HIDDEN FROM HISTORY : The Canadian Holocaust:The Canadian residential school system

August 7, 2003

HIDDEN FROM HISTORY

The Canadian Holocaust

Through the Canadian residential school system, the Christian

churches along

with state authorities, the judiciary, doctors and the police

implemented a

policy of genocide against the native population.

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 9, Number 2 (February-March

2002)

PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com

Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381

From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com

by Rev. Kevin D. Annett, MA, MDiv

Email: kevinannett@.ca

Email: kevin_annett@hotmail.com

Website: http://annett55.freewebsites.com/

(The following is an edited extract from the report, "Hidden From

History: The

Canadian Holocaust - The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal

Peoples by

Church and State in Canada - A Summary of an Ongoing, Independent

Inquiry into

Canadian Native 'Residential Schools' and their Legacy", by Rev.

Kevin D.

Annett, MA, MDiv. The report is published by The Truth Commission

into Genocide

in Canada, a public investigative body continuing the work of

previous Tribunals

into native residential schools: The Justice in the Valley

Coalition's Inquiry

into Crimes Against Aboriginal People, convened in Port Alberni,

British

Columbia, on December 9, 1994, and The International Human Rights

Association of

American Minorities Tribunal into Canadian Residential Schools, held

in

Vancouver, BC, from June 12-14, 1998. Editor.)

FOREWORD

Jasper Joseph is a sixty-four-year-old native man from Port

Hardy, British

Columbia. His eyes still fill with tears when he remembers his

cousins who were

killed with lethal injections by staff at the Nanaimo Indian Hospital

in 1944.

I was just eight, and they'd shipped us down from the Anglican

residential

school in Alert Bay to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, the one run by

the United

Church. They kept me isolated in a tiny room there for more than

three years,

like I was a lab rat, feeding me these pills, giving me shots that

made me sick.

Two of my cousins made a big fuss, screaming and fighting back all

the time, so

the nurses gave them shots, and they both died right away. It was

done to

silence them. (November 10, 2000)

Unlike post-war Germans, Canadians have yet to acknowledge, let

alone repent

from, the genocide that we inflicted on millions of conquered people:

the

aboriginal men, women and children who were deliberately exterminated

by our

racially supremacist churches and state.

As early as November 1907, the Canadian press was acknowledging

that the death

rate within Indian residential schools exceeded 50% (see Appendix,

Key Newspaper

Articles). And yet the reality of such a massacre has been wiped

clean from the

public record and consciousness in Canada over the past decades.

Small wonder;

for that hidden history reveals a system whose aim was to destroy

most native

people by disease, relocation and outright murder,

while "assimilating" a

minority of collaborators who were trained to serve the genocidal

system.

This history of purposeful genocide implicates every level of

government in

Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), every mainstream

church, large

corporations and local police, doctors and judges. The web of

complicity in this

killing machine was, and remains, so vast that its concealment has

required an

equally elaborate campaign of cover-up that has been engineered at

the highest

levels of power in our country; a cover-up that is continuing,

especially now

that eyewitnesses to murders and atrocities at the church-run native

residential

"schools" have come forward for the first time.

For it was the residential "schools" that constituted the death camps

of the

Canadian Holocaust, and within their walls nearly one-half of all

aboriginal

children sent there by law died, or disappeared, according to the

government's

own statistics.

These 50,000 victims have vanished, as have their corpses -

"like they never

existed", according to one survivor. But they did exist. They were

innocent

children, and they were killed by beatings and torture and after

being

deliberately exposed to tuberculosis and other diseases by paid

employees of the

churches and government, according to a "Final Solution" master plan

devised by

the Department of Indian Affairs and the Catholic and Protestant

churches.

With such official consent for manslaughter emanating from Ottawa,

the churches

responsible for annihilating natives on the ground felt emboldened

and protected

enough to declare full-scale war on non-Christian native peoples

through the

20th century.

The casualties of that war were not only the 50,000 dead

children of the

residential schools, but the survivors, whose social condition today

has been

described by United Nations human rights groups as that of "a

colonized people

barely on the edge of survival, with all the trappings of a third-

world

society". (November 12, 1999)

The Holocaust is continuing.

This report is the child of a six-year independent investigation

into the hidden

history of genocide against aboriginal peoples in Canada. It

summarises the

testimonies, documents and other evidence proving that Canadian

churches,

corporations and the government are guilty of intentional genocide,

in violation

of the United Nations Convention on Genocide, which Canada ratified

in 1952 and

under which it is bound by international law.

The report is a collaborative effort of nearly 30 people. And yet

some of its

authors must remain anonymous, particularly its aboriginal

contributors, whose

lives have been threatened and who have been assaulted, denied jobs

and evicted

from their homes on Indian reserves because of their involvement in

this

investigation.

