UN to investigate missing and murdered native women (Canada)

[Jeff]

Via Romeo Saganash. ("There are hundreds of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada. Harper isn't acting, so the UN is.")

UN Will Conduct Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada

13 Dec 2011

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has decided to conduct an inquiry into the murders and disappearances of Aboriginal women and girls across Canada. The Committee, composed of 23 independent experts from around the world, is the UN’s main authority on women’s human rights. The Committee’s decision was announced today by Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, President of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), and Sharon McIvor of the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA).

The inquiry procedure is used to investigate what the Committee believes to be very serious violations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. In January and in September 2011, faced with the continuing failures of Canadian governments to take effective action in connection with the murders and disappearances, FAFIA and NWAC requested the Committee to launch an inquiry. Canada has signed on to the treaty, known as the Optional Protocol to the Convention, which authorizes the Committee to investigate allegations of “grave or systematic” violations of the Convention by means of an inquiry. Now that the Committee has formally initiated the inquiry, Canada will be expected to cooperate with the Committee’s investigation.

“FAFIA and NWAC requested this Inquiry because violence against Aboriginal women and girls is a national tragedy that demands immediate and concerted action,” said Jeannette Corbiere Lavell. “Aboriginal women in Canada experience rates of violence 3.5 times higher than non- Aboriginal women, and young Aboriginal women are five times more likely to die of violence. NWAC has documented the disappearances and murders of over 600 Aboriginal women and girls in Canada over about twenty years, and we believe that there may be many more. The response of law enforcement and other government officials has been slow, often dismissive of reports made by family members of missing women, uncoordinated and generally inadequate.”

“These murders and disappearances have their roots in systemic discrimination and in the denial of basic economic and social rights” said Sharon McIvor of FAFIA. “We believe that the CEDAW Committee can play a vital role not only in securing justice for the women and girls who have died or disappeared, but also in preventing future violations, by identifying the action that Canadian governments must take to address the root causes. Canada has not lived up to its obligations under international human rights law to prevent, investigate and remedy violence against Aboriginal women and girls.”

“The Committee carried out an inquiry into similar violations in Mexico five years ago and we expect the process will follow the same lines here in Canada,” said McIvor. “Mexico invited the Committee’s representatives to make an on-site visit and during the visit the representatives interviewed victim’s families, government officials at all levels, and NGOs. The Committee’s report on the inquiry spelled out the steps that Mexico should take regarding the individual cases and the systemic discrimination underlying the violations. Mexican women’s groups say that the Committee’s intervention helped to spur Government action and we hope to see the same result here in Canada, said McIvor.”

For further information, please contact:
Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, President Native Women’s Association of Canada, Tel.: 613-899-2343
Sharon McIvor Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, Tel.: 250-378-7479
For assistance, please contact:
Claudette Dumont-Smith, Executive Director Native Women’s Association of Canada, Tel.: 613-656-3004
Shelagh Day, Chair, Human Rights Committee Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, Tel.: 604-872-0750

http://www.fafia-afai.org/en/news/2011/ ... men-canada

[Harvey]

My spidey sense is tingling. I suspect this story may prove to be a beachhead against the powers that be for many reasons, not least the persistent allegations against the British royal family in Kamloops. While it would be difficult to prove that QE and Phllip visited Kamloops in 1964 they certainly did in 1959 and 1983. The proximity of Robert Pickton et al suggests something much larger may be about to surface.

https://www.richmond-news.com/bc-news/some-first-nations-in-kamloops-say-mass-burial-find-confirms-long-held-beliefs-3820333

Some First Nations in Kamloops say mass burial find confirms long-held beliefs

Mourners are grieving the grisly discovery of the remains of more than 200 children found buried near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, with some in the First Nations community saying the find confirms stories they’d heard for years.

“It’s always been known when we were kids,” Willow George told Castanet Kamloops.

“We knew when we were kids — we knew they were buried, they were put in the river, in the pond, in the furnace. But the number was never known.”

George, whose parents and brothers attended the residential school, formed an impromptu drum circle Friday on Seymour Street with a handful of co-workers.

Nicole Williams, also part of the drum circle, said the discovery validates the trauma she saw first-hand in some relatives.

