Can Little Corpses Forgive, or Be Apologized To?
Awakening from Canada's Big Lie
by Kevin D. Annett
www.hiddenfromhistory.org

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it .
Adolf Hitler, 1925

You have to admit it, but the Canadian establishment has to be pretty nervous these days, if you judge by its unfolding circus in Winnipeg.

I expected at first for the Indian residential school "Truth and Reconciliation" (TRC) bandwagon to do its usual photo op and move on, after the typically expensive fanfare and self-congratulations. But no. The lies and obscenities are growing on what they feed on. Hot on the heels of the TRC posturing there is descending on Winnipeg in a single week 280 world religious leaders, followed by a United Nations human rights delegation, and finally, Queen Elizabeth herself - all of them bubbling with praise for Canada's human rights record towards aboriginal people.

Liz Windsor, true to form, will have the unmitigated gall to unveil a statue of herself in Winnipeg on July 3, just before laying a piece of soil from Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed, at the foundation of Canada's new "human rights museum", which hosts not a single exhibit of the genocide of Indians in Canada.

Some of us wrote to Queen Liz over two years ago, asking her to identify where the children who died at the hands of her church and state are buried. She never replied. But William Combes, who survived torture and starvation at the Catholic Indian residential school in Kamloops, B.C., wants the Queen to also explain what happened to ten native children who were last seen in her company in the fall of 1964, and disappeared forever.

"The Queen showed up at the school one day in September, she and her husband, when I was eleven" described William on my radio program last year.

"All of us kids at the school were given clean clothes and breakfast that day for her royal visit. We went down to a big field near Dead Man's Creek and had a picnic with her after she did her tour. After that, she went off with seven boys and three girls, and we never saw any of them, ever again."

The truth is that the topsoil has finally blown off the mass graves of more than 50,000 children who never returned from residential school, and those responsible are doing their damnedest to distract all of us from those revealed, tiny corpses. And what better decoy to use than an appeal to our deep collective need, as the guilty party, to be forgiven and to get off lightly for our crime?

A Big Lie can only be believed if those hearing it need to believe it: and in this case, Canadians' need for self-absolution for their century-long slaughter of innocent children has been our primary response to the residential schools revelation.

Every politician and Bishop in Canada knows this, and they've crafted their rhetoric and actions accordingly. But there's an odd sort of panic in the way they're going about it, using such overkill in their ridiculous stacking and censoring of their "official inquiry" into themselves that it suggests a deep and underlying uncertainty and fear by church and state.Undoubtedly this explains how thickly Ottawa and its church partners have been laying it on in Winnipeg since June 16, relying on a smiling Governor General, church celebrities, and the Queen herself to push the Big Lie that every crime, and every corpse, can be swept away with the right words.

The trouble with overkill is that it produces the opposite of its desired effect. For even residential school survivors who came to the TRC believing in it have come away hurt, angry and determined to be heard in some other forum.

Shirley, a Cree woman from northern Saskatchewan, told me,

"Nobody would pay our way to Winnipeg, and there was twenty of us who wanted to speak. So I came all by myself and I waited three days, and I never got to be heard. Except for a few token Indians, the whites were running the show, and they kept looking at me suspiciously and said I had to let them see my statement before I could speak. I said to them, I just want to speak, I don't have it written out, and they just snubbed me after that."

Peter Yellow Quill, an Anishinabe traditional chief who helped lead an anti-TRC protest outside the event, said afterwards,

"People themselves kept raising the whole missing children thing. They kept saying, 'We need help finding our dead relatives.' They were just ignored. There weren't court reporters present so everyone could see it wasn't even a proper hearing. I think the government people are just exposing themselves and they have no way out, really, and it worries them."

Voices like Shirley and Peter never reach "mainstream" Canada or the world, thanks to the loyal compliance of the media in shutting them out. A total of eight different news agencies refused to report our anti-TRC protest in Winnipeg, or quote natives who called for an international inquiry into genocide in Canada, including the CBC, the Globe and Mail, the Winnipeg Free Press, CTV, the Canadian Press and even ostensibly "radical" news agencies like Rabble and Canadian Dimension magazine.

