Your Crime is Not Diminished by Time, or Apology:
Why Nothing has Changed for Victims of Church Torture, or for the Victimizers
By Rev. Kevin D. Annett
It’s worse now, because I’m supposed to be healed. They get away with everything and I’m still here on the corner.
Bingo, a homeless native survivor of Catholic Indian Residential schools, Vancouver, August 10, 2009
Here in Canada, I have an odd déjà vu feeling these days that I’m working again on the Intensive Ward of the UBC Psychiatric Hospital, except somehow the patients have taken over.
It’s a feeling that’s reinforced whenever a smiling government or church official announces that the residential school era has “finally found closure” now that a few words have been uttered, and a bit of money thrown around. Somehow, these guys mistakenly believe that their liability and guilt as been diminished by their lawyers.
To stay sane, I stay close to people like Bingo and the many thousands of others who imagine they survived the electric shocks, the beatings, the sodomizing and starvation and tortures that were daily residential school life. It was official policy in Canada to destroy innocent children. Probably one hundred thousand children died at the hands of priests and nuns and other clergy, and their minions, many of whom still walk around free.
“Then I saw the priest take that little baby and throw him into the furnace. I heard a little cry and heard his body go pop in the flames. We weren’t ever supposed to tell.”
Irene Favel saw the burning alive of a newborn baby in the summer of 1944, not in Auschwitz, but in Lestock, Saskatchewan, at the Muscowequan Catholic Indian school. And she described it live on a national CBC television broadcast on July 3, 2008.
After the broadcast, no-one protested, save a handful. No outraged editorials responded with passion or appeal. No church official was ever charged or brought to trial.
In May of this year, an aboriginal woman named Charlotte Stewart and her sister Beryl held a press conference in Vancouver where they described watching their sister Vicky, age nine, get murdered in Edmonton by a United Church residential school employee named Ann Knizky.
“We want the United Church held responsible” said Charlotte to the two reporters who showed up.
“We want this woman brought to trial and the church to admit what happened. Vicky needs a memorial site so she won’t be forgotten.”
The church said all the predictably correct words, in a letter to Charlotte a month later, written only after the Stewarts threatened church officials with a lawsuit. But no-one is being held responsible, and the police are refusing to investigate.
On a national scale, this protection of perpetrators has been guaranteed by the Canadian government’s refusal to bring criminal charges against the churches for their killing of all those children. And the same guilty churches have even helped to choose the “Truth and Reconciliation” commissioners who will pretend to “investigate” the residential schools while promising that no names will be named or wrongdoing reported.
This kind of miscarriage of justice is called “healing and reconciliation” in Canada.
I won’t ask the obvious question anymore, which is how can church and state get away so easily with such a huge and monstrous crime. We know exactly how. The question is not even why might makes right, or how religion can sanctify murder, for history teaches us why.
Instead, what is suddenly confronting all of us, including the Pope and the Queen of England, is the realization that we cannot escape ourselves, or our own history.
We try to evade ourselves, of course, all the time. Many Canadians now really believe that we have somehow made better what happened at our hands to Indians, as if money and words ever heal anything. For every lawyer-crafted “apology”, every bit of hush money doled out anonymously, is designed to do something more basic than protect blood-soaked institutions, and that is simply to continue our own self-deception.
You don’t have to stand next to a residential school survivor, or a United Church clergyman, for more than five minutes to know that nothing has changed, for any of us. The survivor is still as crushed as ever, and the clergyman is just as stupidly self-justifying. And little Vicky Stewart still lies, unavenged and unremembered, in the cold earth.
And yet while nothing really has changed for us, the truth is finally out there, like a pesky virus in our body politic, threatening to germinate in our soul and change us.
Jesus once compared the kingdom of heaven to a tiny mustard seed, a very strange but compelling metaphor, since such a seed transforms any garden into a mass of weeds that chokes out all other contenders. The truth is like that, which is why we fear it so.
Nothing has been resolved, or reconciled, or healed. The churches and governments that planned and carried out horrible crimes against children are still as liable and guilty as they ever were, regardless of “compensation” and court-ordered gag orders. Native people continue to die in droves, and their land keeps being stolen. And it is the simple job of anyone who knows and love the truth to say and show this to the criminal parties, and dislocate them.
I watched with wondrous joy this summer when thousands of Irish men and women crowded the streets of Dublin with their outrage that the church could absolve itself, and be absolved, of its violence and murder against children. And I wait, and wait, for Canadians or Americans to demonstrate a similar clarity and courage.
And yet we can reverse our complicity, simply by understanding, and declaring, that the residential school crimes are not resolved, that the process of justice, cleansing and moral accounting has just begun, and that the churches and governments and persons responsible for genocide must and will be brought to public trial and sentencing.
We did so at Nuremburg, against other people. Can we do it now, against ourselves? And by doing so, find ourselves again?
…………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Kevin Annett is a former minister with the United Church of Canada who was fired without cause in 1995 when he questioned the church over its killing of children in its Alberni Indian residential school. He is the author of two books and the co-producer of an award-winning documentary film on genocide in Canada. He is the Secretary of The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared, and lives and works with aboriginal and low-income people as a community educator and minister in Vancouver, Canada.
For more information contact Kevin at: hiddenfromhistory@yahoo.ca or through his website at: www.hiddenfromhistory.org
Kevin Annett
260 Kennedy St.
Nanaimo, B.C. Canada V9R 2H8
Ph: 250-753-3345
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
A letter from Eliza Stewart to the United Church of Canada
Letter of Demand to the Moderator, the General Council and Officers of The United Church of Canada
May 29, 2009
We, the members of the Stewart family, make this public demand to you, the fiduciary and responsible officers of the United Church of Canada, regarding the murder of our sister, Victoria Kathleen Stewart, who died at the hands of a paid employee of your church, Ann Knizky, on April 10, 1958, at the Edmonton Indian Residential School, operated by your church.