“Some of our family members never really talked about what happened there,” she said.

“Our tradition was that you weren’t supposed to talk about bad things that happened. That was the way we were taught.”

Williams, who grew up in the Lytton area, said she remembers playing as a child among “the moguls” — mounds in the earth believed to be burial sites for children who died while attending the residential school there.

“My mom would say, ‘All those indents in the woods, those are from the children they buried,’” she said.

“There’s so many.”

In a statement Thursday announcing the discovery, Tk'emlups Chief Rosanne Casimir said the find confirmed long-held beliefs about children dying and being buried at the school. Casimir said the remains of 215 children have been confirmed by ground-penetrating radar.

Williams said she hopes the discovery will help First Nations people take a step forward.

“It’s confirmation of something we already knew,” she said.

“So much has been hidden and it’s starting to come out now. People are starting to understand.”

[dada]

I think this thread belongs close to the top of the board. It could even be pinned to the top. So I'm bumping it back up. I'll post an article that I've shared on another thread somewhere, but could certainly be more widely read, as it is from project censored, and the articles are by definition ranked by being top under reported stories in mass culture media.

#1. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
December 1, 2020

https://www.projectcensored.org/1-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-and-girls/

There are other relevant articles on similar subjects there. Number twenty one is an article titled "The Scourge of Human Trafficking in Yemen."

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

1. Nine year old Vicky Stewart of the Tsimshian nation was killed at the United Church residential school in Edmonton on April 9, 1958 by school matron Ann Knizky, who hit Vicky over the head with a two by four. The RCMP refused to press charges against either Knizky or the United Church, and threatened Vicky`s family with imprisonment if they pursued the matter.
2. Margaret Sepass was raped and then beaten to death by an Anglican priest named John Warner on December 5, 1969, at St. Michael’s Indian school in Alert Bay, British Columbia. Margaret was nine years old. Her burial site is unknown and John Warner was never charged.
3. On January 5, 1938, Albert Gray was beaten to death by Reverend Alfred Caldwell of the United Church of Canada when Albert took a prune from a jar without permission. Albert was eleven years old. His body was buried in secret behind the Ahousat Indian school and Alfred Caldwell was never charged.
4. On December 24, 1946, the same Principal Caldwell kicked 14 year old Maisie Shaw to her death down a flight of stairs at the United Church`s Alberni residential school, as witnessed by Harriett Nahanee. The RCMP covered up the murder.
5. On April 3, 1964, Richard Thomas was sodomized and then strangled to death by Catholic priest Terence McNamara at the Kuper Island Indian school. Richard was buried in secret in an orchard south of the school, and Terence McNamara, who is still alive, was never charged.
6. Elaine Dick, age 6, was kicked to death by a nun in April of 1964 at the Squamish Indian school in Vancouver. The RCMP refused to press charges when requested by the victim`s family.
7. Daniel Kangetok, age 4, was infected with an untreatable virus as part of a Defense Research Board experimental program funded by the Canadian military. He was left to die at the Carcross Anglican residential school in the Yukon, in February of 1971.
8. David Sepass, age 8, was pushed down some stairs by a priest at the Kuper Island catholic school and left to die, early in 1958.
9. A newborn Cree baby was burned alive by a senior priest at the Catholic Muscowegan Indian school near Regina in May of 1944, as witnessed by Irene Favel. The priest was never charged.
10. Susan Ball, age 5, starved to death in a closet at the United Church Edmonton residential school during the winter term of 1959, after being confined there by a church matron for speaking her own language.
11. Pauline Frank, age 8, died from medical experimentation performed by Canadian army researchers at the Nanaimo Indian Hospital in March of 1972. Her body was buried in secret on the grounds of the hospital, which is still restricted military property.
12. Albert Baptiste, age 9, died from electric shocks from a cattle prod wielded by a catholic priest at the Mission residential school over Christmas in 1951.
13. Nancy Joe, age 14, died from involuntary drug testing by military doctors at the Nanaimo Indian hospital in the spring of 1967.
14. Lorraine white, teenager, was gang raped by United Church residential school staff and left to die, Port Alberni, summer of 1971.
15. Eighteen Mohawk children, all under the age of sixteen, were shot to death by Canadian soldiers outside Brantford, Ontario, in the summer of 1943, as witnessed by Rufus McNaughton. The children were buried in secret in a mass grave.
16. Johnny Bingo Dawson, an eyewitness to crimes in Anglican residential schools and a leader of protests against these criminal churches, died of injuries from a police beating after being threatened by them, in Vancouver on December 9, 2009. Official cause of death was alcohol poisoning, despite the absence of alcohol in his blood.
17. Ricky Lavallee, the eyewitness to Bingo’s beating by the Vancouver police, died of a blow to his chest in early January of 2011.
18. William Combes, an eyewitness to the abduction of ten children by Queen Elizabeth from Kamloops Indian school on October 10, 1964, was killed by a lethal injection at St. Paul’s catholic hospital in Vancouver on February 26, 2011.
19. Harriett Nahanee, the first eyewitness to a residential school murder to go public, died after mistreatment in a Vancouver jail, February, 2007.
20. Nora Bernard, the first aboriginal in Canada to sue the Catholic church for residential school crimes, was murdered in December of 2007 on the eve of Canada`s official spin doctoring of the residential school genocide.
… and more than 50,000 others, all of them children.
No-one has ever been charged or tried under Canadian law for any these killings. And the criminal government and churches responsible for this mass murder have been legally absolved of any responsibility for them under Canadian law.
Nothing has been healed. Nothing has been reconciled. Justice has been exterminated as completely as these innocent victims.

