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Singing a Farewell Lament to Ourselves at the End of a World, and at the Birth of Another: Understanding 2012
New Year’s Eve in Nanaimo, as the rain falls quietly on a year’s memories, and on an unhurried dawn. The old adage is true, it seems: that as we age, the years come and go more quickly, but so do the lessons of our life. Tonight, they crowd me as I gaze out at the [...]
Why do Primates Kill their own Kind? A Christmas Epistle to Anglican Archbishop Fred Hiltz
Dear Fred, You may have heard of Crazy Walter, since he collapsed the pomp and dignity of one of your predecessors on a memorable spring day in 1990, at the Vancouver seminary I attended. Walt went on to a street corner preaching in Toronto and the kind of insane joy so unfamiliar to the Church [...]
‘Tis the Season to be Brain Dead, but Listen up Anyway: A Holiday Message and an Invitation to Anglican Bishop Bob (“The Shredder”) Bennett and other assorted Scrooges
Dear Bob, I hear you’ve told all your staff they’ll be fired if they talk to anyone about the documents you’re sitting on, concerning your Mush Hole Indian residential school where we’ve been unearthing tiny bones that are likely human. That’s pretty harsh, Bob. It is Christmas, after all. And it’s not as if [...]
The Bone that Could Change Everything: A Time to End our Complicity in Murder, and Reinvent Canada
by Kevin D. Annett The tiny bone weighs hardly anything, and yet it is the weightiest evidence in Canadian history. The forensic specialists are nearly definite that it’s the upper thigh bone of a small child, maybe four or five years old. This month, their tests will confirm what I felt was true when I [...]
The Mush Hole Missing Children Investigation
Why two kids to a grave doesn’t matter: More than innocence is buried To have come so far, and suffered so much, to finally hold the reason for it all in my hand. The truth has become as immediately hard and real as these brown bone shards themselves, from a hip, a leg, a spine: [...]
Nativity
The last Christmas we were all together hangs over memory like the fog did that year in the Alberni valley. It was a time of gathering, two years and more of labor summoning so many together where once there were but a few. And it was a time of ending. The church stewards had warned [...]
Remembering What Cannot Be, yet Which Must Be
As a boy in Winnipeg, it was a day when I could show off in my boy scout uniform for all the girls, and we got the day off from school; so it was indeed a memorable time. But exactly what and who I was to remember on November 11 never was clear to me, [...]
An Open Letter to John “what corpses?” Duncan from Kevin Annett – Rawennatshani
News Item: Ottawa, Canada - October 28, 2011: Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan claims Indian residential schools “were not genocide” but “an education policy gone wrong” Dear John, So what’s the problem, boyo? Was it laundry day in Ottawa, or something? I mean, why would you stand up all naked like that in public and [...]
Public Notice of Enforcement of Eviction Order and Right of Entry issued against the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, and the United Church of Canada by hereditary Siyam ©Kiapilanoq/CAPILANO™ of the Sovereign ©Skwxwú7mesh/Squamish™ Government
Duly registered and entered in the Vancouver Registry of the “Supreme Court of British Columbia”, Docket S036483, on March 4, 2008 Let all people know That under the hereditary land law jurisdiction of the Sovereign ©Skwxwú7mesh/Squamish™ people, the corporations known as the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada were evicted from the territory [...]
Let the Truth Shine Now, so that the Dead may Rest: An Open Letter of Clarification from Rawennatshani – Kevin Annett
I am Rawennatshani, an adopted member of the Turtle clan of the Onkwehonwe Nation of the Grand River. My English name is Kevin Annett and my ancestral name is Caoimhin Ui Niall of the Gaelic Nation, Clan O’Neill. I ask that the blessings and presence of my ancestors, and yours, guide my words to you [...]