On or about April 9, 1958, Ann Knizky did strike Victoria on the back of the head with a wooden two by four on the grounds of the said school, and this unprovoked attack caused Victoria to die the next day in the Charles Camsell Hospital .
Miss Knizky was never tried for her killing of our sister. We were not allowed to know the events surrounding her death. Your church officers protected Ms.. Knizky and lied about the murder, by claiming publicly that Victoria had died of "TB meningitis". Your church is therefore guilty of colluding in Victoria 's murder and of obstructing justice.
Under the doctrine of Vicarious Liability, established by the Supreme Court of Canada in relation to Indian residential school crimes, you are responsible as an institution for all of the acts of your employees. Thus, you are doubly responsible for this murder.
We are writing this Letter of Demand to you to put you on notice that we hold you collectively and individually responsible and liable for the murder of our sister Victoria and for all of the loss, pain and suffering we have endured as a family because of Victoria 's death.
Prior to possible legal action against you, we therefore notify you through this Letter of our following demands. We call upon you to do the following:
1. Publicly admit to this crime and take unqualified responsibility for it.
2. Come to us and in front of our entire family, issue a public apology for the murder of Victoria , and explain why you colluded in this crime and suppressed knowledge and evidence of it.
3. Identify the whereabouts of Ann Knizky and help bring her to justice to be charged with murder, along with any accomplices or accessories.
4. At your expense, erect a public memorial to Victoria at the site of her murder, and at her gravesite in Kitkatla, B.C.
5. Issue reparation payments to our family, in an amount determined by us.
6. Present yourselves before a Public Commission of Inquiry and a court of law to answer charges of murder and obstruction of justice, not only regarding Victoria but the thousands of other children who died in your Indian residential schools.
Your church is continually speaking of wanting "healing and reconciliation" with residential school survivors. Here is your chance to actually do so. We want justice and accountability, not rhetoric.
You have thirty days as of this date to respond in writing to these demands. If you fail to do so, or fail to grant what we ask, we will proceed with direct actions against you.
Sincerely,
(signed in the original)
Eliza Charlotte Stewart
on behalf of the Stewart family and all the relatives of Victoria Kathleen Stewartc/o The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared
260 Kennedy St.
Nanaimo, B.C. Canada V9R 2H8
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Eyewitness to Murder at Indian Residential School Names Kill
From Kevin Annett and Friends of the Disappeared:
The family of a child murdered at the United Church's Edmonton Indian residential school went public today at a downtown press conference in Vancouver, and named her killer.
Eliza Charlotte Stewart described the murder, and played a recording from her sister Inez Beryl Spencer, who personally witnessed the attack on their sister Victoria that caused her death.
Victoria, age nine, was struck on the head with a wooden two by four by a residential school staff member named Ann Knizky. Victoria died the next day.
"First I was hit on the back, and then Miss Knizky hit Vicky because she wasn't coming into school fast enough. She fell down some stairs" said Inez in her statement.
"That night Vicky started complaining about head aches and she died the next day in the Camsell hospital. Miss Knizky never was tried for killing her."
Eliza Stewart commented,
"Vicky was shipped back to us in a burlap sack and her brain was missing, so we think they did an autopsy and removed her brain to hide the injury done to it. They never told us anything. And the church then claimed she died of TB, but she never had it."
Eliza Stewart and her brother Moses called upon the United Church to identify the whereabouts of Ann Knizky so that she can be charged with murder, along with the church itself.
"They're not off the hook, just 'cause it happened years ago" said Moses Stewart.
"Even if Miss Knizky is dead, we want the United Church to stand trial too for how they covered this all up and protected a murderer."
The Stewart family will be issuing a formal Letter of Demand to the United Church of Canada and its officers this week, which will require them to surrender Ann Knizky and identify her accomplices, publicly admit its responsibility for the murder, erect a memorial for Victoria, and compensate the family for her loss.
The Stewarts will also be calling on the police to open a criminal investigation into Victoria's death.
The press conference was sparsely attended. Of sixteen media outlets contacted, only two reporters were present. Among the absent media was the so-called "Aboriginal Peoples' Television Network" (APTN).
In a final statement approved by the Stewarts, Kevin Annett of The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared said,
"Thousands of children died in this manner in the Indian Residential Schools, and not one person in Canada has ever been charged for the death of a child there, or brought to trial. The government is even forbidding names of perpetrators to be named. We will not allow these churches to get away with murder. We call upon others to come forward and name those responsible for the death and torture of innocent children in the residential schools."
Further updates will follow once the police and United Church respond to the Stewarts, or fail to.
(A longer story along with pictures and video recordings of the event will be posted later this week on the website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org).
For information contact: hiddenfromhistory@yahoo.ca or 1-250-753-3345
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Real Truth and Reconciliation
For Immediate Release:
Eyewitness to Murder at Indian Residential School to go Public and Name Killer at Press Conference this Wednesday
Eyewitness to Murder at Indian Residential School to go Public and Name Killer at Press Conference this Wednesday
Breaking News: May 24, 2009
Vancouver, Canada
The sister of a nine year old girl who was murdered at an Indian Residential School in Alberta will go public this Wednesday with an eyewitness account of her sister's death at the hands of a staff member, who will be publicly named.
Charlotte, an aboriginal woman living in Vancouver, will hold a press conference this Wednesday, May 27 at 10:00 am in classroom no. 2, third floor of the Carnegie Centre at Main and Hastings st. in downtown Vancouver.
Charlotte will share evidence at this event, including a recorded statement from another sister, who lives in Terrace, B.C. and who witnessed the killing and knows the identity of the perpetrator.
The sisters and their family will be issuing a letter to the church that employed the perpetrator and that has allegedly concealed the murder since it happened. Their evidence will be submitted to international human rights agencies.