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

I should clarify I am not the author of the above post. I saw it on Facebook and decided to share here to also honour the 215 children of the Kamloops residential school and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

[dada]

Leaders say MMIWG National Action Plan ‘falls short’
By Melissa Renwick, Local Journalism Initiative ReporterHa-Shilth-Sa
Tue., June 8, 2021

“We waited two years for an incomplete action plan with no deliverables, no landmarks, no immediate goals, no long-term goals, no timelines, no budget,” Charleson added.

Debbie Scarborough, provincial manager of women and child protection with the BC First Nations Justice Council, echoed Charleson and said the action plan “is not really an action plan.”

“At what point are we actually going to say ‘enough is enough?” she questioned. “We’ve done enough talking. Indigenous people are the most researched people in this country and yet, the most underserved. I’ve [heard] enough talking. This was supposed to be the plan.”

...

Another “concrete plan” is to purchase vans and provide drivers licences through the All Nations Driving Academy. Instead of hitchhiking, women could pick-up other women and children along Highway 16, known as the Highway of Tears, she said.

“Every time I drive home along the highway [of tears], I’m reminded that there’s some girls and some women that are buried out there that have yet to be found and brought home – just like the 215 children in Kamloops,” said Scarborough. “We know that there’s likely hundreds, if not thousands, of other graves at the other sites of residential schools. What will it take for this government to actually invest in an action plan?”

Following a recommendation from the national inquiry, the federal government announced in April that Highway 16 will have cellular coverage along the entire route.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/06/08/leaders-say-mmiwg-national-action-plan-falls-short.html

As Indigenous leaders and advocates await “yet another document,” Scarborough said “Indigenous women and girls are still being killed.”

“I get government, I get process but the final report was two years ago and it wasn’t final,” she said. “Now we have an action plan that isn’t really an action plan. At what point do we just stop and do something?”

Cellular coverage on the highway of tears.

Along the entire route. At what point do we just stop and do something. Good question, I think, in general.

And the answer, I'm afraid, is never. We is the social stasis. We hears you, but does not understand. We might even agree with you, but that doesn't make we just stop, nothing in the world will make we just stop. No big picture, no magic words. No alternatives, no icebergs. We does not brake for anyone.

[Harvey]

"At least 645 bodies, many believed to be children, found in unmarked graves at former residential school in Canada"

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/hundreds-of-bodies-found-in-unmarked-graves-at-former-saskatchewan-residential-school

Hundreds of bodies reported found in unmarked graves at former Saskatchewan residential school

The total number of graves near the former Marieval Indian Residential School is expected to be over three times higher than the 215 discovered recently in Kamloops

OTTAWA – A Saskatchewan First Nation says it has made the “horrific and shocking discovery” of hundreds of unmarked graves — many believed to be children — near a former residential school, with a total expected to be over three times higher than the 215 discovered recently in Kamloops, B.C., according to a source briefed on the file.

