Opinion

Truth and Native Abuse

How one man's wild claims threaten success of Truth and Reconciliation.

By Terry Glavin, 30 Apr 2008, TheTyee.ca

Kevin Annett

Kevin Annett: dubious mission.

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When Noam Chomsky says Canada's famously defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett is "more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past," you can take his word for it if you want. And if you like, you can believe Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Corrigan-Maguire of the Belfast Peace People when she calls Annett "a courageous and inspiring man."

It's important to be fair, and to allow that sometimes people say things without really knowing what they're talking about and they might one day regret the things they've said.

But if you do believe these things, I'm afraid there are quite a few more things you are going to have to believe, because you can't have it both ways. If Kevin Annett really is prize-worthy and courageous, you will also have to believe this:

-One of Canada's most respected First Nations' leaders is trafficking in children from Northern British Columbia in a profitable pedophilia ring that's run out of the West Hastings Street premises of the swish Vancouver Club. His clients are Vancouver judges, politicians, and church leaders.

-Back in the 1930s, a team of German doctors arrived at the Kuper Island Indian residential school and began conducting strange medical experiments on the children. Employing large hypodermic needles, they injected some sort of toxin directly into the chests of the school's young inmates, and several were killed as a result.

-As recently as the 1950s and 1960s, aboriginal children at a Vancouver Island medical research facility were tortured with electrodes implanted in their skulls. At least one child was beaten to death with a whip fitted with razors.

-At the Hobbema and Saddle Lake Indian residential schools in Alberta, children were incinerated in furnaces. At St. Anne's Indian residential school in Fort Albany, Ontario, children were executed in an electric chair. At McGill University in Montreal, there is a mass grave containing the bodies of aboriginal children killed in experiments undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency's top-secret MK-ULTRA program.

These are just a few of the stories Annett has been circulating since the early 1990s. He has failed to produce a shred of evidence. RCMP investigators who have looked into Annett's allegations always come up empty. Some of these stories the RCMP hasn't investigated because nobody's reported them, for reasons Annett explains as a distrust of the police.

'Eagle Strong Voice' and his followers

If you think this sort of thing is courageous to the point of being worthy of the Nobel Prize, then you may be happy to know that Annett is busy with another one of his crusades against church and state, with new claims about a network of mass graves across Canada containing the remains of perhaps thousands of aboriginal children, murdered by priests and nuns.

You might also be pleased to know that Annett is back with a new name (he has lately taken to calling himself Eagle Strong Voice) and his followers have established a new group, called the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared, and they're off on a "wave of church occupations" across Canada.

Their routine is to show up with the media in tow, and then issue eviction notices, and then submit unanswerable demands that the churches confess to the mass graves they've been hiding. And then they demand that the churches return the remains of the children they've killed to the tribes they came from.

It all started in the early 1990s, when Annett was a promising but problematic novice minister whose first assignment was to serve the dwindling, white working-class congregation of St. Andrew's in the mill town of Port Alberni. It wasn't long before senior United Church officials discovered to their dismay that Annett was turning his Sunday services into something resembling a series of cathartic, guerilla-theatre testimonials about Satanic ritual abuse. The long and short of it is the United Church put its foot down. Its version of events is a matter of public record.

Annett's version appears in his self-published Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, his autobiographical Love and Death in the Valley, and his recently-released, 110-minute autobiographical documentary, Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide.

If you like, you can believe that the reason 10 Canadian publishers turned down Annett's first book, and the reason why his second book appears under the imprint of 1st Books Library, a vanity press in Bloomington, Indiana, and the reason his documentary was also produced in the United States, is that the powers that be in Canada are determined to conceal their terrible crimes.

Or, you might instead take into account the fact that Annett's stories are the subject of Canadian court injunctions claiming libel and defamation. Annett has responded to these legal admonitions by pleading with Amnesty International for adoption as a "prisoner of conscience." Amnesty has declined to oblige him.

Journalists compound the harm

Still, Annett is interviewed sympathetically on CBC's As It Happens, and it is commonplace for journalists to report Annett's claims unchallenged, no matter how bizarre, and without first inquiring into his history of allegation-making. His documentary film Unrepentant has earned favourable reviews in such "progressive" Canadian journals as Briarpatch. It has won awards at independent film festivals in New York and Los Angeles.

This matters.

It matters because the story of secret residential-school mass graves is an urban legend.

For years, RCMP investigators have been chasing down these stories and they always come up with nothing. But they persist, like the alligators in New York's sewers.

It matters because the thousands of aboriginal people who really did suffer unspeakable torment in residential schools deserve something rather more from us than our complicity in the act of dumping their very real suffering down a rabbit hole into the same parallel universe where you'll find alien abductions, Masonic plots, crop circles, and 9-11 conspiracies.

It matters for lots of reasons.

Annett enjoys the backing of not a single representative tribal organization, and in early April, when he released what he claims is a list of the locations of 28 mass graves of children who died in church-run residential schools, he also announced the formation of the "International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada" to carry out its own investigations.

