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Note: This legal Letter of Demand was sent on April 14, 2006, to the parties named herein:
April 14, 2006
Unceded Coast Salish Territory, Turtle Island
("Vancouver, Canada")
Letter of Demand to the Fiduciary Officers of the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the United Church of Canada:
Luigi Ventura, Papal Nuncio of the Vatican in Canada
Andre Gaumond, President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops
Raymond Roussin, Archbishop of the Vancouver Diocese
Andrew Hutchison, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada
Michael Ingham, Bishop of the New Westminster Diocese
Jim Sinclair, General Secretary of the United Church of Canada
Peter Short, Moderator of the United Church of Canada
Darryl Auten, President of B.C. Conference
Doug Goodwin, Executive Secretary of B.C. Conference
Dear Sirs,
As the responsible officers for the church corporations listed above, you are hereby called upon to take action to admit, disclose and remedy criminal and genocidal acts committed, and regimes established, by your churches in collusion with the government, police and courts of Canada, against entire nations of aboriginal people.
In this capacity, you are each held personally liable and responsible for all acts of murder, rape, violence, torture, warfare, genocide and deprivation committed by your churches against aboriginal people in Canada, including the deaths and disappearances of more than 50,000 children in your former Indian Residential Schools.
As relatives of these children, we issue this public demand to each of you to provide restitution to us through complying with the following requirements of humanity and of the law:
1. We demand to know if you have personal or corporate knowledge or evidence of the fate of the children and all other persons who died or disappeared in your Indian Residential Schools and their adjoining hospitals and other facilities;
2. We demand to know if you have personal or corporate knowledge or evidence of the location of the buried remains of these children;
3. We demand from you a full, public disclosure of the fate and buried location of these children, and a full public explanation of their causes of death, the identity of their killers and accomplices, and why the interring of these children has not been disclosed;
4. We demand from you that the remains of these children be repatriated to their traditional homes and territories, without conditions, and at the expense of your churches;
5. We demand from you that you assume full public and legal responsibility for the deaths and disappearances of these children by presenting those responsible for their deaths to justice, and by declaring a National Week of Mourning in your churches for these innocent dead, and by financially compensating every surviving relative of these dead children on terms established by these relatives;
6. We demand that you open the records of your churches for full public scrutiny, and that your churches divest themselves of all land, revenues and artifacts taken from aboriginal people;
7. We demand that you present yourselves and your churches to appear before an International War Crimes Tribunal into the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, where you will fully disclose and receive punishment for your planned and systematic genocide of aboriginal people in Canada, and
8. As a symbol of genuine repentence from these sins under "God", we demand that you each undertake a week of prayer and fasting, and prostrate yourselves face down before surviving relatives of these dead children and publicly ask for their forgiveness for centuries of genocide, rape, murder and apostasy committed by your churches against aboriginal people.
We expect a response from you to these questions and demands.
Specifically, we expect a reply to this Letter of Demand in writing from each of you no later than April 30, 2006, after which we will consider you to be in violation of the law and of the requirements of humanity. We will then proceed to declare a Public Banning and Boycott of your churches and of each of you personally, under the Land and Tribal Law Jurisdiction of the Indigenous Nations of this continent.
Issued this Fourteenth Day of April, 2006, on the Territory of the Coast Salish Nations, by Thirty Hereditary Elders of the Haida, Cowichan, Coast Salish, Ahousat, Cree, Anishinabe, Mohawk, Mic Mac and Metis Nations.
Please direct all correspondence to:
Elder Whispers Wind, Anishinabe Nation
Issued to the world media.
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