Jun 6, 2015, Dissident Voice
-by Kevin Annett
“Whenever the winners of a war write its official history and pronounce absolution on themselves, the results are both tragic, and comic. Canada demonstrated that in spades this past week when the government-run Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its “official” report on the homegrown church-and-state slaughter of thousands of native children in the so-called “Indian residential school” system.
Despite the rapturous attention the TRC report received in the world press, it said nothing we didn’t already know, and that I personally didn’t broadcast to a deaf world as far back as June of 1998. What the TRC report did do was to cast a thick veil around Canada’s crimes of the past in order to protect its crimes of the present, like institutionalized child trafficking.
To the uninformed, and to those who somehow consider it legitimate for criminals to investigate themselves, it is a convincing enough veil. All the right words were used in the TRC report, concealed of course by horror-softening adjectives: an antiseptic term like “cultural genocide” becomes a substitute for the truth of tortured bodies, sterilized genitals, and violated and torn little children tossed into mass graves at night. Can 50,000 dead innocents really constitute simply a “cultural” extermination?
Besides, regardless of its beguiling doublespeak and outright lies, the TRC report could hardly have unearthed any type of truth about crimes in the residential schools when the primary perpetrators of those crimes – the Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada – were given years to destroy incriminating evidence, trash or hide documents, silence eyewitnesses and obliterate grave sites stuffed with their young victims.
Any judge that allowed a suspected killer to do such a thing would obviously be charged with aiding and abetting crime, and removed from his office. But that’s precisely what the TRC – whose Directors were nominated by these same churches – allowed them to do.
At what even the media called the “circus like atmosphere” at the TRC forums, any residential school survivor who wished to speak had to submit their statement to the TRC officers for screening and censoring before they could make them. Then they got a whopping ten minutes to make their statement. Yet Church officials who used the forum to spout their “we were only trying to do good” propaganda had no such time restrictions placed on them. “It was disgusting, like sitting in the same room with my rapist and having to go through it all over again” one old Cowichan woman said to me after a TRC event in Victoria, BC.
Even worse, whenever survivors mentioned the names of their torturers or those who’d killed children, it was all carefully stricken from the TRC transcripts. That fact alone goes far to disqualify the TRC from any claims at legitimacy or legality: something the global media seem to be ignoring.
“How can all this crap produce anything but a total white wash of our genocide?” bemoaned Squamish Chief Gerry Kiapilano to me after sitting through an early TRC forum in Vancouver.
A white wash is precisely what the TRC report produced, seven years later. But if one can stomach sifting through its hundreds of politically correct, lawyer-crafted pages, much of which is distraction and padding, the ultimate strategy of the report does emerge: namely, to minimize the total dead body count in the residential schools so as to “prove” that the genocide wasn’t intentional. For if there’s no intention, there is no crime, under the law.
Half the children dead is clearly a deliberate genocide, whereas one tenth of them dead is simply “negligence”. And so the TRC spin machine went to work to convince us that, rather than the figure of 50,000 and more dead children yielded by a simple calculation of the constant 40% plus death rate that was the norm for nearly a century, only “four of five thousand” kids actually died.
That low a figure, spread over more than one hundred residential schools, means that according to the TRC, only fifty children died in the entire system every year, or one death for every second school! Such a grotesque Holocaust denial is not only absurd but disproved by all of the records, which routinely report dozens of deaths at individual schools every year, especially in the west.
Given such bald faced deception, it’s hardly surprising that the TRC chairman, a puppet native named Murray Sinclair, recently issued the lie that “the (Canadian) government stopped publishing residential school death records in 1920”. That’s an odd claim to make, even for a sellout, since I have time and again found and published such government death records that span the years 1889 to 1969. I even sent copies of them to Murray.
If the intent of these “schools” wasn’t genocidal, then why did that enormous death rate of 40% to 60% never subside, decade after decade? And why was it present the very first year that the western residential schools opened, in 1889?
Neither the TRC, nor anyone in Parliament or the media or the universities, has ever bothered to address these questions, any more than they are searching for all of those missing children in the twenty eight mass graves documented by me across Canada. For to do so would be to point towards the obvious conclusion that the TRC was established to avoid: that Canada and its churches deliberately exterminated tens of thousands of children, and that this genocide machine has never been turned off.
The massive trafficking and torture of indigenous children through the government’s “child care” and foster care system; the continual murder of reserve Indians for their lands and resources; and the “Agenda 21” plan of depopulating indigenous nations to one tenth of their present levels by mid-century are the hard indicators of these ongoing Canadian crimes that the TRC was set up to conceal.
Fortunately, there is a little matter called International Law, which ever since the Nuremberg judgements has clearly said that citizens under a proven criminal regime like Canada are not only obligated but required not to pay it taxes or obey its laws. Such a regime, in fact, has lost its right to govern, and it must be replaced by a new political arrangement that is lawful, and that reflects the will of the people.
In short, more than damage control was at work in the TRC fiasco. The very survival of that corporate redundancy called the crown of England is at stake, especially now that patriots have proclaimed an alternative to it and to genocidal Canada, through the new common law jurisdiction of the Republic of Kanata.