As a former minister in one of the guilty institutions named in

our inquiry -

the United Church of Canada - I have been fired, blacklisted,

threatened and

publicly maligned by its officers for my attempts to uncover the

story of the

deaths of children at that church's Alberni residential school.

Many people have made sacrifices to produce this report, so that the

world can

learn of the Canadian Holocaust, and to ensure that those responsible

for it are

brought to justice before the International Criminal Court.

Beginning among native and low-income activists in Port Alberni,

British

Columbia, in the fall of 1994, this inquiry into crimes against

humanity has

continued in the face of death threats, assaults and the resources of

church and

state in Canada.

It is within the power of the reader to honour our sacrifice by

sharing this

story with others and refusing to participate in the institutions

which

deliberately killed many thousands of children.

This history of official endorsement of, and collusion in, a century

or more of

crimes against Canada's first peoples must not discourage us from

uncovering the

truth and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

It is for this reason that we invite you to remember not only the

50,000

children who died in the residential school death camps, but the

silent victims

today who suffer in our midst for bread and justice.

(Rev.) Kevin D. Annett

Secretary

The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada

Vancouver, British Columbia, February 1, 2001

PART ONE: Summary of Evidence of Intentional Genocide in Canadian

Residential

Schools

Article II: The intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a

national ethnic,

racial or religious group; namely, non-Christian aboriginal peoples

in Canada

The foundational purpose behind the more than one hundred Indian

residential

schools established in Canada by government legislation and

administered by

Protestant and Catholic churches was the deliberate and persistent

eradication

of aboriginal people and their culture, and the conversion of any

surviving

native people to Christianity.

This intent was enunciated in the Gradual Civilization Act of

1857 in Upper

Canada, and earlier, church-inspired legislation, which defined

aboriginal

culture as inferior, stripped native people of citizenship and

subordinated them

in a separate legal category from non-Indians. This Act served as the

basis for

the federal Indian Act of 1874, which recapitulated the legal and

moral

inferiority of aboriginals and established the residential school

system. The

legal definition of an Indian as "an uncivilized person, destitute of

the

knowledge of God and of any fixed and clear belief in religion"

(Revised

Statutes of British Columbia, 1960) was established by these Acts and

continues

to the present day.

Then, as now, aboriginals were considered legal and practical

non-entities in

their own land and, hence, inherently expendable.

This genocidal intent was restated time and again in government

legislation,

church statements and the correspondence and records of missionaries,

Indian

agents and residential school officials (see Documentation section).

Indeed, it

was the very raison d'être of the state-sanctioned Christian invasion

of

traditional native territories and of the residential school system

itself,

which was established at the height of European expansionism in the

1880s and

persisted until 1984.

By definition, this aim was genocidal, for it planned and

carried out the

destruction of a religious and ethnic group: all those aboriginal

people who

would not convert to Christianity and be culturally extinguished. Non-

Christian

natives were the declared target of the residential schools, which

practised

wholesale ethnic cleansing under the guise of education.

As well, such "pagans" were the subject of government-funded

sterilisation

programs administered at church-run hospitals and tuberculosis

sanatoriums on

Canada's west coast (see Article IId).

According to an eyewitness, Ethel Wilson of Bella Bella, BC, a

United Church

missionary doctor, George Darby, deliberately sterilised non-

Christian Indians

between 1928 and 1962 at the R. W. Large Memorial Hospital in Bella

Bella. Ms

Wilson, who is now deceased, stated in 1998:

Doctor Darby told me in 1952 that Indian Affairs in Ottawa was

paying him for

every Indian he sterilised, especially if they weren't church-goers.

Hundreds of

our women were sterilised by Doctor Darby, just for not going to

church.

(Testimony of Ethel Wilson to International Human Rights Association

of American

Minorities [iHRAAM] Tribunal, Vancouver, BC, June 13, 1998)

According to Christy White, a resident of Bella Bella, records

of these

government-funded sterilisations at the R. W. Large Hospital were

deliberately

destroyed in 1995, soon after a much-publicised police investigation

was to open

into residential school atrocities in British Columbia. Ms White

stated in 1998:

I worked at the Bella Bella hospital, and I know that Barb Brown, one

of the

administrators there, dumped sterilisation records at sea on two

occasions. Some

of the records were found washed up on the beach south of town. That

was just

after the cops opened their investigation into the schools, in the

spring of

1995. They were covering their tracks. We all knew Ottawa was funding

sterilisations, but we were told to keep quiet about it. (Testimony

of Christy

White to Kevin Annett, August 12, 1998)