"It was a total media blackout on us, by everybody" commented one protester.

"The only reason reporters would call me up would be to find out what we were doing that day, probably to tell the feds or the cops. But they'd never do a story on us."

All of this, of course, is a sign of the impact the voices of the living, and the dead, are having on churches and a government which, like the Vatican itself, have run out of options as they stand finally exposed as mass murderers and serial child rapists.

My problem these days is less with the criminals - for they are, after all, ultimately just corporations in damage control - and more with the masses of Canadians, beginning with "progressives" of every hue, who stand by with absolute non-interest regarding the greatest crime and cover-up in our history.

Awakening from a lie, particularly a huge and historical one, is always difficult. But when so many "activists" across Canada studiously shun our rallies at churches demanding that the corpses of children be returned, or that child rapists in high places be arrested and tried, then one wonders what has happened to the soul and the conscience of our people.

After years of acting in the wilderness to expose and undo the Canadian genocide, our efforts are finally igniting a response around the world, especially in the recent formation of an eight-nation International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State - a body that will be confronting the Pope in September and convening local non-governmental tribunals throughout the fall in Europe and on this continent.

In the meantime, it is incumbent on all Canadians to at least loosen their mental and spiritual subservience to the Big Lie and Criminal Conspiracy called Christian Canada - and shift their allegiance away from a murderous Crown and Church to a new social order that some have called a Republic of Kanata.

Stay tuned.

.........................................................................................................................

Kevin Annett is a community minister, author and award-winning film maker who lives in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, Canada. He is a co-founder of The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State, and can be heard every Monday at 1 pm (pacific time) on his program "Hidden from History" at www.coopradio.org .

ph: 386-323-5774
260 Kennedy St.
nanaimo, B.C. Canada V9R 2H8

Read and Hear the truth of Genocide in Canada, past and present, at this website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org , and watch Kevin's award-winning documentary film UNREPENTANT on the same website.

UNREPENTANT: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide
- Winner, Best Foreign Documentary Film, Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, March 2007, Best Director of a Foreign Documentary, New York Independent Film Festival, October 2006
- Winner, Best Canadian Film, Creation Aboriginal Film Festival, Edmonton, 2009


“Kevin is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past.”
- Dr. Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"As a long time front line worker with the Elders' Council at the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre, I stand behind what Kevin Annett is trying to do for our people. The genocide that continues today and which stemmed from the residential schools needs to be exposed. Kevin Annett helps break the silence, and brings the voice of our people all over the world."
Carol Muree Martin - Spirit Tree Woman
Nisgaa Nation

"I gave Kevin Annett his Indian name, Eagle Strong Voice, in 2004 when I adopted him into our Anishinabe Nation. He carries that name proudly because he is doing the job he was sent to do, to tell his people of their wrongs. He speaks strongly and with truth. He speaks for our stolen and murdered children. I ask everyone to listen to him and welcome him."
Chief Louis Daniels - Whispers Wind
Elder, Turtle Clan, Anishinabe Nation
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Deja vu: Canada's 'Indian' Residential Schools ... and now the Roma children??

From article below:
“The [next] government’s agenda must include a program designed to gradually put as many Roma children as possible into boarding schools and gradually separate them from the life they live in their settlements,”

... HMMM! ... sounds an awful lot like this ...
"Their education must consist not merely training of the mind, but of a weaning from the habits and feelings of their ancestors, and the acquirements of the language, art and customs of civilized life."
Egerton Ryerson, 'father' of Canada's 'Indian' Residential Schools (1847)

... AND this ...
"I want to get rid of the Indian problem...Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and no Indian department."
(Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1913-1932)

...AND this ...
Nicholas Flood Davin Report of 1879 noted that "the industrial school is the principal feature of the policy known as that of 'aggressive civilization'....Indian culture is a contradiction in terms...they are uncivilized...the aim of education is to destroy the Indian."