Leaders of the Cowessess First Nation, a roughly two hour drive east of Regina, are expected to reveal details of the macabre discovery near what was once the Marieval Indian Residential School during a press conference Thursday morning, as well as the latest count of newly-identified remains.
Canada indigenous mass graves search 'must widen'...

“The number of unmarked graves will be the most significantly substantial to date in Canada,” says an advisory published Wednesday evening by the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, which represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan. The remains are in unmarked graves in a communal gravesite first used in 1885 but eventually taken over by the Marieval Indian Residential School, founded and operated by the Roman Catholic Church beginning in 1899 on what was then the Marieval Reserve.

Administration of the school was handed over to the federal government in 1969 and then the Cowessess First Nation in 1987 before being closed in 1997. Everything but the church, rectory and cemetery was demolished shortly after, according to National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation records. The First Nation teamed up with an underground radar detection team from Saskatchewan Polytechnic to begin the search just over three weeks ago. In an interview in late May, Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme told the Regina Leader-Post that he did not know how many people’s remains might be discovered. It is estimated that only one third of graves are marked.

“The pain is real, the pain is there and the pain hasn’t gone away. As we heal, every Cowessess citizen has a family member in that gravesite. To know there’s some unmarked, it continues the pain,” Delorme told the newspaper, adding that the goal was to “identify, to mark and to build a monument in honouring and recognizing the bodies that lay (there).”

The discovery comes less than a month after the “unthinkable” discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children — some as young as three years old — in unmarked graves near the Kamloops Indian Residential School outside Kamloops, B.C. James Daschuk, a University of Regina health and Indigenous history researcher, applauded chief Delorme’s decision to pursue these searches despite the “horrific” findings likely to emerge.

“As terrible, and I mean absolutely freaking terrible as this is, what we’re seeing is the community taking their story back,” said Daschuk in an interview Wednesday. “I think this is this is going to be a pretty important time for healing for the affected communities. But this should also be a serious time for reflection and then action on that reflection for all Canadians.”

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) determined that at least 3,200 Indigenous children died while attending residential school, and that general practice was “not to send the bodies of students who died at schools to their home communities.”

“Many students who went to residential school never returned. ­They were lost to their families. Th­ey died at rates that were far higher than those experienced by the general school-aged population. ­Their parents were often uninformed of their sickness and death. Th­ey were buried away from their families in long-neglected graves,” reads the 2015 TRC report.

Students at Marieval Indian Residential School were no exception to that, according to information published in Shattering the Silence: The Hidden History of Indian Residential Schools in Saskatchewan, a historical report published by the University of Regina’s faculty of education. For example, reports dating back to 1919 note that authorities expected school staff to “physically dominate students” and that an Indian Agent refused to transfer a student to another school because he feared that “the other boys may form the opinion that the Brother [in charge of discipline at Cowessess] is afraid of the big boys.”

In 1945, the University of Regina report chronicles how a female student’s hair was forcefully cut into a “usual school girl bob” as a punishment for attempting to escape the building to “meet with local boys. Angered by this treatment, the girl’s parents came to the school and withdrew her and her two sisters. An altercation developed between the mother and one of the supervisors” which led to both parents being charged and convicted in court. An Indian Affairs official then threatened to send the student to Reform School if she did not “behave.”

[DrEvil]

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=9941

215 Little Indians: Or, How is Chevron like the Vatican?

“an act … committed for a political, religious, or ideological purpose that is intended to intimidate the public, or a subset of the public … or to compel a person, government or organization (whether inside or outside Canada) from doing or refraining from doing any act, and that intentionally causes one of a number of specified forms of serious harm, such as causing death or serious bodily harm.”

—“Terrorism”, as defined by the Canadian Government


Five days ago, some lunatic in a truck killed four Muslims in London, Ontario. Our glorious leaders lost no time climbing over each other to see who could most loudly denounce the murders as an act of terrorism.