At risk, Truth and Reconciliation

Meanwhile, after a generation of bitter and hard-fought struggle, the Assembly of First Nations, the Canadian churches that ran the schools and the federal government have embarked upon a $2 billion settlement process that includes the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

On April 28, Justice Harry S. LaForme, a judge on the Ontario Appeals Court and a member of the Mississauga Nation, was appointed its chairman. The commission, inspired by the post-apartheid stabilization process in South Africa, will soon begin its hearings.

Among ordinary Canadians, there already exists a perfectly understandable but stubborn reluctance to believe the heart-rending truth about what actually did happen in some of those institutions. The abuse and the cruelty was sometimes almost beyond belief. And there is no shortage of pundits in this country who are all too eager to encourage that tendency to disbelieve the survivors' stories.

If the Truth and Reconciliation Commission gets dragged into the strange, alternative reality where Annett and his followers thrive, the commission's purpose could be easily defeated. If that happens, we will have lost an historic opportunity to see justice properly done in finally turning the page on one of the darkest and most disgraceful chapters in Canadian history.

Blind alleys

This matters.

It matters because Annett has alleged that perhaps "hundreds" of tiny corpses are buried in a mass grave behind a former United Church residential school building situated on Tseshaht reserve land, near Port Alberni -- and now I want you to stop reading this for a moment and try to imagine what it would be like to be a Tseshaht person reading that same sentence. Tseshaht Chief Coun. Les Sam says he can't imagine what Annett is taking about.

It matters because at Kuper Island, where the Penelakut people have lived from time out of mind, Annett has reported unmarked graves associated with murders at the Catholic residential school that once operated there. Islander Robert Sam, a Penelakut elder who attended the residential school, says he'd heard stories about school children who drowned trying to swim away from the school, but no, certainly nothing about these graves.

Annett and his followers have alleged there are skeletons "between the walls" and under the foundations of buildings at Alert Bay, on Cormorant Island. Namgis tribal administrator George Speck says "no one has a clue" what would make Annett say these things. At Meares Island, Annett says corpses of schoolchildren were stored in the basement of a residential school building, and the bodies of other children are buried in an unmarked grave nearby. Ahousat Coun. Angus Campbell says it's nonsense: "People would know if it was there."

It goes on and on like this, but if you persist in pointing out the spectacular unlikelihood that any of Annett's stories are true, you will almost certainly find yourself accused of "smearing" him. That's what happens if you're white, anyway. If you're aboriginal, you may find yourself called a "police informant" or a "provocateur," or you'll be accused of having been a "collaborator and abuser" during your time in residential school. Annett has levelled just these accusations against his detractors.

He has accused them as well of complicity in "a criminal conspiracy to perpetrate and conceal acts of war, genocide, murder, ethnic cleansing, slave labour, sterilization, land theft, pedophilia" and other such crimes, and accused of conspiring to assault Annett, defraud him, and defame him in order to conceal those crimes.

Among those individuals who stand accused of these things are several Canadian journalists, judges, and corporate executives, former prime minister Jean Chretien, the RCMP, the United Church of Canada, former United Nations' Human Rights Commission chair Mary Robinson, former New Democratic Party cabinet minister John Cashore, and the Nuu-chah-nuulth Tribal Council. Even Annett's ex-wife has been implicated.

Paranoid accounts?

Everybody's out to get him. His supporters die mysteriously, there are shadowy stalkers, night-time visits from people who dump dead deer on his porch, and a "goon squad" run by the federal government. Mysterious people severed the brake lines on Annett's car, twice. Bureaucrats with the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia levy suspiciously high fines when Annett gets into car accidents. Even corrupt tax collectors from the Canada Revenue Agency are in on it. Believe it if you like. But the truth of all this actually matters.

It matters to me because I can count several old friends and colleagues among the people who show up as villains, collaborators and stooges in Annett's conspiracy, and I know a thing or two about Annett from when we were both young socialists, back in the 1970s.

It's personal because as a young reporter, I covered trials of pedophile priests. I came to know their victims as friends. I also came to know brave and kind clergymen who taught in residential schools, and I co-authored a book about residential schools with the former inmates of St. Mary's Mission.

One does not need to exaggerate or embellish anything about what happened in those places.

The terrible reality

It has lately become routine to hear Annett defended along the lines of, well, he may be wrong about some things, but at least he is bringing this terrible history into the light. Or he is forcing us to confront a "Canadian holocaust" that the news media in this country finds too hot to handle.

This is not true, either. You could fill a steamer trunk with clippings of articles about Indian residential schools that have appeared in Canadian newspapers in recent years. There have been stories about the chronic sexual abuse in the schools. There have been reports from criminal trials. There have full accounts of the policies and laws and regulations that were intended to employ the schools in a project of churning out obedient regiments of brown-skinned white people.

There have been feature treatments of the schools' degeneration into child-labour camps, and the part the schools played in reducing once-proud nations to broken remnants. And there have been stories about the heroic efforts First Nations' leaders have made to force the churches and the federal government to squarely face all that shame.

There were front-page stories a century ago, too. In 1897, senior Indian Affairs officials started blowing the whistle on the cavernous, shoddily-built, creaking institutions, pointing out that you couldn't have built more efficient incubation vectors for contagious disease, and for mass death, if you tried.

