Sarah J. Miller is the pseudonym of an award-winning syndicated journalist. In her words,

“I’m assuming an uncharacteristic anonymity in this case because of threats made against me if I proceeded with an investigative piece about Reverend Annett. Such warnings actually perked my curiosity about the man and the shit storm surrounding him.”

I had been prepared to distrust the quiet, intense man who sat across from me, not only because most people I know expected me to.

Zealots of any variety are sowers of unhappiness, and from most of what I had read about him, Reverend Kevin Annett is a latter day John Brown, seeking the downfall of all of official society in his determined quest for justice for the violated. And frankly, I just don’t like clergy persons, including the defrocked brand, for “once a black robe, always a black robe”, from my experience.

And yet the man before me didn’t match my prejudice, especially when he began to speak. He does so calmly and gently, with a confident logic based on hard and compelling evidence garnered from years of research.

Rumors to the contrary, Kevin Annett is neither crazy, nor a charlatan. He is someone, rather, who bears a shocking truth that most Canadians, understandably, do not want to hear.

My pleasant surprise at the man’s unexpected demeanor and the intelligent clarity of his words made me realize right off the bat that everything I had been told and fearfully warned about Kevin Annett was unfounded: a fact that made me want to learn more.

A second look at my subject reminded me of the Vietnam veterans I had come to know during my fledgling days as a greenhorn reporter: someone bearing the kind of war-weariness and “thousand yard gaze” that says more than words ever can.

Kevin talks like a battlefield veteran, with regular references to fallen buddies and unrelenting attacks. But his aura is not weighted down by any kind of post traumatic reactions that I can see, despite the brutal personal savaging he has been put through over the years. He is not a bitter or a vengeful man, although he has enough cause to be.

My own positive vibe from the quietly graying man with an irrepressible smile made the professional journalist in me play hard ball with him.

“So why do people call you crazy?” I asked him provocatively, nudging my pocket recorder towards him.

He smiled.

“I guess it must seem crazy to take on the government of Canada and its churches”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“Well, that wasn’t my original plan. Don’t forget, the United Church went after me first”

“That cost you your family” I offered.

His deep brown eyes showed a brush of sadness for the first time, and he nodded.

“Was it worth it?”

“Not for me, or my daughters” he replied. “But for a hell of a lot of other people, it was”

I stared at the documents spread before me, showing how half of the children at Alberta Indian residential schools had died in one school term; and at a Canadian law from 1933 allowing any Indian to be sexually sterilized.

“Why did nobody know about all this?” I asked him, holding up a document.

“They did” he replied laconically, gesturing to a photocopied article from a November 15, 1907 issue of The Ottawa Citizen that described the enormous death rate in the Indian schools.

“But the churches are acknowledging this now …” I said.

“No, they’re not” Kevin replied, his eyes suddenly hard. “They’ve been forced by us to admit that children died, but they claim it wasn’t from deliberate intent. Like, 50,000 deaths were somehow accidental”

“They murdered them, is that your line?”

“There’s lots of ways to kill off Indians. The preferred method in the rez schools was deliberate exposure to TB and smallpox.”

I felt a strange vexation just then, an angry unacceptance that must have been obvious to my interviewee, for he smiled again as he saw my expression.

“So what do you want?” I exclaimed, trying to sound calm.

“Something that won’t happen in this country. Justice”

“Meaning?”

“Prison terms for church officials. A war crimes trial. Returning the children’s remains, first of all, for a proper burial”

I’d read all of that from his websites, and I knew he was alone in demanding such things. All of Canada, it seems, is content with issuing an apology for what is undeniable genocide – including the aboriginal chiefs. I asked Kevin why he thought that was.

“It’s convenient. Canadians will bear any amount of corruption or murder rather than face anything unpleasant, or controversial. And as for the national chiefs, well …”

Again, that ironic smile, and the piercing turn of phrase.

“There’s always been Around the Fort Natives. You know, the AFN”

The conversation was frustrating me. I wanted to know more about the man, and what allowed him to endure what he has.

“You’re not a very well liked guy” I said.

“That depends who you talk to”

“Look, Kevin, you can’t get a job. You’re a pariah. You’re castigated every day over the internet with some new smear. I think you called yourself a social leper, in your film. Most polite society avoids you like the plague. A lot of powerful players seem determined to shut you up.”

He said nothing as I uttered the obvious.

“So tell me. What’s it like to be banned?”

He smiled at my reference to South African apartheid.

“Seriously” I continued.

He took a moment, and then muttered,

“Very lonely”

Kevin looked out the window at the puffy clouds hovering over Vancouver’s north shore mountains.

“For a long time, I expected a Hollywood ending to all this” he continued frankly. “You know, I’d be vindicated, all the assholes would go to jail after admitting everything, and all my friends would recover. I had to wake up to the way things are. It’s been a long process”

“Waking up?”

“Yeah, to what we’re really a part of. To how these crimes never stop, they just shift location. To how I’m going to go through this shit until the day I die.”

“How does that feel?”

He gave me a long, penetrating stare.

“Indescribable”

“Try”

He shook his head sadly. The room grew very silent.

“I interviewed Leonard Peltier a few times” I offered, trying to break the log jam. “He said it didn’t matter that he was in prison, because everywhere’s a prison for him and his people.”

“That’s about it” Kevin replied, nodding. “But he has the advantage of being an obvious target. I’m a white guy, a former church insider. My imprisonment isn’t so obvious.”

“Oh, I don’t know” I shot back. “Your case is broadcasted all over the world.”

“That really hasn’t helped me, not practically. Anybody who gets too close to me is eliminated, especially if they have pull”

“What do you mean, eliminated?”

“Killed off, if they’re aboriginal. Scared off or bought off, if they’re white”

Kevin proceeded to list off an impressive array of names of lawyers, scholars, and even politicians who had once sponsored his work or come to his aid, and then inexplicably dropped away from his campaign. What I’d been told by a confidential source in the RCMP confirmed a lot of what he was claiming.

“I’ve been told you’re definitely on the fed’s shit list” I ventured.

“You should try telling your newspaper colleagues that, because they won’t believe me”

I shook my head and leaned towards him to emphasize my point.

“It’s not that they don’t believe you, Reverend. They can’t do anything about it, and they know when to avoid a story.”

“No shit”

“There’s just no percentage in backing a whistle blower and giving him a lot of exposure, not unless their target is about to crack. Trust me, I’ve interviewed enough of them” I said.

“So what’s the usual outcome?” he asked me.

“For somebody like you? Exactly what you’re going through” I proclaimed.

He pondered for a minute, and then said,

“The thing is, I’ve already beaten them. I feel like I’ve won”

“Won what?”

“I survived all they could throw at me. I brought out this truth and forced them to respond. I did the right thing and I helped save lives. That’s enough of a victory.”

I doubted he believed what he was saying, knowing something of his character. I told him so.

“So tell me what you really think” I said to him.

