation in North Vancouver. In May of 2002, Harriett told the author, This black stretch limousine would pull up to the end of our road, usually on Friday nights. One night I watched and saw a young boy and girl loaded into the back. They were about eight years old and all dressed up with make up on. I got my nephew to follow the limousine and it went to the rear entrance of the Vancouver Club and the kids were unloaded. So the next Friday we got Noel, a reporter with the Drum newspaper, to stake it out. He waited until 3 am and three kids appeared out the back door. He started interviewing them but then he got whacked on the head. When he woke up his tape recorder was gone, and so were the kids. (see Appendix 7) In 1999, a UNESCO report on global pedophile rings named Vancouver, Canada, along with Bangkok and Rotterdam, as centers where child trafficking and pornography were widespread and aided and abetted by judges, police and other official agencies. The same report claimed that in Canada and Thailand, the vast majority of the victims of child prostitution are aboriginal. (See follow up report at the Second World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Childre, Yokohama, Japan, 2001) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 127 Cree chlldren from norLhern AlberLa belng Laken Lo unlLed Church's LdmonLon lndlan resldenLlal school, 1932 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 1283. Iorc|b|y 1ransferr|ng Ch||dren from Cne Group to Another The Mounties made clean sweeps of all the coastal villages, taking all the children to residential schools. Even the toddlers. The parents would sit on the beaches for days and just sob for their children. Imagine, a whole community without children. And a lot of those kids never came home again, except in a coffin. - Harriett Nahanee, Pacheedaht nation and survivor, Alberni residential school, December 12, 1995 Sawyer has not sent his two children to the local Residential School. Constable Burroughs will assist the Indian Agent in having Sawyers children removed to the Residential School at Kuper Island under sec. 35 of the Indian Act. Sawyer will be persecuted if he does not comply. Copy forwarded to Indian Agent, Cowichan Agency, Duncan, B.C. signed, Insprector C.R. Peters, Commander RCMP Vancouver Island Section, December 11, 1942. - RCMP E Division document, RG 10 series, INAC file 885-10 (7) Abducting children and alienating them from their families and culture is an act of genocide, according to international law. And even forcibly transferring them to another group is equally genocidal, under the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. By that measure, Canada and its churches commenced genocide against native people in their very first missionary schools in the 18th century and throughout the residential school regime, until 1996 and they continue the same crime today through the family services and foster care system, which systematically transfers native children to other groups. This transfer has always been coercive, involuntary, and violent, often resulting in death. Officially, more than 150,000 children seven years and older were transferred from their families to Indian residential schools between 1889 and 1996. However, this official figure is conservative, and does not take into account the regular practice of the abducting agencies primarily the RCMP accompanied by clergy or Indian Agents of capturing all of the aboriginal children of any age from an area and transferring them in their entirety into Indian residential schools. Accordingly, a figure closer to a quarter of a million of abducted children is more likely. On average, nearly one half of these children never returned home, most of them dying in the residential school system. At least 50,000 to 100,000 children must have died or gone missing in that system over a century, based on an average mortality rate of between 40% and 60% in the residential schools. (The Globe and Mail, April 24, 2007, Natives died in droves despite warnings to Ottawa) This huge mortality rate was due in part to the fact that, under Canadian law, no restriction was placed on the amount of force that could be used by government or church agents in seizing children for transport to the schools, or in capturing them if they ran away. In fact, amendments to the Indian Act in 1932 specifically Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 129stated that any amount of force necessary shall be used to secure attendance in the schools. This statute not only legitimated and encouraged violence against native children, but provided a legal safeguard for any killing of these children, or their parents if they resisted. In the fall of 1940, when she was five years old, Harriett Nahanee witnessed an RCMP assault on her village of Pacheedaht near Port Renfrew on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island. I heard in a dream that they were coming, so I woke up and ran behind the stairs of my grandmothers house, under the wood pile. I saw the RCMP gunboat pull up at the wharf and these Mounties with clubs and guns jumped out. People were running and screaming, and I heard some shots. I saw our men getting beaten down by the Mounties when they tried holding on to their children. One man was killed. Soon they had all the kids lined up on the beach, tied together by a long rope. They were all screaming and crying and the parents were too. Some man in a dark suit was ordering the cops around. I think he was the minister from Port Alberni. He was grabbing and slapping the children, examining them like they were cattle. When the boat pulled away the whole village seemed to die. Nobody moved. Everyone lost the will to live after that. I was the only child left in the village and my mother hid me with relatives so I wouldnt get taken. But somebody in the village informed on us and the Mounties came and got me when I was ten. I dont know how I survived that boat ride. We were all down in the hold of the RCMP boat without water or food for two days. Sometimes a kid would die and theyd just throw their body overboard. I was happy to finally land cause I expected to see all my cousins when I got to the Alberni school but only one of them was still alive. Six of them, gone. (December 12, 1995) This violent process of kidnapping children into foreign boarding schools was aided by aboriginal chiefs, whose own children were spared attendance at residential school if the chiefs rounded up and transported the other children in his village. For example, on December 4, 1935, Chief Paul White of the Nanaimo River Indian Reserve was paid $54.00 by the local Indian Agent to transport reserve children that month to the local Indian school. None of Whites own children attended residential school. (Fig. 24) This system of collaboration by native chiefs was not unusual. According to Steve Sampson, a hereditary elder who lives just north of Cowichan territory, collaboration was created by the colonial government early on. Traditionally on our territory, the slaves, the outcasts and the criminals lived in a separate village, and we could never marry or visit them. But after the whites arrived, they set up these outcasts as the bogus chiefs, gave them money and arms, and drove out the real leaders. These bogus chiefs shipped off our children to residential school and Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 130signed away our land. Theyre still doing it too. (from a statement to the author, June 5, 2005) Conditions at the residential schools were so brutal and murderous that children often ran away, especially since aboriginal parents were never allowed to visit the schools except with special permission. Since they were forced to sign away legal guardianship over their own children to the school principal, parents might go for a decade without seeing their children. (See Fig. 25 for a copy of the form the parents were forced to sign.) During the 1930s, federal legislation empowered the RCMP to act as special truant officers for the residential school system, with the power to apprehend runaways and return them to the school. But any white citizen could be thus deputized, and often vigilante groups and literal bounty hunters were hired by the churches to hunt down children. These vigilantes had unlimited power to seize and hold children, break into any place without a warrant and arrest any person, and then charge runaways with juvenile delinquency a classification which allowed the children to be jailed and treated like criminals, even if they were only three or four years old. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 131 Figure 24: Native collusion in abducting children: payment to Chief Paul White for transporting children to Nanaimo Day School, December 1935Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 132 Figure 25: The Application for Admission Form that transferred legal guardianship over native children to residential school principalsPldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 133Marie Wilson, a Kwakiutl survivor of St. Michaels Anglican residential school in Alert Bay, B.C., claims that her mother was raped and killed by such a group of church-hired vigilantes in 1958. I ran away from St. Mikes and hid at my moms for a week but then they tracked me down. We heard these dogs and then there were five men at the front door. I recognized one of them, he was a dorm supervisor at the school, Mr. Miller. I ran out back before they could see me but I couldnt help myself and I looked in through the window. They had mom on the ground, yelling at her, Where is she? Where is she?. (pause) She didnt survive what they did to her. She died protecting me. I hid with my aunt after that but they found me anyway. (Statement to the author, April 12, 1999) When children were returned to residential school they faced extreme punishments which sometimes resulted in death. The degree of punishment varied in each school, but was mandatory, according to continual eyewitnesses. At the United Churchs Alberni residential school, runaway children were routinely locked in a basement cold storage room for two days without food or water, or were stripped naked and beaten in front of the other students, according to eyewitnesses Harry Wilson, Harriett Nahanee and Hazel Joseph. At St. Georges Anglican residential school in Lytton, B.C., runaway children were publicly flogged with a whip and then placed in wooden stocks in the school playground, often for days, in any kind of weather. According to a former Caucasian staff member at the school who worked there in the 1950s, children died from these punishments. First offense was just a flogging. Second offense, the kid got the stocks and then was manacled to their bed for a week. Quite often, theyd die in those stocks, especially in the winter. No allowance was made for the weather. Mr. Lett, the Principal, used to parade the runaway behind him as he drove back to the school after catching the kid. Just like slaves. - (from a statement made to the author, June 3, 1996) The use of flogging and manacles on students at the St. Georges school was confirmed in a letter to the regional Indian Agent from Canon Charles Hives, an official at the school, dated June 21, 1942: Dear Mr. Hoey, Many thanks for your letter received today. The little present enclosed with this letter will surprise you, wont it? But it is a relic of the past administration of St. Georges I was talking to a man the day before yesterday, who was a pupil of the school, when they were in use. He said two girls ran away, and they were chained together and driven home in front of the Principal. They used the shackles to chain runnaways (sic) to the bed. They also had stocks in the playgrounds. And they were used. - (INAC records, RG 10 series, 6463, 888-1) (Fig. 26) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 134Virginia Baptiste of the Osoyoos Nation in southern British Columbia ran away several times from the Catholic school in Cranbrook. Each time she was beaten with wooden brushes by nuns until she fainted. On the third occasion she was tortured. Those bastard nuns made me stand in ice water for hours. I lost all feeling in my feet and legs. Every time I tried to get out theyd beat me with the brushes and force me back in. This sister low ass I called her was the one. Then after theyd make me sleep on a bare floor in an unheated room. That wrecked me for good. The damage was permanent. Ive never felt warm since that day. I can never seem to get warm, and Ive never been able to walk right because of that punishment. (March 12, 2002) This entire system of abduction and transfer, forced confinement, punishment and torture had a simple underlying purpose: to permanently dislocate and destroy the next generation of a populace targeted for extermination. This displacement occurred physically, mentally and culturally, in order to so confuse the identity of native children that they would have no basis, personally or socially, to challenge the theft of their land and nationhood. By destroying so completely aboriginal family and kinship continuity, the cultural memory and identity of entire peoples could be eradicated, and they would wither away. This genocidal purpose ran throughout every terroristic act and policy in the Indian residential schools, and ensured what Duncan Campbell Scott termed as his final solution to the Indian problem. But it all began with the abduction and transportation of native children away from their homes and land, and into Christian internment camps. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 133 Figure 26: Description of punishment of children by flogging, shackles and public stocks, St. Georges Anglican school, Lytton, BC, June 1942Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 136Under international law, any person or agency that forcibly relocates children to another group is colluding in a criminal conspiracy. The web of complicity, in this case, is so vast that any attempt to limit or individualize the responsibility for this crime that brought children into residential schools must be seen as an attempt to obstruct justice. That web includes virtually every level of Canadian society, from the police and Mounties, the bus drivers and boat crews that brought the children to the schools, to the churches that ran them and the government that authorized them, to the doctors and community workers who oversaw their operation. For, in effect, this single crime of forcible transportation of children is the foundational one, since every other crime arose on the basis of this abduction. It is for this reason that the institutions of church and state themselves must be charged with genocide, and the conspiracy to commit genocide, in Indian residential schools, since the sheer magnitude of the crime prevents any legitimate court of law from laying the blame on individual actors. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 137My Dad hired Indians to do the haying. There were plenty of whites around and they were better workers but he made one of those under-the-table deals with the superintendent of the Indian residential school and he got the kids, young fellows about 15 or 16, for about two bits a day. The superintendent got another dime per worker per day. If you had a bit of power you could pull a deal. By that I mean a crooked deal. You never heard much about Indians in those days because I dont think Indians actually existed officially. By that I mean they werent a problem, they were just allowed to starve and die quietly. - From Ten Lost Years, 1929-1939: Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Great Depression, by Barry Broadfoot (1973), pp. 301-2 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 138The children were lean, anaemic and T.B. glands were running in many cases The children were ill fed and ill clothed and turned out into the cold to work and without leadership Dormitories in bad repair, no cleaning had been done for years floors worn out in places. Ventilation poor; beds in poor conditions. The parents had to be forced to place their children in the school. - Report from Principal A.R. Lett concerning conditions at the Anglican St. Georges Indian residential school, Lytton, B.C., April 10, 1923 (RG 10 series, INAC files, Vol. 6462, file 888-1, part 2) Our little girl is now growing up, and the constant contact with tubercular and syphilitic children here at the school does not make our feelings any brighter. - Letter from same Principal A.R. Lett to Duncan Campbell Scott, Indian Affairs, eighteen months later, October 15, 1924 (RG 10 series, INAC, ibid.) Deputy Superintendent for Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott 1920 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 1394. Inf||ct|ng Cond|t|ons Des|gned to cause the phys|ca| destruct|on of the Group over t|me I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our Indian boarding schools to spread infectious diseases. The mortality rate often exceeds fifty percent. This is a national crime. Dr. Peter Bryce to Deputy Superintendent for Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, August 8, 1907 The nature of the present water supply and the so-called toilet system is a positive menace to health. To house forty children in a damp building where they are often chilled and shivering is to make them fertile ground for disease. It is not to be wondered that there has been in recent years a very unusual number of deaths and discharges from school due to physical ailments. William Wood, Principal of the United Churchs Ahousaht residential school, to Indian Agent E.E. Frost, January 30, 1929 (Wood was fired without cause after less than nine months) (Fig. 27) Genocide is not a series of isolated acts or conditions, but a continuum, arising from a murderous purpose of eliminating a group over time. That purpose is evident in the conditions in which the targets are repeatedly forced to live and die. Over the fifteen years of this study, the author has not identified one Indian residential school across Canada that was not characterized by one or more of the following conditions: an unsanitary environment, poor or non-existent food, a substandard water supply, unheated or poorly ventilated dormitories, and regular practices by the staff to maintain these unhealthy conditions. Further, all the efforts by native parents to improve or protest these conditions were repeatedly ignored or rebuffed by government and church agents at the schools. At the same time, there was general acknowledgement by every level of church and state that Indian residential schools were death traps for the young children incarcerated there by law. On February 6, 1903, west coast Indian Superintendent Dr. Ian MacRae wrote to the government: I have before pointed out that the Indian death rate is terribly high; that our medical advisers attribute the frightful mortality to tuberculosis that in my opinion, we are taking no effective steps to reduce the death rate (MacRae to Indian Affairs, Ottawa, RG 10 series, R7733) (Fig. 28) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 140 Figure 27: Description of unhealthy conditions and high number of deaths at United Churchs Ahousaht residential school, January, 1929Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 141 Figure 28: Official warning of high death rate in Indian residential schools and inaction by the government, February, 1903Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 142Six years later, a British Columbia doctor confirmed MacRaes evaluation, and declared if matters are allowed to proceed, as they are proceeding today, it will be but a short time before the Indians are wiped out of existence by this disease. (Dr. C.J. Fagan to Dr. P.J. Bryce, Indian Affairs, July 7, 1909, RG 10 series, R7733, No. 346128) (Fig 29) Hundreds of eyewitnesses have testified to being forced to live for years in unhealthy conditions in these schools. Donna Wilson of Waglisla, B.C. told the author in October, 1997, You dont know cold until you tried sleeping in a dorm at the Alberni residential school. It was never heated on the dorms, not even in winter. We were always cold and shivering. They gave us one thin blanket if we were lucky. Lots of girls come down with the flu or TB and theyd die from it. Ive had diabetes for years and Im only forty three. I cant walk properly because I got frostbite from that place. My circulations shot, my liver and kidneys are ruined from the garbage they fed us. The staff were all sick and evil people. They did that to us on purpose so wed die off later. Willie Sport, who earlier described as being deliberately infected with tuberculosis by Principal Pitts at the Alberni residential school, told IHRAAM investigators how his feet were purposely deformed at the school: After the second time I run away and was brought back, the Principal made me wear these shoes that were too small. I had to wear them all year. I was just six, still growing. My toes got all twisted and the bones got bent so theyre still at funny angles. I couldnt run after that, just hobble around. Ive been like that ever since. That was one of the ways they stopped us from running away. Some boys had their feet bones smashed with hammers. Others got strapped down in bed for months so their leg muscles would weaken and die. All to keep us in prison. (Videotaped interview with Willie Sport, March 28, 1998 in Port Alberni) Indian Agents were very open about the deadly impact of the residential schools on the health and survival of native children, but were at the same time actively complicit in protecting the churches responsible for the conditions. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 143 Figure 29: Medical warning of impending extinction of Indians in British Columbia from tuberculosis, 1909Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 144What is unfortunately too certain is that whatever good the children may receive through residence in a boarding school will be at the expense of the health of all and the lives of some. Of the truth of this statement we have the indisputable proof of long and uniform experience. (RG 10, R7733, Doc. 282748) (Fig. 30) The national inspector of Indian Agencies, W.J. Chisholm, wrote these words to the federal government on September 22, 1905, early in the residential school era. Note that he wrote will be at the expense of the health of all. A national officer thus stated that all children in residential schools were getting sick by being there. The examples of the unhealthy conditions in these schools, and the refusal by authorities to improve them, abound in the documentary record (Figs. 31-38): April 24, 1896: Hayter Reid, Deputy Superintendent for Indian Affairs, states that children who are healthy when entering an Indian school become sick with tuberculosis by being there. (31) May 6, 1927: Indian Agent C. Perry describes the death of thirteen pupils in one month at the Anglican St. Georges school in Lytton, B.C., and how 95% of children there are sick with influenza. (32) January 22, 1949: Over twenty years later, two-thirds of the students at the same school are bed-ridden with influenza. (33) June 30, 1938: Nine years after Principal William Wood called theUnited Church school in Ahousaht, B.C. fertile ground for diseases, conditions at the same school are described by Indian Agent P.B. Ashbridge as terrible a fire trap and a menace to health. Yet by September, 1939, nothing has been done to improve the school, which is still not considered to be safe. (Ashbridge to Ottawa, Sept. 30, 1939) (34, 34a) February 3, 1940: The same school in Ahousaht finally burns down on January 26. Yet the same Indian Agent Ashbridge who had warned of the unsafe conditions there stated in his official report on the fire As this school was the property of, and conducted by, the Church, care was taken to avoid too close (an) inquiry. (Ashbridge to D.M. MacKay, Indian Commissioner for B.C., RG 10, R7733) (35) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 143 Figure 30: Indian Inspector warns of sickly and fatal conditions in Indian boarding schools, 1905Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 146 Figure 31: Indian Affairs official states that healthy native children become sick upon attending Indian boarding schools, 1896 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 147 Figure 32: Indian Agent reports death of thirteen children at St. Georges Anglican school in Lytton, BC, and how 95% of students are sick with influenza, May 1927Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 148 Figure 33: A similarly high sickness level at the same St. Georges school, over two decades later (1949) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 149 Figure 34: West Coast Indian Agent reports unsafe and unsanitary conditions at United Church Ahousaht residential school, June 1938Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 130 Figure 34(a): Over a year later, no improvements have been madePldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 131 Figure 35: Government Indian Agent avoids making inquiry into cause of fire at United Churchs Ahousaht firetrap school, January 1940Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 132December 18, 1940: Despite the fire at the Ahousaht school, no fire alarm equipment is included in the re-construction of a neighboring United Church residential school in Port Alberni, according to Engineer F. Miller in a letter to the government. (below, Fig. 36) Figure 36: No fire alarm included in new residential school, Dec. 1940 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 133June 1948: One half of the students sent from the Catholic school on Kuper Island to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital died there. (Fig. 37, below) Figure 37: Deaths of children, Nanaimo Indian Hospital, 1948Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 134March 27, 1939: A senior conference of church and government officials in Ottawa acknowledges that residential schools destroy aboriginal families and cause serious social problems, since children in residential schools are inclined to grow away from the life of the Indian Band and are unable therefore to take their part later in the work of their parents. But no steps are taken to curtail the schools and they continue for another half century. (Report of R.A. Hoey, Superintendent of Welfare, Indian Affairs, RG 10, R7733, Memo 15/8606) (Fig. 38, below) Figure 38: Government acknowledges destructive effect of residential schools but takes no action to stop it March, 1939Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 133Aboriginal parents continually protested the fatal conditions at the residential schools but their petitions and letters went unheeded. In January, 1946, the chief and counselors from the Nautley Indian reserve at Fort Fraser, B.C. wrote to the government and complained about the treatment of their children at the Lejac Catholic residential school. Their petition said, in part, a motion was unanimously endorsed by all that a complaint was justified that when children were sick at the residential school at Le Jac, they were not kept separate from the other children. Also the school children were not allowed inside when the weather was cold (see Fig. 38a). No response to this petition from the government can be found on record. The truth is that the entire Indian residential school system was inherently unhealthy, dangerous, and designed to incapacitate native people by destroying their capacity to function at a formative age. The simple murderous method of housing those sick with communicable diseases with the healthy was a standard and universal part of the residential school system. Knowing this, it becomes unnecessary to demonstrate the dangerous nature of these schools on the basis of individual examples, for these incidents reflect a common policy of causing sickness among Indian children that was enforced at every level of the system. This policy was indicated by the continual refusal of Indian Agents, clergy, church officials, doctors and civil servants to alleviate the unhealthy conditions in the schools and by the fate reserved for Indians who challenged those conditions. The governments apparent disregard of the Nautley reserve petition, and the continuation of deadly practices in the residential schools, was the norm. Aboriginal parents who complained about the poor food and sickening environment in the schools were routinely ignored, their petitions denied, and were even threatened and bullied by the police. Another example of this occurred years earlier, on the west coast. On June 13, 1922, RCMP Corporal R.W. Clearwater of the Ocean Falls, B.C. detachment sent a report on a protest by native families at the Elizabeth Long Memorial Home, a boarding school near Kitimat. The letter described the coercive threats made by the Mountie against the parents for complaining, as well as a fifty percent mortality rate in the school. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 136 Figure 38(a): Petition from chief and elders of the Nautley reserve Indian band to the government regarding unhealthy conditions at the Catholic Lejac residential school January 1946Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 137Corporal Clearwater wrote in his report, We found that all Indian Children had been withdrawn from the Elizabeth Long Memorial Home by their parents as the result of the death of Hanna Grant, who died on May 8th 1922. We also found that a petition had been drawn up by the natives of the village, and signed by practically every one of them old enough to sign, demanding the dismissal of all teachers in the aforementioned boarding school, it being alleged in this petition that the Indian children inmates of the Home had been compelled to eat rotten fish and oat meal with worms in it. (Fig. 39) Corporal Clearwater attended a protest meeting the next day on the Kitimat reserve held by the natives with Indian Agent Iver Fougner. Parents claimed that many children had died there from the food and by a matron named Miss Alton administering chloroform to misbehaving children which killed them. Confirming the high death rate, Clearwater wrote, Since the Home started forty-nine had died, and fifty were still alive.(ibid) When Indian Agent Fougner told the assembled natives that they had no authority to withdraw their children from the school, the natives became unruly and threatened legal action. At this point, Corporal Clearwater intervened, as he describes: The Indians seemed to be in a very hostile mood, so I decided to address them. I (said that) they must abide by the law of the country and they were not authorized to take the law in their own hands, and if the matter had to go to Court, then practically all that they had told Mr. Fougner would be useless as most of it was hearsay. I informed them that they might be given up to six months with Hard Labour for the unlawful acts which they had committed, however I sincerely hoped that there would be no necessity for imprisonment, especially at this time of the year when they had such great opportunities to make big money logging and fishing (I said) they should consider themselves lucky that they were not all in gaol. Then I asked for a vote to be taken among themselves and they agreed to send the children back to school I then gave instructions to the Indians that every child was to be returned to the school that day. (RG 10, R7733, RCMP Inspector No. 8311) (ibid) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 138Figure 39: Report of RCMP Agent Cpl. R.W. Clearwater describing his suppression of protest by aboriginal parents in Kitimat, BC, after the death of a child, June 1922 (following four pages) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 139 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 160 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 161Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 162By ignoring evidence that native children were being poisoned and starved in the local residential school, and intimidating their parents to send them back into unhealthy and deadly conditions, Corporal Clearwater was not acting arbitrarily but according to a de facto policy, borne out through a regular and accepted practice established with the churches, in which aboriginal children were both physically and psychologically destroyed, and their culture was exterminated. Finally, it must be stated that this forced confinement of children in permanently unhealthy conditions was required by the process of killing children en masse by tuberculosis. For the latter can only cause death over a span of months, during which time a victim is systematically denied proper food, warmth and care. The method to the madness behind improper food, health and sanitation was that precisely these conditions were needed if children were to be killed off in large numbers by tuberculosis. For mere infection with the tubercular virus alone will not ensure death, or be responsible for the huge mortality rate that was the norm in Indian residential schools. Infection, combined with an environment that systematically weakens and destroys the bodys immune system, is necessary for death to result from tuberculosis. As the chosen weapon of genocide in Indian residential schools, tuberculosis needed the right medium in which to cause massive deaths: unheated, unventilated living quarters, unhealthy food, and an environment of continual violence and stress. That medium was provided as a policy by church and state, and their agents, for more than a century, which is why no residential school was allowed to regularly provide proper clothing, heating, food or medical care to native children. On the contrary, every one of the thirty eight residential schools examined by this study, operated by every major Christian denomination in Canada, subjected its young inmates to the following standard treatment: 1. Rancid or contaminated food. 2. Unheated and unventilated dormitories. 3. Insufficient clothing. 4. Permanent isolation from family, friends and love. 5. A daily environment of indiscriminate violence, random punishment and torture, and unalleviated stress. 6. Regular and deliberate exposure to those sick with tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. 7. No regular medical inspection or care. 8. Continual assaults and rape. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 1639. Ritual terror to destroy a sense of self and tradition (eg, banning ones language, shaving of heads, banning laughter, keeping heads constantly bowed). 10. Forced, slave labor. 1he Cngo|ng Consequences In October, 1998, a Canadian government study revealed the consequence of this genocidal treatment. An Indian Affairs report stated that, if grouped as a nation, native people on reserves in Canada would have a standard of living sixty third in the world, below that of Mexico and Thailand. Off reserve natives ranked thirty fifth. (from Canadas Squalid Secret: Life on Native Reserves, The Globe and Mail, October 12, 1998) (Fig. 40) Tuberculosis rates for aboriginal people have always averaged thirty to forty times higher than among non-natives, unabated by the near-abolition of this disease in the wider society. (Fig. 41) Death from suicide, family violence, and substance abuse is fifty times higher among aboriginals, and incarceration in prison is five hundred times more likely for a native than a Caucasian in Canada. These bare signs of slaughter alone do not tell the whole story, for the fact that such a mortality and sickness rate among native people generally has continued unabated, and in many cases actually increased, both during and after the residential school era shows that the same genocidal policies and forces are at work. The targeted group must first be rendered politically stateless and powerless prior to their long term destruction wrote Raphael Lemkin during the United Nations debate on its Genocide Convention in 1946. Indians in Canada were rendered and remain politically stateless by the Indian Act, which is still in effect, and, by outlawing self-government or financial independence by native bands, and continuing to invest all title to lands and resources in the Crown of England, prevents any fundamental change in the conditions or fate of aboriginals in Canada. Being non-citizens under the law, but instead legal wards of the state in perpetuity, Indians in Canada regularly have their children seized at will by social workers and police, and incarcerated in what amounts to privatized residential schools: non-native foster homes. This act may be legal under Canadian law, but constitutes an act of genocide under Article Two, point five of the United Nations Convention on genocide (1948), which Canada ratified in 1952. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 164 Figure 40: Report of third-world standard of living of Canadian Indians, The Globe and Mail, October 12, 1998Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 163 Figure 41: Constantly high tuberculosis infection rates among Indians in Canada, Public Health Canada, 1985Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 166On Vancouver Island during the 1990s, the number of children in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth nation who were transferred into white foster homes increased five times, to over 5,500 children. (Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council statistics from its USMA Child Protection report, 1999) By the same power, natives are routinely murdered by police without consequence, are evicted at will from their homes and lands, and face an indifferent and hostile legal system. It is small wonder this systemic genocide is occurring, considering the institutionalized requirement in residential schools that children were to be incarcerated in disease-breeding, unsanitary conditions. The nuns made me sleep between two girls who were really sick with TB. Every night. I crawled under the bed to stay safe. I tried opening the window but the nuns nailed it shut. Somehow, I survived. They both died. - Mabel Sport, survivor of Christie Catholic residential school, Meares Island, in a TV interview, June, 1998 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 167S. Caus|ng 8od||y and Menta| narm They always pitted us against each other, getting us to fight, inform on kids who spoke their language, even have us molest each other. Every staff member carried a thick leather strap, and theyd use it all of a sudden on you, for no reason. We all lived with this violence that could fall on you at any moment. You could be raped or beaten to death any time. You do that terror to someone when theyre three or four and theyll be broken their whole life, but broken mentally, so youre brainwashed and forget who you are. - Harriett Nahanee, survivor Alberni residential school, December 12, 1995 The entire Indian residential school system was a single, enormous act of violence perpetrated against every aspect of the human body, mind and spirit. The details can easily distract from this essential reality. Not one of the more than three hundred eyewitnesses interviewed as part of this study escaped some form of mental or physical torture and harm while in an Indian residential school. This was in no small part due to a standard practice of head shaving, rape and dehumanization that was inflicted on every child entering a residential school. According to Harry Lucas, who was incarcerated in the Catholic school on Kuper Island in the late 1950s, I remember when we got to Kuper Island, they had us all lined up on the beach, and we were all given numbers. You lost your name that day and became known as number 42 or whatever. Then they shaved our heads and covered us with that DDT powder that made you vomit. But if you threw up they made you get down and eat it, like a dog. The nuns took every boy into a room and got them ready to be used by the priests by ramming plungers or broom handles up their ass. If you fought back theyd give it to you worse. You learned quick that to survive you went along, with everything. I just blanked out after the first day. (from a videotaped interview with the author, March 14, 2005) Larry Lavoie, a Cree elder, was eight years old when he was brought to a Catholic residential school in northern Alberta in 1959. They had us all in this closed grain truck, shoved in like cattle, and it brought us ninety miles to the school. The first day we got there a nun tied fish twine around my cock and tightened it whenever I spoke my language. Sister Denise used to smash kids heads against concrete walls whenever she was mad. My seven year old cousin Jackie died after she did that to him. She told me later, Id do that to every one of you dirty little savages if I could. . (October 12, 2004) An indication of the prevalence of the terror inflicted on children in these schools is found by comparing the frequency of various acts of violence against students, based on a survey of those interviewed for this study. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 168Of the 287 persons surveyed, the following percentages suffered the respective acts listed at the hands of clergy or residential school staff: 1. Beatings: 97% 2. Heads shaved: 100% 3. Floggings with a whip: 67% 4. Rape: 89% 5. Confinement for extended periods without food or water: 71% 6. Forced to eat regurgitated food: 44% 7. Electric shocks to parts of their body: 22% 8. Teeth extracted without painkillers: 38% 9. Needles stuck through parts of their body: 29% 10. Forced to stand until they collapsed: 56% 11. Being manacled or placed in public stocks: 22% 12. Forced to watch or participate in the torture of others: 77% These assaults were not random, but systematic, and particular methods of torture were commonly applied over decades, as in the case of the practice of visiting dentists operating on residential school students teeth without painkillers. In their testimonies offered to the June, 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal, two separate survivors of the United Churchs Alberni school, Harriett Nahanee and Dennis Tallio, describe being subjected to this same torture, respectively, in 1945 and 1964. Former Alberni staff member Marion MacFarlane explains, I worked at the Alberni Indian school in the early 1960s, and I saw how the local dentist never used novocaine on the kids teeth. I hated the dental detail because wed have to hold down these screaming and bleeding kids while they got worked on. I heard one dentist say he hated doing it but that it was orders. He didnt say from who. (Statement to the author, February 9, 1998) This practice was not confined to residential schools. In a letter dated September 22, 2001, Alia McKenzie-Point of the Sechelt Nation near Gibsons, B.C. stated, I remember as an 18 or 19 year old (1968-69) just having moved to my future husbands reserve, Chehalis, seeing children who had just come from the Indian Affairs dentist on Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 169the reserve, and they were in terrible pain due to the fact that no anesthetic was used. My future husband said, They never use anesthetic on Indians. (Fig. 42) At the Alberni residential school, and at Catholic residential schools in Ontario, an actual electric chair was installed in the basement as a form of punishment against students and as entertainment for visitors. One of these torture chairs was located in the Spanish Catholic school in Fort Albany, Ontario. Mary Anne Nakogee-Davis of Thunder Bay, Ontario was tortured in the chair by nuns in 1963, when she was eight years old. In October, 1996, she told the Globe and Mail newspaper, The nuns used it as a weapon. It was done on me on more than one occasion. They would strap your arms to the metal arm rests, and it would jolt you and go through your system. I dont know what I did that was bad enough to have that done to me. (from Schools electric chair haunts natives in The Globe and Mail, October 21, 1996) (Fig. 43) Edmund Metatawabin, former chief of the Fort Albany band, was also shocked in the chair ten years earlier to entertain visiting dignitaries. I was six years old. There was no sense of volunteering or anything. We were just told to do it Once the thing was cranked up, I could feel the current going through me. Your legs are jumping up, and everyone was laughing. (ibid) For the same dental and electrical torture to be inflicted on children over decades, in the same facilities, indicates a standardized method and policy regarding discipline and punishment, rather than merely the random acts of sadistic individuals. It was simply an accepted norm to physically torture native children in the residential schools. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 170 Figure 42: Description of the denial of pain killer to native childrenPldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 171 Figure 43: Use of electric chair torture device at St. Annes Catholic Indian school, Globe and Mail, October 21, 1996Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 172The mental torture inflicted by this regime was equally systematic, especially how it pitted children against one another in a divide and conquer strategy to foster long term conflict among native people. Vera Hunt remembers her first day at the Anglican St. Michaels residential school in Alert Bay, B.C. We all had to stand in line out on the front lawn in these straight lines, and whenever we spoke one of the enforcers would come and start beating us, especially if we spoke our language. These enforcers were kids like us who were given better clothes and food if they spied on us and reported what we did. We all hated them but we were too scared to do anything. So guess who ended up running our band council? The same little shits. (Letter to IHRAAM Tribunal, June 14, 1998) The Indian residential schools functioned as a means to identify and separate out at a young age those natives who would willingly assimilate and collaborate with the white authorities. Turning indigenous children into ab-originals those no longer of their original group involved a systematic brainwashing program through terror and trauma whose outcome today is the small class of affluent native politicians who continue to serve Canada and its neo-colonial regime. Thus, the residential schools were not simply extermination centers, but massive re-education camps to weed out expendable from salvageable Indians, and train the latter as the future collaborators of the Assembly of First Nations and other puppet organizations. Stockholm Syndrome Revisited Survivors of the Nazi death camps in Europe tended to exhibit a form of behavior and mentality termed as the Stockholm Syndrome, in whicha former victim or prisoner identifies with his or her captor and torturer to the point of adopting their manners, attitudes and loyalties. In some cases, former inmates would defend SS guards, downplay the atrocities they witnessed and endured, and even justify these brutalites by blaming themselves or other inmates for their ordeal. A similar phenomenon is common among survivors of Indian residential schools across Canada, especially those groomed and elevated by the system into positions of authority in state-funded native organizations. Time and again, survivors will refuse to name the names of their torturers, condemn what happened to them, or challenge and confront the churches responsible. Indeed, many survivors remained loyal church goers after residential school, and harbor hostility towards their own language, family and culture. Similarly, the strongest critics of our campaign to charge the churches of Canada with genocide, and repatriate those who died in the residential schools for a proper burial, have been the state-funded native leaders who were most strongly Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 173subjected to mental conditioning while in the schools. As one IHRAAM investigator asked, perplexed, after a native politician threatened a fellow eyewitness to crimes at the Alberni school, Why would a residential school survivor try to silence a fellow survivor and defend the United Church? (IHRAAM official Rudy James to the author, February 9, 1998) The native politician in question, Ron Hamilton of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribal Council and an Alberni school survivor, had threatened fellow survivor Harry Wilson if he spoke publicly of discovering a dead body on the grounds of the school in 1965. Hamilton, and his associate Charlie Thompson, had both been enforcers at the Alberni school. These classic Stockholm Syndrome symptoms indicate that the Indian residential school system succeeded in its objective of destroying indigenous identity and winning the hearts and minds of native children. Very few survivors will lift their voices against the system that terrorized them and murdered their friends and relatives, for at a tender age, they were battered and traumatized into abject surrender towards, and eventual identification with, that system. In her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1983), psychologist Alice Miller describes how those who are unable to face and resolve the trauma they endured in childhood will either internalize it through self-destructive behavior or externalize it against safe targets: usually those closest to them, or people who are the most vulnerable. Thus, in the words of one residential school survivor, Its like today, were all still in the rez. All we know how to do is to beat the crap out of each other because thats all we could do then to deal with the rage of getting buggered every day. Those of us who dont drink ourselves to death. Thats why youre wrong, or stupid, to expect any of us to take on the churches and the other fuckers who did this to us. Its like this: only two types of people survived residential school: the slaves and the sell outs. The sell outs are the chiefs, and they tell the rest of us slaves what to do. Thats never changed. (Dennis