This event is sponsored by The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared, and will be monitored by The International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada and its overseas affiliates.
For more information -
email: hiddenfromhistory@ yahoo.ca
ph: 1-888-265-1007
www.hiddenfromhistory.org
-----------
My thoughts and best wishes are with this brave woman. I have known the identity of the accused for about a year now, and it has been difficult for me to sit on that information until she and/or the other eyewitness was ready to come forward - so I can't imagine how difficult it must have been for these women to suffer in silence for so many years.
Naming names is the only way for Canada's First Nations residential school survivors to move forward. The Truth and Reconciliation committee that has been set up does not offer that opportunity; its mandate specifically states that the names of alleged abusers are not to be mentioned by survivors who give their testimony.
Those who are named can defend themselves and clear their names, or (if there is any actual justice in our justice system) face prosecution for their alleged crimes. Many survivors are reluctant to report abuse they suffered to the RCMP or other authorities, because law enforcement was a vital part of the residential school system. Going public with their stories is the only option left to them.
It's time for real truth and reconciliation in Canada.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Action Alert: Leonard Peltier Is Being Maltreated in Prison
Leonard Peltier, recently transferred to Canaan Prison, has been severely beaten by fellow inmates. Because he will not name his attackers, prison authorities are limiting him to one meal per day even though he is diabetic. Whether you believe he is guilty or innocent doesn't matter; this is cruel and unusual punishment by any standards, and a serious threat to the health of a U.S. prisoner. We don't need any more Gitmos.
Please read this alert from Mr. Peltier's sister and consider doing what you can to help:
URGENT ALERT
Please read this alert from Mr. Peltier's sister and consider doing what you can to help:
URGENT ALERT
Thursday, January 8, 2009
A New Year's Message from Kevin Annett
Note from blog administrator, S.M. Elliott: This blog does not necessarily endorse specific recommendations made in the following document, but wholeheartedly supports its message. Please share it freely, as per Mr. Annett's request.
Looking Back, Looking Forward:
The Political Consequences of Uncovering Genocide in Canada
By Kevin D. Annett (Eagle Strong Voice)
Squamish Nation territory
2008 was the year the impossible happened in Canada .
Our national network known as The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared made history this past year, and forever changed the political landscape of Canada. In the words of Dora, an elderly survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School,
“You’ve finally put our people on the map. They can’t ignore us, ever again.”
In a nutshell, we have forced Canada to admit to its genocide of native people, issue a formal apology for the residential school crimes, and acknowledge that thousands of children died in these schools. Our allied hereditary chiefs proclaimed sovereignty over indigenous land and issued eviction orders against the churches responsible for genocide.
Quite simply, after years of effort, we have forever changed the image of Canada in the world and ended an official regime of Holocaust Denial.
It has been a joy and an honor for me to help win such a moral victory for people who have never been “on the map”. But what has this victory meant for such people?
On Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008, fifty of us - natives and "whites" - walked quietly to the front of the Holy Rosary Catholic Cathedral in downtown Vancouver and stood there, facing the congregation, holding a banner that read, “All the Children Need a Proper Burial.”
We had been warned to stay away from that church. But I remember walking unafraid to the front of the sanctuary with all our people, led by three clan mothers. Among us were William Combes, Rick Lavallee and Bingo, homeless survivors of hideous tortures at Catholic residential schools.
That moment was a pinnacle for me, and for the survivors, for in the very heart of that which had tried to kill them, they were able to face it and say, We are still here, and we want our friends returned to us.
Past the angry threats of the priests, and the police who later descended on us, we were reaching out and touching the hearts of people in the Catholic church that day.
And it worked. For, after a few minutes, as our procession left the sanctuary led by the drumming of the clan mothers, the entire congregation rose spontaneously as we walked by.
It was then that I knew we had won. And sure enough, the walls began coming down after our moral victory that day.
In the wake of our March action, the missing residential school children have, for the first time, preoccupied the conscience and public discourse of Canada . It is as if the entire dominant culture is now standing, as did the Catholic parishioners, to acknowledge what they know is true, in remembrance of the missing children.
In opposition, both church and state have done their best, since that day, to belittle our work and downplay the reality of murders in Indian residential schools, and their responsibility for them. But such is always the behavior of those with their backs to the wall.
If our simple act of speaking of the dead and holding up the survivors has begun to shake loose centuries of Holocaust Denial in Canada , it has also caused us to ask ourselves, Where do we go from here?
We are no longer asking for anything from the churches and state that are responsible for genocide. Rather, all our actions in 2008 have laid the groundwork for an even greater step: drawing the broader political consequences of our exposure of Canada as a colonial and genocidal settler state, and creating an altogether new society.
Who are We and What Can We Become?
Our exposure of the Canadian genocide has simultaneously indicted the social order that gave rise to it. Euro-Canadian Christian society as a whole stands condemned in the dock alongside those persons who ran the residential schools, sterilized and murdered children, spread smallpox, and dug the mass graves.
Despite their best efforts to ignore this fact and contain the whole matter with pseudo “apologies”, the Canadian government and its partner Catholic, Anglican and United churches now face the same kind of historical reckoning that Nazi Germany did after its defeat in 1945: an awakening to their own criminal nature.
On April 20, 2007, Canada and those churches suffered a fundamental moral defeat in Parliament, when the first cabinet minister in Canadian history publicly acknowledged that untold thousands of children had died in Christian Indian residential schools.
The extent of this defeat has yet to be appreciated by most Canadians, or even indigenous people. But its impact is nevertheless reverberating throughout every level of society and undermining the very basis of Canada ’s existence.
The question now is how to draw the larger conclusions of this defeat in order to reinvent Canada from the top down, and the bottom up, with a basic purpose: the establishment of a decolonized, secular, and genuinely democratic federation of sovereign nations – the Republic of Kanata .