Back then, P.H. Bryce, the Indian department's chief medical officer, conducted a study of 1,500 children interned in 15 different Indian residential schools across Canada. He found that one in four of the children never made it out alive. A separate study of the Kuper Island school found that four of every 10 children sent there over a 25-year period never survived to graduate.

This is sufficiently damning. It is not necessary to assert, as Annett does, that infectious diseases were deliberately employed as part of a plot to "cull" Canada's aboriginal population. Everybody knows what happened. It is no secret, and is not even a secret that there are mass graves.

This is not a revelation.

From the late 18th century until well into the 20th century, wave after wave of epidemic diseases rolled through Indian villages across the Canadian prairies. The sicknesses swept over the mountains, down through all the valleys of the western slopes, up and down the West Coast, and up and back again.

At the time of the first smallpox epidemic, almost a third of the aboriginal people in what is now Canada lived in the tribal territories that came to be called British Columbia. Then there was smallpox, measles, chickenpox, diphtheria, influenza, mumps, tuberculosis, and typhoid. By the 1950s, the countryside was a vast, forested necropolis.

This is not a hidden history.

A landscape of tombs

This history lives on in the epics handed down in the oral literature of the aboriginal peoples, and in the horrific first-hand accounts of settlers and missionaries. It survives in fur trade journals, colonial correspondence, newspaper accounts, hospital records, Indian residential school studies, and sometimes in the very shape of the land itself.

There is hardly a cove or a bay in the 1,500 sea miles between Victoria and Gingolx where you can put a shovel in the ground without unearthing human bones. In the interior, anyone who has spent any time traversing the territories of the Stlatlimx, the N'lakapamux, the In-Shuck-ch or the Secwepemc will have noticed the tumuli, the overgrown burial places, the forlorn little cemeteries. And you will hear the stories from the people themselves.

You don't even have to leave town. In almost all the reserve villages remaining around Vancouver and Victoria, you will see that beside the old churches, there are plots filled with simple wooden crosses, or sometimes just mounds, where crosses may once have been. Now and then you will even come across rusted and gnarled pieces of iron sticking up out of the ground, from what's left of the graceful, wrought iron crosses of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

These graves come from the times when the sick died so quickly and in such numbers that it's a wonder the few survivors could bring themselves to bury the dead at all.

Indian country, as we used to call it, is a vast landscape of tombs. And the dead are still there, among and between the houses of reborn, thriving villages, and among and between the crumbling ruins of mission chapels, church-run tuberculosis hospitals, dormitories, and residential schools.

After all this suffering, the very least we owe the dead, and the living, is the truth.

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[Tyee]

Widely-published, Victoria-based writer Terry Glavin contributes this occasional column, Dissent, to The Tyee. His most recent book is Waiting for the Macaws and Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions (Penguin).

30 Comments:

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  • Bailey

    4 years ago

    Belief

    Given the horrendous history of man's abuse of his fellow humans the last couple of centuries, many people find themselves ashamed and appalled just to have to share the species with the perpetrators.

    It's not only aboriginal people who have suffered these abuses, though from Cortez on, they certainly have suffered as much as any group. The list of victims goes on and on. Blacks, slaves, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Gypsies, Armenians, the mentally ill and the mentally disabled, once even the 'educated'. All these and more have sometimes suffered institutional abuses, imprisonments and exterminations at the hands of some group or other.

    These are established historical truths, not paranoid delusions, but some who come to grips with these truths are so damaged by them that they themselves are unable to disengage themselves from the emotional and spiritual pain it causes.

    There is a great temptation to believe that any species capable of this must be capable of any horror. But the truth is that, even though evil does exist, most people are not evil.

    Most people are perfectly ordinary, good natured and would never do such things. But neither would they go very far out of their way to find out about it, or do much about it if they did, unless their noses got rubbed in it pretty hard.

    But some people are just...um...sensitive to such information. An understatement, I know.

    So you do get this belief sometimes. This willingness to cast aside both trust and doubt, and let the shame create belief. And that belief can go very far beyond the actualities that generated them. It can become self referential and recursive, and build into a sort of resonant crescendo.

    The only defence is in the nature of evidence. Such claims are always susceptible to evidence. Applying basic reality checking, while consciously remembering that most people are decent enough, can save one from this kind of overdone storytelling.

    Working to help make amends helps, too. After the damaging understanding that bad things were done, there can be healing in trying to make things right.

  • ME2

    4 years ago

    Residential schools.

    I think, if one were to document the deaths from the white man's diseases which ocurred in the home villages at the same time as those in the residential schools referred to in he article above, you would likely find the school rate was much lower than the village rate.

    This is particularly true of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, in which 20-40 million people died worldwide, and which hit aboriginals particularly hard.

    The main problem arising out of the current discussion of Residential schools is that all the documentation of those days that we are told of has been sifted through with the deliberate intent of finding ONLY negative information.

    More than a phoney "Truth and Reconciliation" exercise, what is really needed today is a thorough examination of ALL the information related to the issue, the positive info as well as the negative.

    Although there is plenty of positive info, the anti people will fight tooth and nail to suppress it, holding that there is no positive side, lest it interfere with their carefully nurtured guilt trip.

