Annett’s Weekly: A Free Inquiry and Commentary
Published without copyright or illusions every Wednesday
Posted regularly at https://republicofkanata.ca/category/annetts-weekly/
Issue No. 6: November 24, 2021
Living Alongside the Devil: Canada’s Normalized Genocide
Living Alongside the Devil: Canada’s Normalized Genocide – Annett’s Weekly, No. 6
Quote of the week:
“It is undeniable that the children die at an enormously higher rate in our Indian schools, but such is in keeping with the policy of this Department, which is geared toward the final solution of the Indian Problem.” – Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs, Ottawa, November 7, 1909
A conversation with a killer at peace with himself
An indigenous friend of mine remarked recently that he can’t understand why the Roman Catholic church is still allowed to operate in his community of Kamloops when they killed so many children there. In the way of an explanation, I recalled to him an encounter I had years ago that explains some of Canada’s normalized genocide.
It happened during the summer of 1996, early in my campaign to uncover the slaughter of Indian residential school children. A stranger phoned me and claimed that he had worked at the catholic Kamloops school, and said he wanted to see me. We met over tea at a cafe in Vancouver’s east end.
The stranger was a white man in his sixties. With documents and photos, he revealed how he had been a boys’ dormitory supervisor for over a decade in Kamloops.
“I see you’re getting headlines for your work, but you’re only scratching the surface,” he said quietly. “The full story will never be allowed to come out.”
I listened in horror as he proceeded to describe the nightmare that was daily life in the Kamloops Catholic Indian school: the routine of deliberate starvation, prescribed tortures and secret nightly burials of the hundreds of children who were killed during his time there, between 1952 and 1961.
“The first offense for the kids who ran away was a week on bread and water. After that, the punishment got more severe.”
“How severe?” I asked him, as I jotted down his words.
“We had stocks in the playground. We put the bad kids in them, rain or shine. Often they’d be left there to die. There were a lot of deaths in the school. Too many, really, but we had a quota to fulfill. Eventually we were burying kids two and three to a grave, out behind the garbage dump. We left it to the local Indian chiefs to dispose of all the bodies so we wouldn’t be implicated.”
His matter of fact tone caused my blood to boil, but I stammered,
“What do you mean a quota to fulfill?”
He shrugged nonchalantly.
“It was common knowledge, a practice going back before world war one. The government and the church required that we lower the number of kids in the school by at least one third every year, no questions asked. We were totally protected by the Mounties so we didn’t worry about it.”
“How did you lower the number of children?” I asked.
“We often just let them starve to death. But the preferred method was to lock the kids in together, the sick with the healthy, and never help any of them. That way tuberculosis wiped out most of them. A so-called natural cause, you see? All neat and tidy on the records.”
It was a very un-Canadian moment, when a participant in the mass murder of children admitted to the crime. The old man actually smiled as I said,
“And nobody objected?”
“Object? Why would anyone object? It was all government approved.”
The killer proceeded to describe how the children were farmed out to local hospitals to be sterilized or used in drug testing experiments that profited the catholic church immensely, and were sold to rich child rapists and then vanished forever, and were held down as their teeth were yanked out without painkillers to save local dentists the expense of using novocaine. He even described how the remains of children who were beaten or tortured to death were always incinerated to destroy telltale evidence of how they died.
My naivety at the time leapt out full blown as I exclaimed,
“But how can you just sit here and talk so calmly about killing children?”
The old man seemed confused by my words. But he finally said,
“It isn’t easy to understand what we had to do. And don’t think it didn’t bother me for a while. But you can get used to anything.”
“And you can sleep at night?” I challenged him.
“Of course I can. I’m a deacon in my church and I have five grandchildren. I’m a happy and contented man.”
And he was, indeed, like anyone who is the well-adjusted product of a psychotic regime. Yet I couldn’t resist asking him,
“But how can you be happy, knowing what you did?”
He smiled the kind of bland self-assuredness you see in the pews on Church Sundays, and then he said,
“Because I know that God forgives me.”
Sigmund Freud said that it is always possible for a certain number of people to bind themselves together in love, but only as long as there are other people left over to receive their aggression and violence. Freud said that’s how what we call civilization stays together: by saving some and condemning others to death, even children: all of it performed neatly, legally, and morally, and always with God on the side of the killers.
Navigating the Black Ooze, or How much of this will you read?
Four years ago I wrote and published a play called The Land of No-One. It’s a factually-based tale of a Canadian church doctor who for many years experimented on and killed native children in west coast Indian hospitals, the truth of which surfaces to haunt him and his family. On two occasions, the play was picked up by community theatre groups in British Columbia and Ontario, and production had begun, when suddenly it was cancelled without explanation.
The same curtailment of my play has just happened again, but in America. And this time, at least a reason was given. A Sacramento alternative theatre group known for its politically “radical” productions had enthusiastically embraced The Land of No-One and had begun reading and casting for it. But then I received a worried call from one of their people.
“I’m afraid we can’t produce your play as it stands now,” said the man curtly.
“Oh, really? Why is that?”
“You mention vaccinations and microchipping. If you remove those references we may consider doing it.”
My old buddy Joe Hendsbee called it the Black Ooze. He saw it engulf his entire generation as the Great Fear of McCarthyism and self-censorship swept this continent. Then and now, free inquiry is suspect and criminalized. Certain people and issues are declared anathema, and everyone – including the “progressives” – look and think the other way as human lives and truth are crushed in the shadows.