Rather than the neat resolution hoped for by its blood soaked creators, the TRC has unwittingly opened the door to the disestablishment of Canadian church and state as convicted criminal actors, by confirming that thousands of children died at their hands. None of us are compelled to cooperate with genocidal institutions, and indeed, to do so is to collude in a crime against humanity.
Amidst a similar revolution against the British crown and its tyranny in 1778, Thomas Paine observed that regimes that are collapsing tend to make decisions that are increasingly suicidal, as if seeking out their own destruction. Christian Canada and its sponsors in London and Rome have borne out this axiom. The only question now is whether We the People of Kanata will take advantage of such an historic opportunity, and cleanse our country once and for all of its legacy of institutionalized mass murder.”
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“The residential schools are history. The backlash is just getting started.”
Jun 5, 2015, iPolitics
-by Andrew Mitrovica
“Lots of Canadians still don’t want to accept the ugly truth about the residential schools — that this country kidnapped thousands of aboriginal kids from their homes and families, dressed them up like dolls and stuffed them into “schools” where an alien way of life was violently forced upon them. The process destroyed countless children emotionally, spiritually and physically — children we claimed to be ‘helping’.
By any measure, the systematic, soul-killing horror that hundreds of thousands of First Nations’ children and their parents endured at the hands of their white ‘masters’ was an attempt at genocide — cultural or otherwise.
If those words offend you, if they sound like hyperbole … tough. The truth hurts. Quibble with the language, but not with the facts. And whatever words we use to describe the residential school experience, we should at least have the decency to acknowledge that this nation killed — through neglect, abuse, disease and starvation — more than 6,000 children in the name of enlightenment, of ‘civilization’.
Still, those inclined to deny the residential schools record do exist. Sadly, the project that helped establish that record — the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — gave those revisionists a platform to spew their drivel into two mass-market media outlets.
Exhibit A: Shortly after Justice Murray Sinclair tabled part of his voluminous report on “one of the darkest, most troubling chapters in our collective history”, the National Post published a piece by two academics insisting Sinclair forgot to mention all the good bits.
Rodney E. Clifton, professor emeritus of education at the University of Manitoba, and retired anthropology prof Hymie Rubenstein argued that Justice Sinclair’s report failed to note what they claim were the more redeeming qualities of residential schools:
- A lot of the kids wanted to be there and their parents were happy they were there;
- The kids were learning how to read, write and speak English so they could “fully benefit from membership in the new country of Canada”;
- Yes, the kids were “severely” and “routinely” caned and strapped, but everybody was doing it back then;
- Sure, some kids were “segregated” by sex, but two Inuk teachers sometimes spoke to them in their native tongues and they weren’t punished for doing so;
- Other kids even went home on the weekends and during the summer;
- The schools’ “caring” Christian teachers and religious leaders did their best under trying circumstances, but now they’re being unjustly “libeled” by Justice Sinclair.
Simpson seems to think Canadians are wasting time ‘picking over of the residential schools’ history’. Maybe we can expect a column from Simpson for next Remembrance Day urging veterans and their families to not ‘fixate on the past’.
Finally — and this may have been the most outrageous claim in the piece — the academics argued that since rich kids in private schools all over the British empire also felt lonely and were traumatized by “depravities” and “indignities” like sexual and physical abuse, what happened in Canada’s residential schools wasn’t out of the ordinary. (They left out the part about malnutrition.)
All of which is jaw-dropping lunacy. Consider the source, though. The Post has a habit of belittling or discrediting any effort – official or otherwise – to make amends for Canada’s crimes against lone citizens or groups. (The case of Maher Arar springs to mind.)
Knee-jerk contrarianism is a Post tradition; this is the rag that gets a kick out of running columns claiming climate change is a hoax, or that women often cry wolf about being victims of sexual and physical abuse. But this piece reveals just how ugly and intellectually empty the Post’s iconoclastic pose really is.
Exhibit B: The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson may not be a denier, but he’s certainly a residential school qualifier.
In his contribution to the post-report backlash, Simpson once again deployed his tiresome paternalistic pundit voice — suggesting it was all old news, nothing to see here.
“The story of these schools is well known,” Simpson wrote, adding that the survivors got two “solemn” apologies and monetary compensation, so … time to move on. He also described what happened in the residential schools as a “mistake” that Canadians are constantly being “reminded of.”
I’m reminded of Jon Stewart’s caustic rebuttal to other white males who, like Simpson, whined about always having to hear about racism in the wake of the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by police in Ferguson, Missouri. “You’re tired of hearing about it?” the comedian said. “Imagine how f*cking exhausting it is living it.”
Simpson seems to think Canadians suffer from a “relentless fixation on the past” and are wasting time “picking over of the residential schools’ history”. One assumes Simpson feels the 80,000 residential school survivors would be better off letting the past stay buried. Maybe he’d like to offer that advice to survivor Paul Voudrach, who as a child would look to the heavens at night to find the courage to survive. “I used to look at the stars,” he said, “and I used to think my Mom and Dad are seeing the same stars I’m looking at. I was really, really alone. Lonely and scared.”
Or maybe we can expect a column from Simpson for next Remembrance Day urging veterans and their families to not “fixate on the past”.
Lest we forget, Mr. Simpson.”
****Filed under: Canada, First Nations