  • Bailey

    4 years ago

    forfeit

    When you engage in such abuses, I'm afraid you forfeit the right to point at the times you didn't. Maybe unfair on the decent people involved, but nevertheless.

    You absolutely pollute the subject forever. The positive, if any, is lost to you.

  • Skookum1

    4 years ago

    grotesque...

    Kevin Annett....why is that name, familiar? It's not to do with any of this, I'd remember, this is all new to me. Well, certain things I'd heard, but the people I'd heard them from had been tripping out....

    What was the name of the book about St. Mary's, Terr? St. Mary's in Mission, right, not Cranbrook? Sorry to not know about it until now; always interested in the home turf...any chance you came across the Chinook texts of the once-famous Passion Play held annually there in the course of people's memories? A vicarious question, given the import or your article, but I just had to ask.

  • dirk

    4 years ago

    Terry

    Totally agree with your assessment of Annett.

    This is nothing new(at least to those that have more than a passing familiarity with First Nations issues and concerns),in fact I have heard similar charges leveled against Annett from very reputable and trustworthy sources within the First Nation community( a community I am very familiar with and involved with).
    It's to bad,but for what ever reason Annett seems to be the go to guy when it comes to the residential school issue.Indeed I have blogged about EDITED FOR LIBEL CONCERNS -- TYEE MODERATOR

    Residential Schools took a horrendous toll on First Nations peoples.Indeed the affects are still reverberating through F.N communities.
    Some of Annett's antics are shameful and are doing great disservice to the very peoples Annett supposedly speaks for/feels for.
    But that said,I disagree with your statement;

    ..."Everybody knows what happened. It is no secret, and is not even a secret that there are mass graves"...

    No,everybody does not know,far from it.
    The ignorance of your average Canadian(indeed even within the government) when it comes to First Nations history and suffering is truly astounding).
    Lets also not forget ,with a 40-50% death rate in the Residential Schools these children are buried somewhere.Usually in and around the schools.Families were not informed,the government was not informed,indeed nobody really knows but the churches that ran these schools.
    So the fact that evidence(that could hold up in a modern court) is hard to find should not come as much as a surprise.
    That some distrust the government and in particularly the churches should also come as no surprise.
    The quickest way to disprove the Annetts of the world, would be for the churches and the government to investigate this sad chapter.Better yet release all information in their possession,to a truth and reconciliation committee made up of relevant people.
    But sadly this is not the case.One can only ask why...?

  • ME2

    4 years ago

    Bailey

    Thanks, Bailey, You make my point better than I could ever do.

  • Ontarian

    4 years ago

    Shooting the messenger, once again.

    It's hard to answer, isn't it? Kevin's delusional, anyone who works with him is delusional, so anything he (or we) say is invalid. It's the oldest trick in the book - you don't like the message, smear the messenger. Kevin didn't just pull these things out of his hallucinatory musings - he did research and spoke to many eyewitnesses. As for mass graves already being known about, I'm sure the general public has no idea, as they have no idea of the horrors of residential schools. Why weren't the graves ever investigated to find out how the children died? That's all we want - an impartial investigation, not one run by the implicated parties (the churches and the government).

    P.S. Kevin didn't just decide to call himself Eagle Strong Voice - he was given that name by elder and chief Louie Daniels Whispers Wind.

  • Skywalker

    4 years ago

    Ontarian

    The cause however just is not advanced by those who use misinformation and hyperbole for their own gain. In fact it is hindered. A just cause cannot/should not enlist the "help" of the misguided and self-serving. If the message is based on manufactured information then the messenger should be shot - figuratively speaking.

  • grannysaga

    4 years ago

    The government's 'Truth and

    The government's 'Truth and Reconciliation' Commission seems to want to jump the truth part and just reconcile with those who will, without revealing the whole ugly truth of intentional, systematic genocide. Understandable, since Canada's responsibility for genocide is very clear in the facts and clearly they are trying to avoid that charge. Understandable also since there are people in positions of power in Aboriginal communities now who would not have been had traditional governance survived the genocide.

    The 'Task Force' headed by John Milloy was only created in response to media investigation of Kevin's information: The Globe and Mail did it's own investigation of government reports in the National Archive and concluded Kevin's data was accurate: 50% of the children in residential schools died for over 4 decades that we can document for certain.

    Yes, native people in the villages died at high rates from diseases too, the highest death rate on record for TB in the world, ever. However, their children in the residential schools were dying at SEVEN TIMES the rate of their families in the village, a rate not attainable through normal treansmission, and indicative of intentional and systematic exposure to disease.

    Since the government did not require the churches to report children's deaths to the government nor to the child's family, the death schools could continue to collect per diem grants for all dead students as well as the new students who replaced them. They also met the objectives of the federal government this way: The Superintentent of Indian Affairs, DC Scott, considered high death rates consistent with the policy of the federal government.

    The government's fake "Task Force' into the deaths of children in the residential schools HAS NO BUDGET ALLOCATED TO IT. It is window dressing ... a farce ... a smokescreen.

    The International Tribunal of Traditional Indigenous Elders is not a farce. It is equipped to investigate the burial sites and tell the truth that our Canadian government intends to hide.