“Okay. I feel like I’ve been smashed into the ground and nothing is ever going to stop those fuckers from raping and killing more children whenever the hell they want. I feel stupid for having even tried taking them on. Some days, it’s like, I made a big fucking mistake. I wish I could go back and make a different choice. But I can’t. I’m stuck with my choice, and I’ve got to make the best of it.”

“But in your film you said you’d do it all over again if you had to”

“Of course I would”

“Then, I don’t get it …”

“Neither do I” he said curtly.

After laughing together, I asked him,

“So David didn’t beat Goliath this time?”

“I don’t think he ever does. Maybe it’s not about beating him, but ignoring him”

“How do we do that?”

“Stop paying him taxes and voting for him, for starters. Stop buying his useless shit and going to his bloody churches”

“Are people doing that?” I asked.

“I think so. Here and there. I’m hoping we reach a critical mass of non-cooperation before it’s too late for all of us”

“Did you used to preach like this?” I asked him.

“Not at first. I was trying to be a minister, at first. But yeah, eventually.”

“Do you miss that old life?”

There’s a long pause in our conversation then, for Kevin couldn’t reply. I thought he was going to break down, for the tears welled up in his eyes, and he looked away, embarrassed. I remember turning off the recorder respectfully.

At the time, his reply mattered to me, but it’s strangely unimportant to me now, maybe because it’s so obvious.

I have never been able to say how much of a person’s life I’ve been able to accurately represent in my writing, and whether what I call a story is not just my own yarn, seeking an echo somewhere.

What I can say is how completely shaken I was by my encounter with Kevin Annett. Beyond and beneath all the words and the deep resonation of his character, he left me with a sense of heroic tragedy that I have rarely encountered, even amidst wars and revolutions. The term “lonely courage” says something of the man and his nobility, but there is much more to him and his quest. I would dare to call it an epic.

Kevin was the one to excuse himself, after speaking to me for a few hours. A friend of his needed help of a sort he wasn’t free to describe, but he did allude that the fellow was homeless and without a friend – except, of course, Kevin himself.

I am an agnostic, and rarely do I hold out hope for anything like salvation to pull us from the hell we’ve created for ourselves. But I have indeed met someone I can genuinely claim is a man of god: banned from our midst, to be where he is meant to be, as one despised and feared by those who know him not, and shunned by those who should know better, and yet beloved by the lost and neglected ones; and thus, by all of who and what he is, making a new chance for the rest of us possible.

Nevertheless, outside their crumbling home they’ve proudly erected a “Mitt Romney” election sign.

“We always bin good Republicans” explains Terry, who like most Americans is open and welcoming to strangers: even a nosy Canuck on a bike. “We got to turn the country ‘round.”

I asked him how Mitt would do that.

“He’s one of us” Terry replied, puffing on a remnant of a butt. “Not like that coon in the white house.”

I inquired of Terry whether he knew that Mitt Romney wants to cancel the food stamp program and medicare, and encourage landlords to foreclose on people who can’t pay their rent.

Terry shrugged.

“Whatever’ll help the economy”

I looked at his hovel, and then at him. He didn’t seem to figure himself or his family into the picture.

Terry isn’t that unusual. He reminds me a lot of the stumbling aboriginal woman I once handed a leaflet to outside Vancouver’s Catholic cathedral as she tried hurrying into its morning mass.

“What you got against the church?” she bellowed at me.

“Well, it caused the death of a lot of your people …”

“Ah, bullshit!” she exclaimed. “We was all savages back then!”

I expected to dislike what I encountered this month in Florida, awash as it is in the gyrations of Republican politicians in heat as they hustle votes for the upcoming Primary from people like Terry. But it was all too familiar to me.

The beaches here are empty, except for Canadians and other odd sorts who dare to dip into the Atlantic at this time of year. The Gulf Stream must have a problem, for the ocean is colder than a banker’s heart. But the locals still act like every day’s a pause before summer, and they see the world laconically, like Yankees do, as either right or wrong.

I blame the Puritans for that, but I admire their simplicity.

Mitt Romney knows his audience, and he speaks in simple language, like any successful politician does. He may be a Mormon and a bland sort of bloke who tells shitty jokes, but he’s the favored son down here because of his pigment, at least among folks like Terry.

Meanwhile, down the street from Terry is a big housing complex filled entirely with black families who are just as destitute as he is.

I tried biking in there to see what people thought of the Republican Primary, but before I’d advanced a dozen yards two young dudes approached me suspiciously, and asked me where the fuck I thought I was going.

“Just looking” I replied.

“Lookin’? You lookin’?” one of them said, reaching for something in his pocket.

“Naw” I answered, and sped away quite rapidly.

I didn’t see a Mitt Romney sign anywhere in that particular black ghetto, or any election signs, for that matter.

Frazzled, I biked along a nearby drainage ditch surrounded by the lush tropical foliage that’s everywhere, and watched the alligator turtles slither their prehistoric tails in the garbage-covered slough. I stopped to get a closer look, and imbibe the humid quiet, when a cop car drove bumpily towards me along the grass, its light flashing.

“Hey” said the young cop as he approached me, his hand on his holster.

“Hi” I replied.

“You live heah?”

“Well, I’m visiting my Dad, in there” I replied, pointing to the senior’s complex across the slough.

“Canadan?” he said, grimacing, as I nodded. “You better watch youself ‘round heah”

He must have known that Canadians listen attentively when a cop speaks, for he simply nodded goodbye and left after the opaque warning.

I gave a couple of sermons while I was in Florida, in local churches whose ministers are buggering off somewhere. The pew crowd seemed to like me, especially when I ventured into politics; not because they agreed with me, but because they’re Americans. Speaking your mind is as much a religion down here as obeying the law is in Canada.

After one of the services, an older white man came up to me and remarked,

“What you said about the Seminoles, hiding in the Everglades to survive. They did that to a lot of our people, you know. Wiped ‘em out mostly, then stuck’ em in those camps, like in Canada.”

“Are you native?” I asked him, curious.

“Scots Irish. The original savages” he smiled.

I asked him how he was going to vote in the Primary.

“Thought I’d write my own name on the ballot” he answered. “I can do a better job than any of those jokers.”

He saw me smile, and added,

“I’m serious. It’s time the people ran this country.”

We were conversing over coffee in the church hall, in the small Gulf resort town called Bradenton. The place is miniscule, but even here, there’s a local Occupy group that’s planning to sit in at City Hall next week.

If you believe every network on the television, life in America these days is about choosing between a rich white guy and a rich semi-black guy who are basically saying the same thing. You’re either a Republican or a Democrat. There is nothing else, and no room for you, as a partisan of either team, to offer criticism of your All Star, or suggest another possibility. That’s what’s Primary: getting behind your Team.

But shut off the Sleep Machine, and step out under the heavens, and you realize that what everybody on the ground is really saying without words is that they know the entire Game is already over; they just don’t know what to do about the score.

Even Terry.

Just before I peddled away from the guy’s place in relative disgust, Terry surprised me. The man stepped towards me, holding on tightly to one of his youngest daughter’s scrubby little hands, and he shook his head and remarked,

“Not that I trust any of ‘em. They just is all we got.”