Tallio to the author, August 12, 2000) Fortunately, Dennis Tallio is wrong. A third type of survivor has emerged: those who can grow from the truth, and place the blame for their torture where it belongs - on the churches and government responsible. One such person is William Combes, an Interior Salish veteran of two Catholic residential schools in Kamloops and Mission, B.C. As a spirit dancer and traditional chief, William has helped lead protests in Vancouver against the church and spoken out publicly since 2005 about his witnessing of murders at these schools. In describing what helped him to recover his voice, William said, Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 174The first time I came to a protest you were having at the Catholic church (Holy Rosary, downtown Vancouver), I started feeling sick and dizzy when I heard the church bell and saw that cross. It made me remember the torture on the rack in Kamloops school, and starving every night, and seeing those kids get buried. But then I saw all of you gathered there, and that gave me courage. I thought, if they can stand up, so can I. Something got shook loose in my head and I walked right into that church with you and I faced those priests. And I wasnt afraid, for the first time (Statement to the author, January 12, 2008) If knowledge of the true nature of what they suffered has empowered survivors like William Combes and Harriett Nahanee to become, in her words, a threat now, and not a victim, that knowledge must include the awareness of the ultimate purpose of these mental and physical assaults on whole generations of indigenous children: the creation of a permanent slave class encompassing most Indians, ruled over by an aboriginal elite in the service of the state and their corporate and church allies. That aboriginal elite now administers the Canadian genocide, in order to secure for its masters the lands and resources that are so necessary for lucrative American, Chinese and other global interests. Massive Trauma and Experimental Mind Control Beyond these clear economic and political motives, one of the purposes behind the residential school tortures was to create a large pool of pre-conditioned experimental test subjects for the heavily-funded military studies into mind control that dominated scientific research during the Cold War, and beyond. Following World War Two, the U.S. military was deeply concerned that only a small percentage of its troops had shown a willingness to engage in combat. Could the personality and aggressiveness of average citizens be molded, and their thoughts controlled, to make them better killing machines? This question prompted the massive covert research program code named MKULTRA, commenced by the CIA in 1952. Since Nazi Germany had pioneered this research in its death camps, the CIA secretly imported hundreds of SS doctors into America under Project Paperclip, and put them to work at facilities all over the USA and Canada. Their chief research subjects were children from military families, or those stolen from orphanages, hospitals, and Indian residential schools. (Note: for MKULTRA see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA ; for Project Paperclip see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4443934.stm) One of the main purposes of these experiments was to test the limit of human endurance to pain and torture, and to assess how trauma affected the ability of people to think and act under duress. Children, especially if they were Indians, were easy to obtain for these studies, and in some cases, were deliberately Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 173tortured to death as part of studies by researchers working alongside Nazi and SS doctors. Sara Hunter (a pseudonym) is a Caucasian woman and the child of a military officer who survived these experiments. In her book Always Remember Love, Sara claims that between 1956 and 1958, she was imprisoned in the former Lincoln Park Air Force base in Calgary, Alberta and subjected to rape, torture and experiments along with twenty five other children. The experiments were run, she claims, by a Nazi doctor codenamed Bob Armstrong, whose SS tattoo number was 091374SS, and whose cover was as a Major in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Sara claims that all of the other children, and a similar number of abducted adults, were deliberately tortured to death in special sound proof cells by Armstrong and his assistants, all of them Canadian and American scientists. The bodies of the murdered people were then disposed of at a local mink farm owned by a man named Jim Green. The Canadian military provided security for the operation. Sara recounted to the author in 2005, I was the only one to survive. All the other kids died. Bob Armstrong kept me alive, I think it was to look at the long term effects on me as I got older. He pretended to like me but he couldnt love anyone. I saw him burn a little girl to death with a blow torch and have a mans ears pulled off with plyers. All the time, men in white coats, and a British lady, they were all taking notes, even with all the blood and screaming. (February 22, 2001) Sara says that many of the children who were killed were aboriginal, along with runaways and orphans. Armstrong told her that one of the men watching the tortures was a senior RCMP liaison officer with the U.S. government, and that he had brought the Indian kids from the local boarding school. I think he was proud of what he was doing, like he was making history. He was using me as his sounding board, as if I was writing a book about him. Hed say, This will win me the Nobel Prize and The Yankees will never be able to thank me for what I am teaching them. (February 3, 2005) In January, 1994, Sara and her husband appealed to the Canadian government for redress for her suffering, and that same month were visited by Sergeant Dan Gasseau of the militarys National Investigation Service (NIS). After some checking in military archives, Gasseau phoned Sara and confirmed to her that what she had alleged was true, including concerning the types of experiments being conducted at Lincoln Park and the identity of the SS doctor who supervised them. This Gasseau fellow was really sympathetic, you know? He wanted to help me. But he was really upset and he kept saying, Are you sure this Armstrong was just a researcher? Because it says in the files he was in charge of these programs all over Canada. (ibid) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 176Two weeks after his call, Gasseau phoned again and demanded that Sara forget their previous conversation, and told her that he was off her case. He said that the matter was now closed due to national security, and warned her that she would be sued or jailed if she pursued her claim. (See Fig. 44 for a copy of Gasseaus initial report) The presence of other Nazi researchers at Indian residential schools on Canadas west coast such as at Kuper Island in 1939 - indicates a pattern in these experiments, which relied on a large number of already-traumatized live test subjects, like the children found in a typical Indian residential school. Run in the 1930s by a German Catholic order known as the Montforts, Kuper Island residential school witnessed many killings of children, as described in this books first section on Homicides. But in January, 1939, German speaking doctors arrived at the school, and began, as at Lincoln Park, experimenting on batches of twenty five children. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 177 Figure 44: National Investigation Services whitewash report of Lincoln Park Air Force base torture experiments April, 1994Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 178Arnold Sylvester of the Penelakut Indian band also received the injection. According to Dennis Charlie, a Cowichan man from Duncan, B.C. who survived the experiments, We were taken out and given these shots in our chests by the Germans, one needle near each nipple. It made you all dizzy and sick. I passed out and was sick for days. But some of the other boys died, Sandy Mitchell for one. I saw him in a bed in the infirmary and his body was all puffed up like a balloon before he died. They told his family he died of a cold. - (Statement to the author, August 12, 1998) Arnold Sylvester, another Kuper Island survivor who endured the needles, told IHRAAM judges, We couldnt figure out who those Germans were. They dressed different and needed interpreters. They treated us like we were cattle, just shoved the needle in us and threw us in these little rooms to be watched, like bugs under glass. I was so sick I couldnt keep anything down. I still have the scars from those shots. We were told to never talk about it, especially after Sandy and other kids died from the shots. (Statement to IHRAAM Tribunal, June 13, 1998) After the local police were told of these experiments and began making inquiries, the entire staff of Montfort priests at Kuper Island resigned and left the premises in one day, and were replaced by the Oblates. Significantly, these events at Kuper Island occurred at precisely the same time as the Nazi regimes own T-4 euthanasia program in Germany, where tens of thousands of so-called defective children were taken from their homes by the Reich Ministry of the Interior and experimented on and murdered in twenty hospitals in and around Berlin. Exactly the same procedure was used in the T-4 operation as at Canadian Indian residential schools and hospitals: children were taken from their families under special laws which allowed their incarceration; they were incarcerated and studied, and finally killed with lethal injections or cyanide gas. The families were told that they had died of tuberculosis or pneumonia, and no death certificates were ever issued. (For T-4 see: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsources/Holocaust/t4.html) This similar pattern in Germany and Canada shows a direct link between murderous experiments on the innocent, both before and after World War Two, and a probable joint research program between America, Canada and Nazi Germany. This reality was clarified by a source within the Canadian government, who spoke with the author a few months after the June, 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal. The man, a retired senior civil servant, stated in a phone conversation with the author on October 2, 1998, Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 179A gentlemens agreement was in place during those years, say from 1950 onwards: the churches provided kids from their residential schools, and the Mounties brought them to whoever needed a fresh batch of subjects: doctors mostly, sometimes DND (Department of National Defense), almost always the Americans. This was the cold war: lots of research money out there from the Pentagon if you had a new idea how to create the perfect mindless killer. The Indians, they were already under lock and key. You could do anything you wanted to them. The churches were more than happy to turn them over, as long as they kept getting their money for them from Ottawa. Thats why it went on for so long, even with that huge death rate: there was lots of money to be made. And thats why itll never be acknowledged, officially. Tyrants have known for centuries that if you beat and torture people long enough, the bravest will die, and the weakest will be broken, their minds collapse, and their behavior then patterned in any manner. The Indian residential schools were a massive experiment in social engineering and mind control, where violence and terror were intrinsic to their operations and designed to fashion a slave class of compliant leaders and traumatized underlings: in short, the aboriginal society that exists today in Canada. Accordingly, the Canadian Holocaust that is so enduring cannot be expected to subside, or reform itself, since the motive forces of Economics and Eugenics continue to require the pauperization and eradication of indigenous people. And it is this final characteristic and aim of Genocide the destruction of a groups original institutions, worldview and livelihood that we must examine in relation to how it manifested within the Indian residential schools. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 1806. Destroy|ng |nd|genous |nst|tut|ons, wor|dv|ew and ||ve||hood In our Residential Schools we are trying to give the Indian boy and girl instruction that is practical, and such as will prepare them to be successful farmers. No occupation will so soon dispossess him of his nomadic instincts and fix upon him a permanency of habitation as gardening, care of stock and farming Many of our graduates surrender their treaty right and become naturalized and for them and their children, the Indian problem is for ever solved, since it is the Indian massed in tribes and kept on reserves which creates the problem. - Statement of the Board of Home Missions to the General Council of the United Church of Canada, second annual conference, 1926 We often talked about our right as strangers to take possession of the district, especially as it was evident that we had taken the land by force. But the civilized settler has the right to occupy the land of savage people. There is little doubt that such colonization means the displacing and extinction of the native population. But this impending extinction will stimulate the English settlers to acts of justice and humanity towards them The whole question of the right of any people to intrude upon another, and to dispossess them of their country, is one of those questions to which the answer is always the same. - Gilbert Sproat, Provincial Government Land Commissioner and speculator, British Columbia, 1868 The potlatch tradition among the indigenous nations of Canadas west coast, like the Round Dance of the plains Indians, drove the first Christian missionaries to distraction and panic. These savages have no respect for property or decency! thundered Methodist missionary Thomas Crosby to his bosses in the London Missionary Society in 1883. Women and children are bartered at the potlatching rituals, goods are handed out indiscriminately, and savage dances and rites are carried out that would shame a pagan ... This heinous custom must be denied and outlawed.(London Missionary Society Records, Cambridge University) Crosby was not alone in these sentiments, as Victorian laissez faire capitalist culture collided with indigenous redistributive systems and so-called pagan idolatry. The attitude and aims of Christian missionaries had not altered over centuries by the time they reached the Pacific shores: namely, that the land was theirs for the taking because non-Christians had no right to it. The more liberal missionaries believed, like Las Casas in the sixteenth century, that, after a necessary period of conquest, the remnant populaces of these savages could acquire limited rights only by eradicating themselves and surrendering their children to the church. No missionary of any denomination publicly wavered from this underlying belief in the innate superiority of European Christendom and its Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 181incompatibility with any other faith or culture although the methods of conquest varied. The liberal missionaries tried preserving aspects of indigenous cultures, although often not for altruistic reasons, as in the case of Methodist Thomas Crosby, who, while denouncing pagan rituals created a lucrative trade in stealing west coast Indian masks and drums and selling them to American museums and art dealers. Yet by and large it was seen as sinful to encourage natives to hold on to their languages and institutions, as was demonstrated in the church-led campaign to ban the west coast potlatch. The colonial authorities on Canadas west coast had a vested interest in supporting the anti-potlatch efforts of missionaries, since the potlatch was a vital institution among native nations that ensured clan integrity, resource allocation and inter-tribal contact and trade. Marriages were solemnized, fishing and hunting grounds gifted, and children were named at the potlatch events, which often lasted weeks. By outlawing and breaking this institution, the heart and fabric of west coast aboriginal culture would be gutted. It was thus hardly coincidental that the first anti-potlatching laws, promulgated in the British Columbia legislature in 1885, (Fig. 45) occurred just a year before the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, linking all of Canada and opening the west to massive European immigration. Until 1953, when the law was repealed, hundreds of native people, primarily chiefs and shamans, were arrested and jailed for holding potlatches. Aiming thus at the traditional leaders of the west coast native nations ensured that when the residential school assault began, by 1890, the capacity of tribes to resist the churchs abduction of their children would be fatally compromised. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 182 Figure 45: Government statement describing new anti-potlatching law, British Columbia, April 1885Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 183In the same manner, the siem, or hereditary chiefs of west coast tribes, were deliberately supplanted and destroyed by church and state during the same years, and replaced by outcasts and slaves in the native villages. The millennia-old institution of indigenous caste authority, and the practice of isolating criminals and slaves in separate communities, was thereby abolished overnight, with enormous consequences. As Chemainus traditional elder Steve Sampson describes, Around 1900, the Mounties and the priests declared war on our family. My great grandfather was killed and they put in a slave family as the new chief, after baptizing them. The rest of my family went into hiding and were still living on the margins, while the descendents of that slave chief are still running the band councils today, here, in Duncan, and all over Vancouver Island. Thats how our people keep losing their land, because the slave chiefs have no allegiance to anything but their own greed. (Statement to author, May 12, 2006) History shows that the most effective tool of genocide is the attack on a targeted peoples view of themselves and creation that undermines their hold on the land and their own nation. And that attack was led by the Christian churches. In the words of Alexander Sutherland, the Superintendent of the Methodist church, a forerunner to the United Church of Canada: Make the savage a Christian and he will settle peacefully on reserves. Teach him the scriptures and he will give up his claim to the land that we require. (Letter to field missionaries, August 12, 1889, INAC RG 10 series, R 7733) The battle for the hearts and minds of Indians was essential to the theft of their lands, as every Indian Agent and church official knew when they established the Indian residential schools soon after European Canada became established from coast to coast. As part of this drive to displace and ruin indigenous nations, and their control of the land, the residential schools themselves were situated strategically so as to control the resources upon which independent native nations depended for survival. Both Catholic and Protestant Indian schools were normally built at key fishing sites, near to vast stands of cedar trees or lucrative fisheries, and on rich agricultural lands all over western Canada. The Presbyterian and then United Church school in Port Alberni was deliberately relocated to the mouth of the Somass river in order to break the native fisheries and force Indians away from the town of Alberni, according to Duncan Campbell Scott. In a letter dated May 27, 1919, Scott wrote to the head of Home Missions for the Presbyterian church, stating, the proximity of the Indian reserves is detrimental to the town, and the presence of the (residential) school will attract the Indians to the reserve in the vicinity of Alberni, Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 184thus tending to perpetuate the Indian holdings which the town people hope will soon be opened up for settlement. (RG 10, R7733, Volume 6431, File 877-1, part 1) (Fig. 46) The churches had a strong economic incentive to build the schools near such rich resources, as became evident decades later when all the major denominations profited hugely by selling off native land to large logging and mining companies all over the west coast. This practice was uncovered by the author when, as a United Church clergyman in Port Alberni in 1994, he discovered that his church had sold off land of the Ahousaht people to its corporate contributor, MacMillan-Bloedel, against church policy and the wishes of the Ahousahts. (See Appendix 1) The Ahousaht case was hardly unique, but the norm in church relations with Indians. The churches never asked our permission when they built their worship places here declared hereditary Squamish chief Kiapilano at a protest in Vancouver in March of 2008. My grandfather was thrown out of his longhouse by the Catholic priest and a Mountie in 1920. Ever since then, these churches have occupied our land illegally. They cant produce a deed of sale or any document to prove their ownership. So Im telling them to get off our land, as of today. Chief Kiapilano did more than talk when he made this statement. The same week, he filed an eviction order in the B.C. Supreme Court against the Catholic, Anglican and United Church on his traditional territory, taking in all of modern day Vancouver. (Fig. 47) And like increasing numbers of native people, Kiapilano considers the Euro-Christian churches to now be in a state of illegal trespass on his land, which he wants back. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 183 Figure 46: Government places Alberni residential school according to needs of white settlers May 1919Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 186 Figure 47: Eviction Notice of Squamish Chief Kiapilano to Catholic, Anglican and United Churches, expelling them from his land March 16 2008Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 187There cant be talk of healing unless what the whites stole from us is returned, starting with the land said Mohawk traditional elder Stuart Miyo junior at a rally outside Canadas Parliament in September, 2009. They wont tell us where the children who they killed in residential school are buried, so I doubt if theyll listen to us. But that doesnt matter anymore. The very land Parliament is built on was never treatied with the Algonquins: just stolen. We have to reclaim the land so that we can bring the children home for a proper burial. Such resistance by native people in Canada to centuries of the biggest land grab in history has never completely vanished, despite the murderous consequences of the residential schools and the fact that their purpose was unique in the worlds long litany of genocidal regimes. For by aiming primarily at children, the residential schools holocaust intended to shatter the essential political system that ruled indigenous cultures: that of the matrilineal clan mothers, which was brutally supplanted by Europeans. If you destroy the children, and through them the women, you destroy a culture said Nishga elder Carol Martin in January of 2008, at a press conference in Vancouver. Before the whites came, our clan mothers appointed the chiefs and kept harmony and balance among our people. But the whites encouraged our men to beat and rape their women and defile the clan mothers. The Indian Affairs department set up puppet male chiefs and gave them absolute authority over the tribes, which had never been before. Thats why we dont recognize the band councils or any official native organization. The eradication of traditional political authority and its replacement with puppet groups controlled by the conquering power is a feature of any genocidal regime, such as when the Nazis established the Judenrat, or Jewish Elders Council, to administer the ghettos and death camps. In Canada, this process occurred hand in glove with the imposition of the apartheid Indian Act, and destroyed the most basic institution of pre-contact native nations: the matrilineal system of government. Without its destruction, the final solution of the Indian problem in the residential schools would not have been possible. Finally, the deliberate destruction of the traditional livelihood of native people and their continued loss of lands and resources is another basic feature of any genocidal regime. This destruction has been the norm in Canadas relations to Indians, and continues to the present day. The destruction of a peoples natural diet, their denial of access to hunting and fishing, the systematic loss of their lands, and state policies which relegate them to poor, diseased and usually urban environments are all manifestations of a plan to wipe a people out by preventing them from securing a livelihood. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 188In June, 2008, in response to the duplicitous apology from Canada for the residential schools, the Inuit people of northern Canada established their own Truth Commission. At public hearings that month sponsored by the Qikiqtani Truth Commission (QTC), Inuit men and women described how between 1950 and 1970, RCMP officers shot more than 30,000 sled dogs in order to force the Inuit into permanent settlements. According to witness Alicee Joamie of Iqaluit, It destroyed our nomadic way of life and our tradition as a hunting people. After that, everyone went on welfare. All our men started drinking. They just lost their reason for living. (QTC transcript of testimonies) Similarly, during the 1960s, traditional fishing families among the west coast Nuu-Chah-Nulth people were subjected to massive pressure by the federal government to surrender their fishing boats so as not to compete with the growing corporate monopoly of the Pattison and Weston fish processing conglomerates. Fisheries officers came and offered us money to sell our boats. When we didnt bite, they said wed get no more subsidies and might lose the mortgages on our homes. Lots of our men took the money and theyve been on skid row ever since recalled former fisherman Danny Gus of Port Alberni to the author in October of 1992. In northern British Columbia, hundreds of families of the Carrier-Sekani Nation were forced off their lands and hunting sites after their band council chiefs signed secret deals with resource companies to expropriate the lands for hydro dams, logging and mining ventures. Fred Martin lost his trap line and nearly his life in the 1980s after one such deal. The Alcan Kemano hydro project flooded lots of our land, and all our trap lines. We didnt have a warning, not after Chief Ed John made the deal. We were out, that was it. We didnt get compensation or nothing. So I went to the Carrier-Sekani tribal council in Prince George and tried making a stink. Ed John told me it was a done deal. When I asked him how I was to support my family now, his goons made it rough for me. I got worked over a few times when I spoke out against the deal. First time was the beating. Second time I got a bullet through my windshield. I didnt wait around for the third time. All the really bad poverty, the drugs, the prostitution in our villages started up after that deal. All those missing women, everything. The same guys that did the Alcan deal made those women disappear. (Statement made to a closed session of the IHRAAM Tribunal, June 13, 1998 The consequences of this dislocation on native people across Canada is severe, and worsening. Most of them are internal refugees on their own land, living in poverty in urban centers and prey to violence, drugs and early death. The policy Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 189of native band councils of forcing their own people off the reserves, combined with the federal governments refusal to create jobs, housing or alternatives for aboriginals who have been displaced from their lands, means that dispossessed natives are dying a slow urban death in a classic third world pattern. In the words of Bill Quinn, a Cree man who survived the Edmonton residential school and who lives now in Vancouvers downtown eastside, This whole neighborhood is one big prison camp for Indians. It just doesnt happen right away, is all. This is the white worlds garbage can to toss the shit they dont want to look at. I lost my language, my family land, all my kids. Whats ever going to give all that back to me? An apology? (April 2, 2010) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 190 The Bones Cannot Fi nd Peace Unti l the Truth They Hol d i n Themsel ves Has been Reveal ed Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 191art 1hree: Summary of the Lv|dence concern|ng Genoc|de |n Canad|an Ind|an kes|dent|a| Schoo|s 1. There is considerable evidence to indicate the existence of a plan and a criminal conspiracy by the government and the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and United churches of Canada to exterminate indigenous populations, primarily children, and steal their lands, under the guise of religion and education through what is termed the Indian residential school system. 2. This plan and conspiracy was commenced in 1889 with the establishment of the Department of Indian Affairs, and was codified in a contract signed by all these parties in Ottawa in November 1910, by which all parties were financially and legally responsible for the operation of these schools. 3. As a result of this plan and conspiracy, between 50,000 and 100,000 indigenous children died or disappeared in the residential schools between 1889 and 1996. 4. The average annual mortality rate in these schools ranged between 30% and 65% from the years 1889 to at least 1950. 5. The primary cause of the death of this huge number of children was a policy and regular practice by school staff of deliberately housing healthy native children alongside those infected with tuberculosis, and then denying them aid or treatment. 6. The death and disposal of these children, and all other crimes committed in these schools, was aided and abetted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), by every level of government and these churches, and by local police, coroners, doctors, social workers and state-funded aboriginal chiefs. 7. These parties are in clear and direct violation of every provision of the United Nations Convention on the Crime of Genocide (1952) because of their complicity in operating the residential schools and concealing the evidence of their crimes. 8. Every act described as genocide under the aforementioned U.N. Convention took place in Indian residential schools and their associated Indian hospitals, which were also operated by the government of Canada and these churches. 9. The government and churches of Canada were completely aware of the enormous mortality rate in these residential schools as early as 1891, and Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 192not only took no steps to prevent the deaths but actively facilitated and caused them, as follows: a) In 1919, the government abolished all medical inspection in these schools, despite the huge mortality rate, causing a marked increase in deaths from tuberculosis. b) In 1920, the government then made it mandatory under federal law for every native child seven years and older to be placed in these schools. c) In 1929, the government transferred legal guardianship over children in these schools to the churches that ran them. d) Between 1928 and 1933, provincial laws allowing the legal, involuntary sterilization of children in residential schools were passed in those western regions with the largest remaining concentrations of unassimilated, non-Christian Indians. e) In the same period, provincial laws in the same regions stripped all Indians of the right to hire a lawyer or sue in courts of law. f) As early as 1910, the government and churches of Canada adopted an informal policy not to hospitalize or treat Indians who were suffering or dying from tuberculosis. 10. Children within residential schools and Indian hospitals were subjected to routine and systematic tortures, rapes, beatings, involuntary sterilizations, medical experimentation, slave labor, child sex trafficking and other crimes against humanity by clergy, school staff and others under a cloak of official secrecy and legal protection. 11. These acts of violence and torture were not isolated, random or unauthorized in nature but were planned and institutionalized,and were legitimated, sanctioned and protected by every level of police, Church and government. 12. At least twenty eight mass graves containing the remains of the children who died in these facilities are located across Canada at or near to the grounds of these former facilities. The RCMP and other police have systematically refused to investigate these sites and may be involved in destroying them. 13. Not one person or organization in Canada has been arrested, tried or convicted for the death or disappearance of a child in an Indian residential school. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 19314. None of the aforementioned church, government or private organizations have taken responsibility or been charged for the death or disappearance of these children, or identified their buried locations. 15. Despite having found these churches and government jointly liable for damages to children in the residential schools, the courts of Canada have refused to charge or prosecute any of these institutions or their officers for these crimes, or for the death of these children, and have ruled the charge of genocide to be legally inadmissible and ultra vires (outside its jurisdiction). 16. These crimes have had a devastating inter-generational impact on native people in Canada, with the result that the effects continue as if the crimes described were still taking place. 17. A widespread system of organized child trafficking continues to operate across Canada which uses and exploits aboriginal children and women, and involves the active collusion of police, church, aboriginal and government officials. 18. These crimes and facts meet the accepted international legal criteria and standards of Genocide. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 194 kecommendat|ons Ar|s|ng from these I|nd|ngs 1. We find that the aforementioned government and churches of Canada are guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, and of conspiracy to commit and conceal genocide. 2. An international Inquiry should be convened to examine this and other evidence in order to bring charges of Genocide and Conspiracy to commit genocide against the aforementioned government, churches and parties. 3. This Inquiry must be established and operate independently of these accused parties, and especially of the government of Canada. 4. Until such an Inquiry can be convened, we consider all citizens of Canada to be absolved from all responsibility and duty towards these guilty parties of church and state, and can and must refrain from paying these bodies all taxes, tithes and other monies, and from obeying their laws and procedures, according to the Nuremburg Legal Standards adopted at the U.N. in 1950. 5. The government and churches of Canada are hereby considered and named publicly as criminal and pariah bodies under International law, and an international consumer, tourist and trade embargo and a public boycott is declared against Canada and these churches. 6. April 15 is proclaimed as an Annual and International Day of Remembrance of the Aboriginal Holocaust in Canada. 7. Citizens and groups are urged to create local tribunals of Inquiry to gather the forensic, eyewitness and documentary evidence to indict these bodies for Genocide. 8. Public memorial sites and Aboriginal Holocaust Museums must be established on the sites of former Indian residential schools to depict the full story of their crimes, including the names of the children who died there and their cause of death. 9. In the event of the failure of international human rights bodies and other nations to launch such an Inquiry into genocide in Canada, indigenous and common law courts of justice are to be established across Canada in which the perpetrators of these and other crimes can be tried and sentenced. 10. To ensure the survival of such popular courts of Justice, the authority of the institutions responsible for the Canadian genocide the Crown of England and the Roman Papacy is annulled on the territory formerly known as Canada, and a sovereign Republic of Kanata is hereby proclaimed. (see Fig. 83) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 193Respectfully submitted to world opinion and to The Executive of The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State _____________________________________ Kevin Daniel Annett, M.A., M.Div. Secretary, ITCCS September 1, 2010 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 196A Comprehens|ve L|st of Cr|mes Comm|tted |n Canad|an Ind|an kes|dent|a| Schoo|s and nosp|ta|s The following offenses occurred at Indian residential schools and hospitals in every Canadian province save Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland between the years 1891 and 1996. They were perpetrated against indigenous children and youths of both sexes between the ages of three and nineteen. The perpetrators were clergy, school staff, government agents, doctors, nuns, police, and in some cases other aboriginals. In many cases these offenses resulted in the death of the victim. These crimes were witnessed and attested to by 287 survivors of thirty-eight separate facilities, and were verified independently by other parties, by archival documentation, and by cursory forensic examinations and surveys. Between 50,000 and 100,000 children died or disappeared as a result of these offenses in schools and hospitals established and operated by the government of Canada and the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist and United churches of Canada. Signed affidavits and videotaped testimonies are recorded separately and are stored in trust by The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State. 1. Murder, by beating, flogging, rape, sodomy, imprisonment, hanging, starvation, poisoning, strangulation, electric shocks, medical experiments, being thrown from windows and kicked or thrown down stairs. 2. Criminal negligence. 3. Rape, by individuals and groups. 4. Sexual assault on a daily basis. 5. Daily, unprovoked beatings by staff and clergy using standard-issue whips and belts, sticks, leather harnesses, conveyor belts, iron bars, studded belts, pool cues and bare fists. 6. Public floggings followed by public confinement in restraining stocks and in manacles. 7. Routine administering of electric shocks in a specially-designed electric chair as a punishment and disciplinary device, and for the entertainment of staff and visitors. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 1978. Repeated administering of electric shocks to the genitals, tongues, and other body parts. 9. Applying electric shocks to the heads to eradicate memory, language and intelligence. 10. Prolonged exposure to X ray radiation to induce sexual sterility. 11. Tubal ligation, vasectomies and other intrusive methods to induce sexual sterility. 12. Deliberate contamination with tuberculosis and other communicable diseases through forced contact between the healthy and the sick in unventilated quarters, and through contaminated food, while denying all medical aid or treatment. 13. Inducing abortions in those made pregnant by clergy and staff. 14. Killing newborn babies resulting from the rape of students. 15. Slave labor regimens in which students of all ages were used as field workers, domestic servants and in manual labor projects, including by the renting out of students by the staff in return for monetary rewards. 16. Administering of drugs by medically incompetent persons, resulting in death. 17. Involuntary removal of teeth, tonsils, and other organs for experimental or training purposes. 18. Conducting dental work without pain killers. 19. Denial of food and water for days as punishment. 20. Systematic and routine physical and mental torture, including: - tightening fish twine and wire around boys penises - sticking needles through tongues, ears, penises - forcing children to eat excrement or their own vomit - wrapping heads or bodies in urine soaked sheets - holding children over open graves and burying them alive Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 198- stripping children naked in front of others and degrading them, sexually and physically - ripping hair from heads - smashing heads against hard surfaces - forcing children to stand for hours in ice water - forcing children to sleep outside and in unheated dormitories - forcing children to strangle animals or beat them to death - forcing them to fondle or assault other children - making children run the gauntlet as punishment and endure beatings - confining children for days in closets without food and water 21. Medical experimentation, without their knowledge or consent, and under coercion, including: - injections with experimental drugs and toxins - receiving skin grafting and eye color altering drugs - deliberate exposure to fatal diseases - prolonged exposure to radiation - injections with cancer-causing agents - sexual sterilization methods and being inserted with experimental birth control devices - behavior modification and mind-altering methods, including sensory deprivation, electric shocks, prolonged isolation and torture - prolonged exposure to sub-zero cold while naked - forcing children to observe dead bodies of other children Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 19922. Involuntary sexual sterilization of all non-Christian Indians as a matter of policy 23. Imprisoning children on school premises to extort money or compliance from their parents 24. Renting out and trafficking children to pedophiles 25. Regularly forcing children to eat contaminated or maggoty food and regurgitated remains 26. Providing children to pharmaceutical testing companies, the military and universities for experimental purposes 27. Obstruction of justice and police investigations 28. Blackmailing, threatening and killing witnesses to these and other crimes. 29. Displacing native families from their homes and lands to ensure attendance by children in the residential schools 30. Forcibly kidnapping children from their homes and territories 31. Stealing and speculating in indigenous lands and resources 32. Operating a reign of terror against non-Christian Indians and their children through special courts and police constables outside the law 33. Secretly interring the remains of children who died because of these acts, and disinterring and disposing of them through incineration 34. Systematically concealing these crimes and others by murder, falsification and destruction of records, disinterring of human remains, and fabricating false histories of the residential schools, with the collusion of others. These crimes occurred in but were not restricted to the following institutions Residential schools and Indian Hospitals operated by the aforementioned government and churches, to which eyewitnesses have attested. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 200Residential schools Roman Catholic: United Church: 1. Christie (Meares Island, BC) 1. Ahousaht (Flores Island BC) 2. Kuper Island 2. Alberni 3. Sechelt 3. Coqualeetza (Sardis) 4. St.Pauls (Vancouver) 4. Kitimat 5. St. Marys (Mission) 5. Edmonton (Alberta) 6. Kamloops 6. File Hills (Saskatchewan) 7. St. Eugene (Cranbrook) 7. Birtle (Manitoba) 8. Lejac 8. Brandon 9. Ermineskin (Alberta) 9. Portage La Prairie 10. Blue Quills (Saddle Lake) 10. Norway House 11. Muscowequan (Saskaychewan) 11. Cecilia Jeffrey (Ontario) 12. Norwood House (Manitoba) 13. Sandy Bay 14. Spanish (Fort Albany, Ontario) 15. Shubanacadie (Nova Scotia) Anglican: 1. Carcross (Yukon) 2. St. Michaels (Alert Bay, BC) 3. St. Georges (Lytton) 4. Pelican Lake (Ontario) 5. Shingwauk 6. Mohawk Institute (Brantford) Indian Hospitals 1. Nanaimo (B.C.) United Church 2. Kings Daughters (Duncan) 3. R.W. Large (Bella Bella) United Church 4. Coqualeetza (Sardis) United Church 5. Charles Camsell (Edmonton, Alberta) United Church 6. Lakehead Psychiatric (Ontario) Other facilities where experimentation and sterilizations were performed, and childrens bodies were processed: 1. St.Pauls Hospital, Vancouver, BC 2. West Coast General Hospital, Port Alberni 3. Provincial Training School. Red Deer, Alberta 4. Ponoka Mental Hospital 5. Lincoln Park Air Force Base (Calgary) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 201Statement of Aims for The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (Founded June 15, 2010) Note: The term "Church" refers to both Catholic and Protestant denominations, and any religious organization complicit in these crimes 1. Full Reparations: Genuine restorative measures and payments are required, on terms dictated by survivors and their families. The Church must pay for all costs incurred by their victims as a result of their abuse by the Church, including all medical bills, counseling, vocational retraining, loss of income and education, and other expenses. The Church must return all land and property taken from their victims, evacuate illegally occupied land of indigenous people, and restore all the wealth generated by their exploitation of their victims. 2. Full Disclosure: The Church must be compelled to surrender all evidence, documentation and forensic remains, and all witnesses and perpetrators, connected to crimes against persons under their care or in their institutions. The Church must openly and fully participate without conditions in public and legal inquiries into their crimes. 3. Repatriation and Memorials: The Church must surrender for a proper burial the remains of all those who died under their care or in their institutions, without conditions and at church expense. Public memorial sites and museums must be established to record these crimes, the names of the dead, their cause of death and the names of those responsible. 4. Criminal Prosecution: The persons and institutions responsible for the suffering and death of children must be arrested, tried and sentenced in courts of law and as part of an International Commission of Inquiry. No form of immunity, exemption or protection regarding the Church, diplomatic or otherwise, can impede this legal process. 5. Preventative Measures: To ensure that these crimes against the innocent never happen again, the Church must lose all special privileges and immunities which set it above and beyond the law, and be re-established as a public, accountable institution. All clergy and church officials must be licensed and monitored as public servants, and be subject to review, discipline and loss of licensing. All Church tax exemptions must be abolished, and the Church and its property and wealth nationalized. All diplomatic recognition and governmental status of the Vatican must be annulled. All Church laws and policies which Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 202harm others and conceal criminal acts by the Church will be abolished. Known offenders among clergy and other Church personnel will be publicly identified and registered, and monitored by the community. No Church body larger than an individual congregation will be allowed to legally exist or operate. This statement has so far been endorsed by over fifty individuals and the following organizations: Templemore Forgotten Victims ( Antrim, Ireland ) Survivors of Clergy Abuse Australia Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared ( Canada ) Shuswap Association for the Promotion of Eco-Development (SAPED - Canada ) Against Church Terror (ACT) - United States Cultural Foundation Native Expressions ( Canada ) Republican Party of Kanata ( Canada ) Akha Heritage Foundation ( United States - Thailand ) www.hiddenfromhistory.org Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 203War Cr|mes |n Naz| Germany and Canada: A Compar|son The so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed, were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees. - Rudolf Hoess, SS Commandmant at Auschwitz, at his trial in 1945 The abuses done to students at our Indian residenetial schools were almost benign in nature. They were not the result of a deliberate policy but rather the isolated acts of certain individuals. - Brian Thorpe, Secretary, B.C. Conference of The United Church of Canada, March 3, 1996 Annual Death Rate in Auschwitz: 15% - 25% (1) Annual Death Rate in Indian residential schools in Canada: 35% - 60% (2) Number of persons convicted for these deaths at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps: 209 (3) Number of persons convicted for these deaths at Indian residential schools: None Sources: 1. Body Disposal at Auschwitz: The End of Holocaust Denial by Prof. John C. Zimmerman, University of Nevada (1999) 2. From the statistics of the Department of Indian Affairs, report of Dr. Peter Bryce, November 1907, to D.C. Scott, Department of Indian Affairs, Ottawa, quoted in The Globe and Mail, April 24, 2007 (Natives died in droves as Ottawa ignored warnings). 3. Statistical Table of the Nuremburg Trials; Telford Taylor, U/S. Prosecutor, author of The Nuremburg War Crimes trials, in International Conciliation, No. 450, p. 371, April 1949. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 204 Mass killing of Jews, Ukraine, 1942 Mass killing of native Indians, Wounded Knee, 1890 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 2031est|mon|es of kes|dent|a| Schoo| Surv|vors The following statements are but a small but representative sample of the nearly three hundred testimonies submitted to this study by residential school survivors. They were offered freely by the latter, and were recorded in peoples homes, in open forums, and in videotaped sessions. Besides editing the nuances and pauses, these statements have not been modified. The pages containing these statements are not numbered. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 206My name is Inez Beryl Spencer and I just want people to know what happened to my sister, Victoria Kathleen Stewart, in Edmonton, in 1958. She died there at the age of nine because of a beating that happened. She was hit over the head with a two by four by one of the supervisors and shortly after that she started getting sick, and she ended up going to the Camsell Hospital. This was very late in the evening. Then by next morning they told us she had died. Miss Knizky was the one who hit her on the head with that two by four. We were running in from the yard and just because we were running thats why she hit her. First she got me in the back with the two by four and then she got Vicky over the head. At the United Church Edmonton Residential School. Inez Beryl Spencer, Terrace, B.C., May 27, 2009 Victoria Stewart, 1949-1958 Murdered April 9, 1958 by Ann Knizky, Supervisor, United Church residential school in Edmonton, Alberta Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 207 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 208 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 209 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 210 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 211 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 212 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 213 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 214 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 213 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 216 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 217 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 218 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 219Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 220Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 221 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 222 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 223 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 224 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 223 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 226 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 227 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 228 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 229Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 230 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 231 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 232 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 233 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 234 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 233 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 236List of Appendices Appendix 1: Stolen Land and Genocide: The Case of Lot 363 and the Ahousaht People Appendix 2: Genocide and the Founding of British Columbia: Recent Evidence Appendix 3: An Early Whistle Blower: Dr. Peter Bryces 1922 work A National Crime and its description of massive mortality rates in Indian residential schools Appendix 4: The Campaign of Official Cover up and Misinformation The Role of the RCMP, the churches and a compliant media Appendix 4(a): Canadas Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the Final Stage of Official Cover up and Indemnification Appendix 4(b): A Note on Reconciliation: Its Actual Meaning as Re-subordination Appendix 5: The Historic June, 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal: Its Findings and Eventual Sabotage Appendix 6: The Silencing of Eyewitnesses to residential school crimes: The Case of Harry Wilson Appendix 7: Ongoing Crimes of Child Trafficking and Official Complicity Appendix 7(a): Memorandum on the Organized Disappearance, Torture, Exploitation and Murder of Women and Children on Canadas West Coast: A Summary from Eyewitnesses Appendix 8: List of Mass Graves at or near former Indian residential Schools and hospitals across Canada submitted to the media by Kevin Annett and the FRD on April 10, 2008 Appendix 9: Extracts from the Vatican Document Criminales Solicitationas, silencing victims and perpetrators of rape and other abuse within the Roman Catholic church, 1962 This policy is still in effect Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 237Append|x 1: Sto|en Land and Genoc|de: 1he Case of Lot 363 and the Ahousaht eop|e Genocide is always about the theft of other peoples lands by those who stand to profit by it. No better case study in this process exists than the saga of Lot 363: a parcel of land of the Ahousaht people of western Vancouver Island. Lot 363 is the Euro-Canadian designation for one hundred hectares of old growth red cedar forest adjacent to the village of Marktosis on Flores Island on the west coast of Vancouver Island: the ancestral homeland of the Ahousaht people. The author learned of the land in his duties as a minister to the Ahousahts between 1992 and 1995, from traditional elders like Chief Earl Maquinna George and the resident United Church clergyman at that time, Bruce Gunn. The Lot 363 story really begins in 1903, with the arrival of Presbyterian missionary John Ross among the Ahousahts. Ross had been dispatched on a special mission by worried officials of both church and state: to subdue the Ahousahts and secure their land. Unlike most surviving Indians in British Columbia in the early twentieth century, the Ahousahts still clung tenaciously to their lands, fishing grounds and traditional beliefs: less than ten percent of them were Christians in 1903, compared to more than 95% of other local Indians who had been assimilated by then. To crush this independent remnant, and access the rich unlogged cedar forests of the west coast, John Ross was given special powers: he was appointed a provincial magistrate as well as a missionary, with the power to form a special police force of native constables, arrest rebellious Indians, try them in secret courts and imprison them. John Ross indulged in such absolute power as church and state rolled into one man with great relish. Within a year of his arrival, he had arrested dozens of elders and chiefs for potlatching, or for not sending their children to the residential school established by Ross. He quickly alienated many Ahousahts, who called for his removal. (Figs. 48) But using this power, Ross also forced the Ahousaht chiefs to surrender to his Presbyterian church all of the land that would eventually be designated Lot 363: one hundred hectares, or forty acres, of the richest timber on Flores island. On this prime land Ross had the Ahousaht Indian residential school built in 1904. (See Ross description in Fig. 49) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 238Figure 48: Letter from Ahousaht chief to government protesting the actions of Presbyterian missionary John Ross December 1914Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 239Figure 49: John Ross own description of his work in Ahousaht 1935 (following two pages) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 240 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 241The Presbyterian church and its descendent, the United Church of Canada, which inherited the stolen land when it was formed in 1925 claimed that it had bought Lot 363 from the Ahousahts for $104 in 1904. However, the Ahousaht elders, including Chief Earl Maquinna George, still insist that their people did not buy or sell land then, and therefore could not have made such a transaction. No deed of sale for Lot 363 has ever been produced by the Presbyterian or United Church. But even if one accepts the claim of church officials, they are thereby admitting that they grievously cheated the Ahousahts in the land transaction, since what they claim they paid for Lot 363 was far below the value of the land, according to the government of British Columbia. That is, in 1912, the B.C. Treaty Commission Survey estimated that the land value at the Marktosis reserve and adjacent to it was $15 per acre, and had been so since the arrival of John Ross in 1903. In fairness, the Presbyerians should therefore have paid the Ahousahts $600 for it, not $104. If the church is to be believed, they paid to the Indians less than one sixth of the lands value, or $2.60 per acre. (See Fig. 50 for land prices in the Clayoquot Sound in 1912. Marktosis Village is listed as No. 15) Clearly, these good Christians either stole the land outright, or cheated the Ahousahts in gross land speculation; for in 1917, the Presbyterian church tried to sell off the land quickly to the federal government for $8000, eighty times more than they had supposedly paid for it. But the government declined, and Lot 363 as well as the Ahousaht residential school that stood on it passed into the coffers of the United Church of Canada when the Presbyterians helped establish it in 1925. By then, John Ross had long since departed from Marktosis, having been implicated in the murder of Carrie George, the youngest daughter of Chief Maquinna George, who was Ross most bitter opponent among the Ahousahts. (Fig. 51) But the Ross legacy remained: the Ahousahts were tamed and Christianized by the United Church, and more than a third of the children who passed through the Ahousaht residential school died or were murdered there. (Fig. 52) In 1953, without consulting any Ahousahts, the United Church sold Lot 363 to an insider: the grandson of missionary John Ross, a local businessman and church financier named Hamilton Ross. The latter got the land at a bargain rate: $2000 for the entire lot, less than a quarter of what the church had asked for the land back in 1917. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 242 Figure 50: Land prices at Marktosis, Flores Island, in 1912Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 243 Figure 51: Implication of John Ross in the death of his chief opponents daughter, 1915Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 244 Figure 52: Murder at Ahousaht residential school, 1938Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 243Within two years, Hamilton Ross had sold off the land to the logging company MacMillan-Bloedel, a financial patron of the United Church (Fig. 53), for $6000, a three fold profit. By 1992, Lot 363 was worth over half a million dollars. Needless to say, not a penny of this value had found its way into the hands of the Ahousaht people. Such a valuable chunk of old growth forest soon caught the eye of another rapacious company, Weyerhauser, the American multinational that bought up MacMIllan-Bloedel in 1999. Weyerhauser wanted in to the dwindling old growth forests of Vancouver Island, including Lot 363 and its easily-obtainable lease thanks to MacMillan-Bloedels connection to the United Church, the original landowner. A third party then entered this corporate arena: the NDP government of British Columbia itself, which had become the largest single shareholder in MacMillan-Bloedel. Despite its official stance opposing free trade and multinational corporate control over B.C.s economy, the NDP deliberately facilitated the Weyerhauser takeover of MacMillan Blodel (Fig. 54) and its grabbing of the Ahousaht land on Lot 363. However, before the deal could be finalized, Weyerhauser, the B.C. government and their United Church MaMillan-Bloedel partners faced a sudden and unexpected obstacle, in the form of one man: the authors friend and associate, Chief Earl Maquinna George of the Ahousahts. As the hereditary Keeper of the Land, Earl George was obligated by his tribal law to claim all of Lot 363 and protect it from logging, as Earl had done in 1982 when he led road blockades against logging on neighboring Meares Island. And so, in November of 1992, after hearing of the impending land grab, Chief Earl George wrote to the government of B.C. and asked for all logging to stop until the issue could be negotiated. (Fig. 55) By claiming sovereignty over Lot 363, Earls letter threatened the entire upcoming Weyerhauser acquisition and even worse, from the point of view of the United Church Earl also insisted that the church be involved in negotiations, since it had sold the land to Hamilton Ross. Suddenly, the churchs sordid history of land theft and speculation and even potentially of the murderous Ahousaht residential school threatened to be exposed publicly. The B.C. government, too, had much to lose over Earls letter, since its planned Interim Measures Agreement between all provincial native bands required the resolution of all disputed land claims by June, 1993. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 246 Figure 53: MacMillan-Bloedel charitable donations to the United Church of Canada, 1994-95Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 247 Figure 54: NDP government helps American multinational Weyerhauser acquire MacMillan-Bloedel cheaply Vancouver Sun, June 22, 1999 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 248 Figure 55: Chief Earl Georges original letter to BC government, asking for halt to logging on Lot 363 in Ahousaht November 1992 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 249To make matters worse for all parties, in response to Earl Georges letter, Paul Pashnik, the provincial Forester, issued a halt order on all logging operations on Flores Island, and the Weyerhauser deal ground to a halt, since their planned acquisition of Lot 363 was by now no means certain. A new actor then entered the fray to fix the problem created by Earls letter and eventually, to fix Earl himself: Rev. John Cashore, who worked for both the government and the United Church. Soon after Earls letter, Cashore, a United Church clergyman, was appointed Aboriginal Affairs minister by the government, from where he could deal with Earls protest while simultaneously saving the Weyerhauser deal and sparing his own church a huge public scandal. Cashore quickly did so by relying on the age-old colonial method of divide and conquer: marginalizing Earl George within his Ahousaht community while buying off the Ahousaht band council chiefs with a promise of a share in the loot. Cashore arranged with the Atleo and Frank families in Ahousaht to exclude Earl George from all Lot 363 negotiations and isolate him at Marktosis. Cashore then offered to help establish a joint venture company between the collaborating Ahousaht chiefs and Weyerhauser, in return for their surrender of Lot 363. The chiefs agreed. To add a final nail in Earls coffin, John Cashore arranged to have the United Church suspend Earls candidacy for ordained ministry, by stopping all funding for his theological education, even though it had already been approved. (Fig. 56) Cashores plan proceeded like clockwork. With the help of United Church official Brian Thorpe - who would later have the author also fired and expelled from the church after he supported Earl George the latter was forced from his community through bribes and a smear campaign. The Ahousaht chiefs were told by Jim Angus of the United Churchs Northern Native Group that they would receive no money from the United Churchs Land Claims Campaign as long as Chief Earl George lived in Ahousaht. Ahousaht minister Bruce Gunn told the author in 1999, The payoff to the Ahousat band council came from the United Church after a conference call with John Siebert and Brian Thorpe that arranged to pay for research into the traditional oral claims of the Ahousahts regarding Lot 363. In the spring of 1995, $7000 went to the band council by way of the churchs northern native group, run by Jim Angus. This $7000 went to the Ahousat band council, and another $7000 bill for research was picked up by the church, making it a $14,000 payoff in all. The church was also cutting off Earl Georges funding for ministerial training, and spreading rumours and smears against Earl among the Ahousahts. (Fig. 57) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 230 Figure 56: Proof of Chief Earl Georges approval for theological education Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 231Figure 57: Letter from Rev. Bruce Gunn, describing sabotage of Chief Earl George and buying off of Ahousaht chiefs March 1999 (next two pages) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 232Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 233After these events, Earl George was forced from his lifelong community at Ahousaht into obscurity in Port Alberni. Later, he reflected to the author, I knew I wouldnt be able to go through for the ministry when I met John Cashore in Ahousaht in the spring of 1994. We were at a community dinner and he came up to me with a big smirk on his face, and he said, Do you think youre ever going to become a United Church minister? Nobody would talk to me after that. Then in December the church guys came and told me I couldnt go through for ordination, just like that. (March 25, 1995) During this same period, with obvious thanks for services rendered, MacMillan-Bloedel, through its charitable arm, issued to the United Church its largest single donation to a recipient: $8000 to First United Church of Port Alberni. (see Fig. 53) By the summer of 1994, the road had been cleared for the acquisition of MacMillan-Bloedel by Weyerhauser: Chief George and his land claim had been neutralized, a joint venture company, Ilsaak Ltd., had been created by the Ahousaht band council and Weyerhauser, the governments Interim Measures Agreement was ratified, and the United Church had been removed from any involvement in Lot 363 negotiations by its man in government, John Cashore. It was strange recalled Mike Matsumoto, a government negotiator, in a conversation with Rev. Bruce Gunn in June of 1995. I was explicitly ordered by John Cashore to leave the United Church out of our negotiation meetings, even though Chief George and other First nations parties had requested their involvement. As an agent in the land transaction, the church should have been there, legally. I raised a protest about it and was told that it was non-negotiable. The scandal seemed to have passed: except for a new threat to these machinations, from the author himself. In September, 1994, Rev. Kevin Annett of St. Andrews United Church in Port Alberni learned about the Lot 363 affair from Chief Earl George and Bruce Gunn. Kevin was deeply concerned, as he expressed in a letter to the church, because the selling off of Lot 363 by our church is a clear violation of our policy on native land claims, which requires that any native land in our possession be returned to the First Nation in question. (Supplementary note, November 2, 1994) Kevins concern was heightened at an October, 1994 meeting of his churchs Comox-Nanaimo Presbytery meeting in Gold River, B.C., when church official Oliver Howard misrepresented Chief Earl George and, employing racial slurs, accused the Chief of lying. In response, on October 17, 1994, Kevin wrote a letter to the Presbytery Executive that supported Chief Georges land claim of Lot 363 and demanded that the church adhere to its own policy and return Lot 363 to the Ahousahts without cost or conditions. (Fig. 58) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 234Kevin also cited the policy of the World Council of Churches (WCC), which is binding on the United Church of Canada, which states, the WCC and its member churches are called upon to return church lands taken from indigenous peoples and to divest church assets in corporations exploiting indigenous lands (WCC Conference on World Evangelism, San Antonio, Texas, summer 1989) Rather than follow its own policy, and thereby upset a corporate deal in which it was deeply implicated, the United Church responded to Kevins letter by expelling him and Chief Earl George from the United Church. In December, 1994, the same two church officials, Bob Stiven and Cameron Reid of the Comox-Nanaimo Presbytery Executive, acting under orders from John Cashore and Brian Thorpe, moved against both Kevin Annett and Earl George. Both Stiven and Reid visited Earl George in early December and told him he was not eligible for United Church ministry, even if he did find the funds. The same week, the two men gave Kevin Annett an ultimatum, communicated through members of his Personnel committee, to close his food bank, stop preaching about social justice, and stop visiting non-members. When Kevin refused to do so, he was fired without cause or notice on January 23, 1995, by Reid and Art Anderson of the B.C. conference office of the United Church. Members of Kevins church board were informed before the firing not to tell Kevin, (Fig. 59) and Presbytery members as a whole were kept in the dark about Kevins secret removal without cause (see Bruce Gunn letter, Fig. 60). By openly suppressing the two public critics of the Lot 363 deal, the United Church brought more attention to the scandal and to the whole untold history of the residential schools. Despite his subsequent victimization and blacklisting, Kevins story acquired much publicity (Figs. 61-63), especially the fact that the church had timed his firing with the commencement of the RCMPs investigation into the Alberni residential school, on February 9, 1995. (Fig. 64) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 233 Figure 58: Kevin Annetts letter, protesting Lot 363 sale, to Comox-Nanaimo Presbytery of the United Church October 1994 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 236 Figure 59: Account of Kevin Annetts secret firing by church board member Gerry Walerius August 1996 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 237Figure 60: Letter from Bruce Gunn describing background to Kevin Annetts firing and his secret removal from his church August 1996 (following four pages) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 238Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 239Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 260Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 261Figures 61- 63: Media coverage of Kevin Annetts firing without cause and expulsion from United Church 1995-1997 (next three pages) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 262Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 263Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 264 Figure 64: Timing of Kevin Annetts firing to coincide with commencing of RCMP investigation into Alberni residential school, February 9, 1995 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 263Unfortunately, since these events, a concerted misinformation campaign by the United Church and the RCMP has hidden many of these facts from public memory, and caused the issue that prompted the expulsion of Kevin and Earl from the church to be forgotten. Nevertheless, Bruce Gunn and Kevin Annett compiled the evidence of the deal in an open letter to the World Council of Churches (Fig. 65): a letter that went unanswered. In 1999, on cue, Weyerhauser acquired MacMillan-Bloedel for $2 billion in the biggest corporate takeover in B.C. history. The native-run Ilsaak logging company continues to log old growth forests in the Clayoquot Sound, profiting only the Ahousaht band council chieftains whose favourite son, Shawn Atleo, now heads the national, state-funded Assembly of First Nations. After the acquisition, veteran journalist Vaughn Palmer wondered aloud why the ostensibly left wing NDP government had followed policies designed to encourage the takeover of a Canadian company by a U.S. multinational. (see Fig. 54) But Palmer and most other people were ignorant of the unholy triple alliance of church, state and boardroom, with minor aboriginal accomplices, that profited from the further destruction of Ahousaht land and nationhood. As in the residential school years, the same forces remain at work, ensuring that land, wealth and official truth stay in their hands. (Post script to follow after Figure 65) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 266Figure 65: Letter of Bruce Gunn and Kevin Annett to World Council of Churches, outlining Lot 363 scandal January 1997 next three pages Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 267Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 268Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 269Post Script: During the authors defrocking from United Church ministry between August 1996 and March 1997, Comox-Nanaimo Presbytery official Win Stokes declared, under oath, It was just that well, a senior government minister told me, We cant have Kevin upset the applecart over Lot 363. He has to go. (October 3, 1996) When asked by the author during cross examination whether that government minister was John Cashore, Stokes refused to answer, and the hearings chairperson, church lawyer Jon Jessiman, who had helped arrange Kevins firing, declared that any discussion of Lot 363 and native people was not relevant to the proceedings. In the spring of 2000, the author asked the B.C. Governments Conflict of Interest Commissioner, H.A.D. Oliver, to investigate John Cashores actions in using his office to apparently protect his own United Church from scandal and accountability over the Lot 363 deal, and silence critics. A month later, Oliver met with the author in downtown Vancouver and stated that Cashore was completely free of any suggestion of wrongdoing or conflict of interest. When the author objected, Oliver smiled at him and said, Come now, Mr. Annett. You dont really think theres a separation of church and state in this country, do you? Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 270Append|x 2: Genoc|de and the Iound|ng of 8r|t|sh Co|umb|a: kecent Lv|dence Ldward 8ulwer-LyLLon Colonization is civilization If we, the superior race, take the land of other races, we must utterly destroy the previous inhabitants. - Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, co-founder of British Columbia, Member of the Legislative Assembly, in his book The Coming Race (1868) I just got a blanket well-infected with smallpox, carefully put it between a saddle blanket and a sweat pad I succeeded. They all died of smallpox. - John McLain, Hudsons Bay Company trader and land speculator, on his sojourn among the Chilcotin Indians, from Only in Nazko (1908) All men must die. The Indians obeyed the mandate perhaps a little earlier than otherwise they might. The diseases not only killed many but made the living diseased, rendered the women barren or their offspring incapable of living. This is the real and true cause of their disappearance. Socially, probably their death is of little consequence; politically, it does not seem they were intended to set the world on fire. What of the breed remain will require a great deal of crossing to make a superior race. The British have been through the process. - Dr. John Helmcken, Speaker of the British Columbia Legislature, Hudsons Bay Company Director, dispenser of smallpox, from his Reminiscences (1898) I may have to employ the Colorado Solution and order every white man to kill every Indian in this province. - Premier Frederick Seymour, British Columbia, 1868 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 271In the fall of 2008, Tom Swanky, a community researcher and former librarian in Quesnel, B.C., released archival material he had researched for over a decade concerning the earliest years of British Columbias European occupation. The material, entitled The Tragedy of British Columbia: Genocide at its Founding, uses period newspapers and government correspondence to show that the leading politicians, traders, church men, military officers and doctors of the first colony on Canadas west coast actively killed off large segments of the aboriginal population. Swanky establishes that this killing occurred primarily through the deliberate spreading of smallpox to Indians across the province, through the use of infected blankets and smallpox inoculations. And he also shows how a common element uniting all of these perpetrators of genocide is that they were all linked to the colonial government, the Anglican Church of England and to the Hudsons Bay Company, and its subsidiary, The Puget Sound Agricultural Company (PSAC), which sought to acquire land in areas still heavily populated with aboriginals. Swanky begins by showing how the largest war ever conducted by Indians against Europeans in western Canada, besides the Riel Rebellion the Chilcotin War of 1862-68 was in reality an attempt by the Chilcotin (Tsilhqotin) natives to halt the men who were spreading smallpox among their people: men like Alex McDonald, Hudsons Bay company trader, Anglican missionary Rev. John Sheepshanks, and gold miner William Barron. (See the DVD summary of The Tragedy of British Columbia: Genocide at its Founding by Tom Swanky, Dragon Heart Enterprises, Quesnel, B.C., 2008) The ample evidence acquired by Swanky shows that a) the worst, most sustained outbreaks of smallpox among Indians across British Columbia occurred soon after missionaries and doctors had inoculated natives over a wide area with smallpox; and b) these men, and those associated with them, had already applied for pre-emption of the lands occupied by the Indians who died, well before the outbreak of the smallpox. A clear example of this intentional practice occurred in Bella Coola, on the central coast, during 1861 and 1862. Several thousand natives had occupied the area for millennia, yet by July of 1862 three quarters of them were dead from smallpox: more than 1500 Bella Coola coastal Indians. Remarkably, they had all died in a four-week period. The Attorney General for British Columbia, George Carey (a long time trading partner with the Puget Sound Agricultural Company) seemed to anticipate this extermination two years earlier, when early in 1860 when thousands of natives still lived in Bella Coola - he had declared in the Legislative Assembly, There is no Indian settlement in Bella Coola nor shall there be. Several business partners of Carey John Miles, Robert Miles and Duncan MacKay, all shareholders in the PSAC had applied for pre-empted land lots of 160 acres each on the land occupied by the Bella Coolas during the fall of 1861, Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 272nearly a year before the smallpox epidemic de-populated the Indians. Under the law, pre-emption could only be undertaken on unoccupied land. These illegal pre-emptions were nevertheless granted by Careys government, with the obvious foreknowledge that soon there would be no Indians left on the sought-after land. In his memoirs, Francis Poole of the Royal Engineers an associate of George Carey wrote, I led the party that introduced smallpox in Bella Coola and Fort Alexander . William Downey, another PSAC partner, wrote in 1893, in the year 1862, smallpox was carried by whites into Bella Coola. A similar practice of buying up land still occupied by Indians, who then quickly died off en masse from smallpox introduced by associates of the land buyers, occurred during the same time in the interior of B.C., under the direction of Rev. John Sheepshanks, an Anglican missionary and government insider. Early in 1862, Colonel Moody, head of the Royal Engineers in New Westminster then the provincial capital ordered Lt. Henry Palmer to go among the populous Chilcotin Indians and lay out reserves for several new town sites. Moody then put his friend John Sheepshanks, who served as chaplain to the Royal Engineers, in touch with a Doctor Seddall, who provided the missionary with smallpox inoculations. According to the Columbian newspaper of April 29, 1863, The good missionary Reverend Sheepshanks stated (at a public meeting) that during his tour of the interior during July of last year, he had vaccinated all the Indians he could find. Within two months of Sheepshanks mass inoculations of the Chilcotins, nearly all of them were dead or dying from smallpox. In what is now the town of Quesnel, his associate, Lt. Palmer, had already pre-empted most of the natives land on behalf of Col. Moody and his government colleagues. Rev. John Sheepshanks was rewarded for his murder of so many Indians. Later in life he was appointed the Bishop of Norwich, and served in the House of Lords in London until 1908. In his memoirs, Sheepshanks admits knowledge of these killings, when he wrote, The noble savage is being improved off the face of the earth I cannot now dwell upon the causes of the disappearance of these people, though, alas! Some of them I know right well. At precisely the same time, a third area of B.C. was experiencing the same deliberate genocide through smallpox inoculations. William Manson, a factor with the Hudsons Bay company in Kamloops, kept an official journal, and he noted in it the following: June 24, 1862: Vaccinated many Indians of the North River Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 273July 12: Smallpox has appeared among the North River Indians July 29: Vaccinated South Branch Indians August 2: Indians begin dying along the south branch August 18: Indians refuse contact and further vaccinations September 28: Smallpox is raging among all the Indian bands By October of 1862, smallpox was devastating Indian tribes in a huge arc taking in the west coast, northern villages and central Interior, ending in Mission and New Westminster. In the Chilcotin area alone, 5000 Indians had died of the disease in less than six months, while only four whites had succumbed to smallpox for only the Indians had been inoculated. This arc of death corresponded exactly to the path of travel of smallpox inoculators like Rev. John Sheepshanks, John Poole of the Royal Engineers, and Alex MacDonald of Hudsons Bay company and PSAC. By February 27, 1863, the Colonist newspaper in Victoria declared, The Indians from the Forks of Quesnelle and indeed all central interior savages including Lillooet have nearly all been carried off by the epidemic. In fact, between 75% and 90% of all interior Chilcotin Indians had died in just over a year, during 1862 and 1863. And during that same period, most of their land had been previously pre-empted by the agents and investors of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company. Most of the senior government officers of B.C. at the time were company shareholders, including Governor Douglas, Speaker of the Assembly Dr. John Helmcken, Chief Justice Cameron, and George Foster and William Tolmie, Members of the Legislature. All of these men were also loyal Anglicans and associates of Col. Moody and Rev. Sheepshanks. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 274 Photograph courtesy BC Archives Call Number F-05146 8ev. !ohn Sheepshanks (1834-1909) In a final, desperate effort to save their people, Chilcotin warriors under the leadership of Chief Lhatsassin killed three of the men who had spread smallpox among the Chilcotins, including Alex MacDonald. For this, Lhatsassin and his friends were all hanged by the government of British Columbia. The official history books in B.C. still teach that the Chilcotin wars were the result of angry Indians taking vengeance on whites who built roads through their territories. Smallpox, John Sheepshanks, and the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, are never mentioned. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 273Append|x 3: An Lar|y Wh|st|e 8|ower: Dr. eter 8ryce's 1922 work "A Nat|ona| Cr|me" and |ts descr|pt|on of mass|ve morta||ty rates |n Ind|an res|dent|a| schoo| Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL Append|x 4: 1he Campa|gn of Cover up and M|s|nformat|on - 1he ko|e of the kCM, the churches and a comp||ant med|a We could never investigate all the deaths of students at the Alberni residential school. It would be too huge an investigation. Constable Gerry Peters, RCMP E Division, October 3, 1997 There is no evidence that children died at the Alberni residential school. Constable Gerry Peters, RCMP E Division, March 4, 1999 Shortly after the commencement of the first class action lawsuit by residential school survivors against the United Church and federal government, in October of 1998, one of the men suing the church for his torture at the Alberni residential school was found dead in the Nanaimo harbor. Darryl Watts apparently killed himself after being battered on the witness stand by church lawyer Chris Hinkston, who claimed that Darryl was lying about being raped by school staff. But after the press disclosed the incident, the United Church, under pressure, introduced from its own archives evidence that in 1960, both the church and the government responded to reports of violence against children at the Alberni residential school by issuing a directive to keep the incidents out of the media. (The Province, October 27, 1998, see Fig. 66) This first public and official confirmation of a cover up of crimes in residential schools caused an enormous scramble by agents of church and state to cover their tracks even more and issue a plethora of contradictory statements about the fate of residential school children. Investigators like Gerry Peters of the RCMPs Task Force into Indian residential schools, who had previously confirmed that large numbers of children had died in west coast schools, suddenly claimed that no evidence existed for these deaths, despite the growing numbers of witnesses who described children dying or even witnessing murders. Coming soon after the convening of the first non-government inquiry into residential schools the June, 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal in Vancouver and the latters documenting of numerous murders in the schools, the sudden contradictory denials by police investigators indicated that, far from encouraging the truth, the official investigation into Indian residential schools aimed at fogging and subverting it. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL Figure 66: Confirmation of church-state cover-up of crimes in Indian residential schools The Province, October 27, 1998Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
One incident will illustrate this cover-up. In December, 1995, eyewitness Harriett Nahanee was quoted in the Vancouver Sun as having seen 14 year old Maisie Shaw kicked to her death by Principal Alfred Caldwell at the United Churchs Alberni residential school. The same week, RCMP investigator Paul Willms told the same newspaper that if deaths of children had occurred at the school, it would certainly fall within the mandate of his Task Force to investigate them. (Vancouver Sun, December 13, 1995, p. B8) (Fig. 67) However, within a few months, Willms was replaced as head of the RCMP Task Force by Gerry Peters, who stated publicly in 1996 that it was never the mandate of the Task Force to investigate homicides in residential schools. In response, during February, 1996, Kevin Annett searched for a death record for Maisie Shaw in the provincial Archives, and were told by Provincial Records Registrar Bryan Young that neither a burial permit nor a death certificate for her could be found. However, in October 1997, after more reports of residential school deaths had been covered by local media and after Gerry Peters had been challenged publicly by Kevin Annett over his contradictory statements - Bryan Young contacted Kevin Annett with the news that he had discovered a death certificate for Maisie Shaw. (Fig. 67a) However, the death certificate produced by Bryan Young was completely inconsistent with records from both the Port Alberni funeral home that Young claims handled Maisie Shaws body, and the Tseshaht Indian cemetery where the certificate claimed she was interred. Neither facility had any record of a Maisie Shaw. The death certificate claims that Maisie Shaw died not from a violent fall, as Harriett Nahanee witnessed, but from heart failure and that she was buried the day after she died, on December 27, 1946. But thats impossible declared Louise, a senior employee at the Stevens Funeral Home in Port Alberni, that allegedly handled her body. No-one ever gets buried that quickly. Ive never seen that happen, not in twenty years here. Theyd have to have done no autopsy or normal processing. That document is in error. (from a phone conversation with Kevin Annett, November 9, 1997) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 67: First report of murders in United Church Alberni residential school, The Vancouver Sun, December 13, 1995 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 67 a: Official death certificate for Maisie Shaw, killed at Alberni residential school, containing false information Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Vancouver Sun reporter Steven Hume investigated the document after being given a copy of it by Kevin Annett. In a telephone conversation after he visited Port Alberni, Hume told Kevin, The document is legitimate but the information on it isnt. The signature of the presiding physician doesnt even match the handwriting under cause of death. Im sure this is a forgery. The document was only entered into the government records in 1995, not 1946, when she died. Theres the proof that its a fake. (November 13, 1997) The fact that the death certificate for Maisie Shaw was not officially on record until the spring of 1995 shortly after the RCMP Task Force began their official investigation of the Alberni residential school, that February suggests that the Mounties or another party created the certificate to conceal that Maisie had been killed and buried in secret. Constable Gerry Peters and other members of the RCMP have actively discouraged survivors of residential schools from giving their testimonies, including concerning modern day crimes in native communities. Sharon Blakeborough, a former employee of the RCMP Task Force into residential schools, spoke at the June, 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal in Vancouver. She told tribunal judges that the Task Force was little more than a public relations stunt by the government that never conducted investigations or helped survivors. I worked in the north shore office of the Task Force for two years. I cant remember a single investigation we ever did. Millions of dollars went through our office but we were told to refer people with a story to tell to the native liaison office, which was just a dead end. We just shuffled paper and issued press releases. To give you one example of the whole farce, in the fall of 1995, forty or so victims of the Alberni and Alert Bay residential schools called up our office from Bella Bella and said they wanted to tell their stories. So Gerry Peters flies up there, but not a day later hes back again. He never spoke to any of them or took down their statements. It turns out that one of the perverts being named by those people was the local band council chief, who had been a stooge at residential school and was still a bad pedophile in the village. But that chief had pull with the government, he was important to their treaty plans, so Peters left him alone and ignored all those survivors. So I learned pretty quick that the whole supposed RCMP investigation was one big scam, to protect the perpetrators and shut everybody else up. (Statement to IHRAAM Tribunal, June 12, 1998) Such behavior by the RCMP, and government agents in general, is hardly novel, or recent, when it comes to crimes in Indian residential schools. From their inception, the churchs operation of the latter, and the crimes that occurred within them, were concealed and protected by the state. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
The classic statement of Indian Agent P.D. Ashbridge, in his February 3, 1940 report about the burning of the United Churchs residential school in Ahousaht, B.C., speaks volumes of the policy of cover up by the government towards the residential schools: As this was the property of the church, care was taken to avoid too close (an) inquiry.(See Fig. 35) Such a policy of avoiding a serious inquiry into the residential schools was intensified in the course of the lawsuits against church and state that mushroomed after the historic Brenner decision of the B.C. Supreme Court, which in 2001 found the United Church and federal government equally liable for harm done to native children in the Alberni residential school. That same year, a major misinformation campaign about the Indian residential schools was launched by the government, the churches and the state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), to fog the true history of the schools and minimize the churches involvement in and liability for crimes therein, including the murder of children. The media began to assert, for example, that the schools had been established by the government, which then recruited the churches to run them when in fact the opposite was true. All the documentation shows that the churches in fact had established and operated the residential schools for years, with government authorization and that it was the churches that fought to keep them open, right up until the 1980s, in the face of government opposition. To rewrite history like this, and place responsibility for the schools onto the government, meant to shift legal liability for the crimes to Ottawa, away from the churches which is exactly what occurred starting in 2001. In the spring of 2002, undercutting the Brenner decision, and a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that the churches were vicariously liable for damages to native children by their employees, the government of Canada assumed full financial and legal liability for the crime. That was a criminal act itself, designed to protect proven murderers says Henry Bear, a lawyer for the Maliseet people of eastern Canada, who tried suing Canada and its churches for genocide in 2003 and found himself disbarred for trying. For the government to have negated the top courts decision about joint liability was totally unprecedented. It was a huge miscarriage of justice. But it was all part of the big fix. My law practice was destroyed because I wouldnt play along with this obstruction of justice. My own clients were urged by the government to fire me when I wouldnt force them to accept minimal settlements for their abuse. The feds cut off my funding and forced me out of my profession after I charged them in court with crimes against humanity. (from an email to the author, February 2, 2005) This injustice was aided and abetted by a compliant mass media across Canada, which faithfully echoed the government-church line about residential schools Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
reached new levels of duplicity. In reality, the TRC itself is the most complete act of misinformation and obstruction of justice yet launched by the government and churches to conceal their crimes and evade their liability for murder. Accordingly, this new concealment campaign requires a separate discussion. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 68: First international media coverage of genocide in Canadian residential schools and Kevin Annett The New Internationalist, January 1999 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
In short, not only is the TRC not what it claims to be a real inquiry into the residential schools, modeled on the South African TRC but it is set up to do nothing more than what the Canadian courts have already established regarding residential schools which is very little. The TRC can therefore offer nothing new, let alone justice or resolution. Not a single person or institution has ever been named or indicted for the death of a child in these schools, despite an acknowledged mortality of more than 50,000 children in them. Yet only if something has already been proven in court can it be admitted as evidence at the TRC a huge loophole which allows the churches to evade any prosecution for their crimes especially that of homicide. This $68 million pretense is being displayed to the world as Canadas effort to come to terms with its bloody past and yet it is doing precisely the opposite, which is to muffle the survivors, bury the truth, and protect the guilty parties from any prosecution or public accountability. Thats how winners of a war get to act reflects Peter Yellow Quill. But its always been that way for us. This TRC bullshit is just a rehashing of when the Treaty One Commissioners forged my ancestors signatures in 1871 to steal our land. Its the old colonial trick: make theft and murder seem like justice. Now they call it reconciliation. Its all the same crime. This enormous miscarriage of justice is part and parcel of a prolonged silencing and cover-up of residential school crimes imposed by the legal process in Canada. Since 2001, when government legislation began subverting court decisions, and restricting the legal options facing survivors, court settlements have become highly politicized and designed to gag the survivors and limit their settlements. Native people who have tried suing those responsible for their torture found themselves before a government-appointed panel that defined for them their own damages, and their value under the law. An arbitrary point system for damages cynically called a meat chart - was devised by a panel of lavishly paid government lawyers that determined the ultimate financial settlements. Under this process, before stern faced strangers, residential school survivors are forced to recount in gruesome detail all that they had suffered, only to be told that their pain hadnt tallied enough points to warrant compensation. For example, under the Compensation Rules schedule devised by the governments Indian Residential Schools Alternative Dispute Resolution Process, being fondled or masturbated is deemed to be not as serious as one incident of actual intercourse; the former gets a survivor only 11 to 25 points, while the latter 45-60 points. Being continually physically assaulted gets you only 1 to 10 points, just enough to qualify you for a whopping $5000 to $10,000. (Fig. 69) Assuming one survives this humiliating re-traumatization, a survivor is then forced to legally gag him or herself by agreeing never to talk about their case or Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