Back in 2008, Canada declared The World Tamil Movement (an entity previously known mainly for earthquake relief efforts and supporting Tamil immigrants) as a “terrorist organization” because of alleged financial support to the Tamil Tigers—despite the fact that no member of the WTM had even been charged with a crime, much less convicted.

The Catholic church has killed, raped, and assaulted thousands during its residence within this nation’s borders. It has a history of torture, murder, and inquisition dating back to the third century. The latest revelation—215 dead children hidden away beneath the soil (from a single residential school—there were over 130 of those, most under Catholic jurisdiction) is bound to be only the tip of the latest iceberg. (Late-breaking update: Oh, speak of the Devil: another mass grave discovered at a residential school in Manitoba.) The church—which continues, surrealistically, to tout itself as a Moral Authority to the rest of us—doesn’t even bother to deny these atrocities, even while it refuses to apologise for them.

An act committed for a political, religious, or ideological purpose, check. Intended to intimidate, check. To compel people to do or refrain, to intentionally cause harm, to cause death or injury check check check. The Vatican’s treatment of Indigenous peoples is a classic example of terrorism as defined by the Canadian government itself.

Four people dead: terrorism. An organization with no criminal warrants at all: terrorist.

Thousands of dead kids with more to come, a generations-long legacy of rape, assault, and murder? Tax-free status, private schools, and a vacuous bobble-head of a PM who bleats about making things right while his own government spends $163.5 million (and counting) fighting court decisions favourable to First Nations. A PM who, even now, proclaims his Catholic identity without any apparent shame.

What could possibly constitute a mitigating factor here? Why have we not banned this odious hate group and thrown its silly-hatted officials into jail? Why haven’t we, at the absolute least, told them to pay some fucking taxes?

A common refrain is to cite all the “good things” the church has done over the years: the counselling, the food banks, the overseas missions[1]. Anyone tempted to run that particular rationale up the flagpole might ask themselves how they’d feel if Ted Bundy, say, had argued Sure I killed all those people, but hey: I volunteered in a soup kitchen! I gave to the March of Dimes!

Another approach is to plead reform, to hang one’s head and say Yes we’ve been bad, we’re sorry about raping and killing all those kids and we’re sorry about our small part in the Sixties Scoop and we’ll do much better going forward— no, seriously, we really mean it this time— so can’t we just let bygones be bygones? Again: imagine any other murderer getting to walk if they just promise they won’t kill any more people in the future. Imagine a murderer getting to walk after he’s already made that promise in the past, and broken it.

A third argument—perhaps the weakest, given that Catholic atrocities extend nigh unto the present day—is that it was a different age: that in hindsight the Inquisition and the Crusades and even the residential schools may not have been among the Church’s finest hours, but they were after all merely a product of their time. It’s unfair to judge those days by modern standards, especially since the modern institution has done so much good. (Ahem.)

Which is an odd defence for an institution which has always exalted itself as the bearer of Eternal Truth. The whole point of Christianity is that God’s laws do not change: they are perpetual, apart from ephemeral community standards. There is no moral relativism. There is Good and there is Evil and the Vatican exists in a sinful world to help the rest of us tell one from the other. To claim now that the Church never really led society but was a mere weathervane, blamelessly reflecting whatever morals happened to be in fashion at the moment? That’s not just a shameless attempt to weasel out of culpability. It raises an existential question: if the Church doesn’t act to better society but merely to reflect it, what the fuck is it for?

None of these arguments strike me as especially compelling. So why are the leaders of this criminal organization still walking around free? Is it because it’s only terrorism if the other guy does it, just another iteration of Nazis and Skin Cream and Gallo’s Humor? Is it because the government realizes that if it starts down that road, it would logically have to declare itself a terrorist organization because of its complicity (scratch that: because of its initiative) in institutionalized acts of violence against Indigenous peoples? Or is it simple inertia: Sure we’d go to town if this was some new cult but Catholicism’s everywhere; way too much trouble to pull it out by the roots. Besides, can we really do without the Catholic vote?

I suspect that’s it. It’s easy to prosecute one racist asshole driving a truck; it’s simple, it doesn’t cost you any votes, it makes you look like a hero fighting on the side of the angels. Changing the very fundamentals of Canadian society? That’s just too much work. It may be ethically laudable—mandatory, even—but let’s get real. It’s not gonna happen.