    I always find it interesting that those who denigrate, dismiss and try to destroy Kevin Annett's credibility, nonetheless always have to end up acknowledging the truth of the facts he presents: There are mass unmarked graves, and it was genocide. That is what Canadians do not know and must learn.

    Time for the truth: Canada is not nice!

  • SoundWind

    4 years ago

    Thank You Terry Glavin!

    I've found it PROFOUNDLY disturbing that so-called journalists seem to take everything Annett says and just run with it without looking into the details of what he's saying or his credibility. I realize they do it becuase it makes good "sound-bite" media.

    The truth is bad enough, the histrionics supported by Annett and his followers does nothing to further the cause, it just diminishes the efforts of those people who really do want find the truth and provide some measure of reconciliation to the thousands of people whose lives continue to be effected by this terrible period in our history.

    I also find it very odd how people like grannysaga (whose posts appear on many websites that report on or question Annett's credibility), the rest of Annett's followers and Annett himself seem to already know the outcome of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission...how is that possible since the head of the commission was just appointed this week? A highly respected NATIVE judge is heading it...but I'm sure Annett et al will find something wrong with him too. They'll declare him a conspiritor with the government or some such nonsense.

    The bottom line is if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem and right now "Eagle Strong Voice" is part of the problem not part of the solution. EDITED FOR LEGAL CONCERNS -- TYEE MODERATOR

  • mopled

    4 years ago

    Just watch it.

    You don't have to take Annett's word. I would advise watching the award winning documentary before you make up your minds.

    I watched it yesterday from a link supplied by rense.com, which featured it.
    http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-6637396204037343133&hl=en-CA

    Genocide has been standard practice among humans forever. That Church and State collude isn't news either.

    If we want it to stop genocide anywhere, we will have to recognize it here first.

  • anarcho

    4 years ago

    More Glavin Smear

    Not content with smearing the peace movement as pro-Saddam etc., Glavin now turns his attacks on the movement to unearth the truth about the deaths of children in the residential schools. He does this, as someone else points out, by attacking the messenger. By the way, unlike Glavin, I have known Annett since he was 18 years old and know him to be as honest and decent a person as you could meet.

  • dirk

    4 years ago

    Ontario said... "It's hard

    Ontario said...
    "It's hard to answer, isn't it? Kevin's delusional, anyone who works with him is delusional, so anything he (or we) say is invalid. It's the oldest trick in the book - you don't like the message, smear the messenger. Kevin didn't just pull these things out of his hallucinatory musings - he did research and spoke to many eyewitnesses"....

    I think you are misreading this,nobody is saying Annett is totally wrong.He definitly has cause to displaying his outrage at this long neglected and ignored issue....
    The residential schools system was ill conceived and morally reprehensible.In that it's goal was to destroy native culture.The children were taken with out parental consent and in some case without their knowledge,never to be seen again.Many were subjected to physical and sexual assaults.Indeed 40-50% died before "graduation".
    ....But he is stretching things,and is using tactics that seem to be more about himself and his ego.Why...?

    I have no problem with Annett calling attention to this issue,and in part I am sure the guy played a positive role in attracting attention to this issue,for that he deserves some credit.
    Also some readers might have trouble with Glavin's article,particularly his using of the controversy that surrounds Mr Annett,to ridicule the character/intelligence of some on the left,i.e Chomsky.
    Like as if Chomsky as a person,scholar & activist,can be doubted or ignored based on a handful of his comments he might have made in regards to Mr Annett.Humans beings are fallible after all.
    In fact Glavin sees me as one of one of those "leftist fools".As I often take issue with Mr Glavin,to many of his articles seem to be needlessly inflammatory.
    It's as if Mr Glavin has an axe to grind with the "left",who ever they are.
    In fact his ego shines through in many of his writing on the "left",indeed in a manner that is quite similar to Mr Annett's ego.They problem being,both their egos override other aspects of their work/writings.Even those writings that raise important points and doubts..
    Again,do not let your opinions of Mr Glavin cloud your thinking at least not in regards to Mr Annett,and the issues Glavin has raised.
    I can totally understand where Glavin is coming from.One might take issue with Glavin's ridiculing of Mr Annett,and those people that work with or take him seriously,but one can not argue with the points Glavin has raised.
    Mr Annett has opened himself up to these attacks,by virtue of his own behavior and his many bizarre allegations.
    Of course someone is going to come along eventually and blow his house down.Don't blame the messenger,even those messenger that grate.

  • marta

    4 years ago

    Thank You Terry Glavin

    EDITED FOR LEGAL CONCERNS -- TYEE MODERATOR
    The residential schools were a shameful period in our history. But Annett is not going to help with any real understanding of what went on. He is going to cause real harm to many, many people.

  • POC04746160

    4 years ago

    Marta,

    I am proud to be Kevin’s friend and follower. Without personal experience is hard to accept the ugly truths. Public servants deliberately lied to steal my child and ruin his health and life. For seeking justice your government declared me dangerous, delusional, paranoid, mentally ill criminal. Lying and covering up lies and crimes against disposable children remains the norm in your stolen cursed land. Prima facie evidence of my family’s tiny part of native people's general experience is posted at the http://fcase.blogharbor.com. I will be extremely grateful for any comment.