Legislation permitting the sterilisation of any residential

school inmate was

passed in BC in 1933 and in Alberta in 1928 (see "Sterilization

Victims Urged to

Come Forward" by Sabrina Whyatt, Windspeaker, August 1998). The

Sexual

Sterilization Act of BC allowed a school principal to permit the

sterilisation

of any native person under his charge. As their legal guardian, the

principal

could thus have any native child sterilised. Frequently, these

sterilisations

occurred to whole groups of native children when they reached

puberty, in

institutions like the Provincial Training School in Red Deer,

Alberta, and the

Ponoka Mental Hospital. (Former nurse Pat Taylor to Kevin Annett,

January 13,

2000)

Of equal historical significance is the fact that the Canadian

federal

government passed legislation in 1920, making it mandatory for all

native

children in British Columbia - the west coast of which was the least

Christianised area among aboriginals in Canada - to attend

residential schools,

despite the fact that the same government had already acknowledged

that the

death rate due to communicable diseases was much higher in these

schools and

that, while there, the native children's "constitution is so weakened

that they

have no vitality to withstand disease". (A. W. Neill, West Coast

Indian Agent,

to Secretary of Indian Affairs, April 25, 1910)

That is, the Canadian government legally compelled the

attendance of the most

"pagan" and least assimilated of the native peoples in residential

schools at

precisely the time when the death rate in these schools had reached

their

pinnacle - about 40%, according to Indian Affairs officers like Dr

Peter Bryce.

This fact alone suggests a genocidal intent towards non-Christian

aboriginals.

Article II (a): Killing members of the group intended to be destroyed

That aboriginal people were deliberately killed in the residential

schools is

confirmed by eyewitness testimonies, government records and

statements of Indian

agents and tribal elders. It is also strongly suggested by the bare

fact that

the mortality level in residential schools averaged 40%, with the

deaths of more

than 50,000 native children across Canada (see Bibliography, inc. the

report of

Dr Peter Bryce to Department of Indian Affairs Superintendent Duncan

Campbell

Scott, April 1909).

The fact, as well, that this death rate stayed constant across

the years, and

within the schools and facilities of every denomination which ran

them - Roman

Catholic, United, Presbyterian or Anglican - suggests that common

conditions and

policies were behind these deaths. For every second child to die in

the

residential school system eliminates the possibility that these

deaths were

merely accidental or the actions of a few depraved individuals acting

alone

without protection.

Yet not only was this system inherently murderous, but it

operated under the

legal and structural conditions which encouraged, aided and abetted

murder and

which were designed to conceal these crimes.

The residential schools were structured like concentration

camps, on a

hierarchical military basis under the absolute control of a principal

appointed

jointly by church and state, and who was usually a clergyman. This

principal was

even given legal guardianship rights over all students during the

early 1930s by

the federal government, at least in west coast residential schools.

This action

by the government was highly unusual, considering that native people

were by law

the legal wards of the state, and had been so since the commencement

of the

Indian Act. And yet such absolute power of the school principal over

the lives

of aboriginal students was a requirement of any system whose killing

of

aboriginals had to be disguised and later denied.

The residential schools were constructed behind this deception

in such a way

that the deaths and atrocities that constitute genocide could be

hidden and

eventually explained. In the Canadian context, this meant a policy of

gradual

but deliberate extermination under a protective legal umbrella,

administered by

"legitimate and trusted" institutions: the mainline churches.

It should be clarified from the outset that the decisions concerning

the

residential schools, including those which caused the deaths of

children and

resulting cover-ups, were officially sanctioned by every level of the

churches

that ran them and the government which created them. Only such

sanction could

have allowed the deaths to continue as they did - and the

perpetrators to feel

protected enough to operate with impunity for many years within the

system,

which they universally did.

¥ Exposure to Diseases

In 1909, Dr Peter Bryce of the Ontario Health Department was

hired by the Indian

Affairs Department in Ottawa to tour the Indian residential schools

in western

Canada and British Columbia and report on the health conditions

there. Bryce's

report so scandalised the government and the churches that it was

officially

buried and only surfaced in 1922 when Bryce - who was forced out of

the civil

service for the honesty of his report - wrote a book about it,

entitled The

Story of a National Crime (Ottawa, 1922).

In his report, Dr Bryce claimed that Indian children were being

systematically

and deliberately killed in the residential schools. He cited an

average

mortality rate of between 35% and 60%, and alleged that staff and

church

officials were regularly withholding or falsifying records and other

evidence of

children's deaths.

Further, Dr Bryce claimed that a primary means of killing native

children was to

deliberately expose them to communicable diseases such as

tuberculosis and then

deny them any medical care or treatment - a practice actually

referred to by top

Anglican Church leaders in the Globe and Mail on May 29, 1953.

In March 1998, two native eyewitnesses who attended west coast

residential

schools, William and Mabel Sport of Nanaimo, BC, confirmed Dr Bryce's

allegation. Both of them claim to have been deliberately exposed to

tuberculosis

by staff at both a Catholic and a United Church residential school

during the

1940s.

I was forced to sleep in the same bed with kids who were dying

of tuberculosis.