...AND this too?? ...
"It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in the residential schools and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this does not justify a change in the policy of this Department which is geared towards a final solution of our Indian Problem."
(Duncan Campbell Scott)
www.shannonthunderbird.com/residential_schools.htm

Boarding schools for Roma kids?

by Claire Ward on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 2:40pm - 2 Comments

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/05/12/boarding-schools-for-roma-kids/

In an attempt to integrate future generations of Roma into European society, the Slovakian government has controversially proposed to send children of Roma families to state-run boarding schools. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico made the announcement in March following a damning report by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay during her annual address. Pillay slammed Slovakia for the “deteriorating” situation of its impoverished, widely unemployed Roma citizens, who represent around 10 per cent of Slovakia’s overall population of 5.4 million.

“The [next] government’s agenda must include a program designed to gradually put as many Roma children as possible into boarding schools and gradually separate them from the life they live in their settlements,” said Fico, whose left-wing Smer party is facing a June election. “It seems that there is no other system. Many things have been tried. If we don’t do it, we will raise another generation of Roma which will not be able to integrate.”

A recent EU summit in Spain focusing on the Roma situation in Europe concluded that tens of thousands of Roma children are currently sent to schools for the mentally disabled, and suffer from a widely adopted systemic racism that perpetuates the segregation problem. Fico’s solution hasn’t been rejected by the EU, on the condition that the schools are voluntary and temporary. The Slovak government has confirmed preliminary approval of the plan by top Roma officials, and that the schooling would be indeed offered on a voluntary basis.

But human rights organizations have decried Fico’s solution. “[The Canadian Roma community] are very upset about it,” says Ronald Lee, a Hamilton-based Roma-Canadian author and activist. “It’s like native children in Canada being sent to residential schools. It destroys the ethnicity, the culture, the language, the sense of identity. How are they going to be treated in these boarding schools? Prejudice over there is rampant.”

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Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group

GENOCIDE "Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
GENOCIDE@WIKI

Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Political Consequences of Uncovering Genocide in Canada

By Kevin D. Annett (Eagle Strong Voice)

Squamish Nation territory

2008 was the year the impossible happened in Canada .

Our national network known as The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared made history this past year, and forever changed the political landscape of Canada. In the words of Dora, an elderly survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School,

“You’ve finally put our people on the map. They can’t ignore us, ever again.”

In a nutshell, we have forced Canada to admit to its genocide of native people, issue a formal apology for the residential school crimes, and acknowledge that thousands of children died in these schools. Our allied hereditary chiefs proclaimed sovereignty over indigenous land and issued eviction orders against the churches responsible for genocide.

Quite simply, after years of effort, we have forever changed the image of Canada in the world and ended an official regime of Holocaust Denial.

It has been a joy and an honor for me to help win such a moral victory for people who have never been “on the map”. But what has this victory meant for such people?

On Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008, fifty of us - natives and "whites" - walked quietly to the front of the Holy Rosary Catholic Cathedral in downtown Vancouver and stood there, facing the congregation, holding a banner that read, “All the Children Need a Proper Burial.”

We had been warned to stay away from that church. But I remember walking unafraid to the front of the sanctuary with all our people, led by three clan mothers. Among us were William Combes, Rick Lavallee and Bingo, homeless survivors of hideous tortures at Catholic residential schools.

That moment was a pinnacle for me, and for the survivors, for in the very heart of that which had tried to kill them, they were able to face it and say, We are still here, and we want our friends returned to us.

Past the angry threats of the priests, and the police who later descended on us, we were reaching out and touching the hearts of people in the Catholic church that day.

And it worked. For, after a few minutes, as our procession left the sanctuary led by the drumming of the clan mothers, the entire congregation rose spontaneously as we walked by.

It was then that I knew we had won. And sure enough, the walls began coming down after our moral victory that day.