  • POC04746160

    4 years ago

    Why were Marta's and my posts without any explanation removed?

    Long live FREEDOM OF SPEECH! http://fcase.blogharbor.com

  • POC04746160

    4 years ago

    Racist and Holocaust Denier maligns Residential School survivors

    Racist and Holocaust Denier maligns Residential School survivors and their advocate, Kevin Annett Eagle Strong Voice, in Tyee magazine

    Statement by the Indigenous Elders of The International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada (IHRTGC)

    For International Media Release

    30 April, 2008
    Squamish Nation Territory ("Vancouver, Canada")

    We are shocked and disgusted by an article that appeared this week in the west coast magazine "The Tyee", authored by Terry Glavin. This article is nothing more than a racist denial of the claims of residential school survivors that children died and were buried in mass graves across Canada.

    The article is also a scathing and unsubstantiated personal attack on the one caucasian man who has fought consistently and with great self-sacrifice for residential school survivors in Canada, Reverend Kevin Annett, who has been given the sacred name Eagle Strong Voice by our elder and IHRTGC judge Chief Louis Daniels, and adopted by him into the Anishinabe Nation. We therefore consider any attack made upon Reverend Annett to be an attack on the Anishinabe people, and on us.

    We consider The Tyee to have violated and dishonoured our people by printing this hateful and misleading article, and we demand its formal retraction and the public censure of Terry Glavin by the magazine and by all concerned citizens.

    Until The Tyee takes these steps, we call upon all people to boycott this publication.

    For generations we have fought against the kind of ignorance and racism spouted by Mr. Glavin, who is basically calling our people liars.

    For example, Glavin insultingly refers to eyewitnesses' accounts of residential school graves as "urban legends ... like alligators in New York sewers" (!).

    In effect, Glavin is saying that there are no mass graves of native children, when the very body he claims to support - the government's "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" - has already cited evidence that children in these schools were buried "four or five to a grave".

    This is not an "urban legend", as Glavin sarcastically claims. This is the truth, as witnessed by Sylvester Greene, who personally buried an Inuit child at the United Church school in Edmonton in 1953; or William Combes, who saw a priest bury a child at the Kamloops Catholic school in 1964.
    cont.

  • POC04746160

    4 years ago

    Racist and Holocaust Denier maligns Residential School survivors

    cont.
    Is Glavin calling these men liars? Why has he not interviewed them, and given their story the same exposure as he has his hatred against Reverend Annett?

    And why does Glavin falsely claim that the RCMP have "investigated" these claims and "found nothing"? This is an outright lie, for on countless occasions, we have taken this evidence to the RCMP, who have flatly refused to investigate. For they, like Mr. Glavin, are actively concealing this crime of genocide against our people.

    With typical colonial arrogance, and speaking in the same tongue as our church and government abusers, Terry Glavin states that all our claims are already known, and that the history of the residential schools is not hidden. What a lie this is! The real story of these schools has only begun to be told, as is evident in Glavin's and The Tyee's refusal to reprint or comment on any of the evidence of murders, forced sterilizations and mass graves that we have submitted to them over the past four years.

    Rather than help our people, Terry Glavin engages in the worst kind of character assassination and yellow journalism by attacking Rev. Annett personally, belittling and mocking the physical attacks made against him, and subjecting him to the same kind of cruelty that has been inflicted on him by those in church and state who are responsible for the torture and death of our children in residential schools. We therefore must ask if Glavin is working for these same destructive parties.

    We are especially appalled that Glavin is posing as a "supporter" of our people while conducting such a hateful and destructive assault on our work and the word of residential school survivors. Lacking the honesty or courage to attack us directly, Glavin targets Reverend Annett, who he portrays as being the author of the claims of murder and mass burials at residential schools.

    cont.

  • POC04746160

    4 years ago

    Racist and Holocaust Denier maligns Residential School survivors

    cont.
    Let this be clear: the claims that Glavin is attacking concerning the murder and burial of residential school children do not emanate from Kevin Annett, but from hundreds of eyewitnesses who saw these killings, participated in burying children, or personally experienced the brutalities documented so accurately by Reverend Annett since 1996. Reverend Annett is simply the messenger of these accounts.

    In that regard, we stand by every statement made by Reverend Annett concerning crimes in Indian Residential Schools, and we challenge Mr. Glavin and The Tyee to refute them with evidence of their own.

    In addition, on March 16, 2008, Reverend Annett was appointed as the personal agent of hereditary Squamish Chief Kiapilano, on whose land Mr. Glavin lives and The Tyee is published. We therefore consider Terry Glavin and The Tyee to have violated their occupancy of Chief Kiapilano's land, and Chief Kiapilano's hospitality, and we call upon both Terry Glavin and The Tyee to vacate Squamish territory immediately.

    Let us conclude by saying that we consider Terry Glavin's article to be an outright assault on all residential school survivors and their struggle to be heard and believed. Glavin and The Tyee have set back the clock and added to the crushing burden on our people by undermining that struggle.