Nowadays, the state of the Ooze reminds me of the concluding scene of the cult sci-fi movie The Blob, where the voraciously-expanding organism has engulfed most of the unsuspecting townspeople and nothing seems able to stop it. When my 92 year old father Bill asked me today how I am doing, I told him I felt like I am perched on the upper branches of a wobbling tree as the floodwaters rise around me.
“Well, hell, Kev,” he replied laconically. “That’s nothing new for you.”
A case in point: one rainy Vancouver morning in April of 2006, I stood with a few Indians outside Christ Church Anglican cathedral, holding a soggy sign about the children the Anglicans had murdered. A frowning woman reporter from BCTV came to me with her cameraman and demanded,
“Reverend, these claims you’re making about children being killed in residential schools seem pretty wild. What proof do you have?”
I gestured to an elderly native woman named Harriett Nahanee who stood nearby.
“She witnessed the murder of a girl named Maisie Shaw in the Alberni school. Why don’t you interview her?”
The reporter gave a startled and then horrified look at Harriett, waved off the cameraman, and hurried away from me and Harriett.
Encouraged by the prevailing Black Ooze, the latest batch of genocide nay-sayers are cropping up again across Canada, whether by design or simple knee-jerk reflex, now that dead little Indians are rising once more from their graves. That’s to be expected in a place like my country, which like an untreated psychopath must deny the murder weapon in its hand and threaten anyone who points it out. The same folks who go ballistic over the present COVID restrictions refuse to believe that our present police state has been around from the beginning. It just never touched them.
Last Wednesday, in response to the nay-sayers I published the complete record of evidence proving how and why genocide happened against native children in Canada for over a century. It’s over four hours of scrupulously researched video-recorded evidence – news reports, eyewitness statements, archival documents, and forensic analysis – gathered over twenty years. It’s the evidence that compelled Canada’s pseudo-“apology” for residential schools in July 2008 and helped force “Pope Benedict” from office in February 2013. But to Canadians, it might as well not exist. Their level of interest in its hard proof is next to nothing: especially the academics, librarians, journalists, and “freedom activists”.
Perhaps the present Ooze is best summed up by the immortal words of the first United Church official to toss me from a job, Paul Mills, a Bay street lawyer and the chairman of the Board of the church’s Fred Victor Mission in Toronto where I worked. When I wrote to him about the drug dealing, rape, child trafficking, and money laundering going on at the Mission, he summoned me to his office and said to my face,
“We know all about those things. The only problem here is that you wrote a letter about it.”
Oh, Canada.
(Here is the evidence of the crime:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvhfXAd08TE – ICLCJ proceedings, Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPKFk_L7y9g&t=879s – ICLCJ proceedings, Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF71AEjTNPY – ICLCJ verdict, Feb. 25, 2013)
Absolving ourselves: Canada’s very own “post Vietnam” pastime
One of my strangest encounters as a clergyman was with a nice young guy named Mike. He had it all: good looks, a cushy job, a gorgeous wife named Esther and three wonderful daughters. Every week his seemingly happy family worshipped in my Port Alberni church without a hint of a problem. That is, until Mike asked to see me one Sunday after the service.
“I need your advice,” he said pleasantly as we retired to my office. And then with a not-exactly troubled look, Mike quickly described in lurid detail his series of affairs with various women in town.
After a few minutes of his voyeuristic account, I interrupted him by asking,
“So what do you want advice about?”
He gave me a smirk and said,
“I just wanted to know if you think it’s okay.”
I stared at him, dumbstruck, and asked,
“The issue is whether you think it is, Mike.”
“Oh yeah,” he said casually. “It’s not really cheating on Esther because I keep my underwear on during sex.”
Mike’s attitude is consummately Canadian. His adultery isn’t actually adultery to him because he wore his jockey shorts while he was doing it, just like to his United Church, its genocide of little children isn’t actually genocide because it wore what it considered a good intention. Lying to ourselves seems to be a national pastime here in the Great White North, which tends to happen in a killing zone.
The time after the orgasmic frenzy of a war, whether foreign or domestic, is always one of post-coital reflection. And the other day I stumbled across a remarkably precise description of today’s blithely self-assuring mood of bogus “reconciliation” in Canada, now that it is pretending to look at the mass graves of its little brown victims. It’s a passage from the autobiography of American playwright Arthur Miller, who describes what he saw as the self-delusion into which his country plunged soon after its own genocidal war in Vietnam. He writes,
“In time, after the conflict, the system would invent a redemption, cooking it up like a movie script out of the longings of the audience. What had become common tragic knowledge was carefully rewritten by experts in denial who gave us in myth the victory that eluded us in reality. Our pain was apparently too great to bear if untempered by the merest meaning, and so the doors were thrown open to an orgy of sentimental self-appreciation, and we were ‘standing tall again’ on the same quicksand of unreality as ever. The monumentalized dead were imagined rather than mourned, and avoidance was the survivors’ lot. It was as though our people had witnessed something so repulsive, so inexplicable for us to have done, that we could not acknowledge the casting away of so many lives. Instead, we found solace in a show business performance that reassured us of greatness reborn, and spoke over and over of an alleged ‘national healing’, as if to convince ourselves of something not there.”
Personally, this understanding goes far to explain why I am still an exiled pariah in my own land, even after my exposure of our homegrown war crimes has been vindicated. Pale Canadians still cling to their national self-image as that of a civilized, well-intentioned people, because the alternative would mean to let slip the mask and see the ugly reflection in the mirror. The same desperate delusion explains why most of us long for a return to an imagined pre-COVID “good old days” that in truth existed only for the privileged beneficiaries of massive race murder in Canada
Absolving ourselves of our own crimes never resolves anything; it only speeds our demise. Because we cannot come to terms with something we have never understood – namely, ourselves.