In the wake of our March action, the missing residential school children have, for the first time, preoccupied the conscience and public discourse of Canada . It is as if the entire dominant culture is now standing, as did the Catholic parishioners, to acknowledge what they know is true, in remembrance of the missing children.

In opposition, both church and state have done their best, since that day, to belittle our work and downplay the reality of murders in Indian residential schools, and their responsibility for them. But such is always the behavior of those with their backs to the wall.

If our simple act of speaking of the dead and holding up the survivors has begun to shake loose centuries of Holocaust Denial in Canada , it has also caused us to ask ourselves, Where do we go from here?

We are no longer asking for anything from the churches and state that are responsible for genocide. Rather, all our actions in 2008 have laid the groundwork for an even greater step: drawing the broader political consequences of our exposure of Canada as a colonial and genocidal settler state, and creating an altogether new society.

Who are We and What Can We Become?

Our exposure of the Canadian genocide has simultaneously indicted the social order that gave rise to it. Euro-Canadian Christian society as a whole stands condemned in the dock alongside those persons who ran the residential schools, sterilized and murdered children, spread smallpox, and dug the mass graves.

Despite their best efforts to ignore this fact and contain the whole matter with pseudo “apologies”, the Canadian government and its partner Catholic, Anglican and United churches now face the same kind of historical reckoning that Nazi Germany did after its defeat in 1945: an awakening to their own criminal nature.

On April 20, 2007, Canada and those churches suffered a fundamental moral defeat in Parliament, when the first cabinet minister in Canadian history publicly acknowledged that untold thousands of children had died in Christian Indian residential schools.

The extent of this defeat has yet to be appreciated by most Canadians, or even indigenous people. But its impact is nevertheless reverberating throughout every level of society and undermining the very basis of Canada ’s existence.

The question now is how to draw the larger conclusions of this defeat in order to reinvent Canada from the top down, and the bottom up, with a basic purpose: the establishment of a decolonized, secular, and genuinely democratic federation of sovereign nations – the Republic of Kanata .

Shedding the Past, Creating a Future

Canada has never been allowed to become a sovereign and democratic nation because of its historical role as a resource base and captured market for first the British and then the American empire. That dependency required that Canada remain frozen as a colonial, church-dominated, semi-feudal society: a condition that has caused the sustained genocide of indigenous peoples and the destruction of their lands, and now threatens the lives of all of us.

The two attempted democratic revolutions in our history – the abortive rebellions in 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada, and the Metis Insurrection of 1885 in the Red River basin – had as their aim the ending of an Imperial oligarchy and the creation of a democratic Republic in which aboriginals and Europeans could co-exist equally. The crushing of both rebellions ensured that oligarchy and apartheid would remain the political norm in Canada .

And yet, the same vision of freedom that propelled these revolts had been originally offered by the eastern Six Nations to the arriving Europeans through the “Two Road Wampum” Great Law of Peace, in which both cultures would share the land and not seek to dominate or conquer the other.

That offer was rejected not by Europeans as a whole, but by the religious and commercial elites who ran the foreign policy of both the French and British Empires, especially during the European Religious Wars of the formative 17^th century.

Time and again, the Catholic and Protestant churches subverted peaceful relations between whites and natives, and among aboriginal nations such as the Huron and Iroquois, as part of their plan to exterminate all non-Christian peoples and take their land. In the words of the Jesuit missionary Jean Brebeuf,

“There can be no peace or parity between the savages and Christians. This is required by our Faith and the fur trade.”

Canada as we know it has arisen on the basis of this basic philosophy of Christian Superior Dominion.

There is still no equality between natives and non-natives in Canada because of an apartheid Indian Act that relegates “Indians” to a separate and inferior status, and holds most of them in a state of permanent sickness, landlessness and poverty on their own land. Such permanent internal colonialism is required by the foreign and domestic corporate interests that run Canada as a fuel pump and watering hole.

Quite simply, in a neo-colonial regime like Canada , where “the Crown” legally owns all the land, native people must continue to be killed off, legally and methodically, for such theft to continue. A constant aboriginal death rate twenty times the national average is the deadly proof.