That was at the Catholic Christie residential school around 1942.

They were

trying to kill us off, and it nearly worked. They did the same thing

at

Protestant Indian schools, three kids to a bed, healthy ones with the

dying.

(Testimony of Mabel Sport to IHRAAM officers, Port Alberni, BC, March

31, 1998)

Reverend Pitts, the Alberni school principal, he forced me and eight

other boys

to eat this special food out of a different sort of can. It tasted

really

strange. And then all of us came down with tuberculosis. I was the

only one to

survive, 'cause my Dad broke into the school one night and got me out

of there.

All of the rest died from tuberculosis and they were never treated.

Just left

there to die. And their families were all told they had died of

pneumonia. The

plan was to kill us off in secret, you know. We all just began dying

after

eating that food. Two of my best friends were in that group that was

poisoned.

We were never allowed to speak of it or go into the basement, where

other

murders happened. It was a death sentence to be sent to the Alberni

school.

(Testimony of William Sport to IHRAAM officers, Port Alberni, BC,

March 31,

1998)

¥ Homicides

More overt killings of children were a common occurrence in

residential schools,

according to eyewitnesses. The latter have described children being

beaten and

starved to death, thrown from windows, strangled and being kicked or

thrown down

stairs to their deaths. Such killings occurred in at least eight

residential

schools in British Columbia alone, run by all three mainline

denominations.

Bill Seward of Nanaimo, BC, age 78, states:

My sister Maggie was thrown from a three-storey window by a nun at

the Kuper

Island school, and she died. Everything was swept under the rug. No

investigation was ever done. We couldn't hire a lawyer at the time,

being

Indians. So nothing was ever done. (Testimony of Bill Seward, Duncan,

BC, August

13, 1998)

Diane Harris, Community Health Worker for the Chemainus Band

Council on

Vancouver Island, confirms accounts of the murders.

We always hear stories of all the kids who were killed at Kuper

Island. A

graveyard for the babies of the priests and girls was right south of

the school

until it was dug up by the priests when the school closed in 1973.

The nuns

would abort babies and sometimes end up killing the mothers. There

were a lot of

disappearances. My mother, who is 83 now, saw a priest drag a girl

down a flight

of stairs by her hair and the girl died as a result. Girls were raped

and

killed, and buried under the floorboards. We asked the local RCMP to

exhume that

place and search for remains but they've always refused, as recently

as 1996.

Corporal Sampson even threatened us. That kind of cover-up is the

norm. Children

were put together with kids sick with TB in the infirmary. That was

standard

procedure. We've documented thirty-five outright murders in a seven-

year period.

(Testimony of Diane Harris to the IHRAAM Tribunal, June 13, 1998)

Evidence exists that active collusion from police, hospital

officials, coroners,

Indian Agents and even native leaders helped to conceal such murders.

Local

hospitals, particularly tuberculosis sanatoriums connected to the

United and

Roman Catholic churches, served as "dumping grounds" for children's

bodies and

routinely provided false death certificates for murdered students.

In the case of the United Church's Alberni residential school,

students who

discovered dead bodies of other children faced serious retribution.

One such

witness, Harry Wilson of Bella Bella, BC, claims that he was expelled

from the

school, then hospitalised and drugged against his will, after finding

the body

of a dead girl in May 1967.

Sadly, the two-tiered system of collaborators and victims

created among native

students at the schools continues to the present, as some of the

state-funded

band council officials - themselves former collaborators - appear to

have an

interest in helping to suppress evidence and silence witnesses who

would

incriminate not only the murderers but themselves as agents of the

white

administration.

A majority of the witnesses who have shared their story with the

authors and at

public tribunals on the west coast have described either seeing a

murder or

discovering a body at the residential school he or she attended. The

body count,

even according to the government's own figures, was enormously high.

Where,

then, are all these bodies? The deaths of thousands of students are

not recorded

in any of the school records, Indian Affairs files or other

documentation

submitted thus far in court cases or academic publications on the

residential

schools. Some 50,000 corpses have literally and officially gone

missing.

The residential school system had to hide not only the evidence of

murder but

the bodies as well. The presence of secret gravesites of children

killed at

Catholic and Protestant schools in Sardis, Port Alberni, Kuper Island

and Alert

Bay has been attested to by numerous witnesses. These secret burial

yards also

contained the aborted foetuses and even small babies who were the

offspring of

priests and staff at the schools, according to the same witnesses.

One of them,

Ethel Wilson of Bella Bella, claims to have seen "rows and rows of

tiny

skeletons" in the foundations of the former Anglican residential

school of St

Michael's in Alert Bay when a new school was built there in the 1960s.

There were several rows of them, all lined up neatly like it was

a big cemetery.

The skeletons had been found within one of the old walls of St Mike's

school.