    We insist that, once it has relocated, The Tyee immediately open its pages to those residential school survivors who can speak of the murders they have witnessed, and the burial sites they know exist. If it refuses to, we must assume that the Tyee endorses the racist and irresponsible garbage written by Terry Glavin.

    We call upon the world to endorse our condemnation and expulsion of Terry Glavin and The Tyee, and to boycott this magazine and person.

    Sincerely, we are

    The Indigenous Elders of the IHRTGC, coming from the Squamish, Cree, Metis, Anishinabe, Lakota and Six Nations under the traditional Land Law Jurisdiction of Turtle Island.

    Chief Louis Daniels, presiding elder

    contact:

    30 April, 2008

  • Dr.Dawg

    4 years ago

    Annett is not the issue

    I have to agree with Glavin that Annett shows some disturbing signs of paranoia. But, as Henry Kissinger once remarked, "Even paranoids have enemies." It's quite possible that stumbling across stories of unimaginable abuse and then finding that no one is interested could drive one slowly insane.

    What if one of us became aware of those kids in an Austrian cellar, and told authorities, and just got shrugged off? Wouldn't that drive one to despair and ultimately to delusion?

    I don't know that this is what happened here, of course. What concerned me when the story broke was that the media for the most part maintained a wall of silence. Annett has finally specified real places where these graves allegedly are.

    Why not have a reliable third-party commission of forensic anthropologists and archaeologists, with direct First Nations involvement, investigate two or three of these claims? It's put up or shut up time. Either Annett is raving, or there's something in what he says.

    Incidentally, Glavin might think that mass Native graves are already an acknowledged fact of history, but I was unaware of them, and I'm far from alone, I suspect.

    What I sense here is more than a whiff of AFN politics. They don't want their hard-won Truth and Reconciliation Commission upstaged by mavericks. I know how political institutions work, and so I am not surprised that Annett's quirkiness, rather than his charges, has become the issue. But...what if he's right?

  • Skookum1

    4 years ago

    Turtle Island not part of Skwxwu7mesh cosmogony/tradition

    I always find it funny (not ha-ha funny) when people invoke invented traditions, and then claim that they're real traditions. Since when is the turtle and "Turtle Island" part of any Skwxwu7mesh tradition? Since the rabble rousers from the Plains and Woodland peoples east of the Rockies showed up I guess....who is Louis Daniels speaking for? The Skwxwu7mesh people or his allies from the "Lakota, Cree etc"??

  • anarcho

    4 years ago

    An old propaganda trick

    It is a very old propaganda trick - going back to at least the slave-owner opposition to the Abolitionist Movement - to malign individuals by claiming they are involved for fame or publicity. People who seek fame (or infamy) for its own sake are shallow, narcissistic and ill-educated. Think only of Paris Hilton or Donald Trump. Kevin, whom I have known since 1975, both as a member of a socialist organization and Spartacus Books Coop, is a serious and studious person. When he was young, we, his older friends, used to smile at his youthful earnestness, a trait he maintains to this day, minus of course, the youthful naivety. I cannot think of anyone less likely to do something for publicity or fame than Kevin. People who slander him in this way are cowardly and despicable, otherwise they would deal with the issues rather than engage in such cheap, slimy and cliched trickery.

  • anarcho

    4 years ago

    Dissapointed In You!

    "Since the rabble rousers from the Plains and Woodland peoples east of the Rockies showed up I guess."

    Er, I am surprise you don't know this but there is a world-wide Aboriginal Movement also called "4th World" There is also a pan-Indian movement. It is something called solidarity. I am also surprised to see you giving any credibility to anything Glavin would write. He has joined the other side.

  • Omahkohkiaayo

    4 years ago

    The Cause

    The sad thing is that "The Cause" of justice for Residential School victims, of whom my mother was one, is just, and indeed there are many allegations in need of investigation, and thus, when someone like Annett, EDITED FOR LEGAL CONCERNS -- TYEE MODERATOR latches on to "The Cause",

    EDITED...

  • Lunamoth

    4 years ago

    re: Your Recent Nervous Breakdown

    Personal attacks are always a sign the writer can't win the argument any other way. Kevin Annett is only one man -- and should you bother to visit his website www.hiddenfromhistory.org, or actually read LOVE AND DEATH IN THE VALLEY, you might learn a few lessons on the lost art of truth-telling.

    After dumping on Kevin Annett, you present yourself as the true voice of residential school survivors -- and eventually end up parotting the same horrific reports that Kevin has been bringing up for years.

    This issue is enormous and threatens the legal, social, and political foundations of our country. There is plenty of room in this investigation for mavericks like Annett.

    You question the truth of his allegations that there are mass graves across the country. Maybe you need to read some declassified Cold War history and study the role of our military, government and police in operating, and later covering up, a vast program of secret experiments, based on Nazi-style eugenics, which used minority children as guinea pigs. While you're at it, read about the thousands of Duplessis orphans from Quebec, who disappeared during the same period, and have been traced to mass graves behind mental hospitals. Look into the long-suppressed history of the MKULTRA program, that operated from coast to coast in Canada, including one facility in Lincoln Park, Alberta.

    [OFFENSIVE COMMENT DIRECTED AT THE WRITER DELETED. -MODERATOR.]