Why, you might as well talk about weaning the country off Big Oil.

So now you know the answer to the question posed in the title. It is not an answer that bodes well for the future. Because if the one cry that’s supposed to get people off their asses by appealing directly to the brain stem—that visceral, reflexive, refrain Think of the children!—if that isn’t enough to make us even follow the rules we wrote for ourselves, what hope does the planet have?

1) Let us put aside for now the fact that missions such as those run by St. Mother Teresa were charnel-houses of corruption and gratuitous suffering.

So when does the Pope go on the no-fly list?

[conniption]

RT
(embedded links & videos)

Another Canadian church goes up in flames, amid suspicion arson attacks are linked to unmarked graves discoveries

1 Jul, 2021

A historic Alberta church has been destroyed in what many suspect to be the latest arson attack in a string of retaliations for the historic abuse of Canada’s indigenous community by the Catholic Church.

The St. Jean Baptiste church in the town of Morinville was almost entirely destroyed by the fire, which broke out on Wednesday morning. By the time firefighters arrived at the scene, its interior had already begun to collapse, and its basement had been engulfed by flames. Hours later, only a few fragments of its walls remained standing.

“It’s one of the [town’s] largest buildings. It's a very old construction, so an awful lot of wood. It went very quickly and it was a very difficult fire to fight,” said Iain Bushell, the general manager of Morinville’s infrastructure and community services.

Morinville is a community of some 10,600 people about 30km (19 miles) north of Alberta province’s capital, Edmonton. Many had viewed the church as an essential part of the town’s life and legacy – its “heart and soul,” in the words of Mayor Barry Turner. Its construction was completed in 1907 and it was named in honor of Father Jean-Baptiste Morin, who led several Francophone families to the area from Quebec in 1891 and also lent his name to the town itself.

The mayor said he was “confident that our community will respond in a way that we can all be proud of.” However, the city authorities decided to cancel Morinville’s Canada Day celebrations on Thursday in the wake of the fire.

Also on rt.com Two MORE Catholic churches in British Columbia go up in flames amid ‘anger and rage’ over school mass graves

St. Jean Baptiste’s is at least the seventh Catholic church built on First Nation lands across Canada where fire has broken out recently. Officials described the latest blaze as “suspicious,” and many see it as the next link in a chain of hate-motivated attacks.

The crimes are suspected to be connected to the recent discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at sites where Catholic-run residential schools operated in the last century. The system of boarding schools for First Nation children is now perceived as an oppressive and deadly government-backed attempt to eradicate the culture of native Canadians. The latest burial location, comprising 182 graves, was found via underground radar-imaging in British Columbia, with the discovery announced hours after the fire in Morinville.

Also on rt.com Over 180 unmarked graves found at former Catholic school in Canada, indigenous group says, in third such find

“I understand the anger of it,” town resident Robert Proudfoot told RT, adding that he nonetheless condemned the alleged act of hate. “This is not the way to go. And whoever did this arson should maybe think a little bit about what he did here and how he put so many people in danger.”

Some 50 people were evacuated from a former convent located near the burned church that has been converted into residential apartments. The building was damaged by smoke and water as fire brigades from several neighboring towns worked in shifts to contain the blaze.

The Alberta government last week offered financial assistance to religious and cultural organizations that wanted to upgrade their security systems. A suggestion to set up patrols and initiate other protection measures also came from the province’s native community. Grand Chief Arthur Noskey said the offer was not only about helping their Catholic neighbors, but also about digging to the bottom of the injustices his people had suffered.

“These are potential evidence sites,” he told the Toronto Star newspaper. “I know everybody’s hurting and the whole nation is in an uproar, but you know, for us, the truth is coming out.”