Shedding the Past, Creating a Future
Canada has never been allowed to become a sovereign and democratic nation because of its historical role as a resource base and captured market for first the British and then the American empire. That dependency required that Canada remain frozen as a colonial, church-dominated, semi-feudal society: a condition that has caused the sustained genocide of indigenous peoples and the destruction of their lands, and now threatens the lives of all of us.
The two attempted democratic revolutions in our history – the abortive rebellions in 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada, and the Metis Insurrection of 1885 in the Red River basin – had as their aim the ending of an Imperial oligarchy and the creation of a democratic Republic in which aboriginals and Europeans could co-exist equally. The crushing of both rebellions ensured that oligarchy and apartheid would remain the political norm in Canada .
And yet, the same vision of freedom that propelled these revolts had been originally offered by the eastern Six Nations to the arriving Europeans through the “Two Road Wampum” Great Law of Peace, in which both cultures would share the land and not seek to dominate or conquer the other.
That offer was rejected not by Europeans as a whole, but by the religious and commercial elites who ran the foreign policy of both the French and British Empires, especially during the European Religious Wars of the formative 17th century.
Time and again, the Catholic and Protestant churches subverted peaceful relations between whites and natives, and among aboriginal nations such as the Huron and Iroquois, as part of their plan to exterminate all non-Christian peoples and take their land. In the words of the Jesuit missionary Jean Brebeuf,
“There can be no peace or parity between the savages and Christians. This is required by our Faith and the fur trade.”
Canada as we know it has arisen on the basis of this basic philosophy of Christian Superior Dominion.
There is still no equality between natives and non-natives in Canada because of an apartheid Indian Act that relegates “Indians” to a separate and inferior status, and holds most of them in a state of permanent sickness, landlessness and poverty on their own land. Such permanent internal colonialism is required by the foreign and domestic corporate interests that run Canada as a fuel pump and watering hole.
Quite simply, in a neo-colonial regime like Canada , where “the Crown” legally owns all the land, native people must continue to be killed off, legally and methodically, for such theft to continue. A constant aboriginal death rate twenty times the national average is the deadly proof.
This genocidal reality will never change in Canada as it is presently constituted, since the maintenance of natives, and the poor generally, as a disempowered cash cow for others to exploit is an institutionalized part of Canadian society.
The nine billion dollar Indian Affairs industry requires a sick, dependent aboriginal populace, and a compliant class of collaborating native elites to administer this sickness. For the resulting totalitarian control of native people at every level is precisely what resource-hungry corporations need to take the last remnants of oil, timber, minerals and water from what is still aboriginal land.
Such a structurally criminal regime cannot be tinkered with or reformed, resting as it does on the oppression of most of the population, whether native or non-native. The existence of Canadians as “subjects of the Crown” under the ultimate authority of one person – a Governor-General accountable only to a foreign monarch – amounts to a state of legal slavery utterly repugnant to democracy and sovereignty.
“The only way to reform a colonial system is by dismantling it” said the great Irish nationalist, Bernadette Devlin. And the key to dismantling the Canadian oligarchy is to establish responsible government by severing ties with the English monarchy and creating a federated and secular Republic of sovereign indigenous nations with full public ownership of the economy, the land, and all its resources.
In short, every vestige of the system that spawned genocide in Canada needs to be abolished, if we are serious about ending its legacy and doing justice to aboriginal people and residential school survivors.
A Program for Ending Genocide
Legal genocide in Canada has rested historically on three pillars: a colonial political oligarchy under the authority of the English Crown; a powerful, unaccountable and state-protected religious oligarchy in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and later, the state-created United Church ; and a foreign-controlled, dependent economy.
To dismantle the root causes of genocide in Canada, we must replace all three of these systems, through a process of active de-construction and reconstruction: undoing what caused the wrong and building an altogether new political and social regime in its place.
To commence, our general aim must be the following steps of “decolonization and de-construction” in order to lay the basis for a true democratic and secular Republic:
I. Politically: Active disaffiliation from the English Crown and the Canadian state and its courts;
II. Spiritually: Disestablishment of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada ; and
III. Socially: De-corporatizing our economy and the creation of local, self-sufficient economies under public ownership.
A real Program of Justice for all victims of genocide in Canada must restore social equality, the health of the land, and democratic sovereignty of all nations within Kanata , through these and other measures:
I. Politically:
1. Abolish the Governor-General and issue a formal Declaration of Independence from the British Crown.
2. Abolish the Indian Act, the federal courts, the Senate, the RCMP and the Indian and Northern Affairs department.
3. Reconstitute Canada as a federated and secular Republic of Kanata , based on a recognition of the root title sovereignty of all indigenous nations and of the common ownership by all citizens of the economy, wealth, lands and resources of Kanata .
II. Spiritually:
1. Tax the churches: Revoke the charitable tax-exempt status of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church, nationalize all church property and land, audit and assess all payments owed by these churches to the people and indigenous nations since their inception, and return all lands and effects stolen by these churches from native people.
2. Revoke the legal charters and legislation governing the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, and thereby end their official, legal status.
3. End diplomatic recognition of the Vatican and expel the Papal Nuncio.
4. Separate church and state: no funding for religious schools or churches, no religious oaths or functions connected to the state, no state protection for clergy or churches (ie, revoke sections 176 and 296 of the Criminal Code of Canada).
5. Establish a public, international inquiry into crimes of these churches against native people, including in Indian residential schools, with the power to subpoena, try and jail offenders.