None of them could have been very old, from their size. Now why would

so many

kids have been buried like that inside a wall, unless someone was

trying to hide

something? (Testimony of Ethel Wilson to Kevin Annett, Vancouver, BC,

August 8,

1998)

Arnold Sylvester, who, like Dennis Charlie, attended Kuper

Island school between

1939 and 1945, corroborates this account.

The priests dug up the secret gravesite in a real hurry around 1972

when the

school closed. No one was allowed to watch them dig up those remains.

I think

it's because that was a specially secret graveyard where the bodies

of the

pregnant girls were buried. Some of the girls who got pregnant from

the priests

were actually killed because they threatened to talk. They were

sometimes

shipped out and sometimes just disappeared. We weren't allowed to

talk about

this. (Testimony of Arnold Sylvester to Kevin Annett, Duncan, BC,

August 13,

1998)

Local hospitals were also used as a dumping ground for

children's bodies, as in

the case of the Edmonds boy and his "processing" at St Paul's

Hospital after his

murder at the Catholic school in North Vancouver. Certain hospitals,

however,

seem to have been particularly favourite spots for storing corpses.

The Nanaimo Tuberculosis Hospital (called The Indian Hospital) was

one such

facility. Under the guise of tuberculosis treatment, generations of

native

children and adults were subjected to medical experiments and sexual

sterilisations at the Nanaimo Hospital, according to women who

experienced these

tortures (see Article IId). But the facility was also a cold storage

area for

native corpses.

The West Coast General Hospital in Port Alberni not only stored

children's

bodies from the local United Church residential school; it was also

the place

where abortions were performed on native girls who were made pregnant

at the

school by staff and clergy, and where newborn babies were disposed of

and

possibly killed, according to witnesses like Amy Tallio, who attended

the

Alberni school during the early 1950s.

Irene Starr of the Hesquait Nation, who attended the Alberni

school between 1952

and 1961, confirms this.

Many girls got pregnant at the Alberni school. The fathers were

the staff,

teachers, the ones who raped them. We never knew what happened to the

babies,

but they were always disappearing. The pregnant girls were taken to

the Alberni

hospital and then came back without their babies. Always. The staff

killed those

babies to cover their tracks. They were paid by the church and

government to be

rapists and murderers. (Testimony of Irene Starr to Kevin Annett,

Vancouver, BC,

August 23, 1998)

Article II (b): Causing serious bodily or mental harm

Early in the residential schools era, the Indian Affairs

Superintendent, Duncan

Campbell Scott, outlined the purpose of the schools thus: "to kill

the Indian

within the Indian".

Clearly, the genocidal assault on aboriginals was not only

physical but

spiritual: European culture wished to own the minds and the souls of

the native

nations, to turn the Indians it hadn't killed into third-class

replicas of white

people.

Expressing the "virtues" of genocide, Alfred Caldwell, principal

of the United

Church school in Ahousat on Vancouver Island's west coast, wrote in

1938:

The problem with the Indians is one of morality and religion. They

lack the

basic fundamentals of civilised thought and spirit, which explains

their

child-like nature and behaviour. At our school we strive to turn them

into

mature Christians who will learn how to behave in the world and

surrender their

barbaric way of life and their treaty rights which keep them trapped

on their

land and in a primitive existence. Only then will the Indian problem

in our

country be solved. (Rev. A. E. Caldwell to Indian Agent P. D.

Ashbridge,

Ahousat, BC, Nov 12, 1938)

The fact that this same principal is named by eyewitnesses as

the murderer of at

least two children - one of them in the same month that he wrote this

letter -

is no accident, for cultural genocide spills effortlessly over into

killing, as

the Nazis proved so visibly to the world.

Nevertheless, Caldwell's letter illuminates two vital points for

the purpose of

this discussion of mental and bodily harm inflicted on native

students: (a) the

residential schools were a vast project in mind control, and (b) the

underlying

aim of this "re-programming" of native children was to force

aboriginals off

their ancestral lands in order to allow whites access to them.

To quote Alberni survivor Harriett Nahanee:

They were always pitting us against each other, getting us to fight

and molest

one another. It was all designed to split us up and brainwash us so

that we

would forget that we were Keepers of the Land. The Creator gave our

people the

job of protecting the land, the fish, the forests. That was our

purpose for

being alive. But the whites wanted it all, and the residential

schools were the

way they got it. And it worked. We've forgotten our sacred task, and

now the

whites have most of the land and have taken all the fish and the

trees. Most of

us are in poverty, addictions, family violence. And it all started in

the

schools, where we were brainwashed to hate our own culture and to

hate ourselves

so that we would lose everything. That's why I say that the genocide

is still

going on. (Testimony of Harriett Nahanee to Kevin Annett, North

Vancouver, BC,

December 11, 1995)

It was only after the assumption of guardianship powers by the

west coast school

principals, between 1933 and 1941, that the first evidence of

organised

pedophile networks in those residential schools emerges. For such a

regime was

legally and morally free to do whatever it wanted to its captive

native

students.