https://www.rt.com/news/528080-canada-c ... ted-arson/

~~~

Global Research


First Nations: Why an Apology is Wrong, and Deceptive: Bringing Humanity to Bear on the Residential School Atrocity

By Kevin Annett
Global Research, July 03, 2021
http://www.mohawknationnews.com 25 May 2008
Region: Canada

[print]

First published by Global Research on May 25, 2008.

Author’s Note:

This article below was offered to the Canadian media as an exclusive piece last week, and was rejected or ignored by the following newspapers:

The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Montreal Gazette, The Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, The Ottawa Sun, The Winnipeg Free Press, The Edmonton Sun, The Vancouver Sun, The Province, The Alberni Valley Times, The Epoch Times, and the Victoria Times Colonist:

Rend your hearts, and not your garments Joel 2:17

Kevin Arnett, May 25, 2008

***

All major newspapers in Canada refused to publish the truth regarding the residential schools as conveyed by Rev. Kevin Arnett. We are reposting this important article on Canada Day 2021.

Let us reflect on our history and how our history has been the object of censorship and distortion (including online censorship and the manipulation of search engines)

Please forward Kevin Arnett’s article far and wide,

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, Canada Day 2021


***

Imagine for a moment that your own child goes missing and never comes home. Years pass, and one day, the person responsible for your child’s death is identified, but he evades arrest and imprisonment simply by issuing to you an “apology” for your loss. He even speaks of seeking “reconciliation” with you.

How would you feel?

Hold on to that feeling, and now multiply your loss by many thousands of children, and make the guilty person the government and churches of Canada. Do so, and you will have arrived in a human way at the Indian Residential Schools atrocity.

One of my former parishioners put it another way:

“What we did to those native children was an abomination, and abominations aren’t resolved with words and money. We need to have our hearts torn in two and be changed. We’ve got to stand, ourselves, under the judgment of God.”

I doubt that Stephen Harper would be satisfied with an apology if his own kids were hauled off and killed for being practicing Christians. Yet on June 11, 2008, he will stand up on our behalf and try to apologize to other nations for having exterminated their children.

The whole effort seems more than ludicrous, or obscene. One cannot, after all, apologize to the dead. But the truth is, the government’s planned “apology” to native people is an enormous exercise in deception – primarily self-deception.

Do we even know the meaning of that easily uttered term, “apologize”?

It actually has a double meaning, according to the internet Dictionary: a) “an acknowledgment of regret for a fault or offense” and b) “a formal justification, defense or excuse for one’s actions”.

That is, in our vernacular understanding of the term, an “apology” can be a genuine regret for one’s acts; but it can equally be a way to evade responsibility for one’s acts, by justifying oneself before one’s victim.

The legal understanding of the word, however, is more specific, and has nothing to do with regret: “apology” is defined simply as “a disclaimer of intentional error or offense”.

A disclaimer.

Now, I’m assuming that the government of Canada relies on legal definitions – operating, as it claims, “under the rule of law” – rather than popularly understood ones. So we must realize that when the government and its Prime Minister uses the term “apology”, its understanding of the word is the legal one: namely, “a disclaimer of intentional error or offense”.

In other words, on June 11, Stephen Harper will issue to the world a disclaimer to the effect that the Indian Residential Schools were not an intentional offense.

It’s not surprising that the Prime Minister will be making such an outrageous and unsupportable claim, since if he ever admitted that the residential schools were intentional, he’d be the first defendant in the dock at an international war crimes trial.

But more important, this effort by our government – and the churches it is protecting – to be absolved of their own crimes is taking place under the illusory pretense of making amends with native people, when its purpose is simply to legally exonerate itself of culpability for the deaths of thousands of children.

This, indeed, has been the norm for both church and state ever since the first lawsuit was launched by residential school survivors in February of 1996. An army of court scholars and legal experts has generated a mountain of “holocaust denial” at every level of Canadian society during the past dozen years, to convince the world that the daily death and torture at the residential schools was not intentional at all.

Such an “apologetic” agenda defies logic and common sense, as in the statements from the government’s misnamed “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” scholars that, while evidence shows that residential school children were being buried “four or five to a grave”, and that the death rate in these schools stayed constant at fifty percent for over forty years, these deaths were “not intended”.

To believe that, one has to ignore the evidence of senior government officials like Dr. Peter Bryce, who found that children were regularly being “deliberately exposed to communicable diseases” in residential schools, and left to die untreated. The word Bryce used was “deliberately”. How else, after all, do so many children die?