This genocidal reality will never change in Canada as it is presently constituted, since the maintenance of natives, and the poor generally, as a disempowered cash cow for others to exploit is an institutionalized part of Canadian society.

The nine billion dollar Indian Affairs industry requires a sick, dependent aboriginal populace, and a compliant class of collaborating native elites to administer this sickness. For the resulting totalitarian control of native people at every level is precisely what resource-hungry corporations need to take the last remnants of oil, timber, minerals and water from what is still aboriginal land.

Such a structurally criminal regime cannot be tinkered with or reformed, resting as it does on the oppression of most of the population, whether native or non-native. The existence of Canadians as “subjects of the Crown” under the ultimate authority of one person – a Governor-General accountable only to a foreign monarch – amounts to a state of legal slavery utterly repugnant to democracy and sovereignty.

“The only way to reform a colonial system is by dismantling it” said the great Irish nationalist, Bernadette Devlin. And the key to dismantling the Canadian oligarchy is to establish responsible government by severing ties with the English monarchy and creating a federated and secular Republic of sovereign indigenous nations with full public ownership of the economy, the land, and all its resources.

In short, every vestige of the system that spawned genocide in Canada needs to be abolished, if we are serious about ending its legacy and doing justice to aboriginal people and residential school survivors.

A Program for Ending Genocide

Legal genocide in Canada has rested historically on three pillars: a colonial political oligarchy under the authority of the English Crown; a powerful, unaccountable and state-protected religious oligarchy in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and later, the state-created United Church ; and a foreign-controlled, dependent economy.

To dismantle the root causes of genocide in Canada, we must replace all three of these systems, through a process of active de-construction and reconstruction: undoing what caused the wrong and building an altogether new political and social regime in its place.

To commence, our general aim must be the following steps of “decolonization and de-construction” in order to lay the basis for a true democratic and secular Republic:

I. Politically: Active disaffiliation from the English Crown and the Canadian state and its courts;

II. Spiritually: Disestablishment of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada ; and

III. Socially: De-corporatizing our economy and the creation of local, self-sufficient economies under public ownership.

A real Program of Justice for all victims of genocide in Canada must restore social equality, the health of the land, and democratic sovereignty of all nations within Kanata , through these and other measures:

I. Politically:

1. Abolish the Governor-General and issue a formal Declaration of Independence from the British Crown.

2. Abolish the Indian Act, the federal courts, the Senate, the RCMP and the Indian and Northern Affairs department.

3. Reconstitute Canada as a federated and secular Republic of Kanata , based on a recognition of the root title sovereignty of all indigenous nations and of the common ownership by all citizens of the economy, wealth, lands and resources of Kanata .

II. Spiritually:

1. Tax the churches: Revoke the charitable tax-exempt status of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church, nationalize all church property and land, audit and assess all payments owed by these churches to the people and indigenous nations since their inception, and return all lands and effects stolen by these churches from native people.

2. Revoke the legal charters and legislation governing the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, and thereby end their official, legal status.

3. End diplomatic recognition of the Vatican and expel the Papal Nuncio.

4. Separate church and state: no funding for religious schools or churches, no religious oaths or functions connected to the state, no state protection for clergy or churches (ie, revoke sections 176 and 296 of the Criminal Code of Canada).

5. Establish a public, international inquiry into crimes of these churches against native people, including in Indian residential schools, with the power to subpoena, try and jail offenders.

