by Kevin D. Annett, M.A., M.Div.

 

It's not often that parties to a crime get to investigate themselves and determine whether the crime happened - and have the whole self-investigation passed off as just and legitimate.

 

But that's what the federal Minister of Indian Affairs, Jim Prentice, announced to reporters in Ottawa on April 24 when he declared that his department and the churches that ran the Indian Residential Schools would soon establish a "working group" to determine whether children died in those places.

 

No, it's not a joke: just business as usual in this self-regulating political system we like to call Canada.

 

We never have had responsible government in this country, not after the Patriotes of 1837 were defeated and hanged, and colonial structures were forever embedded in our polity and confused with democracy. The judiciary, the civil service, the Prime Minister's Office and provincial governments, the CSIS, the military, and let's not forget the churches, are all beyond the reach of accountability and independent review. And so it's hardly surprising that this latest exercise in self-investigation is being passed off as a legitimate investigation of crimes committed in Indian Residential Schools - and is being accepted as such by a public too dumbed and numbed to know what responsible government actually looks like.

 

And yet the latest charade coming out of Ottawa has something particularly grotesque about it, since it involves an attempt to institutionalize the cover-up of the mass murder of untold thousands of innocent children in church-run boarding schools across Canada.

 

It's odd to know how the churches that ran these schools for over a century - the United, Anglican and Catholic - and the government that legalized them, are going to decide if they are guilty of causing deaths in their facilities, when both church and state have been telling us recently that no death records exist for the Indian residential schools. They're lying, actually, and they know it, since as early as the spring of 1997, I unearthed such death records for western residential schools and mailed copies to all of them.

 

I never heard back from anyone in church or government, but I can't believe their officials don't read their mail, or suffer from some weird form of amnesia. The death records are there, but in the official view, they don't exist.

 

Hmm. How is this self-investigation going to happen, then, when at the very outset, the self-investigators say they don't have any evidence?

 

Eyewitnesses don't seem to count, at least if they're aboriginal ones. The hundreds of first-hand testimonies of residential school survivors who describe experiencing or witnessing crimes, including homicides, that I have also mailed to these agencies, and exhibited in my books and documentary film UNREPENTANT, have never been referred to by the self-examiners when they talk about evidence of deaths in the residential schools. What matters to the self-examiners is paper proof, which is convenient, since paper shreds, and burns.

 

I smell a typically Canadian solution looming: specifically, an earnest-looking Minister of Indian Affairs throwing up his hands with the cry, "Gosh, folks, there's just nothing in those archives! But we tried!". Jim Prentice has already said as much, by stating on April 22 that the government can find nothing in its libraries concerning dead residential schools kids - another lie, since it was in Indian Affairs archives that I first came across the death records - and therefore, must turn to the churches and their records.

 

That's like a judge going to mass murderer Clifford Olsen and asking if he has any documentation of the kids he tortured to death.

 

I don't expect the United, Anglican or Cathgolic churches, or their snug clergy and bureaucrats, to incriminate themselves for generations of sterilizations, murders and medical experiments on innocent kids. Nor will Ottawa. That's why neither the churches nor the government should be investigating this issue at all. The people who were and are the targets of Genocide in Canada should be the ones in charge of this inquiry into residential school deaths.

 

It's up to aboriginal people and their true allies - and not the overpaid "Around the Fort Indians" of the state-funded native organizations like the Assembly of First Nations - to undertake the search for the children who died or disappeared in the Indian Residential Schools and hospitals between the 1880's and the 1990's. It's up to them, allied with all concerned citizens, to uncover the evidence from their own memories, and graveyards, and archives, and bring the murderers to justice: the very institutions that are presently trying to pass themselves off as legitimate bodies of church and state in Canada.

 

Doing that, of course, will undermine and overturn the political status quo in Canada. It will mean challenging the very foundations of the state and religion in Canada: institutions which are the architects of crimes against humanity.

 

That will require revolution. And why not? We have never had a successful insurrection in Canada, and we're long overdue for one.

 

Just ask the native people. Fifty thousand murdered children can't be wrong.

 

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April 24, 2007

 

Kevin Annett is the founder and secretary of the Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada. He is a public educator, film maker and author who lives in Nanaimo, BC. His books can be located on the website below.

 

Nanaimo, BC V9R 2H8

ph: 250-753-3345 or 1-888-265-1007

email: hiddenfromhistory@yahoo.ca