The residential schools became a safe haven - one survivor calls

it a "free fire

zone" - for pedophiles, murderers and brutal doctors needing live

test subjects

for drug testing or genetic and cancer research.

Particular schools, such as the Catholic one at Kuper Island and the

United

Church's Alberni school, became special centres where extermination

techniques

were practised with impunity on native children from all over the

province,

alongside the usual routine of beatings, rapes and farming out of

children to

influential pedophiles.

Much of the overt mental and bodily harm done to native students

was designed to

break down traditional tribal loyalties along kinship lines by

pitting children

against each other and cutting them off from their natural bonds.

Boys and girls

were strictly segregated in separate dormitories and could never meet.

One survivor describes never seeing her little brother for years,

even though he

was in the same building at the Alert Bay Anglican school. And when

children at

the schools broke into each other's dormitories and older boys and

girls were

caught exchanging intimacies, the most severe punishments were

universally

applied. According to a female survivor who attended the Alberni

school in 1959:

They used the gauntlet on a boy and girl who were caught together

kissing. The

two of them had to crawl naked down a line of other students, and we

beat them

with sticks and whips provided by the principal. The girl was beaten

so badly

she died from kidney failure. That gave us all a good lesson: if you

tried

having normal feelings for someone, you'd get killed for it. So we

quickly

learned never to love or trust anyone, just do what we were told to

do.

(Testimony of anonymous woman from the Pacheedat Nation, Port

Renfrew, BC,

October 12, 1996)

According to Harriett Nahanee:

The residential schools created two kinds of Indians: slaves and

sell-outs. And

the sellouts are still in charge. The rest of us do what we're told.

The band

council chiefs have been telling everyone on our reserve not to talk

to the

Tribunal and have been threatening to cut our benefits if we do.

(Harriett

Nahanee to Kevin Annett, June 12, 1998)

The nature of that system of torture was not haphazard. For example,

the regular

use of electric shocks on children who spoke their language or were

"disobedient" was a widespread phenomenon in residential schools of

every

denomination across Canada. This was not a random but an

institutionalised

device.

Specially constructed torture chambers with permanent electric

chairs, often

operated by medical personnel, existed at the Alberni and Kuper

Island schools

in British Columbia, at the Spanish Catholic school in Ontario, and

in isolated

hospital facilities run by the churches and Department of Indian

Affairs in

northern Quebec, Vancouver Island and rural Alberta, according to

eyewitnesses.

Mary Anne Nakogee-Davis of Thunder Bay, Ontario, was tortured in an

electric

chair by nuns at the Catholic Spanish residential school in 1963 when

she was

eight years old. She states:

The nuns used it as a weapon. It was done on me on more than one

occasion. They

would strap your arms to the metal arm rests, and it would jolt you

and go

through your system. I don't know what I did that was bad enough to

have that

done to me. (From The London Free Press, London, Ontario, October 22,

1996)

Such torture also occurred at facilities operated by the churches

with

Department of Indian Affairs money, similar to the sterilisation

programs

identified at the W. R. Large Memorial Hospital in Bella Bella and

the Nanaimo

Indian Hospital.

Frank Martin, a Carrier native from northern BC, describes his

forcible

confinement and use in experiments at the Brannen Lake Reform School

near

Nanaimo in 1963 and 1964:

I was kidnapped from my village when I was nine and sent off to

the Brannen Lake

school in Nanaimo. A local doctor gave me a shot and I woke up in a

small cell,

maybe ten feet by twelve. I was kept in there like an animal for

fourteen

months. They brought me out every morning and gave me electric shocks

to my head

until I passed out. Then in the afternoon I'd go for these X-rays and

they'd

expose me to them for minutes on end. They never told me why they

were doing it.

But I got lung cancer when I was eighteen and I've never smoked.

(Videotaped

testimony of Frank Martin to Eva Lyman and Kevin Annett, Vancouver,

July 16,

1998)

Such quack experimentation combined with brutal sadism

characterised these

publicly funded facilities, especially the notorious Nanaimo Indian

Hospital.

David Martin of Powell River, BC, was taken to this hospital in 1958

at the age

of five and used in experiments attested to by Joan Morris, Harry

Wilson and

other witnesses quoted in this report. According to David:

I was told I had tuberculosis, but I was completely healthy; no

symptoms of TB

at all. So they sent me to Nanaimo Indian Hospital and strapped me

down in a bed

there for more than six months. The doctors gave me shots every day

that made me

feel really sick, and made my skin all red and itchy. I heard the

screams of

other Indian kids who were locked away in isolation rooms. We were

never allowed

in there to see them. Nobody ever told me what they were doing to all

of us in

there. (David Martin to Kevin Annett, Vancouver, November 12, 2000)

A recurring and regular torture at the residential schools

themselves was

operating on children's teeth without using any form of anaesthesia

or

painkiller. Two separate victims of this torture at the Alberni

school describe

being subjected to it by different dentists, decades apart. Harriett

Nahanee was

brutalised in that manner in 1946, while Dennis Tallio was "worked on

by a sick

old guy who never gave me painkillers" at the same school in 1965.