Rise like lions, after slumber, in unvanquishable number; Shake your chains to earth like dew, which in sleep had fallen on you. You are many; they are few.
- Percy Shelley, 1815

Dear friends,
Recently, I was told that your months-old invitation to me to preach to your congregation on February 5 has been withdrawn because of the alleged protests of two unidentified “native men”, who claim that I, a Euro-Canadian, am not competent and have no right to speak about the genocide inflicted by my people on aboriginal children.
I’ll leave aside, for the moment, the perplexing question of how two unnamed people who are not from your congregation can unilaterally censor and ban a guest preacher on the basis of innuendo and hearsay – especially within a liberal church that prides itself on its progressiveness. Let’s look instead at the heart of the accusation against me, which is that I am “trying to speak for native people”, to quote one of these faceless, alleged critics.
It’s not a new charge, but like all lies, it’s one devoid of any substance.
A man who confronts the rape of women isn’t trying to speak for victims: he’s attempting to stop and uproot male supremacy and violence. I don’t have to be a Jew, and certainly am not trying to be one, when I investigate and condemn Hitler’s slaughter of European Jewry. And America’s civil rights movement would have failed had not those from the white society stood arm in arm with black people and defeated Jim Crow laws.
Frankly, it’s only when those from the guilty culture open the lid on their own crimes that the latter have any hope of being dealt with: a truth that the Nuremberg indictments proved to posterity.
Despite my having been adopted into and given a name by elders of three indigenous nations, and my authorization by these elders of the Mohawks, the Anishnabe and the Squamish nations to investigate and speak publicly about the murder of their relatives in Christian internment camps, I have never tried nor claimed to speak for or represent native people, or the survivors of our home-grown genocide. For almost twenty years, I have done the opposite, and that is, to expose and confront the crimes of my own people, and my former denomination.
Since 1993, I’ve done so relentlessly, without pay or recognition, and in the face of enormous personal loss and unrelenting attacks by church and state.
I’ve personally interviewed over a thousand survivors of the residential schools holocaust, published their stories in books and film, brought their cases to court, counseled and stood by those native men and women when their own “leaders” refused to do so, presided at their funerals, and created a public storm aimed at mainstream Canada, all so that the survivors themselves could find their own voice and win justice on their own terms.
Anyone who has witnessed my work up close, or who follows my story, knows this to be true.
Sometimes, I’ve been accused of being “crazy” for doing this work, and daring to show that children died at the hands of publicly-funded Catholic and Protestant churches. Since none of the many documents, eyewitness testimonies, and forensic remains from Indian residential school graves that I’ve publicized are imagined, and since this evidence clearly confirms what I’ve been claiming, I’ll leave it to you to decide who is the one being “delusional” when my critics deny these realities, and choose instead to try to discredit me with name calling.
In truth, my most recent critics who contacted you are not among those who have witnessed firsthand what I have uncovered and who I am. Like those who stand to lose by my exposure of mainstream North America’s crimes against humanity, they seek to disparage me from a distance, using rumor, innuendo and outright lies to convince unsuspecting people that I am an unstable, nefarious creature, out to profit from and exploit battered residential school survivors – without ever offering any evidence.
Again, this is not a recent slander. It was actually cooked up in the summer of 1998 by David Iverson, a national officer with the United Church of Canada, along with Inspector Peter Montague of the “E” Division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver, who launched the dirty tricks campaign against me which is still in operation, as we can see from the recent fiasco at your church.
This black ops campaign to discredit me began after I had brought to light the complicity of government-funded aboriginal chiefs in the present-day sexual trafficking of their native children: “chiefs” who are indispensable to the Canadian government in signing away the lands and resources of their own people.
The homogenous thing called “Indians” is a colonial invention, and not all native people stand against the genocidal actions of church and state on this continent. Some, indeed, profit very well by their allegiance to the very system that slaughtered and imprisons their people. That’s always how the European scheme of Divide and Conquer has worked.
So it isn’t too much of a surprise when state-funded, affluent native politicians, who as children often helped abuse and discipline their fellow students in residential schools, come out so strongly against me and my efforts to expose the real story of these crimes. For in any North American equivalent of a Nuremberg Tribunal, these aboriginals, as well as “white” church and government officials, will be standing in the dock of judgment.
These collaborating Indians, including the Assembly of First Nations and other puppet groups, will have to explain at such a Tribunal why they never indicted Canada and Christendom for the slaughter of their own people – and why they personally profited off that slaughter, and the selling off and desecration of their peoples’ ancestral lands.
To quote one of my sponsors, elder Bill Squire of the sovereign Mohawk Nation of the Grand River in Brantford, Ontario:

It’s not the whites who are the big problem anymore, but our own leaders. The chiefs and band councils have not once helped us bring home the kids murdered at residential school for a proper burial. They are never there when we’re in front of the bulldozers, trying to save what’s left of our land. They’re paid by the feds to sit there and do nothing. The time for that is over.

Your precipitous action in suddenly excluding me from your midst will have an impact beyond simply censoring an inconvenient truth. For, as an adopted member of Bill Squire’s Grand River Mohawk community, I do not speak and act alone, but operate under the protection of that nation, as was affirmed publicly last year when I was given by them the name Rawennatshani, “He who warns the people with a strong and wise voice”. And so your decision to censor and stop my efforts to share the truth of the holocaust made against the Mohawk people is also directed against their nation, who are an affiliated part of our global campaign known as The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State. (www.itccs.org)
If we are to ever end the terrible legacy of racism and genocide, we must surrender the false divisions and labels that separate humanity, and discover again the common ground that unites us all. We, the settler nations who planned and committed the biggest genocide in human history, and who still conceal it, are precisely the ones who must take responsibility for it. That is my purpose, and the intention of our International Tribunal.
Unfortunately, your action in censoring this topic from your church because of an anonymous complaint is setting back any serious effort to hold our culture accountable under moral and international law. You have indeed avoided such accountability under the guise of a dubious “political correctness” – an absurd fallacy, really – that claims that only Indians can address this issue.
I have welcomed a broad-based aboriginal involvement in my work and our campaign from the beginning. Unfortunately, none of the “professionals” in the native world – Indian lawyers, academics, and politicians – have readily taken up this invitation, and challenge. On the contrary, these largely government-paid aboriginal elites have shied away from seriously confronting church and state for their crimes, or standing with the residential school survivors themselves. When these professionals begin to do so, I will take their remarks and criticisms of me and my work more seriously.
Until then, I urge you to take the hard but necessary step of looking at the evidence of deliberate genocide by your culture, and religion, and undergo the spiritual and social transformation that alone can bring about justice and genuine recovery from this horrible legacy.
I welcome you in this effort, for in truth, it is an exciting opportunity for we as the heirs of a dark tradition to cast off that legacy, and reinvent ourselves according to the Great Law of Peace: specifically, through the Two Row Wampum Treaty of Equality to share the land in harmony, that was offered by the indigenous nations to our ancestors when they first arrived on this continent.
As one who has been commissioned by the Onkwehon:we (Mohawk) and Haudenosonee (Iroquois) nations to share this Great Law with my own people, I offer it to you today in friendship, and I invite you to step out of the past, towards a new allegiance, and a new identity.
Sincerely,
Rev. Kevin D. Annett – Eagle Strong Voice

By Kevin D. Annett

Ricky Lavallie is dead.