    When you use your opponents' own arguments to attack your opponent, it generally means you have no leg to stand on.

  • Skookum1

    4 years ago

    patronizing attacks...

    Quote:
    Er, I am surprise you don't know this but there is a world-wide Aboriginal Movement also called "4th World"

    [INFLAMMATORY COMMENT EDITED. -MODERATOR.] of course I know about "4th World", which is why I know you/they don't have aboriginal community support. The rest of your post, and the follow0-aups, follow a familir pattern of personal put-downs I've heard from various kidns of propagandists.

    Pleae explasin to me whose claimed title is not Skwxwu7mesh but Musqueam in origin presumes to speak for the Skwxwu7mesh? Someone who doesn't have native status because his paretns gave it up? Someone who never acquired the name Capilano by proper indiegneous law, i.e. p[otatches and naming cermeony, and community endorsement?

    Apparenmtly 4th world knows more about the Skwxwu7mes than the Swku7mesh do.

    And as for the yak about Kevin Annett not being publicity-hungry, Iv'e heard that kind of crap before; probably from other Spartcaus Books-related invective (Long live the Glorious Trotskyite Reality and its inspiring Rhetoric!!), I know now why t he name is familiar; I lived across the street. With one Ian Hunter, a pot-legalization and other things activist who also styled himself as modest and meek and not out for dough; but used the hosue rent money (2 grand) to finance his affairs, and published his own p.r. with banners like "Ian Hunter triumphs again!". The face he put to the public was nothing like the one we had to look at.

    yeah, modesty while revving up sensationalist issue and recruiting devoted followers is alwasy suspect.

    that one of those followers isn't even who he claims to be (Te Kapilano) [EDITED. -MODERATOR.]. 4th World indeed.

  • Teko

    4 years ago

    Does Annetts work not bring this to the public eye?

    I can see where the writer is going with his article and small parts of this writing are of my opinion too. But I have to disagree with where he states that these horrific acts against humanity that occurred in the residential schools is public knowledge. I am shocked at the number of Canadians who do not know about the abuse that occurred, about the assimilation, about the cultural genocide that happened and to a leaser degree is still happening today. This is not something that is taught in Canadian schools, it is not part of the curriculum in any province of this country. So believe what you want of what Annett and his followers say but take away one thing.....The past abuse and the present abuse of Aboriginal Canadians must remain in the public eye and must be addressed by our Federal Government. The Greatest Experiment in the History of North America is alive and well today in Canada and if Kevin's voice can draw attention to it.....Then Go Big and Go Strong Kevin!

  • Omahkohkiaayo

    4 years ago

    Published Letter of Harriet Nahane Before her Death

    I was Convener of the Tribunal on Residential Schools which took place in
    Vancouver B.C. in June of this year. I worked together with Kevin Annett whom I have been associated with for several years. As a Residential School survivor this Tribunal was very important to me. It was my hope that some justice could be won for our people. There is a federal government Healing Fund of $350 million for healing of survivors but none of it has gone to the survivors themselves. I put a lot of effort into the preparation of the Tribunal and it was through my relationship with Jack Bell, a wealthy Benefactor, that the Tribunal was able to secure special terms for the rental of the hall at the Maritime Labor Centre.

    During the Tribunal a number of things went seriously wrong. Decisions and procedures which had been decided together were suddenly changed without my
    participation, funds were misappropriated, the privacy of witnesses giving closed testimony was compromised, and some of the judges appointed by Kevin
    Annett and Rudy James turned out to be without credentials. Many people were upset and angry. Jim Craven saw what was going on and has attempted to set things right. I have serious grievances with Kevin Annett because of his actions during and after the Tribunal which showed that he had an agenda other than that which had been presented at first. I feel used by him and information about my experiences at residential school have been given for publication by him without my consent.

    I am President of the Western Canada Leonard Peltier Defence Fund and
    District Vice-President of the Indian Homemakers Association in North
    Vancouver. I belong to the Pacheeda Nation and carry the name of Tsibeot
    who was the Grand chief of Pacheeda. I also run the Sacred Duty Institute and I teach hereditary chiefs their traditional roles. I feel very strongly that nobody has the right to speak for others but white people always speak for us and think they know better than us. They consider us as helpless children to work on behalf of.

    Most of us who survived the Residential Schools and have been involved in court cases in Port Alberni suing the United Church and the government of Canada, we are not on the internet. Jim Craven has taken a lot of trouble to inform us about these discussions on internet, to listen to us carefuly and speak our thoughts the way we would like. We would like him to
    continue. If you need further information on any of these matters please contact me by phone at (604) 985-5817.

    Rosetta Stone (Harriet Nahanee)

  • Ontarian

    4 years ago

    Re: Published letter by Harriet Nahanee

    [COMMENT REMOVED FOR LIBEL CONCERNS. -MODERATOR.]

  • Geoff

    4 years ago

    Administrator

    This thread is now closed...

    Due to the highly inflammatory nature of the comments on the thread and since close supervision is not possible at the moment, we are closing it. Apologies for the inconvenience. If you have any concerns or questions, please e-mail

    .

    Thanks

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