III. Socially
A Jubilee Campaign to restore the land and economy to the people:
1. Cancel all debts and mortgages, and return all land to its original owners.
2. Place banks, money supply and credit under public ownership and control.
3. Impose a 100% tax on all wealth gained by inheritance, interest and speculation, and the abolition of all income tax.
4. Establish a maximum wage and redistribute all surplus income to the lower paid.
5. Collect all back taxes owed by corporations and a special tax on the super wealthy and on corporate profits.
6. Abolish foreign ownership of the economy.
7. Abolish all land speculation and the commercial trading in land.
8. Nationalize all resources.
9. Socialize all housing, medicine, education and transportation, freely available to all.
A Gaia Campaign to restore the health and harmony of the land:
1. Impose a Green Tax on all privately owned vehicles.
2. Abolish nuclear power and the uranium industry.
3. Develop wind, solar and tidal energy industries.
4. Phase out petrol vehicles, and replace with non-polluting, mass-transit systems.
5. Immediately nationalize all polluting industries and abolish or eco-convert them.
6. Legally limit the size of all land ownership to 100 hectares.
7. Collectivize all farming and agriculture, and abolish all pesticides and herbicides.
8. Abolish the sale and commercialization of water: Provide free, universal access to water through the establishment of public ownership over all water resources.
Acting on this Vision and Program
These proposals are but a beginning in a long process of social and spiritual emancipation from corporate genocide.
Our purpose as a de-colonizing movement is to create a new society within the shell of the old: to bring about a parallel social order in opposition to “Canada” through a massive democratic movement from below. We can only succeed through a conscious, activated citizenry who take control of their lives and the land.
Consequently, we reject any reliance on or involvement in the existing parliamentary or electoral system, which is based on an undemocratic allegiance to a foreign monarch.
Instead, we will seek to create new popular assemblies and courts through which the people can express their will freely and openly, justice can be directly enacted, and the present political system can be overturned. We will use mass civil disobedience, strikes, withholding of taxes, and other direct actions to undermine and replace Canada and its institutions with a truly democratic republic.
To coordinate and lead this campaign, we look to a mass revolutionary party to engender but not dominate our movement. The creation of a democratic and secular Republic of Kanata will unleash the greatest freedom and diversity among the people, who will learn through their own struggles the meaning of self-government.
Our underlying recognition is that true democracy and sovereignty cannot come into being or survive without the complete public ownership of all of Kanata by all the people. The poorest person has as equal a right to the land and its wealth as the richest, and we shall work to create a society where all class distinctions and the private ownership of the economy have been abolished.
We encourage you to share this Program and Vision, and begin to act on it.
As a first step, we call upon all people who are in agreement with this Vision and Program to take the Pledge of Allegiance to Kanata (below) and to form organizing committees in their communities to prepare for the formal launching of the Republican Party of Kanata.
In solidarity and hope for our common future,
The Elders and National Council of the Republican Movement of Kanata, in alliance with traditional Squamish Chief Siem Kiapilano
………………………………………………………………………………
Pledge of Allegiance to the Republic of Kanata
I do solemnly swear allegiance to the Federated Republic of Kanata, and to the principles of sovereignty, natural law, unconditional democracy, and public, collective ownership for which Kanata stands.
I swear to defend the Republic of Kanata against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to sever all ties and allegiance to the British Crown, and to the government known as Canada. I pledge to stand in solidarity with all those who take this oath and to defend them unconditionally.
I take this pledge freely, without coercion, mental reservation, or ulterior motive, according to my honor and freedom as a natural and sovereign person.
(Name, Address and Date)
Please send a copy of your signed Pledge to:
The Secretary, RPK
260 Kennedy St.
Nanaimo, B.C.
V9R 2H8
Acting under the authority of traditional Squamish Chief Siem Kiapilano, on his territory
1 January, 2009
www.hiddenfromhistory.org
Looking Back, Looking Forward:
The Political Consequences of Uncovering Genocide in Canada
By Kevin D. Annett (Eagle Strong Voice)
Squamish Nation territory
2008 was the year the impossible happened in Canada .
Our national network known as The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared made history this past year, and forever changed the political landscape of Canada. In the words of Dora, an elderly survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School,
“You’ve finally put our people on the map. They can’t ignore us, ever again.”
In a nutshell, we have forced Canada to admit to its genocide of native people, issue a formal apology for the residential school crimes, and acknowledge that thousands of children died in these schools. Our allied hereditary chiefs proclaimed sovereignty over indigenous land and issued eviction orders against the churches responsible for genocide.
Quite simply, after years of effort, we have forever changed the image of Canada in the world and ended an official regime of Holocaust Denial.
It has been a joy and an honor for me to help win such a moral victory for people who have never been “on the map”. But what has this victory meant for such people?
On Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008, fifty of us - natives and "whites" - walked quietly to the front of the Holy Rosary Catholic Cathedral in downtown Vancouver and stood there, facing the congregation, holding a banner that read, “All the Children Need a Proper Burial.”
We had been warned to stay away from that church. But I remember walking unafraid to the front of the sanctuary with all our people, led by three clan mothers. Among us were William Combes, Rick Lavallee and Bingo, homeless survivors of hideous tortures at Catholic residential schools.
That moment was a pinnacle for me, and for the survivors, for in the very heart of that which had tried to kill them, they were able to face it and say, We are still here, and we want our friends returned to us.
Past the angry threats of the priests, and the police who later descended on us, we were reaching out and touching the hearts of people in the Catholic church that day.
And it worked. For, after a few minutes, as our procession left the sanctuary led by the drumming of the clan mothers, the entire congregation rose spontaneously as we walked by.
It was then that I knew we had won. And sure enough, the walls began coming down after our moral victory that day.
In the wake of our March action, the missing residential school children have, for the first time, preoccupied the conscience and public discourse of Canada . It is as if the entire dominant culture is now standing, as did the Catholic parishioners, to acknowledge what they know is true, in remembrance of the missing children.
In opposition, both church and state have done their best, since that day, to belittle our work and downplay the reality of murders in Indian residential schools, and their responsibility for them. But such is always the behavior of those with their backs to the wall.