He was a 51 year old native man, and was the sole witness to the murder by three Vancouver policemen of another key aboriginal activist in our network, Johnny Bingo Dawson.

The sudden death of Ricky Lavallie on January 3 has wiped out the last of my original core supporters among urban native people in Vancouver and Winnipeg. Our original nucleus of the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (FRD) has been extinguished.

In barely two years, all of our strongest activists, and those who forced the missing residential schools children into national and world consciousness, have died: Chief Louis Daniels, Elder Phillipa Ryan, Johnny Bingo Dawson, William Combes, Harry Wilson, and now Ricky Lavallie.

These deaths follow on the earlier, equally sudden demise of key eyewitnesses to murders in Indian residential schools: Archie Frank, Willie Sport, Joe Sylvester, Virginia Baptiste, Nora Bernard, and Harriet Nahanee.

These witnesses, and the dead native leaders of our FRD, were instrumental in publicly naming the churches and government of Canada as being guilty of crimes against humanity. And they have all paid the ultimate price for doing so.

I charge these religious and state organizations with their murders.

I charge the E Division of the RCMP with complicity in these deaths, along with the head officers of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

In the case of Ricky Lavallie, I charge the Vancouver Police Department with complicity in his death. For I have two separate videotaped testimonies of Ricky from last August, in which he states that a Vancouver police sergeant threatened him with imprisonment and death if he continued to speak about his witnessing of the deadly beating of Bingo Dawson by the same sergeant and two other Vancouver cops on December 6, 2009.

I have written the following obituary and tribute to my friend Ricky, for his steadfast courage and devotion to the missing children. I hope and pray, as always, that some of the spirit of such a brave soul will pass into us, and help us all awaken from complicity.
Let us see and name the murders still happening, and bring down those responsible.
Otherwise, how are we any better than they are?
……………………………………………………………………..

Ricky Lavallie: May 20, 1960- January 3, 2012

His tears flowed so easily whenever he remembered how his five year old brother was killed by a catholic priest bearing an electric cattle prod at the Portage la Prairie residential school in 1968. He carried the terror of that day with him at every moment, for he refused to numbly forget. But nevertheless, Ricky Lavallie was always at my side at every rally and vigil outside churches across Vancouver, and he never wavered.

I lost more than a friend in Ricky, but a brother warrior: one who could have created the usual excuses of most people to stay away from all of our righteous confrontations with cops and priests down the years, as we battled impossibly for disclosure and justice. Rick more than anyone had enough cause to hide, but he never did.

I once marched with Ricky and only eight other people down one of Vancouver’s busiest streets during rush hour traffic, bearing the banner that he clung to like his memories: “All the Children Need a Proper Burial”.

As passersby gawked at our little army, and cars lurched to a stop to let us pass, I turned to Ricky and said,

“How are we doing, Rick?”

He smiled, which was rare, and shouted cheerfully,

“We’re doing great!”

Ricky was the one who walked with me to the front of a church sanctuary during a busy mass, as we occupied the main catholic cathedral in Vancouver on Palm Sunday in 2007. I recall how he gazed solidly at the priest who was berating and threatening us, and said quietly to the red faced idiot,

“When are you gonna give me back my brother’s body?”

Before we were banned from the airwaves of the former “Vancouver Co-op Radio” – now a muzzled subsidiary of the corporate Pattison Media Group – Ricky regularly regaled our listeners with life on the streets, his time in the death camp called residential school, and with his latest song, strummed out on a three strong guitar we kept lying around the studio. But his best moments were with his fellow survivors of church torture, when they faltered on the air and broke down in the flood of dark remembrances that he carried and endured so nobly.

“That’s okay, we’ll get those bastards” he’d say softly to a man or woman amidst their sobs, placing a large and tender arm around them. And then he’d shout into the microphone,

“Screw those churches!”

We did get those bastards, again and again, and Ricky showed me in the flesh how and why his kind are inheriting the earth. He was the kind of man who no bribe and no threat could stop: and so, even now, he hasn’t been stopped.

Ricky’s great joy, of course, was that he was a central character in our documentary film Unrepentant. Just to know that his story and that of his brother were now known to millions of people around the world seemed to make up for all that he had lost. Whenever he saw me on the grimy streets of East Hastings he’d lumber over to me and ask for another few copies of our film.

“They can’t ignore us anymore, right?” he’d exclaim.

The last time I ever saw Ricky was in October, during the Occupy Vancouver encampment. My friend spent his days there leafleting mostly indifferent occupiers about the residential schools genocide, and he never stopped talking about his murdered brother to anyone who would listen.

From there, one day, he led a dozen people on a Sunday morning to the same cathedral he had helped occupy that bright Sunday in 2007, and he stood almost alone in the face of dozens of burly Knights of Columbus and the usual brutal phalanx of cops who try so pathetically to guard the church from Judgement.

Ricky Lavallie left the world in such a spirit, as he had lived: resolute and unbroken and truthful, despite his scars, and his deep fears.

It’s never enough to write about another fallen hero, or to remember him, or even to continue on in the sacred work he died for. The long sadness, the lengthening shadow of aloneness among we fewer and fewer veterans of this campaign, is never lessened by the bright light of their example. But somehow we carry on anyway, like Ricky, remembering, as he always did, all of the little ones who suffered and died, and the ones who will tomorrow if we let go of our banner, or our memories.

Ricky Lavallie. He is present.

Ricky Lavallie (left) with Siyam ©Kiapilano™ and Kevin Annett (right)

Remembering the Canadian Holocaust

]]> http://kevinannett.com/2012/01/23/is-it-nothing-to-you-another-hero-falls-ricky-lavallie-1960-2012/feed/ 0 http://kevinannett.com/2012/01/05/waking-up-to-what-we-are-and-what-we-can-be-thoughts-on-this-week%e2%80%99s-latest-panic/ http://kevinannett.com/2012/01/05/waking-up-to-what-we-are-and-what-we-can-be-thoughts-on-this-week%e2%80%99s-latest-panic/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:27:32 +0000 admin http://kevinannett.com/?p=131

When our adversary loses his liberties, it’s called justice. When we lose ours, it’s called dictatorship.  – Ammon Henacy

I’ve been advised by people apparently in the know that America officially became a police state this past week, with the passing of President Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Meanwhile, across the waters, friends in Ireland have just denounced in righteous indignation the convening of “secret courts” of the Roman Catholic Church to investigate itself for raping children, and silence in-house stool pigeons in the process.

Well now, that’s all a big surprise.