Dr Josef Mengele is reputed by survivors of his experiments to have

worked out

of Cornell University in New York, Bristol Labs in Syracuse, New

York, and

Upjohn Corporation and Bayer laboratories in Ontario. Mengele and his

Canadian

researchers, like the notorious Montreal psychiatrist Ewen Cameron,

used

prisoners, mental patients and native children from reserves and

residential

schools in their efforts to erase and reshape human memory and

personality,

using drugs, electric shocks and trauma-inducing methods identical to

those

employed for years in the residential schools.

Former employees of the federal government have confirmed that

the use of

"inmates" of residential schools was authorised for government-run

medical

experiments through a joint agreement with the churches which ran the

schools.

According to a former Indian Affairs official:

A sort of gentlemen's agreement was in place for many years: the

churches

provided the kids from their residential schools to us, and we got

the Mounties

to deliver them to whoever needed a fresh batch of test subjects:

usually

doctors, sometimes Department of Defense people. The Catholics did it

big time

in Quebec when they transferred kids wholesale from orphanages into

mental

asylums. It was for the same purpose: experimentation. There was lots

of grant

money in those days to be had from the military and intelligence

sectors: all

you had to do was provide the bodies. The church officials were more

than happy

to comply. It wasn't just the residential school principals who were

getting

kickbacks from this: everyone was profiting. That's why it's gone on

for so

long. It implicates a hell of a lot of top people. (From the Closed

Files of the

IHRAAM Tribunal, containing the statements of confidential sources,

June 12-14,

1998)

Such experiments and the sheer brutality of the harm regularly

inflicted on

children in the schools attest to the institutional view of

aboriginals as

"expendable" and "diseased" beings. Scores of survivors of 10

different

residential schools in BC and Ontario have described under oath the

following

tortures inflicted on them and other children as young as five years

old between

the years 1922 and 1984:

¥ tightening fish twine and wire around boys' penises;

¥ sticking needles into their hands, cheeks, tongues, ears and

penises;

¥ holding them over open graves and threatening to bury them alive;

¥ forcing them to eat maggot-filled and regurgitated food;

¥ telling them their parents were dead and that they were about to be

killed;

¥ stripping them naked in front of the assembled school and verbally

and

sexually degrading them;

¥ forcing them to stand upright for more than 12 hours at a time

until they

collapsed;

¥ immersing them in ice water;

¥ forcing them to sleep outside in winter;

¥ ripping the hair from their heads;

¥ repeatedly smashing their heads against concrete or wooden

surfaces;

¥ daily beating without warning, using whips, sticks, horse

harnesses, studded

metal straps, pool cues and iron pipes;

¥ extracting gold teeth from their mouths without painkillers;

¥ confining them in unventilated closets without food or water for

days;

¥ regularly applying electric shocks to their heads, genitals and

limbs.

Perhaps the clearest summary of the nature and purpose of such

sadism are the

words of Bill Seward of Nanaimo, a survivor of the Kuper Island

school:

The church people were worshipping the devil, not us. They wanted the

gold, the

coal, the land we occupied. So they terrorised us into giving it to

them. How

does a man who was raped every day when he was seven make anything

out of his

life? The residential schools were set up to destroy our lives, and

they

succeeded. The whites were terrorists, pure and simple. (Testimony of

Bill

Seward to Kevin Annett and IHRAAM observers, Duncan, BC, August 13,

1998)

Editor's Note:

To obtain a copy of "Hidden From History: The Canadian

Holocaust", contact The

Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada, c/- 6679 Grant Street,

Burnaby, BC V5B

2K9, Canada, telephone +1 (604) 293 1972, email kevinannett@.ca

or

kevin_annett@hotmail.com, or visit the website

http://annett55.freewebsites.com.

See review, NEXUS 9/01.

August 25, 2003

The great American land row

By Chris Summers

BBC News Online

American Indians are embroiled in a $137bn lawsuit with the US Government over land royalties. The saga, which has been going on for seven years, rests on a judge's decision, which is expected shortly.

The lawsuit centres on huge tracts of land west of the Mississippi

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), an arm of the US Department of the Interior, is being sued in a class action on behalf of 280,000 American Indians.

The plaintiff, Eloise Cobell, a 56-year-old Blackfeet Indian from Browning, Montana, claims billions went missing because records were not kept properly and trusts were pilfered by the US Government.