If our simple act of speaking of the dead and holding up the survivors has begun to shake loose centuries of Holocaust Denial in Canada , it has also caused us to ask ourselves, Where do we go from here?
We are no longer asking for anything from the churches and state that are responsible for genocide. Rather, all our actions in 2008 have laid the groundwork for an even greater step: drawing the broader political consequences of our exposure of Canada as a colonial and genocidal settler state, and creating an altogether new society.
Who are We and What Can We Become?
Our exposure of the Canadian genocide has simultaneously indicted the social order that gave rise to it. Euro-Canadian Christian society as a whole stands condemned in the dock alongside those persons who ran the residential schools, sterilized and murdered children, spread smallpox, and dug the mass graves.
Despite their best efforts to ignore this fact and contain the whole matter with pseudo “apologies”, the Canadian government and its partner Catholic, Anglican and United churches now face the same kind of historical reckoning that Nazi Germany did after its defeat in 1945: an awakening to their own criminal nature.
On April 20, 2007, Canada and those churches suffered a fundamental moral defeat in Parliament, when the first cabinet minister in Canadian history publicly acknowledged that untold thousands of children had died in Christian Indian residential schools.
The extent of this defeat has yet to be appreciated by most Canadians, or even indigenous people. But its impact is nevertheless reverberating throughout every level of society and undermining the very basis of Canada ’s existence.
The question now is how to draw the larger conclusions of this defeat in order to reinvent Canada from the top down, and the bottom up, with a basic purpose: the establishment of a decolonized, secular, and genuinely democratic federation of sovereign nations – the Republic of Kanata .
Shedding the Past, Creating a Future
Canada has never been allowed to become a sovereign and democratic nation because of its historical role as a resource base and captured market for first the British and then the American empire. That dependency required that Canada remain frozen as a colonial, church-dominated, semi-feudal society: a condition that has caused the sustained genocide of indigenous peoples and the destruction of their lands, and now threatens the lives of all of us.
The two attempted democratic revolutions in our history – the abortive rebellions in 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada, and the Metis Insurrection of 1885 in the Red River basin – had as their aim the ending of an Imperial oligarchy and the creation of a democratic Republic in which aboriginals and Europeans could co-exist equally. The crushing of both rebellions ensured that oligarchy and apartheid would remain the political norm in Canada .
And yet, the same vision of freedom that propelled these revolts had been originally offered by the eastern Six Nations to the arriving Europeans through the “Two Road Wampum” Great Law of Peace, in which both cultures would share the land and not seek to dominate or conquer the other.
That offer was rejected not by Europeans as a whole, but by the religious and commercial elites who ran the foreign policy of both the French and British Empires, especially during the European Religious Wars of the formative 17th century.
Time and again, the Catholic and Protestant churches subverted peaceful relations between whites and natives, and among aboriginal nations such as the Huron and Iroquois, as part of their plan to exterminate all non-Christian peoples and take their land. In the words of the Jesuit missionary Jean Brebeuf,
“There can be no peace or parity between the savages and Christians. This is required by our Faith and the fur trade.”
Canada as we know it has arisen on the basis of this basic philosophy of Christian Superior Dominion.
There is still no equality between natives and non-natives in Canada because of an apartheid Indian Act that relegates “Indians” to a separate and inferior status, and holds most of them in a state of permanent sickness, landlessness and poverty on their own land. Such permanent internal colonialism is required by the foreign and domestic corporate interests that run Canada as a fuel pump and watering hole.
Quite simply, in a neo-colonial regime like Canada , where “the Crown” legally owns all the land, native people must continue to be killed off, legally and methodically, for such theft to continue. A constant aboriginal death rate twenty times the national average is the deadly proof.
This genocidal reality will never change in Canada as it is presently constituted, since the maintenance of natives, and the poor generally, as a disempowered cash cow for others to exploit is an institutionalized part of Canadian society.
The nine billion dollar Indian Affairs industry requires a sick, dependent aboriginal populace, and a compliant class of collaborating native elites to administer this sickness. For the resulting totalitarian control of native people at every level is precisely what resource-hungry corporations need to take the last remnants of oil, timber, minerals and water from what is still aboriginal land.
Such a structurally criminal regime cannot be tinkered with or reformed, resting as it does on the oppression of most of the population, whether native or non-native. The existence of Canadians as “subjects of the Crown” under the ultimate authority of one person – a Governor-General accountable only to a foreign monarch – amounts to a state of legal slavery utterly repugnant to democracy and sovereignty.
“The only way to reform a colonial system is by dismantling it” said the great Irish nationalist, Bernadette Devlin. And the key to dismantling the Canadian oligarchy is to establish responsible government by severing ties with the English monarchy and creating a federated and secular Republic of sovereign indigenous nations with full public ownership of the economy, the land, and all its resources.
In short, every vestige of the system that spawned genocide in Canada needs to be abolished, if we are serious about ending its legacy and doing justice to aboriginal people and residential school survivors.
A Program for Ending Genocide
Legal genocide in Canada has rested historically on three pillars: a colonial political oligarchy under the authority of the English Crown; a powerful, unaccountable and state-protected religious oligarchy in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and later, the state-created United Church ; and a foreign-controlled, dependent economy.
To dismantle the root causes of genocide in Canada, we must replace all three of these systems, through a process of active de-construction and reconstruction: undoing what caused the wrong and building an altogether new political and social regime in its place.