I guess the outraged internet commentators who tremble and bemoan the repercussions of the NDAA have never heard about that great liberator Abraham Lincoln’s “emergency measure” laws during the U.S. civil war, whereby he shut down opposition newspapers, jailed dissenters without trial or habeas corpus, and ran the country like a one man fief.

And what’s so new about there being one law for us, and another for child-killing priests? Secret church courts? Yeah, I’ve been there.

I often think that the degree of our moral outrage at injustice is directly proportional to the degree of our own ignorance and naivety about the kind of culture we live in, and loyally maintain: one that has been built on and thrives upon the crushing oppression of all sorts of people by both church and state, here at home and abroad.

The only problem these days, it seems, is that such an iron hand is now starting to descend on the lives of certain privileged, bourgeois, dare I say “white” folks: a fact that’s supposed to get us all concerned. I mean, we can’t have our rights violated now, can we?

I’ve seen friends killed by cops, thrown from their homes, blacklisted into suicide and legally robbed of everything by official agents of law and order. Most of these people were dark skinned, or poor, or simply alone. And all during their torture, nobody complained about how their fate marked the commencing of totalitarianism in our midst.

Ah, but those were just isolated individuals, you might reply. These new police state laws affect everybody. Well listen up, dummy: how did you think those laws we now face were able to come about, except by what was happening first to all of my friends, while you all stood by and looked the other way? They were the trial runs, the test cases. And now it’s your turn.

If not poetic justice, you could call it historical inevitability.

I helped make this present sorry mess happen, too, of course. I was only shaken out of some of my own complicity when I experienced the big boot of church tyrants who tried and sentenced me to public execution in a secret ecclesiastical court that no law could touch. The Attorney General for British Columbia even said so, in a letter to me: “The internal disciplinary processes of the United Church are outside the jurisdiction of this department (read: the law)”. I told the world about that particular tyranny, and nobody cared, starting with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and every lawyer in sight.

I don’t carry much of a grudge anymore about all that cruelty, regardless of how it destroyed my life, because it opened my eyes. It put me on a higher and necessary path and purpose. So I counsel all of today’s chicken littles who see the sky crashing down on their little world at the hands of that evil Mr. Obama to realize that Big Brother is actually giving all of you a rare gift, and an opportunity: to know how the rest of us live.

Be that as it may, another advantage of all this unusual honesty by the state in so openly declaring its monstrous nature is that it puts more and more of us in the same boat. Our ranks are swelling with some very pissed off people. Like any naked act of terror, the NDAA and other such assaults is creating a new generation of freedom fighters where once resided mere bubble headed techno serfs. So I thank Obama, really, for his efforts at sharpening the minds and the love of liberty in so many erstwhile complicit Americans.

As for his counterparts in the hierarchy of that even more ancient tyranny called Roman Catholicism, all those pathetic priestly turds are the best thing that’s happened for secular humanism and free thinking since the days of Martin Luther. I hear that some of the Irish are so outraged at these secret church courts that they’re planning on invading their sessions and trashing them, and putting the child-raping priests on trial in common law courts of their own making.

And being Irish, you can bet your brogans they’ll do it, too.

Man, I love tyranny. I love repressive laws. They’re the whip that awakens a slumbering humanity, and forces us to know what matters, and what we must do.

One of the guys that made the American Revolution and its Republic, and whose words would undoubtedly qualify him for arrest and secret trial by the present U.S. government, was good old Thomas Paine. Battling exactly the same tyranny that grips America today, and facing the same odds as we do, Tom Paine exhorted the stumbling and weary veterans at Valley Forge with these words, born of misery and oppression:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly …

And …

An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. For such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing. I love the man who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. So if there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.

Now is the time, friends. Take strength from the blows, walk not in fear, especially of one another, and stand as one now, in our great company of ancestors who were not those of timid disposition.

Are we not ready?

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 night, and at the faces of those who died and that which was revealed.

Billie Combes was killed in a Vancouver hospital on February 26, having spoken too readily of the royal Thing that abducted forever ten children from a Christian internment camp in Kamloops.

Billie was a stumbling man of fifty seven, long lived for a street Indian, and he cried so easily whenever he remembered his internment, and the little ones he could never save. The last time I ever saw him, he actually smiled, and told me that I was his friend.

The crowned Thing Billie named barred me from England on May 29 with the kind of cold efficiency that once made it ruler of our planet. It gazed at me through the thick, banal lenses of a Border Agency cop who didn’t even smile at the jokes I cracked.

The African woman and her baby who shared my immigration prison cell weren’t laughing that night, either. Both of them were quietly crying. The world ends like this, says the poet T.S. Eliot: not with a bang, but a whimper.

Equally muffled cries arose from the hardened soil that I turned on November 21, near to the death house called the Mush Hole Indian residential school, built by the crowned Thing in 1832. I held in my hands the bones of unknown children on that day as one world ended, and another began.

Those three moments – the truth, the silencing, and the lonely vindication – blaze at me as this year ends, and we all wonder what 2012 will bring: not so much to remind me of the way things are, as to mark the termination of that whole trapped arrangement.

The lesson that it is all over has been yelping at me for some years now, and not because of a Mayan calendar. Frankly, I’ve been too intent on gnawing at the bare bones of injustice to notice what the lesson has been saying. Perhaps it was Billie’s death that paused my efforts, and made me able to recognize what finally came to rest in my hands – and what it all means.

I’ve done a lot of funerals over the years, and I’ve enjoyed most of them because of their inescapable honesty. The official mourners often seem mildly ashamed at their secret joy, of breathing while another lies dead in front of them, but what matters is that not one of them can deny what has happened. They all know the truth, and have to deal with it, somehow. Such are birthing moments.

The corpse makes them realize life, and its fragile perfection. Something is enlargened in them by facing death, and that awareness denies fear a place to enter, for in their mourning, there is vanquished the illusory hope that permits lies to take root.

Endings are what we mortals live for, because they define us. They are our most sacred encounters, for they sum up everything.

My Gaelic ancestors have a word for this summing up: Caoineadh, “the beautiful song”, which was traditionally sung at a chieftain’s funeral by hereditary mourners known as “keeners”.

The public wailing of these women was in fact the telling of the chieftain’s life story: his victories and his defeats, his character, and the purpose of his being. As his life was recounted, the soul – which was said to hover over its corpse for three days – took comfort and strength from the lessons of this latest life, for its next journey to another incarnation.

The stereotypical Irish wake – a happy drunk fest, according to British Imperial detractors – was in truth the pinnacle of community joy, for in their shared lament, everyone played a part in the completion of the cosmic cycle of one life, in the re-birthing of a soul imbued with wisdom and grace.

Their mourning was in fact the first gasping breath of a new existence.

That’s how I see our situation as 2012 dawns.

Typically, our attention as a people has been on everything but ourselves: on the Mayan cycle, or other people’s prophecies, and not on our own. Yet everything in us speaks a simple truth, known to us away from the clatter of life and our own worry, and that is this: we cannot be born into the new world awaiting us, because we have not yet learned that we have already died.