settlement. Even worse, they must sign away any future legal action against the churches and government responsible for their damages, and legally indemnify these bodies: in effect, to absolve the perpetrators of any wrongdoing. For instance, in a letter to his client, Trudy Smith, who suffered as a child at the Catholic Christie residential school on Meares Island, B.C., a Victoria stated in writing on March 3, 2008, For your information, by signing the Acceptance Letter you release Canada and the Church for responsibility for the pain and suffering caused to you by the conduct of their employees or agents while you were at the Residential School (Fig. 70) Note the terminology used: it is the employees and agents of church and state, not those institutions as a whole, which are considered responsible for the crime and damages; and nevertheless, those institutions are the ones absolved and freed of any responsibility. The settlement, in short, is a fraudulent denial of culpability by those actually responsible: a fraud ratified by their own victims, who have no alternative but to comply, and cooperate with this enormous miscarriage of justice. Canada and its churches like to call this charade healing and reconciliation: and for good reason, as the discussion in the next Appendix will illustrate. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 69: Levels of Abuse chart and compensation schedule for Indian residential school victims under governments Alternative Dispute Resolution process following two pages Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
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Figure 70: Excerpt from lawyers letter to his client, requiring that she indemnify and release the Catholic church from all liability Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Judaism and committed to the galleys as slaves. (Henry Charles Lea, The Inquisition of the Spanish Dependencies, New York: 1908, p.421) To quote the medieval historian Henry Charles Lea, Reconciliation to the Church entailed confiscation and was usually accompanied with other penalties according to the record of the culprit and the readiness with which he confessed and recanted. There might be prison, public humiliation, scourging or the galleys. (ibid., p. 421, fn 1) In effect, the rebel indemnifies the conqueror (sound familiar?) by acknowledging that the violence and injustices done by the latter were right and necessary, freeing the conqueror from blame, shame or liability: that is, stating publicly that no crime had been committed, except by the conquered and re-subjected rebel. This is precisely what Indian residential school survivors have been forced to do under Canadian law in relation to the institutions that tried to kill them. This notion and practice of blaming a victim for their suffering at the hands of a ruler, and of expecting any rebel or opponent to do penance on the rulers terms, is the core message of the churchs version of Genesis and the operating philosophy of modern civilization. Its a theme that is also basic to Roman and Greek philosophical belief that the mighty are always right, that power equals virtue, and that the conquered have no rights or status and must make amends to the conqueror. The Romans institutionalized this belief through their religious rites wherein conquered chieftains or other enemies of Rome sought forgiveness on their knees in front of the Emperor, prior to their public strangulation. And as the direct heir of the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic church incorporated this practice into its treatment of any enemy it conquered, including dissident Christians, Jews, Muslims or indigenous people. The essence of this practice the public indemnification of the ruler by his victims and the condemnation and killing of the latter is simply the acting out of the churchs most basic paradigm: the supposed fall of humanity and the need for our reconciliation with god as re-subjected slaves. All of this struck home to me in the spring of 2009, as I watched the government Indian Chief Phil Fontaine of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) grovel in subjection in front of Pope Joseph Ratzinger in Rome, after the latter had issued a holocaust-denying regret for some of the harms caused in Indian boarding schools. Not only did poor Phil kiss the papal ring (and undoubtedly other parts) but he joyfully accepted the Popes statement as proof that healing has finally arrived. What Fontaine was actually doing was re-enacting an ancient ritual of re-subordination. Like any conquered chief seeking resubmission to the fold before Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
his public execution (Phil was removed as AFN Chief a month or so after his papal audience), Phil Fontaine was engaging in a re-conciliation. Unfortunately, every residential school survivor is forced to endure the same public humiliation, by accepting re-traumatizing and an insulting monetary pittance, and then absolving their torturers of any wrongdoing for which they can earn re-acceptance as a reconciled slave, aka, one who is healed. When Canada, its mass media, and its churches speak so ecstatically about reconciliation with their aboriginal victims, their happiness is not misplaced. For they are all too aware that to be reconciled with residential school survivors means, morally and practically, that these inconvenient Indians have re-subordinated themselves on the terms of white society: by foregoing legal action, freeing whites of responsibility, and publicly forgiving Christian Canada for its bloody crimes, as happened so pathetically in the spring of 2010 at the presentation of a formal Forgiveness Charter to Canada and its churches by state-funded aboriginal officials in Ottawa. For the survivors of Christian genocide, re-conciliation means surrender, humiliation and defeat. Their Christian conquerors have just never had the honesty to explain the actual meaning of the term to them. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
IHRAAM were dispatched; in a public invitation dated April 16, 1998, it was declared by IHRAAM that IHRAAM is conducting an inquiry into allegations of murder and other atrocities at native residential schools (Fig. 72) and the event was billed as the North West International Tribunal, sponsored by IHRAAM. (Fig. 73) These facts are important, considering the subsequent claim by IHRAAM that it did not condone or help organize the Tribunal, and that it was not conducting such an inquiry. As part of their fact finding work, Rudy and Diana James traveled with Kevin Annett to Port Alberni in late March to hear from survivors there and, inadvertently, to witness the attempt by government-paid native officials to silence eyewitnesses to crimes at the Alberni residential school, including Harry Wilson. (see Appendix 6) On June 12, the Jameses, Dr. Yussuf Kly, and twenty aboriginal observers who functioned as judges at the Tribunal, gathered to open the first day of what became a three day event. Forty two survivors of residential schools in B.C. and Alberta spoke to the Tribunal, and another eleven offered statements in a closed session. Missing, however, were the forty six officials of church and state, and others, who were issued a Diplomatic Summons to attend the Tribunal and respond to the charges made against their institutions by survivors. Not one of them replied to the Summons or even sent representatives. (Figs. 74, 74a) The media, as well, ignored the Tribunal. Of the fifty media invitations issued, only one, the Globe and Mail newspaper, responded, and published a brief report on the event in its June 20, 1998 issue. (Fig. 75) Over the three days the Tribunal convened, every act described as genocide by the U.N. Convention on Genocide was attested by witnesses as having occurred in Canadian residential schools, including homicide, involuntary sterilizations, forced labor, physical and sexual violence, and deliberate concealment of these acts. We have a solid case for charges to be laid against Canada and these churches said Rudy James to Kevin Annett at the end of the first day of the Tribunal. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 71: Payment by IHRAAM of hall for use by its Tribunal into Canadian residential schools May 1, 1998 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 72: Public invitation to attend its Tribunal, issued by IHRAAM official Rudy James, with IHRAAM authorization Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL 3Figure 73: Media release concerning the Tribunal issued by IHRAAM official Diana James, with IHRAAM authorization next two pages Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 74: Diplomatic Summons issued by IHRAAM-sponsored Tribunal to forty six officials of police, church, state and others, requiring their attendance Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 74(a): List of officials issued the Diplomatic Summons none of whom replied or attended next two pages Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 75: The only media coverage of the IHRAAM Tribunal Globe and Mail article of June 20, 1998 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
On the second day of the Tribunal, more than residential school crimes began to be described. Native men and women from northern B.C. unexpectedly described a modern-day child trafficking network operated by several prominent state-funded chiefs, especially Ed John, head of the Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council in Prince George. According to a member of the Carrier-Sekani tribe, Frank Martin, Ed John is the power up north. He runs the governments First nations Summit. He signed the secret deal with Alcan that forced hundreds of our people off their land. He sponsors the drug trafficking and if people complain, he has their children abducted into his kiddy porn rings. My wife Helens cousin complained too loudly and got killed by Ed Johns goons, in 1996. Helen and I tried objecting at a council meeting and Eds goons beat the crap out of us in the parking lot. The guy gets away with murder. But hes in tight with the feds so he gets away with everything. (June 13, 1998) After Frank Martin spoke to the Tribunal judges on the morning of the second day of the event, and the issue of ongoing child trafficking was named publicly for the first time, the Tribunal began to experience sabotage and disruptions, which were led by a shadowy figure named James Craven, who had appeared at the Tribunal uninvited, and offered himself to be a judge. In a statement issued in February of 2005, Lydia White Calf, a judge at the Tribunal, said, It became obvious to me pretty quickly that Jim Craven was sent in to disrupt the Tribunal. His job seemed to be to attack and undermine the credibility of Kevin Annett, who was the force behind the event. Craven claimed to represent the Blackfoot Nation but he never produced credentials or references. He just showed up and offered his services. Then, at the end of the first day of the Tribunal, he went completely ballistic. He claimed that none of what the witnesses were saying about children being killed was possible, and that Kevin Annett had made them say that. By the third day he was slagging Kevin personally and urging judges not to issue any kind of report about what they were hearing from the survivors. Cravens smear campaign did not confine itself to Kevin, but targeted IHRAAM official Rudy James himself. Jim Craven told me that Rudy was sleeping with witnesses and getting them to say what he wanted that way said Uva Jane Ankenbauer of the Cherokee Nation, another judge. It was very odd that Craven would spend so much time attacking Rudy and Mr. Annett like he did. They concerned him more than the rapes and tortures we were hearing about from the people. I remember the month after the Tribunal when Craven spoke to me on the phone, he hissed at me so proudly, I destroyed Kevin Annett! (Statement of July 3, 1999) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Craven went further, and in August of 1998, paid four members of a group established by Kevin Annett and Harriett Nahanee, The Circle of Justice, to publicly break with Kevin and issue the lie that he was using survivors statements without their permission. Their lies are still circulated by Craven and his associates on the internet as part of the ongoing misinformation and black ops campaign against Kevin Annett. Jim Craven told me that he had gotten FBI training and he could get me money if I spoke out against Kevin said Harriett Nahanee to film makers shortly before her death in early 2007. Irene Starr, the sister of Amy Tallio who was one of the natives who falsely claimed that Kevin was using her statement without her permission, claims that Amy told her that Craven had paid her to lie about Kevin. In a signed letter dated August 24, 2004, Irene wrote, Amy got along with Kevin until after the Tribunal, and then she started bad mouthing him, right out of the blue She just broke off ties with him and started saying to people that Kevin was using her story without her permission, which I knew was a lie Amy told me there was money to be made if I spoke against Kevin She told me she was working with a man named James Craven who was with the government Amy did the same thing when we were kids together in the Alberni residential school. She ratted out other kids when they spoke their language.. (for the complete letter, see Fig. 76) Other operatives were active during the Tribunal, trying to disrupt the proceedings. Dean Wilson, a native man from Bella Bella, B.C., was paid by the Northern Native Group of the United Church of Canada to attend the event and intimidate witnesses into silence. He was caught on several occasions threatening survivors if they spoke. On June 13, Dean Wilson physically assaulted Kevin Annett, shoving him into a corner and warning him to stop his research into the residential school crimes. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 76: Statement of Irene Starr regarding sabotage of Tribunal and the campaign against Kevin Annett next two pages Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
findings, their reports served as the basis of Kevin Annetts first edition of this work: Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, first published in 2001 - and for the subsequent campaign to bring Canada and its churches to trial. The price paid by aboriginal people who spoke out at the Tribunal was high. Less than two weeks after the Tribunal, Harriett Nahanees house in North Vancouver was invaded by an armed RCMP tactical unit, who held her family at gunpoint for hours. Other survivors lost their jobs on reserves, funding for their schooling, and family and friends for giving their testimonies. Kristy White of Bella Bella, B.C. was threatened with violence if she tried organizing survivors to help Kevin Annett carry on the work of the Tribunal. Two United Church Indians showed up in town one of them was Ron Hamilton from Port Alberni (note: the same man who threatened Harry Wilson in March, 1998 see Appendix Six) and they said if anyone spoke about residential school to Kevin Annett theyd be very sorry. They cancelled ads I had on the local TV station and told me Id lose my kids if I went any further. (from a letter to the author, March 12, 1999) The test of time has negated these efforts to bury the truth and the truth tellers as have the persistent efforts of Kevin Annett, the White Calfs, and a few others to continue surfacing the evidence of murder and genocide in residential schools in the wake of the June, 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
In refusing to submit Harry Wilsons entire statement in court, including his finding the dead girls body in 1967, Patterson said to me, Im not only Harrys lawyer but an officer of the court, and there are certain issues Im not allowed to raise. Dead Indian children, it seems, is not something a Canadian court will admit as evidence. None of that deterred Harry, who won his case and was granted nearly $200,000 in compensation. David Patterson took a third of it. Within six months, all of the money was gone, and Harry had seen very little of it, thanks to a horde of sudden new friends and helpful relatives. By 1998, Harry was on the streets again, still homeless, only now legally gagged by his settlement so that if he spoke about his torture at the school, he could go to jail. Thats when I asked him to accompany me and two officers of IHRAAM, Rudy and Diana James, to a public forum on residential schools in Port Alberni. Harry agreed right away. Despite the gag order on him, he was very determined to speak about his abuse at the forum. But when we arrived at the forum at the local Odd Fellows Hall, Harry shrank back when he saw two other natives in the room: Charlie Thompson and Ron Hamilton of the state-funded Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council. Both men had been enforcers at the Alberni school when they were children, and had often beaten up and molested Harry and other kids as part of the privileges granted to them for informing and spying on them. And the men were there, once again, to spy and intimidate. As survivors of the school began to speak haltingly at the microphone, I saw Ron Hamilton, and then Charlie Thompson approach Harry and speak to him. Harry quickly left the hall after that, and sat in our car the rest of the evening. Later, he told Diana James and me what happened. In a signed affidavit he sent to IHRAAM and me, Harry described, Just before I was to give my testimony a man called Ron Hamilton came to talk to me he said to me, Are you going to talk about that dead girl you found? I told him that I was. He then said to me, I wouldnt talk about her if I was you. If you say anything about it, youll be sorry. As Charlie Thompson left our Circle, he walked by me and said to me, You have half a brain and no-one will miss you if youre found floating face down in the water. (Fig. 78) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 78: Harry Wilsons description of threats made against him by tribal council officials, Port Alberni, March 1998Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
After the event, Harry suggested that it was Hamilton and Thompson who were behind the girls murder, or at least knew who was. Both men, now as then, are officially protected by the government. The morning of the forum, a cousin of Harry Wilson, Dennis Tallio, had actually met Ron Hamilton on the ferry to Vancouver Island, and knowing him, asked where he was going. Hamilton smiled and said, Im off to Port Alberni to do a job for Ed John. Harry Wilson gets periodically reminded to stay quiet about what he knows. In the fall of 2009, two native men roughed him up and asked him if he was still working with me. But Harry still comes on my radio program and tells the story about the unknown girl whose body he found one morning and whose murderer has never been sought, and never will be. On June 21, 2010, three strangers all white men grabbed Harry on the streets of Vancouver, knocked him on the head with a club, and shoved a needle into his arm. Harry has been dying slowly ever since: unable to eat without vomiting, listless, and prone to constant headaches. The street clinic workers do not know why hes losing so much weight nor do they seem to want to know. Soon, after Harry is gone, few will remember him, or wonder how he died. The murder is so common that it passes unnoticed especially when it strikes an Indian. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
observed three young children emerge from the back door, staggering and crying. Martin approached and tried to interview them. After a few moments, he was struck from behind and passed out. When he awoke, the children, and his tape recorder, were gone. The Community Task Force began compiling these and other incidents when it formed in August, 2004. It discovered evidence of an active pedophile network in B.C., documented in April, 1994, when an aboriginal lawyer named Renate Auger filed a writ in the B.C. Supreme Court that charged lawyers, judges, and officers of the Law Society with criminal acts, including conspiring to aid child rapists. (Fig. 79) Auger immediately faced disbarring from the Law Society for filing the accusations, which she claimed were based on eyewitness testimonies obtained from former employees of the Vancouver Club. In response, she hired seasoned Vancouver criminal trial lawyer Jack Cram to defend her. On April 26, Cram submitted evidence in a Vancouver court which included photographs of two prominent Supreme Court judges involved sexually with young boys in a chamber of the Vancouver Club. Cram claimed that their actions were part of a wider pedophile ring enjoying police and government protection, including from the Attorney-Generals department. (B.C. Supreme Court Writ No. C941542, dated April 6, 1994). What happened next is described by an eyewitness, Pandora Jones: By this time there were over forty sheriffs in the courtroom. The judge ordered them to arrest Cram and many of them wrestled him to the ground then spread eagled and held him down, one sheriff holding him by the throat. The judge apparently relented enough to allow Jack to make his case and by 4 pm that afternoon, Cram had laid before Mr. Justice Callaghan details of a cover up by the head officers of the Law Society and by Judges to aid and abet a pedophile. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 79: Writ filed by lawyer Renate Auger, charging judges and lawyers with criminal conspiracy and aiding pedophiles April 1994 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
That night Cram appeared on CKNW radio to talk about what he had discovered. Just after midnight on arriving home, Cram was attacked by ten police officers and his hands and feet shackled. He was neither read his rights nor even informed what the assault was about. Cram was hustled into a waiting ambulance and was drugged, and detained against his will in the Psychiatric ward at Vancouver General Hospital for a week. During this time he was forcibly injected with drugs. He was in and out of drug-induced sleep. All attempts by friends and lawyers to contact him were refused. The "committal" was authorized by two doctors who had just happened to be sitting in the courtroom and had declared on the committal certificates that they had examined Cram! Cram was released from the hospital on May 2nd. While he had been detained and drugged the Law Society had obtained a judicial order appointing two lawyers as custodians of his practice and its property. A witness watching Cram's office building saw people holding pictures and negatives up to the light in his office window. Later Cram discovered that his photographic evidence of the judges involved with small boys had vanished. Renate Auger was disbarred, but managed to escape during this period and has not been heard of since. Jack Cram has also dropped out of the picture and is now ranching in the interior of the province and refuses to discuss the issue any longer. (from A Tale of Two Lawyers by Pandora Jones, Radical News Service, 2001) In the fall of 1999, UNESCO released a study on child prostitution and trafficking in the world, and named three cities Vancouver, Bangkok and Rotterdam as major points where child pornography and pedophilia are not only rampant but unofficially tolerated and even protected by elements within the judiciary, police and government system. (UNESCO Report on the Status of the Child,1999 Geneva, p.12)) Not surprisingly, churches are a big part of the underground network of child trafficking on the west coast, considering their legal protection under section 176 of the Criminal Code of Canada, whoever disrupts the work of a clergyman can go to jail for two years their general legitimacy, and their history of organized child rape and trafficking in Indian residential schools. After convicted pedophiles were found working as child counselors at the United Churchs Camp Kwomais in Surrey, B.C. in 2003, and were not only retained but their accusers were fired and maligned within the church, a link was found between one of the men and Reverend Russell Crossley, a United Church minister in Victoria, B.C., who was kept on in his parish at Metropolitan United Church even after he had been tried and convicted for serially raping congregants for over thirty years. The church official who aided and protected both Crossley and the Camp Kwomais pedophiles, Brian Thorpe, was also responsible for the firing and defrocking without due process of Rev. Kevin Annett in 1995, after Kevin Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