To commence, our general aim must be the following steps of “decolonization and de-construction” in order to lay the basis for a true democratic and secular Republic:
I. Politically: Active disaffiliation from the English Crown and the Canadian state and its courts;
II. Spiritually: Disestablishment of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada ; and
III. Socially: De-corporatizing our economy and the creation of local, self-sufficient economies under public ownership.
A real Program of Justice for all victims of genocide in Canada must restore social equality, the health of the land, and democratic sovereignty of all nations within Kanata , through these and other measures:
I. Politically:
1. Abolish the Governor-General and issue a formal Declaration of Independence from the British Crown.
2. Abolish the Indian Act, the federal courts, the Senate, the RCMP and the Indian and Northern Affairs department.
3. Reconstitute Canada as a federated and secular Republic of Kanata , based on a recognition of the root title sovereignty of all indigenous nations and of the common ownership by all citizens of the economy, wealth, lands and resources of Kanata .
II. Spiritually:
1. Tax the churches: Revoke the charitable tax-exempt status of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church, nationalize all church property and land, audit and assess all payments owed by these churches to the people and indigenous nations since their inception, and return all lands and effects stolen by these churches from native people.
2. Revoke the legal charters and legislation governing the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, and thereby end their official, legal status.
3. End diplomatic recognition of the Vatican and expel the Papal Nuncio.
4. Separate church and state: no funding for religious schools or churches, no religious oaths or functions connected to the state, no state protection for clergy or churches (ie, revoke sections 176 and 296 of the Criminal Code of Canada).
5. Establish a public, international inquiry into crimes of these churches against native people, including in Indian residential schools, with the power to subpoena, try and jail offenders.
III. Socially
A Jubilee Campaign to restore the land and economy to the people:
1. Cancel all debts and mortgages, and return all land to its original owners.
2. Place banks, money supply and credit under public ownership and control.
3. Impose a 100% tax on all wealth gained by inheritance, interest and speculation, and the abolition of all income tax.
4. Establish a maximum wage and redistribute all surplus income to the lower paid.
5. Collect all back taxes owed by corporations and a special tax on the super wealthy and on corporate profits.
6. Abolish foreign ownership of the economy.
7. Abolish all land speculation and the commercial trading in land.
8. Nationalize all resources.
9. Socialize all housing, medicine, education and transportation, freely available to all.
A Gaia Campaign to restore the health and harmony of the land:
1. Impose a Green Tax on all privately owned vehicles.
2. Abolish nuclear power and the uranium industry.
3. Develop wind, solar and tidal energy industries.
4. Phase out petrol vehicles, and replace with non-polluting, mass-transit systems.
5. Immediately nationalize all polluting industries and abolish or eco-convert them.
6. Legally limit the size of all land ownership to 100 hectares.
7. Collectivize all farming and agriculture, and abolish all pesticides and herbicides.
8. Abolish the sale and commercialization of water: Provide free, universal access to water through the establishment of public ownership over all water resources.
Acting on this Vision and Program
These proposals are but a beginning in a long process of social and spiritual emancipation from corporate genocide.
Our purpose as a de-colonizing movement is to create a new society within the shell of the old: to bring about a parallel social order in opposition to “Canada” through a massive democratic movement from below. We can only succeed through a conscious, activated citizenry who take control of their lives and the land.
Consequently, we reject any reliance on or involvement in the existing parliamentary or electoral system, which is based on an undemocratic allegiance to a foreign monarch.
Instead, we will seek to create new popular assemblies and courts through which the people can express their will freely and openly, justice can be directly enacted, and the present political system can be overturned. We will use mass civil disobedience, strikes, withholding of taxes, and other direct actions to undermine and replace Canada and its institutions with a truly democratic republic.
To coordinate and lead this campaign, we look to a mass revolutionary party to engender but not dominate our movement. The creation of a democratic and secular Republic of Kanata will unleash the greatest freedom and diversity among the people, who will learn through their own struggles the meaning of self-government.
Our underlying recognition is that true democracy and sovereignty cannot come into being or survive without the complete public ownership of all of Kanata by all the people. The poorest person has as equal a right to the land and its wealth as the richest, and we shall work to create a society where all class distinctions and the private ownership of the economy have been abolished.
We encourage you to share this Program and Vision, and begin to act on it.
As a first step, we call upon all people who are in agreement with this Vision and Program to take the Pledge of Allegiance to Kanata (below) and to form organizing committees in their communities to prepare for the formal launching of the Republican Party of Kanata.
In solidarity and hope for our common future,
The Elders and National Council of the Republican Movement of Kanata, in alliance with traditional Squamish Chief Siem Kiapilano
………………………………………………………………………………
Pledge of Allegiance to the Republic of Kanata
I do solemnly swear allegiance to the Federated Republic of Kanata, and to the principles of sovereignty, natural law, unconditional democracy, and public, collective ownership for which Kanata stands.
I swear to defend the Republic of Kanata against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to sever all ties and allegiance to the British Crown, and to the government known as Canada. I pledge to stand in solidarity with all those who take this oath and to defend them unconditionally.
I take this pledge freely, without coercion, mental reservation, or ulterior motive, according to my honor and freedom as a natural and sovereign person.
(Name, Address and Date)
Please send a copy of your signed Pledge to:
The Secretary, RPK
260 Kennedy St.
Nanaimo, B.C.
V9R 2H8
Acting under the authority of traditional Squamish Chief Siem Kiapilano, on his territory
1 January, 2009
www.hiddenfromhistory.org
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
"Leave it to Jehovah"
A middle-aged sex offender, dressed conservatively enough to impress, trudges from house to house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. He rings doorbells and quietly delivers his memorized spiel to any adults who answer.
He's not fulfilling his legal obligation to notify new neighbors that he's a convicted sex offender. He's a Jehovah's Witness. He has never spent a day in jail.