Our modern western world is like a wandering spirit that knows not that is has passed on, and is trapped and terrified in an illusory limbo world. It is small wonder that the Nuu-chah-nulth people where I live first called us Europeans the “mu multh nees”: ghost people.

We have been such a people for some time – but in our deep fear and denial of death, of what we have become, we have been blind to ourselves.

It’s hardly an accident that as our Christian culture became more psychotic and blood soaked over the centuries, its fear of death multiplied, for we see the world not as it is, but as we are.

Much as modern America’s terrorist-obsessed mind has no escape but in more violence because it sees everyone as a reflection of its own terror, the western world spawned by a “catholic” church that tried to murder Christ and his way can no longer know the life that comes after death. And so we can only fear and deny the fact that we have already died.

I’m not mistaken that we as a people are not simply dying, but are already dead. And here’s the simple proof.

A people who are alive respond with outrage, and action, when the lives of their children are threatened. They rush to protect the future generation. They cannot live alongside that which murders or rapes them.

Similarly, a people who are alive defend their natural world and its sacred bounty and health, for their very existence depends on their doing so.

On the other hand, a people who have died do not respond to any of these threats, for they feel nothing. They cannot perform the most basic steps of self-preservation. They simply function, like parts of an unthinking machine, just as we are doing: but in our case, our actions as a culture all seem designed to actually ensure our own final destruction.

That is who and what we have become: denizens of Necropolis – the City of the Dead, which sucks the vitality out of all life on our planet. And the more we impact our world, the quicker the death we embody spreads, toxifying and radiating our world. And what we do to ourselves in the material world is an expression of a spiritual death that long preceded it.

How can we awaken our collective self – our higher mind – to our own death? By lamenting. We can sing to ourselves our own Caoineadh, the beautiful recounting of who we were and what we did in our life as a people – and how we came to die. And then our hovering soul will know it is time to release, and move on.

Tonight, I awakened to the fact that this is precisely what I’ve been doing since 1995: counseling my own people through their death agony by telling the tale of how something called European Christendom caused its own destruction, and those it conquered.

I called it an exorcism when I stood outside the Vatican on two occasions and compelled a dead spirit to depart from there. But then, as now, I was simply singing the same requiem ritual to that which is finally awakening to its own demise.

So what does all this mean for us now, on the first day of a momentous new year?

For nearly twenty years, I have described and documented the crimes of my people, and brought them to the world. And yet ultimately, all of these efforts have fallen on deaf hearts and ears: those of the dead.

There is no public reaction to all the evidence of murder and torture of children by church and state, because there can be no response that actually stops the crime from happening again. We have finally recognized what we are a part of: soulless institutions of the Lie, that have no heart or purpose save self-perpetuation. And so now, to quote one of my friends, it is time to “Leave the dead to bury the dead”.

It is time to let go of everything, and allow our collective self to dream its being into a new life, and begin all over again.

So I’m not worrying anymore about proving to the world that Mohawk children were murdered and buried on the grounds of the Brantford Anglican school. We know it happened. So does the Crown and Church of England, who caused the slaughter.

Instead, I am resolved to dismantle both of those institutions, and all those like them, so that they can do no more harm. Only thus can we awaken their inhabitants to their dead condition, and allow their souls to move on.

To do so, we don’t need another Tribunal, or an Inquiry into the obvious. For even with such an inquiry and its final proof that those who rule this society are mass killers, who would impose on these guilty groups any sentence? How can we enforce our verdict on the Genocide, without wielding our own force to make justice real?

We are faced, ultimately, with a question of power, and who wields it. We need therefore a spiritual and a political revolution, from the bottom up, to reinvent society so that the City of Death is no more.

To replenish itself, the land lies fallow every few years. So too must we now let go of a murderous social disorder to allow ourselves to regenerate, and build a culture based on the Great Law of peace and equality.

Thus, at the same time as we stop paying taxes and voting away our autonomy, and sever our economic involvement with society, we reclaim that stolen by a few, beginning with the land and our families. From the ground up, we fashion a republic of spiritual and social Equals in harmony with the earth.

So I turn my back on Canada, and its churches, and its corporate oligarchy, as I call you to do too, and on the City of Death wherever you encounter it.

I pledge myself in this year of 2012 to help begin our new life as a people whose allegiance is the Natural Law, by reclaiming our minds, our land, and our people from the death they have dwelt in for too long.

Now is the time for poets and bards to sing our captive hearts into a new reality, and for our true warriors to overthrow Necropolis and establish justice in the land, and the Natural Order.

We have sought fruitlessly for humanity from institutions that have none. Their time is over, and they will fall at our hands.

As Chippewa native elder Del Riley said recently,

“These churches that killed our people will not be allowed to legally operate on our territories anymore.”

The spiritual reclamation, and the material, has begun. And as that unfolds, the children who died, and those like Billie Combes who died in their defense, will begin to rest. But not before.

“Your wound is incurable, your injury beyond healing … But I will restore you to health, and heal your wounds’, says the Lord your God” – Jeremiah 30

Kevin

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 your secret is at risk, or anything. Even if somebody in your church developed a conscience and started spilling their guts about the Mush Hole, who are people going to believe: one disgruntled employee, or the entire Church of England?

So take a valium and some egg nog, Bob. Figure heads like you are supposed to remain calm at all times, and keep control of the narrative – in this case, concerning those missing 50,000 Indian children who passed through the tender mercies of your system on their one way trip to the bone yard. They all died of natural causes, don’t forget. They ran away. Maybe their records can’t be found. Hell, maybe they were even abducted by aliens.

Meanwhile, don’t forget, you have the best public relations boys in the business to rely on, and their sure-fire method called the Inoculation.
It got started just yesterday on the CBC, which ran a big program on national television about the mass graves of children in Canada.

Now don’t shit yourself, Bob, they weren’t referring to the Indian residential schools, but the kids struck down by the Spanish flu in 1919. That was long, long ago. So don’t worry – our fellow pale Canadians got the message, loud and clear: massive numbers of dead kids in Canada is the result of an act of nature, and disease – not deliberate killing.

We’ve been inoculated now: prepared, conditioned, and molded in our responses. So the Mush Hole bones won’t seem so bad when they fully surface: “Mass graves? Oh yeah, I heard about that … probably the flu …”

It always works. Surely you of all people should know that, Bob. Besides, our November 21 public announcement of the discovery of probable children’s bones at your Anglican residential school in Brantford didn’t exactly cause a ripple of shock or protest anywhere here in lovely Canada. But still, you and your friends in government must be worried, to shoot us full of scandal-prevention serum like that, and just before Christmas.

After all, those little bones are exposed now, Bob, slip ups do happen, and not all of us are immunized to the bullshit. So I really do get why you’re perched these days so fretfully in your London, Ontario office astride those piles of documents about the Mush Hole. I hope you’re getting out for air, occasionally.

But I do know the score, Bob, and I realize that as a Bishop, you can conceal any evidence you like of a crime scene, and even shred it to your heart’s delight. Fred Hiltz, your big boss in Toronto, even said so the other day, when he declared that even he, the Primate (I love that term) for all Anglicans in Canada, couldn’t order you to release those documents. Fred answers to Lizzie Brit herself, Bob, and she is the Crown, after all. So that means you’re above and beyond the law.