The dispute dates back to the 1887 Dawes Act, which seized Indian land - much of it rich in natural resources - and gave it to white-owned companies to exploit.

History of the dispute

1877: Battle of the Little Big Horn, followed by defeat of Crazy Horse and end of Indian Wars

1887: Dawes Act leads to land being parcelled up and sold off

1996: Eloise Cobell launches lawsuit, claiming the trusts have been mismanaged

2002: The Department of the Interior is ordered to account for all the money

2003: Judge will decide whose accounting plan to adopt

Under the Act the land was divided into plots of between 160 and 180 acres.

Each Indian family was assigned a parcel of land, which was alien to their culture in which all land belonged to the tribe.

The idea was for them to be "compensated" in perpetuity for the use of their land.

The author of the Act claimed land ownership would "civilise" the Indians, but disputes arose almost immediately.

To be civilised is...to wear civilised clothes, cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey and own property.

Congressman Henry Dawes

Author of Dawes Act 1887

Mrs Cobell, a trained accountant, told BBC News Online: "I remember, as a child, hearing people complaining about not getting their cheques. They would go to the BIA office to complain and they'd be treated like dirt."

She launched the class action in 1996 and has already ruffled some very illustrious feathers.

Held in contempt

In 1999 a judge examining the case cited two of President Clinton's Cabinet Secretaries, Bruce Babbitt and Robert Rubin, for contempt because of their departments' failure to produce key documents.

Then in 2002 Judge Royce Lamberth found President Bush's Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, in contempt for her failure to comply with earlier court orders.

Now, after a 44-day trial, Judge Lamberth is considering two options.

The traditional image of American Indians... but many live in poverty

He could accept the BIA's plan for accounting of the money in the trust accounts or he could agree to a far more radical approach suggested by Mrs Cobell's team.

Washington did not believe the Indians capable of exploiting the land themselves.

Mrs Cobell said: "They said we were stupid, incompetent and dumb and couldn't run our own financial affairs. They said they would manage it to the highest fiduciary standards."

But she said that in the intervening years the records of these accounts, known as the Individual Indian Money (IIM) Trusts, became shambolic.

The federal authorities lost track of the account holders and destroyed or mislaid records, said Mrs Cobell.

As a result hundreds of thousands of Native Americans allegedly never got money which was owed to them.

Mrs Cobell, and the team of lawyers and accountants working for her, said the trusts had not been audited since 1887 and she estimated up to $137bn had gone missing.

Some of the tribes affected

Cherokee (Oklahoma)

Sioux/Lakota (South Dakota)

Navajo (Utah)

Blackfeet (Montana)

Cheyenne (South Dakota)

Arapaho (Wyoming)

Chippewa/Ojibwa (Minnesota)

Nez Perce/Nimi'ipuu (Idaho)

She said some of the Indian families relied on the money to pay their grocery bills.

Mrs Cobell said the government tightly regulated privately-run trust funds but added: "When the shoe is on the other foot they don't have to comply with any law. They have run our trusts like a bank totally out of control.

"This is worse than Enron or WorldCom. It's the biggest scandal since the Teapot Dome affair in the 1920s."

Mrs Cobell said: "It's ironic that the US Government, which has been beating up on the Swiss over Jewish money from the 1940s, was responsible for perpetrating an even bigger outrage on the Indians."

She is hoping, with 2004 being an election year, Indians in several key swing states - such as Nevada, Arizona and Montana - can bring pressure to bear on the Bush administration to settle the dispute and agree for the government to pay the missing money.

But BIA spokesman Dan DuBray said the figures given by the plaintiff were "fanciful" and he said the case had been "infected with hyperbole and bad feeling".

Mr DuBray, whose own father is a Sioux with an IIM account of his own, said if the judge agreed to the plaintiff's plan it would take 10 years and cost $2.4bn to check all transactions.

He said this type of "archaeological accounting" would not benefit those in Indian country, some of whose IIM accounts earned only a few cents a year.

American Indian decline

In 1492 it is estimated there were six million Indians in the territory of what became the United States. By 1900, decimated by disease, starvation and war, that number had fallen to 237,000

Mr DuBray said: "There is no question there is hundreds of years of poor history between the government and the Indians. But this case is not to do with Wounded Knee or the Trail of Tears."

He said: "The plaintiffs have suggested that we used Indian trust money to pay off the national debt, and to bail out Chrysler in the 1970s. But there is no truth to any of these grandiose allegations."

Vernon Bellecourt, the director of international affairs with the American Indian Movement, said they backed Mrs Cobell's lawsuit and added: "It's outrageous that this has been allowed to happen."

Speaking from a sun dance ceremony in Montana, Mr Bellecourt told BBC News Online: "We have been the victims of an American holocaust.

"They took our land away - sacred land, like the Black Hills (in South Dakota) - and now we find out they have stolen our money."