As reported by CBC's investigative news program the fifth estate ("Spiritual Shepherd"), Jehovah's Witnesses are experiencing many of the same child-molestation issues as the Catholic Church, thanks to a lax policy in reporting child sexual abuse to the proper authorities. Church elders are routinely instructed to contact their country's JW headquarters when alleged abuse is reported to them. The legal department will then instruct them to follow official protocol: Ask the accuser and accused if the allegations are true. If the accuser confesses, he/she should be counselled to repent. If the allegations are denied, "Leave it to Jehovah." The only way an alleged abuser can be considered guilty without confessing to his/her crime is if at least two witnesses saw the abuse occuring. This policy, in most U.S. states and throughout Canada, violates laws requiring citizens to report suspected child abuse to child welfare and/or police.
This policy - though denied by the church - has apparently been in place for decades, and is still in place today. Victims of sexual abuse have reported that their claims were minimized, refuted, or ignored by church authorities, and they're speaking out.
Accused child molestors who are not considered guilty by church authorities are still allowed to proselytize door-to-door, and to work one-on-one with children.
What to do if you suspect a church member has or is abusing a child:
1. Do not rely on church elders to resolve the problem. Go directly to the proper authorities. Jehovah may be in charge, but it's your legal responsibility to report suspected child abuse. If you don't, you may be aiding and abetting the sexual exploitation of children. This applies even if the suspected perpetrator is your own spouse, sibling, parent, friend, church elder, etc.
2. Notify church authorities after you've contacted child welfare or the police. Request that the accused not be allowed one-on-one contact with children in the church until the matter has been legally resolved, for the protection of the children and the church. If you are told that the matter should be resolved only within the church, point out that this is in violation of the law and could leave the church vulnerable to legal action.
3. Find out your church's policy on abuse claims. If it is not in line with the law, demand changes. Tell your fellow church members about the policy and encourage them to demand changes, as well. This is in the best interests of your children, your spiritual community, and your community in general.
What to do if have been or are you are a victim of sexual abuse by a church member:
1. Do not expect action from church authorities. Go to a social worker, trusted friend or family member, teacher or school staff member, a doctor or health worker, child welfare, the police, or other authority figure outside the church first. You can go to the church after you have turned to someone who is in a position to help you legally.
2. If someone in the church, even an elder, tries to minimize the abuse you have suffered, accuses you of lying, or tells you that it is in the best interests of everyone to keep the abuse a secret, do not accept this. You are the victim of a crime. You deserve to be heard and to have your claims investigated in a timely, legal, appropriate fashion.
3. If questioned by a church member about details of the abuse, do not give information you are not comfortable giving. You are not obligated, legally or spiritually, to give details that you do not want to reveal.
For more information on Jehovah's Witness child abuse, please visit silentlambs.org. This is an online community by and for victims of abuse whose claims were covered up or ignored by church authorities, and it provides a wealth of information on the issue. This is not just a JW problem. It affects our children and our communities. It's up to all of us to make sure that child sexual abuse is not tolerated for any reason.
He's not fulfilling his legal obligation to notify new neighbors that he's a convicted sex offender. He's a Jehovah's Witness. He has never spent a day in jail.
As reported by CBC's investigative news program the fifth estate ("Spiritual Shepherd"), Jehovah's Witnesses are experiencing many of the same child-molestation issues as the Catholic Church, thanks to a lax policy in reporting child sexual abuse to the proper authorities. Church elders are routinely instructed to contact their country's JW headquarters when alleged abuse is reported to them. The legal department will then instruct them to follow official protocol: Ask the accuser and accused if the allegations are true. If the accuser confesses, he/she should be counselled to repent. If the allegations are denied, "Leave it to Jehovah." The only way an alleged abuser can be considered guilty without confessing to his/her crime is if at least two witnesses saw the abuse occuring. This policy, in most U.S. states and throughout Canada, violates laws requiring citizens to report suspected child abuse to child welfare and/or police.
This policy - though denied by the church - has apparently been in place for decades, and is still in place today. Victims of sexual abuse have reported that their claims were minimized, refuted, or ignored by church authorities, and they're speaking out.
Accused child molestors who are not considered guilty by church authorities are still allowed to proselytize door-to-door, and to work one-on-one with children.
What to do if you suspect a church member has or is abusing a child:
1. Do not rely on church elders to resolve the problem. Go directly to the proper authorities. Jehovah may be in charge, but it's your legal responsibility to report suspected child abuse. If you don't, you may be aiding and abetting the sexual exploitation of children. This applies even if the suspected perpetrator is your own spouse, sibling, parent, friend, church elder, etc.
2. Notify church authorities after you've contacted child welfare or the police. Request that the accused not be allowed one-on-one contact with children in the church until the matter has been legally resolved, for the protection of the children and the church. If you are told that the matter should be resolved only within the church, point out that this is in violation of the law and could leave the church vulnerable to legal action.
3. Find out your church's policy on abuse claims. If it is not in line with the law, demand changes. Tell your fellow church members about the policy and encourage them to demand changes, as well. This is in the best interests of your children, your spiritual community, and your community in general.
What to do if have been or are you are a victim of sexual abuse by a church member:
1. Do not expect action from church authorities. Go to a social worker, trusted friend or family member, teacher or school staff member, a doctor or health worker, child welfare, the police, or other authority figure outside the church first. You can go to the church after you have turned to someone who is in a position to help you legally.
2. If someone in the church, even an elder, tries to minimize the abuse you have suffered, accuses you of lying, or tells you that it is in the best interests of everyone to keep the abuse a secret, do not accept this. You are the victim of a crime. You deserve to be heard and to have your claims investigated in a timely, legal, appropriate fashion.
3. If questioned by a church member about details of the abuse, do not give information you are not comfortable giving. You are not obligated, legally or spiritually, to give details that you do not want to reveal.
For more information on Jehovah's Witness child abuse, please visit silentlambs.org. This is an online community by and for victims of abuse whose claims were covered up or ignored by church authorities, and it provides a wealth of information on the issue. This is not just a JW problem. It affects our children and our communities. It's up to all of us to make sure that child sexual abuse is not tolerated for any reason.
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