So what is all the worry about?

I’ll tell you what. Leona Moses spilled the beans to me last month when I sat down in her home in Oshweken, on the scrap of land you guys have left her and her fellow Mohawks.

You remember Leona, Bob. She worked for your Huron Diocese as a researcher in 1999, until she and her co-worker, Wendy Fletcher, were both gagged for ten years by your church after they started talking about what they uncovered. Leona was told never to talk about what she’d seen in your archives: especially one particular document she found.

It seems that, back in 1870, your church signed a formal agreement with the puppet chiefs set up by your Crown to wipe out all the Mohawks by incarcerating their children in the Mush Hole residential school. It’s signed and sealed, in a document issued by the Crown and the New England Company, who set up the school. And it’s accompanied by a whack of letters proving that you guys and the Crown knew that children were dying en masse in the place, and you did nothing about it.

Of course, why would you? That was all in the game plan.

Now that’s what I’d call a smoking gun. But that particular document vanished, according to Leona, and ended up in something you call “the
G 20 black box”.

So, Bob, the whole world wonders: where is this black box? And what else is tucked away in there?

In my teenage years, I got a real kick watching on TV former US President Big Dick Nixon sweat and lie to Congress about all the incriminating tapes and evidence he didn’t have in his possession. I like to think you’re closeted away in your drab office in the same manner, scowling and paranoid like old Dick, barking at subordinates and telling them to find a way to fix everything. But I know that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

Instead, I’m sure you’re preaching to your flock this Sunday on reconciliation and healing, or whatever.

But that black box is still in your sanctum sanctorum somewhere, Bob, just itching to be explored. And I bet that even part of you is wanting it aired. Nobody, after all, is completely iniquitous. Isn’t that what you guys teach?

Old Scrooge’s delight that glorious Christmas morning when he had found himself again, and reveled like the child we all are inside once he found it so easy to do the right thing, always struck me to the core, whenever it expressed itself in old movies or from the faded pages of my father’s Dickens collection. I laughed and I cried with Scrooge, when he discovered the real joy of the season. Just like I will laugh and will cry with you, one day, Bob.

It was Tiny Tim who said it all, in the Dickens tale. And I hear his words whisper up through the grounds of the Mush Hole, where so many other innocents lie, mangled and forgotten, almost lost to us.

You can help revive them, Bob. You can do the right thing. All you need to do is to come outside, and open all the locked and forbidden places, and secrets, and beg all those little ones for forgiveness – by telling the truth, and awaiting history’s judgment on you, and those like you.

But you’ll likely need a midnight visit by three ghosts, first. Or even 50,000 of them.

Season’s salutations,
Kevin

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 recently lifted it from the soil near the former Anglican Indian school in Brantford: that the first of Canada’s Disappeared – the missing and murdered residential school children – have begun to come home.

Canada and its churches tried for decades to bury and forget the bone, and the other remains of the 50,000 and more children who died in their residential “schools”. And when these innocents’ deaths could no longer be denied, the same guilty parties distracted us from their foul deed with “reconciliation” babble and a whitewashing “truth and reconciliation commission” that has not once turned over the soil at a residential school grave.

That’s all about to change, in a way that most of us have yet to realize.

For one thing, once this bone, or others, are positively identified as human, the entire Indian residential schools issue becomes no longer a matter of public platitudes about “healing”, but of a massive crime scene. Every possible church record and grave site connected to a residential school will have to be opened and examined by competent specialists – and that does not and cannot mean the RCMP, police or any agent of the Crown or church, who are, after all, complicit in the crime.

The opening of these graves, in other words, will require and compel us to reinvent Canada, transforming it from an agent of the Crown and its church partners to a sovereign Republic with the power to prosecute historic agents of genocide, such as, in the Brantford case, the Church of England and its head, Elizabeth Windsor.

Most mainstream Canadians want such a change to a Republic, anyway: 58% of them, in the latest national poll. And what better issue to ignite such sovereignty than the need to bring comfort and justice to innocent children who died at our hands?

Some of the good people in southern Ontario have already taken such a step by forming something called Not in Our Name!(Non!): a community network that wants to rally support for the excavations at the local residential school authorized by Mohawk elders recently, that I have helped to organize. But Non! is more than that. To quote one of its statements,

We are sickened and outraged by the acts of the Anglican, Catholic and United churches … For generations, our ancestors have been lied to and fooled by these churches and the crown to fund the slaughter of native people, our friends and neighbors. They have killed children in our name and continue to profit from their crime by not paying taxes and having we, the taxpayers, foot their legal bills! … The churches must instead account for their crimes not with words, or money, but by giving up their right to operate as protected corporations above the law … We must take back our churches and our culture by returning the land and wealth they stole from the original people, and disestablishing their right to operate as anything larger than individual congregations. Perhaps that will allow moral as well as material reparations to murdered children …

Non! could spell the death knell of the church corporations that have evaded justice for so long, simply because it’s a movement emerging from within the churches themselves. One of the Non! organizers is a retired clergyman who actually left the church over its cover up of the residential schools massacre: a man who, like me, was pilloried and persecuted for his stand, but, unlike me, has chosen to stay silent about what happened to him. Until now.

Our excavations at the Anglican Indian school in Brantford are waiting for the new year, and more research, to resume, but already, three other indigenous nations have asked me to come and help them begin similar digs at their local Indian residential school mass graves.

Meanwhile, Non! is spreading as well, and setting up similar groups across the country. “White” Canadians, it seems, are switching their allegiance, and laying the basis for a sovereign nation capable of facing its past crimes and present possibilities. It all seems to echo the words of a Mohawk elder whom I’ve come to befriend and respect, Bill Squire, who said to me last week,

Once we bring home our murdered children we’ve acted as a real nation, saying, this is our crime site. And then we’re going to put Canada on trial.

Bill Squire will get his chance this spring, when a European Union parliamentary committee will hear and see the forensic proof of the dead children at the Brantford school – and much more. Canada could then face sanctions, and an international war crimes tribunal. And it will all be thanks to a small bone fragment, and many more like it, that you and I and many others will bring to light, by saying our Non!, loudly and clearly, and through action.

Welcome to the Republic of Kanata.

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: one from a small child, other bones being once part of a young boy or girl in their teens. Although I more than any of my people knew the truth of what those fragments represent, still, it was not quite real to me over the years that I wrote and spoke and protested about the missing and slaughtered children. Somewhere in me I still hoped that it was not true at all. But no longer.

It is undeniable to me now, and from my firm knowing the whole world will come to know.

And it all begins, always, like this: as a single collision of raw bones on flesh, like a light rippling outwards to burst open all the hidden places, and graves.

……………………………………………………………………

On November 28, an archaeologist confirmed that it was the bones of children that we had unearthed during the previous week.

