No court in Canada will ever hear a case against the Crown or the fucking churches about their genocide.
— Samuel Wedge1
I was asked to review the novel Samuel Wedge: A Memoir of Necropolis. I read, but don’t usually review novels, but the author’s father told me: “It’s an autobiographical novel.” So I agreed to review it because I consider the subject matter highly important. I already know the story of author Kevin Annett fairly well.
I read Samuel Wedge, and it cuts extremely close to the history that Kevin Annett has put forth over the years. It is a story of how a United Church minister revealed sordid crimes carried out in Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation territory, in a little corporate logging town situated in the middle of southern Vancouver Island colonially designated Port Alberni. Annett alleges that thousands of First Nations children were beaten, raped, and killed or exposed to diseases with church involvement.
For failing to keep quiet about all this, Annett has suffered greatly. He was delisted as a church minister from the United Church; his wife divorced him and was granted full custody of their two daughters; unemployed, he became penniless; he was dismissed from the doctoral program at University of British Columbia; and scorn was heaped upon him by mass media.
This is the story of Kevin Annett and it comes across basically the same for Samuel Wedge.
I was curious, so I asked Annett: “How much of your novel Sam Wedge is autobiographical? Or perhaps easier to answer: what is fictional other than names of people?”
Annett replied, “It’s all based on real incidents and events. Some of it is fictionalized, like the boardroom scenes with church officials, although the outcome of events makes such scenes likely and plausible. The names are made up, and of course the plot is somewhat fictionalized. Otherwise, it all happened.”
It is clear that the reader is not just dealing with a fictionalized novel here. The story is based on real life events.
Kevin Annett is a difficult person to suss out. The Indian Residential Schools are a sordid fact of Canadian history that elicited a sorry from the prime minister Stephen Harper many years later. Whether that apology was genuine or had ulterior motives is cause for speculation.2 The defrocked minister has several detractors, and this would be expected from the church, colonially derived governments based on the dispossession of First Nations, and corporations that exploit the resources of First Nations territory.
Samuel Wedge is a quick read, although it reads unevenly. At times the author displays pedantry and at other times crudeness.3 The novel flips back and forth in time and changes locales often as well. This reader found it difficult to get a bearing on where the events were occurring and from which period of time.
It seems what is primarily important is not the quality of the storytelling but the verisimilitude of the narrative. It is indeed undeniable that a genocide has occurred and is still occurring to Original Peoples of Turtle Island.4
Annett is unabashedly a self-promoter. His emails boast: “Kevin Annett was re-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015.”
In his novel Samuel Wedge also comes across as cocky. He claims his wife left him for “a lesser man.” (p. 208) He also claims his wife hates him because she still loves him. (p. 208)
Annett’s novel substantiates the child murders, child trafficking, and genocide allegations made by Wedge, and by extension himself: “Mary’s article about me … proved the crime and the plot against me …” (p. 230)5
In real life, however, this has not transpired.6,7
Samuel Wedge explains the problem: RCMP subversion.
Stage One in dealing with any target is Distraction: you take attention off what he’s saying and put it instead on what you want to say about the issue, or the target. Stage Two is Discrediting: you publicaly destroy the target’s reputation and credibility. And Stage Three is Removal: you take him out completely. (p. 204)
This has a lot of cogency because RCMP dirty tricks have been revealed many times.8
It seems that Annett, whatever his faults, deserves at the very least much credit for bringing the plight and deaths of Indigenous children in Indian Residential Schools to wider public consciousness. His advocacy for justice for Indigenous peoples and against the crimes of church and state is supported. However, his tactics and veracity should be carefully scrutinized. As always, people need to do their own due diligence, inform themselves, and arrive at a reasoned conclusion based on evidence.9
- In Kevin Annett, Samuel Wedge: A Memoir of Necropolis (Bloomington, IN: authorHouse, 2015).
- This is from a prime minister who denies colonialism was part of Canada’s history; a prime minister who nixed a pact reached with First Nation representatives, the Kelowna Accord; who presides during what should be a national outrage: the violence against Indigenous women and the Highway of Tears; and who has done nothing of consequence to mediate or alleviate historical crimes against First Nations such as land theft, corporate exploitation, environmental desecration, poor drinking water, deculturation (including linguicide), poverty, etc.
- E.g., “I had held her and fucked her without knowing the raw barrenness lodged within her, which tells you how hard I had fallen …” p. 27.
- See, e.g., David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (London: Oxford University Press, 1992). Robert Davis and Mark Zannis, The Genocide Machine in Canada: The Pacification of the North (Montreal: Black Rose, 1973). Tom Swanky, The Great Darkening: The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific plus The Tsilhqot’in and other First Nations Resistance (Burnaby, BC: Dragon Heart Enterprises, 2012); read review. Kim Petersen, “‘I take this as genocide’,” The Dominion, 30 September 2004.
- The evidence Annett proffers:
evidence of Genocide in Canada and other crimes against the innocent at www.hiddennolonger.com and at the websites of The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State at www.itccs.org and www.itccs.tv .
An International, multi-lingual ITCCS site can be found at: http://kevinannettinternational.blogspot.fr/
The complete Common Law Court proceedings of Genocide in Canada are found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvhfXAd08TE – Common Law Court Proceedings – Genocide in Canada (Part One) – 1 hr. 46 mins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPKFk_L7y9g – Common Law Court Proceedings – Genocide in Canada (Part Two) – 1 hr. 47 mins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ormOIlOi4Vc – Final Court Verdict and Sentencing – 8 mins. 30 secs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IylfBxm3sMg – Authorizations and Endorsements of ITCCS/Kevin Annett by indigenous eyewitnesses – 10 mins. - Kanien’keha:ka warrior Splitting the Sky was highly skeptical of Annett writing: “If Anett has evidence of these heinous allegations then tell the a hole to produce the evidence in public or shut his mouth”
He is supposed to be a radio personality on co op radio in Vancouver and is violating some serious ethical protocols.
There are many of us who are getting very annoyed by this.
Your little groupies are seeking the nobel peace prize for a person who instigates disharmony.
PRODUCE THE EVIDENCE NOW OR CEASE AND DESIST!
STS - It is alleged of Annett that he “has used peoples’ private disclosures without their consent, he has misrepresented people on radio and in print, and has betrayed the trust of many Survivors by using their stories in various ways without their permission.” In The St’at’imc Runner, February 2008 issue. See here.
- RCMP not so cleverly brag on video that “smear campaigns are our speciality.”
- See the APTN documentary “Unmarked Graves“