III. Socially

A Jubilee Campaign to restore the land and economy to the people:

1. Cancel all debts and mortgages, and return all land to its original owners.

2. Place banks, money supply and credit under public ownership and control.

3. Impose a 100% tax on all wealth gained by inheritance, interest and speculation, and the abolition of all income tax.

4. Establish a maximum wage and redistribute all surplus income to the lower paid.

5. Collect all back taxes owed by corporations and a special tax on the super wealthy and on corporate profits.

6. Abolish foreign ownership of the economy.

7. Abolish all land speculation and the commercial trading in land.

8. Nationalize all resources.

9. Socialize all housing, medicine, education and transportation, freely available to all.

A Gaia Campaign to restore the health and harmony of the land:

1. Impose a Green Tax on all privately owned vehicles.

2. Abolish nuclear power and the uranium industry.

3. Develop wind, solar and tidal energy industries.

4. Phase out petrol vehicles, and replace with non-polluting, mass-transit systems.

5. Immediately nationalize all polluting industries and abolish or eco-convert them.

6. Legally limit the size of all land ownership to 100 hectares.

7. Collectivize all farming and agriculture, and abolish all pesticides and herbicides.

8. Abolish the sale and commercialization of water: Provide free, universal access to water through the establishment of public ownership over all water resources.

Acting on this Vision and Program

These proposals are but a beginning in a long process of social and spiritual emancipation from corporate genocide.

Our purpose as a de-colonizing movement is to create a new society within the shell of the old: to bring about a parallel social order in opposition to “Canada” through a massive democratic movement from below. We can only succeed through a conscious, activated citizenry who take control of their lives and the land.

Consequently, we reject any reliance on or involvement in the existing parliamentary or electoral system, which is based on an undemocratic allegiance to a foreign monarch.

Instead, we will seek to create new popular assemblies and courts through which the people can express their will freely and openly, justice can be directly enacted, and the present political system can be overturned. We will use mass civil disobedience, strikes, withholding of taxes, and other direct actions to undermine and replace Canada and its institutions with a truly democratic republic.

To coordinate and lead this campaign, we look to a mass revolutionary party to engender but not dominate our movement. The creation of a democratic and secular Republic of Kanata will unleash the greatest freedom and diversity among the people, who will learn through their own struggles the meaning of self-government.

Our underlying recognition is that true democracy and sovereignty cannot come into being or survive without the complete public ownership of all of Kanata by all the people. The poorest person has as equal a right to the land and its wealth as the richest, and we shall work to create a society where all class distinctions and the private ownership of the economy have been abolished.

We encourage you to share this Program and Vision, and begin to act on it.

As a first step, we call upon all people who are in agreement with this Vision and Program to take the Pledge of Allegiance to Kanata (below) and to form organizing committees in their communities to prepare for the formal launching of the Republican Party of Kanata.

In solidarity and hope for our common future,

The Elders and National Council of the Republican Movement of Kanata, in alliance with traditional Squamish Chief Siem Kiapilano

………………………………………………………………………………

Pledge of Allegiance to the Republic of Kanata

I do solemnly swear allegiance to the Federated Republic of Kanata, and to the principles of sovereignty, natural law, unconditional democracy, and public, collective ownership for which Kanata stands.

I swear to defend the Republic of Kanata against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to sever all ties and allegiance to the British Crown, and to the government known as Canada. I pledge to stand in solidarity with all those who take this oath and to defend them unconditionally.

I take this pledge freely, without coercion, mental reservation, or ulterior motive, according to my honor and freedom as a natural and sovereign person.

(Name, Address and Date)

Please send a copy of your signed Pledge to:

The Secretary, RPK

260 Kennedy St.

Nanaimo, B.C.

V9R 2H8

Acting under the authority of traditional Squamish Chief Siem Kiapilano, on his territory

1 January, 2009

www.hiddenfromhistory.org ............... Read and Hear the truth of Genocide in Canada, past and present, at this website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org “Kevin is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past.” - Dr. Noam Chomsky Institute Professor Emeritus Massachusetts Institute of Technology “A courageous and inspiring man." (referring to Kevin Annett) - Mairead Corrigan-Maguire Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Belfast , Northern Ireland The very lands we all along enjoyed they ravished from the people they destroyed ... All the long pretenses of descent are shams of right to prop up government. ' Tis all invasion, usurpation all; ' Tis all by fraud and force that we possess, and length of time can make no crime the less; Religion's always on the strongest side. Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino (England, 1706)

Enlightenment Racism

Michael Nenonen

November 12, 2008

(from The Republic)

The belief that other societies were “less evolved” than European civilization was used to justify European domination of the globe. This domination was portrayed as the “White Man’s Burden”, the noble responsibility of the Enlightened West to drag backwards people into a beneficent modernity. In doing so, Enlightenment ideologies prevented Europeans from perceiving their own nihilistic brutality.