According to Audrey, I know for a fact that Anne Marie is being molested by her foster dad. The bastard is a convicted child rapist. I complained to MCF but they ignored me. God knows whats happening to the others. They took the baby when he was still on my breast because they said they got a complaint about me. Wouldnt say from who. They dont need to. (March 12, 2010) Rob Nicholson, in his book Stolen Innocence, points out that a system is in place within the government to, as he puts it, grease the wheels of child trafficking at every level. Front line workers identify available children, secure them, and pass them on to pedophiles and child traffickers. Judges, crown counsels and individual RCMP officers provide protection. Their actions are not detected because they occur within an institution. Also, as with the churches, an aura of legality and legitimacy surrounds their offices, as they are officially above suspicion, and in reality, above the law. In November of 2000, NDP Premier Ujjal Dosanjh appointed to his cabinet, and to head the Ministry of Children and Families, an unelected man named Chief Ed John of the Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council in prince George, B.C.: the same man who had been named at the June, 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal as a key actor in child trafficking among northern native communities. The author wrote a letter of concern to Premier Dosanjh and shared with him the allegations made against Ed John at the IHRAAM Tribunal. (Fig. 81) Dosanjh replied by threatening legal action against the author. Two years later, in the summer of 2002, after the allegations against Ed John were reprinted in a community newspaper in Quesnel, and voiced over the authors radio program in Vancouver, the B.C. government paid to hire attorney Marvin Storrow of Blake, Cassels and Graydon law firm to bring a lawsuit against the author and the editor of the newspaper. Storrow, a personal friend of then Prime Minister Jean Chretien, also represents the same multinational corporations operating in Ed Johns territory which have displaced countless aboriginal families from their lands, with Ed Johns assistance. Storrow secured a Supreme Court injunction against the author and the editor, and five other persons, including Frank Martin, who had named Ed Johns alleged criminal actions at the IHRAAM Tribunal. The newspaper went bankrupt as a result, although the author ignored the injunction and continued to air the claims of Ed Johns accusers, without legal consequence. (Fig. 82) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 82: Copy of Supreme Court injunction against the author and others attempting to stop them from airing evidence of complicity of Ed John in crimes against children July 2002 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Supp|ementary Documents Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Whos doing t his? Whos killing us? Robbing us of light and life; mocking us wit h t he sight of what we might have been? Does our ruin benefit t he eart h? Does it help t he grass t o grow or t he sun t o shine? I s t his darkness in you, t oo? Have you passed t hrough t his night ? James Jones, The Thin Red Line Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
That new standard was imposed from the outside, and was based on a novel and quite arbitrary international law of morality that declared certain actions to be inherently and retroactively criminal, according to a universal system of morality. Note, however, that the Nazis were not tried and indicted for genocide, but for waging a war of aggression. Genocide was neither defined nor considered a criminal act, at the time, and as mentioned, was prevented from being condemned outright as an actual crime under the United Nations Convention of the same name. For, despite its wording, the 1948 Genocide Convention neither prevents nor discourages genocide by states or regimes, since the latter cannot be prosecuted for genocide only individuals can. The community of nations will never deny to themselves the use of the tool of genocide, as history shows; nor will they prosecute one another for inflicting extermination on entire groups. International action against genocide must and will limit itself to the occasional and random prosecution of individuals in order to tacitly absolve and legally immunize the actual genocidal regimes, and what gives rise to them. That, at least, has been the arrangement until now. Reinventing Ourselves The ease with which Christian churches and governments exterminate other people, and then after the fact absolve themselves of the crime with verbal apologies and cash payouts to the survivors, reflects a much deeper sickness that is the root of the matter. We discussed the historical and philosophical roots of this sickness at the start of this book, and traced how it was and is responsible for genocide in Canada and around the world. The task now becomes curing the sickness by ending that which causes it: the paradigm and practice of a dominator, conquering culture that has come to envelop the globe and is endangering our very planetary survival. Genocide has become planetary ecocide declared Royce White Calf, a Lakota elder, at our 1998 IHRAAM Tribunal in Vancouver. Our world is dying at the hands of the same thing that locked up our people in boarding schools. The land and resources are being raped just like our brothers and sisters were by priests and nuns. One day, you whites will wake up and find that by letting those crimes happen to us, you were just letting them happen to you one day. Now, were all facing the same ending. (Closing remarks of Tribunal Judges, June 14, 1998) To save ourselves, our entire culture, its legacy, attitudes and political-economic structures, must not simply be put on trial, but must end. Our window of opportunity to do so before irreversible eco-disaster strikes may in fact have already closed. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Over years of struggle, many of us have come to realize that the undoing of genocide and what spawns it can only come about after a long process of spiritual and political transformation that aims at recovering our lives, our minds, and our planet from a murderous and ravenous system that now threatens all human life. The very act of trying to indict and put on trial this system begins to reverse our personal complicity in it, and frees us to confront its operations even more fundamentally. Non cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good declared Mohandas Gandhi in 1919, after the Amritsar massacre in India. In the harmony of means and ends, it is only by our resolute refusal to give support to whatever degrades and destroys mankind that our aim of the elevation of mankind can be accomplished Our lives are purified and elevated by our non-conformity to institutions that oppress and enchain the multitudes. More than simple civil disobedience, our global non-cooperation with what we live within is a way to invent a new society within the shell of the old, and restore to every person, no matter how poor or disabled, the capacity to think and act freely, in their own name. Such a personal reformation is always the necessary precursor to real social change. Weaning people, and especially abuse survivors, from their mental dependence on the very institutions that violated them is a long and difficult process, especially since there seems to be no alternative to petitioning the government, pleading for accountability from the churches, and other such illusory and disempowering expectations. Actions that confront these bodies, and take back the initiative from the abusers, are the best antidote to such dependency. Throughout 2007 and 2008, for example, native survivors of residential schools in Canada launched a wave of unexpected occupations of church and government offices in Vancouver, which not only shocked the nation but forced a flurry of reactions from church and state that years of polite requests had not produced including the belated apology and the creation of an official missing childrens task force. And yet the greatest victory from these actions are the examples they offer to people as to how they can break free from dependence on a system of lies and murder. But isolated actions must be united in a vision of a new social and spiritual order, and the creation of working alternatives to the status quo. We will overthrow the British Empire by ignoring it declared Irish revolutionary Eamon de Valera in 1916, as he urged massive non-cooperation with the English and their laws. And on the basis of my peoples remembrance of who they were before the English conquerors arrived, a new culture emerged alongside and in opposition to imperial rule: Irish courts of law based on our indigenous Brehon Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
legal system, a boycott on all things English, and even the establishment of the Dail, a self-governing Irish parliament, under the noses of the British Army. As de Valera described, We invented our new Ireland first in the minds of the people, and then established it without permission or foreign legality The moment we dreamed ourselves free and independent, that freedom became real. So too must we who expose and resist genocide and confront the system that caused and maintains it, go beyond mere protest and resistance to creative revolution, by actively displacing the institutions responsible for this massive crime against humanity and creation. Some indigenous elders have already taken this step, like hereditary siem of the Squamish nation, Kiapilano, when he publicly evicted the Catholic, Anglican and United churches from his traditional territory of Vancouver, Canada, in March of 2008. Kipailano and others are re-establishing tribal courts of law in which those who killed and harmed children in local residential schools will be tried and sentenced. Others, like former mining executive Doug Stelling of North Vancouver, are actively withholding taxes from the Canadian government and giving the money instead to indigenous nations. I cannot in good conscience continue to fund the government or churches that murdered Indian nations and their children declared Stelling in a letter to the Canadian taxation services in April, 2004. I am instead giving the $300,000 claimed by you to the Quatsino native band, in partial reparations for centuries of robbing and killing them. In June of 2009, Stelling, the author and many others proclaimed The Republic of Kanata in Winnipeg that formally severed their allegiance to the English Crown, and vowed themselves part of a new Republic free of the Crown and Church that had inflicted genocide on native nations. (Fig. 83) As these movements of sovereignty and independence spread, the foundations of what caused and sustains genocide and planetary ecocide are weakening and collapsing. In their place is arising a world where equality, respect, love, and protection of the innocent and of creation are not catch phrases but living realities. It has been my lasting joy to have been part of the movement that is toppling the worst evil in the history of mankind - and to have overturned the hardened soil of injustice so that new life can emerge from out of the eternal and indestructible heart that is our humanity. For the unborn generations who will read these words, may you learn from the hard-won lessons of we, your ancestors, that have been written in blood, pain Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
and struggle. May you reap the good that we have sowed, and prune away our mistakes and our follies. Kevin Daniel Annett Eagle Strong Voice Caoimhin Bochanan Ui Niall Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Figure 83: Highlights from the Proclamation of the Republic of Kanata Made in Winnipeg, Canada, on July 1, 2009 A Pr ocl amat i on Made t hi s Day, t he 1st of Jul y, 2009, i n Wi nni peg, est abl i shi ng now and f or ever t he Feder at ed Republ i c of Kanat a We, t he descendent s of i ndi genous and Eur opean peopl es who met and co-exi st ed i n har mony her e t wo cent ur i es ago, and as sover ei gn men and women i n accor dance wi t h De Pronunt i oni s Deus and by Ri ght of Nat ur al Law, do sol emnl y pr ocl ai m and est abl i sh t he Feder at ed Republ i c of Kanat a, and r enounce now and f or ever al l al l egi ance t o and r ecogni t i on of t he so-cal l ed Cr own of Engl and and i t s appendage, t he gover nment of Canada, and her eby abol i sh t hei r f al se and unj ust j ur i sdi ct i on over our l and. We f i r st l y st at e as f act wi t hout di sput e t hat f or cent ur i es, a pr edat or y f or ei gn power cal l ed t he Cr own of Engl and and i t s par t ner , sponsor and l or d, t he Vat i can, has i mposed i t sel f as an occupat i on f or ce on our peopl es, r aped and dr ai ned our l ands of t hei r vast weal t h and vi t al i t y, conduct ed war s of aggr essi on and genoci de agai nst our nat i ons, mur der ed t he i nnocent , and kept us i n a st at e of col oni al dependency and i mpover i shment ; and t hat t hi s r ei gn of t er r or cont i nues t o t he pr esent day. We make t hi s pr ocl amat i on t o show t o t he wor l d our i nt ent t o be f r ee of t hi s mur der ous l egacy of Empi r e and Imper i al Chur ch, and t o br i ng about an hi st or i c and mor al r eckoni ng f or t he cr i mes of t hese bodi es. We r ef use t o l i ve any l onger i n associ at i on wi t h such a mur der ous and di shonor abl e l egacy, and by t hat associ at i on, r emai n compl i ci t i n i t s cr i mes. We compl et el y r ej ect t he asser t i on t hat t he pr esent f or m of Canada i n any way r epr esent s a f r ee and f ai r democr at i c soci et y, but i s i n f act not hi ng mor e t han a char ade and f r aud usi ng t he out war d symbol s of f r eedom, f ai r ness and j ust i ce but wi t h t he ef f ect of denyi ng t he f ul f i l l ment of a t r ul y f r ee and equi t abl e soci et y, whi l st whol l y pr ot ect i ng t he i nt er est s of a Cr own and Chur ch t hat ar e gui l t y of t he af or ement i oned cr i mes. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Thr ough t he cont r ol of al l l ands and r esour ces i n Canada by t he Cr own, and t he r educi ng of Canadi ans t o t he st at us of l andl ess subj ect s of a f or ei gn power under t he l egal aut hor i t y of a si ngl e r epr esent at i ve of t he Cr own, we r emai n not hi ng mor e t han moder n day ser f s i n a neo-f eudal soci et y, and pauper s i n our own l and. Ther e r emai ns no pr esent i nst i t ut i onal r emedy f or such a condi t i on of sl aver y, si nce ever y l evel of l egal and pol i t i cal aut hor i t y i n Canada oper at es under an oat h of l oyal t y t o t he ver y ar chi t ect of our sl aver y, i ncl udi ng Member s of Par l i ament , t he gover nment , t he mi l i t ar y, t he cour t s and t he pol i ce. To asser t our basi c and i nher ent r i ght s, t hi s t yr anni cal ar r angement must f i r st be undone: and we t her ef or e pr ocl ai m our i ndependence and sover ei gnt y f r om t he Cr own. We pr ocl ai m t hat t he l ands and r esour ces of Kanat a bel ong t o al l of i t s peopl e, who have an equal and i nher ent r i ght t o l i f e, l i ber t y and t he f r ee shar i ng of ear t h s bount y. A cr uel , f or ei gn occupat i on has not di mi ni shed or abol i shed t he hi st or i c, i nher ent sover ei gnt y and nat ur al r i ght s of al l i ndi genous nat i ons t o t hei r t er r i t or i es. We pr ocl ai m Kanat a as a sover ei gn, democr at i c and secul ar nat i on, f r ee of f or ei gn domi nat i on and al l i ances. It s ci t i zens shal l enj oy al l nat ur al r i ght s of f r eedom of t hought , expr essi on, t he pr ess, di ssent and pol i t i cal act i on and opi ni on, t he f r ee and absol ut e exer ci se of whi ch cannot be annul l ed, r est r i ct ed or abr ogat ed f or any r eason by any l aw or act of gover nment . Wi t hi n i t s bor der s, t he or i gi nal peopl es of Kanat a shal l enj oy compl et e aut onomy and sover ei gn i dent i t y. The l ands and r esour ces of Kanat a ar e owned by t he peopl e as a whol e, and cannot be bought , sol d, r ent ed, l eased or ot her wi se al i enat ed f r om t he common t r easur y, as a si gn t hat t he Gr eat Law of Nat ur e and Equal i t y i s r espect ed and honor ed. The f or mer i nst i t ut i ons r esponsi bl e f or t he conquest and genoci de of our peopl es ar e her eby and f or ever abol i shed wi t hi n our bor der s, i ncl udi ng t he agenci es of t he gover nment of Canada, t he RCMP, and t he Roman Cat hol i c, Angl i can, and Uni t ed Chur ch of Canada. The weal t h and pr oper t y of t hese or gani zat i ons ar e her eby nat i onal i zed, and pl aced under t he aut hor i t y and common owner shi p of t he peopl e. These act s ar e her eby put i nt o ef f ect t hr ough 1. t he est abl i shment of Popul ar Tr i bunal s of t he Republ i c of Kanat a whi ch wi l l br i ng t o t r i al , j udge and sent ence t he af or ement i oned i nst i t ut i ons and t hei r of f i cer s and agent s, and 2. a massi ve, sust ai ned, and popul ar movement of non-cooper at i on desi gned t o di sr upt and end t he oper at i ons of Cr own, st at e and chur ch, and br i ng i nt o power t he Republ i c of Kanat a. Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Outside the Canadian Embassy in Trafalgar Square, London: April 2010 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
residential school children are buried, and calling for their return to their families for a proper burial, and for a surrender of those persons responsible for their deaths. b) Publicly identify and perform citizens' arrests on those persons responsible for crimes against native people and the land. c) Create indigenous and popular courts of justice where the perpetrators of murder and other crimes against our people and the land can be tried and sentenced. 4. Support our efforts to launch a full, non-governmental inquiry into genocide in Canadian Indian residential schools - a) Endorse our call for an international Tribunal into Genocide in Canada. b) Organize a local chapter of our network The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State in your community and formally affiliate yourself and your organization with our Tribunal. 5. Help us to research and document the evidence of genocide in Canada - a) Interview residential school survivors in your community, record their stories, and help create local video libraries containing this evidence. b) Research local archives and government and church records for the evidence of crimes in residential schools and hospitals across Canada. c) Organize academic and public conferences on the theme of genocide in Canada. 5. Send us a donation, which will be used to produce our books and film and fund our research and travel costs - To send donations, see the Pay pal link on this website, or send a cheque or money order made out to Lori O'Rorke to the address below. To order our books, film and other material, and to arrange to work with us, contact: The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State c/o 260 Kennedy St. Nanaimo, B.C. Canada V9R 2H8 ph: 250-591-4573 email: email@example.com OR email@example.com website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Dec|arat|on of Consc|ence Iorm - 1o be subm|tted to the Catho||c, Ang||can and Un|ted Church of Canada Pledge of Conscience I, the undersigned, cannot in good conscience contribute money to this church until it returns the remains of the children who died under its care, in Indian Residential Schools and hospitals, and fully discloses their fate and cause of death, and those responsible. Until this occurs, I am refraining from financially supporting this church. I will not make any form of donation or pledge to this church, nor will I rent your facilities. I will urge others to conduct a similar boycott of your institution. ____________ _________ _________ Name ____________ _________ _________ Date Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Illusion is the most tenacious weed in human consciousness. History teaches, but it has no pupils. Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937 Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
8|b||ography Books Allen, Richard, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1973) Alvarez, Alex, Governments, Citizens and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach (Indiana University Press, 2001) Annett, Rev. Kevin, Unrepentant: Disrobing the Emperor (O Books, London, 2010) Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, Book Two (Paris, 1267) Arnett, Chris, The Terror of the Coast: Land Alienation and Colonial War on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands 1849-1863 (Talon Books 1999) Berenbaum, Michael, ed., The Holocaust and History (University of Indiana Press, 1999) Black, Edwin, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and Americas Campaign to Create a Master Race (Thunders Mouth Press, New York, 2003) Broadfoot, Barry, The Lost Years, 1929-1939: Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Great Depression (Paperjacks, 1975) Brunt, P.A., Studies in Greek History and Thought (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993) Bryce, Dr. Peter, The Story of a National Crime: Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1940 to 1921 (Ottawa, 1922) Comaroff, Jean and John, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, Vol. 1 (University of Chicago Press, 1991) Choquette, Robert, The Oblate Assault on Canadas Northwest (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1995) Cooper, John, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (Herald: 2008) de Las Casas, Fra. Bartolomeo, A Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies, 1542 Driver, John, How Christians Made Peace with War: Early Christian Understandings of War (Herald Press, 1988) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Encisco, Martin Fernandez de, Suma De Geografia Que Trata De Todas Las Partidas Del Mundo, 1518 Glass, James, Life Unworthy of Life: Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (University of Toronto Press, 1998) Goldhagen, Daniel, Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 1995) Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (Harvard University Press, 1981) Gramsci, Antonio, The Prison Notebooks (Pathfinder, New York: 1971) Hunter, Sara, Always Remember Love (self-published, Vancouver, 1999) Henry Charles Lea, The Inquisition of the Spanish Dependencies, New York: 1908) Lemkin, Raphael, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, 1944) Totally Unofficial Man: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (unpublished, 1959) Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. 1 (London, 1888) Miller, Alice, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Noonday Press, 1983) Miller, John R., Shingwauks Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (University of Toronto Press, 1996) Milloy, John, A National Crime: The Canadian government and the residential school system, 1879-1986 (University of Manitoba Press, 1999) (Warning: Milloy is a paid agent of the government of Canada and his research is heavily biased in support of the churches and government) Moir, John, Enduring Witness: A History of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (Bryant Press, 1974) Newcomb, Steve, Pagans in the Promised Land (Fulcrum, 2008) Nicholson, Rob, Stolen Innocence (Kelowna: 1998) Rubenstein, Richard, The Cunning of History (New York: Harper, 1975) Ryerson, Stanley, The Founding of Canada: Beginnings to 1815 (Progress Books, 1960) Said, Edward M., Culture and Imperialism (Vintage Books, 1993) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
Sanger, Margaret, Women and the New Race (New York: 1920) Siggins, Maggie, Riel: A Life of Revolution (Harper Collins, 1995) Sproat, Gilbert Malcolm, The Nootka: Scenes and Studies of Savage Life (London: Smith Elder, 1868) Stannard, David E., American Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1994) Swanky, Tom, The Tragedy of British Columbia: Genocide at its Founding (Dragon Heart Enterprises, Quesnel, B.C., 2008) Walker, Williston, A History of the Christian Church (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1959) Wiesenthal, Simon, Justice, Not Vengeance (Random House, 1973) Zimmerman, John C., Body Disposal at Auschwitz: The End of Holocaust Denial (University of Nevada Press, 1999) Journal Articles Health Protection or Population Control? by Lynn McLean, in Alive, August 1996 The Evidence of Christian Nationalism in Federal Indian Law: The Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson v. McIntosh, and Plenary Power by Steven Newcomb, in New York University Review of Law and Social Change, Vol. XX, No. 2, 1993 The Nuremburg War Crimes Trials Statistical Tables by Telford Taylor, Deputy American Prosecutor, in International Conciliation, No. 450, April 1949, pp. 371. Government Legislation or Reports The Quarterly Review of the Department of Indian Affairs, Ottawa The Indian Act of Canada (RSC 1989) An Act Incorporating the United Church of Canada (14-15 George V, Assented July 19, 1924 in the House of Commons, Ottawa) The Sexual Sterilization Act of the Province of Alberta (1928) The Sexual Sterilization Act of British Columbia (1933) Report of the Canadian Department of External Affairs, Ottawa (1948) Pldden no Longer: Cenoclde ln Canada, asL and resenL
One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only the truth. Voltaire (1694-1778)