All of this legal hoop jumping and evasion of responsibility might make sense to the government, and pay the salaries of their intellectual mercenaries, but it does nothing to advance the cause of truth telling and humanity in Canada, and snuffs out the lives of our victims ever more quickly.

I know this all too well, having spent most of my waking hours for years as a counsellor, advocate and chronicler for many aboriginal survivors of the death camps we like to call residential schools. And what I’ve learned from such work is that we cannot come to grips with something that we don’t understand.

The truth is, Euro-Canadian society still doesn’t understand what these “schools” were, either at a “head” or a “heart” level. If one believes the officers of the churches and government, the residential schools “issue” is all about money and verbal gymnastics. Yet none of these officials, as far as I know, have broken down and wept in public over the deaths of so many innocent ones; nor have they even offered to return their remains to their families for a proper burial.

Oddly enough, the very same officials continually and glibly speak about “healing the past”, without even knowing their own history, and about “solutions” to the “residential school problem”, as if they understand what that problem is – not realizing that, to quote William Shakespeare, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

For in truth, there is not now, nor has there ever been, an “Indian problem” in Canada. Rather, the problem is a “white” one. The problem is with us.

I won’t point to collapsing eco-systems or troops in Afghanistan to prove this point. Nor need I pose the paradox of how educated men and women, with families of their own and a professed “Christian morality”, could drive needles through infants’ tongues at Indian residential schools, throw three year olds down stairs, sterilize healthy kids, and deliberately allow children to cough their lives away from tuberculosis, and then bury them in secret graves.

The evidence of the problem is more immediate, and far closer to home, in our continued segregation of aboriginal people into a lower standard of humanity that allows them to die at a rate fifteen times greater than other people of this country.

After all, if we Canadians are who we imagine ourselves to be – an enlightened society that “assimilated” native people into our ranks, and made them our equals – then why has not a single person ever been brought to trial for the death of a residential school child? Why is the disappearance of tens of thousands of native children in these schools not the subject of a major criminal investigation? And why is there an Indian Act, and not an Irish or an Italian Act?

Being, in reality, an unofficially apartheid society that operates, in practice, with two standards of justice – one for native people, and one for the rest of us – Canada can no more cure the legacy of the residential schools than it can stop chewing up the earth for short-term comfort and profit. At least, not this side of a fundamental moral and social revolution.

The fact that we are far from such a change struck home to me a few months ago when the the government’s fraudulent “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” announced that, although criminal acts did indeed occur in the residential schools, there would be no criminal investigation of these schools: an unbelievably brazen subversion of justice that evoked not a murmur of protest in the media or among the good citizens and politicians of Canada.

Regardless of this, there are things that can be done to overcome the genocidal residential schools legacy, and do justice, for once, to the survivors.

Rather than issuing verbal and self-serving “apologies” which change nothing, or staging a sham “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” that has no power even to subpoena evidence, the government and all of us could take these kind of bold measures:

1. Declare an Official Nation-wide Day of Mourning for Residential School Victims, dead and living.

2. Fully disclose what happened in the residential schools – naming the crimes, the perpetrators, and the cover-up – by launching an International War Crimes Tribunal with the power to subpoena, arrest and prosecute those responsible.

3. Bring home the remains of all children who died in these schools for a proper burial, and establish public memorial sites for them.

4. Create National Aboriginal Holocaust Museums.

5. End federal tax exemption for the Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, in accordance with the Nuremburg Legal Principles concerning organizations complicit in crimes against humanity.

6. Abolish the Indian Act and Indian and Northern Affairs.

7. Recognize indigenous sovereignty and return all stolen lands and resources to indigenous nations.

An Irish relative once told me that the way her country is evolving away from eight centuries of warfare is through a simple formula:

“First you remember; then you grieve; then you heal”.

Instead of skipping the first two steps, as Mr. Harper and too many of our people are trying to do “apologetically”, it is time that Canadians found the courage to truly remember and admit to the world what we did to the first peoples of this land, and grieve our actions in the manner of people who truly rend their own hearts and want to change.

Perhaps then “healing and reconciliation” can become something more than an overworked political catch-phrase.

Kevin Annett is a community minister in Vancouver who is the author of two books on Indian Residential Schools and an award-winning film maker.

Posted by MNN Mohawk Nation News http://www.mohawknationnews.com
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/first-nat ... ocity/9066

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