I first stood over the mass graves of children at Canada’s oldest Christian internment camp – our people like to call them “Indian residential schools” – four years ago, during a lecture tour to Brantford, Ontario. This past month, I have been part of the team there that for the first time in our history has unearthed the bones of children killed in the name of Christ by churches that are still above the law.

I am working with the Onkwehonwe people, called Mohawks, who have never signed a treaty with Canada or surrendered their nationhood – but whose children were carted off at gun point to die en masse at the Church of England’s “Mohawk Institute”, called the Mush Hole by survivors. On November 21, the dead began to come home.

After offering words of prayer in Mohawk that morning, our team had just broken the soil in the woods fifty yards from the former “school” when the first bones appeared, not even two feet under the ground. We all stopped our digging, as what turned out to be part of the thigh bone of a small child was carefully brushed clean, photographed, and lifted gently from the earth. Alongside it rested other bone fragments, from a wrist, and a spine, small and fragile, along with a horde of small ivory buttons, bits of children’s shoes, and everywhere, mounds of charcoal.

“Why all the charcoal?” someone asked.

“They burned the bodies in the school furnace” replied a survivor who had gone there.

Further examination of the bones showed that several of them had been cut long ways with a sharp device. The chopped up little bodies, along with the ashes and charcoal that had incinerated them, were obviously dumped in the woods from somewhere else, for they all lay close to the surface.

I didn’t sleep that night, or very much during that first week of our excavations, for the complete indifference of Canadian media and the public to our horrible discovery was weighing on me. This matter of fact attitude to genocide in our midst was summed up for me by a letter from 1948, written by the Mush Hole Principal and Anglican clergyman Zimmerman to his predecessor, in which he blithely commented,

“Due to austerity measures, we are burying children two to a grave.”

Zimmerman never had to explain why so many children were dying in his prison, any more than he was ever tried for his serial raping of the kids who did survive – and for the same reason that the Anglican church will never be asked in Parliament, or in Canadian editorial pages, why its employees were cutting up the remains of dead Mohawk children and scattering the bits in mass graves.

The other side’s casualties in war are never worth mentioning, because they don’t matter.

Auschwitz was a relocation center, not a death camp; its inmates were sanitized, not gassed; and the millions of brown skinned people on this continent were civilized and assimilated by us, not murdered. That’s the way the Master Race fable goes, and Canada is the stuff of Imperial myth that endures on the bones and ashes I handled this week, even when the body parts are finally brought to light.

Not just the innocent, but we ourselves were buried in mounds like those surrounding the Mush Hole, for our capacity to understand ourselves is still as interred as the remaining hordes of children who will never be known, or given a proper burial.

We don’t understand, for instance, that the children whose remains I held today were victims of the longest war in history – Christianity and its offshoot societies versus the indigenous nations – and the latter’s extermination rate of roughly 90% across this continent was the worst massacre in human history.

They didn’t die from what Minister of Aboriginal Affairs John Duncan absurdly calls “an education policy gone wrong”, for children at the Mush Hole never received much formal education. They were targeted for eradication, one way or another, in the Just War of Civilization against Savagery: and their death was therefore not a crime, or a moral wrong, which is why so few Canadians, regardless of their politics, contacted us after we broadcast the truth about those little human bones at the Mush Hole.

Why should we care, after all? The gradual extinction of “lesser” peoples by our system is an imperative, even a religious commandment, in our culture. Genocide has not only been an accepted and lawful tool of state, and religion, but it is even seen as a law of nature by our people.

Take Charles Darwin, for instance, who like all educated European Christians, looked to the extermination of other races as the precursor to any progress. In The Descent of Man, published a year before Canada’s Indian Act was created in 1872, he wrote,
“At some future period not very distant as measured in centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

Last year, Prime Minister Harper made reference to the “inevitable adaptation” of native people in Canada to the status quo. Pick your euphemism. The message is the same: Adapt, or die.

It’s been a nearly twenty year journey for me to come to the Mush Hole grounds and its scattered bones of our victims – and to the point where I have shed any illusion that uncovering this crime will change the Thing that caused it. Not a single reporter came to our press conference that announced our findings, or quoted our historic discovery. And no Anglican official will go to jail for what happened to the Mohawk children.

And, perhaps more to the point, you, the reader, will soon turn to another item in this newspaper, and move on.

It’s said that we owe respect to the living, but to the dead, we owe only the truth. But I say something more. To the future generations, we owe justice: and a world free of child killers hiding behind religion – a world, in truth, which can only manifest from somewhere other than ourselves.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Post script: After the Opening, the Dead Remain

Over the long years, there was a single hope that made each new defeat and betrayal possible for me to bear – a single refrain, echoed by me and those few who chose to care, and that was: “Once we open those children’s graves, the world will have to notice, and finally care”.

And now, we have opened the graves, and proved they hold the remains of children. We broadcast it to the world yesterday. And today, no-one called.

I misunderstood something about my people, by thinking the dead matter to them.

I knew already that the fate of children is of no concern to us, drenched as we are in the fear and loathing of our own innocence. But even more basic, the dead are nothing to us because they represent the past. For what possible connection can there be, asks the proud, momentary leaf, between me and the root that spawned the tree?

My ancestors came to this continent to escape history, which meant to try to flee from ourselves. And in so doing, we ended up a people without memory.

I stood yesterday in front of a crowd of very young “radicals” at the Occupy Toronto camp on the grounds of the city hall where exactly twenty years ago, I spent my late nights as a street chaplain bringing coffee and my own illusions to the heaps of dying men and women who slept in their dozens on the hot air grates there. Ironically, the Occupiers spoke that day of exhibiting “solidarity” towards those now dead Indians who once slept where they now rallied with the proud assurance of those who know they have the answer to it all. So I took the Occupiers at their word, and I held up to them a piece of a child’s leg bone.

I explained where it had come from, and how Anglican Christians had raped and slaughtered this child, then chopped her or him up into bloody bits and tossed their bones in a ditch. I asked them to help us bring this crime to light, and stop those responsible.
The radicals stared at me, unmoved. A few of them blinked uncomprehendingly. Nobody applauded, or came up to me afterwards … no, actually, one of them did, to remark gloomily,

“That really messed with my head …”

I don’t blame them. They’re the fruit of amnesia. They don’t know what to do with their past, or its present outcome, because, quite simply, it’s all too horrible.

After this non-response in Toronto, I returned to the Mohawks, who are in no better shape, basically, except that they are not total strangers to their root, and so are not yet entirely crazy. But they seemed to avoid the dead just as much that night, in their own way, and turned to their own laughter and busyness rather than gaze out the Kanata Centre window, as I did, at the single mass grave that is this land.

“Lighten up, Kev” one of them offered to me, and perhaps I should have, if I could somehow forget the unendurable weight of that tiny piece of bone in my hand.

I’m sure I will, someday, once my efforts have slammed enough times against the fact that the Greeks called nihilio, the great Nothing. For to quote a battle-wisened soldier in The Thin Red Line,

“They want you either dead, or in their lie.”

Which one will it be for you, now that you know?