In an August 9, 2008 interview with La Presse, VANOC board member Dick Pound addressed the issue of human rights and the Beijing Olympics: “We must not forget that 400 years ago,” Pound said, “Canada was a land of savages, with scarcely 10,000 inhabitants of European descent, while in China, we're talking about a 5,000-year-old civilization.”

The statement upset a lot of people, but not Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente. In her October 25, 2008 column, Wente wrote that while Pound was stupid to say what he did, his point was fundamentally correct. Drawing upon an as-yet unpublished book by Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard entitled Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, Wente wrote that “North American native peoples had a neolithic culture based on subsistence living and small kinship groups. They had not developed broader laws or institutions, a written language, evidence-based science, mathematics or advanced technologies. The kinship groups in which they lived were very small, simply organized and not very productive. Other kinship groups were regarded as enemies, and the homicide rate was probably rather high. Until about 30 years ago, the anthropological term for this developmental stage was ‘savagery.’... Today, however, it is simply not permissible to say that aboriginal culture was less evolved than European culture or Chinese culture – even though it's true.”

Wente believes that guilt prevents non-Aboriginals from acknowledging the savagery of pre-contact First Nations people: “We robbed and mistreated aboriginal people for a very long time, and most of us feel terrible about it. Yet, Ms. Widdowson believes this denial of reality is extremely damaging. It dooms hundreds of thousands of native Canadians and their descendants to lives that remain isolated from the modern world, without the skills and aptitudes they need to make their way in an increasingly complex society. The message they get is that they need not, and should not, change. But a neolithic culture cannot possibly give them a future. And it's time for us to face that.”

Wente is shockingly ignorant of some basic facts. Anthropologists discarded the word “savage” because of its ugly moral connotations. According to my Oxford Dictionary, the word can be used as an adjective to mean fierce, cruel, wild, angry, and bad-tempered, or as a noun to describe a person with these unpleasant qualities. The Dictionary describes its use to refer to “primitiveness” or “primitive people” as “archaic offensive”: that is, it’s both obsolete and rude. The term doesn’t describe, it condemns, and in the case of Aboriginal people it condemns unfairly.

Wente seems unaware that modern anthropologists overwhelmingly reject the Social Darwinian idea that societies “evolve” towards some predetermined end-point. Even in biology, where the word has some meaning, evolution is simply a process by which organisms change over the course of generations in relation to their shifting environmental pressures. Evolution lacks any kind of teleological purpose, any kind of goal. Wolves aren’t “more evolved” than coyotes: their species have simply evolved differently. If evolution applies at all to human societies, then it does so only in the sense that societies change over time in response to various pressures. It’s a sign of profound anthropological illiteracy to say that four centuries ago the cultures of Europe were any more evolved than those of the Americas.

Furthermore, anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss have demonstrated conclusively that the cultures of Indigenous peoples are remarkably intricate. Culture is like language: just as the languages of Indigenous peoples are as sophisticated as those of colonial peoples, so are their cultures. This holds true regardless of the scale, complexity, and technological development of their forms of social organization. Once you know what to look for, you can find extraordinary sophistication throughout Aboriginal cultures.

Consider the tribal masks of the First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest. Levi-Strauss has shown that these masks formed part of a system of structured differences that transcended individual tribal groups. The Dzonokwa mask of the Kwakiutl, for example, is an inversion of the Swaihwe mask of the Salish: whereas the Swaihwe is typically white, the Dzonokwa is painted black. While the Dzonokwa has animal hair and a fur cloak, the Swaihwe has a feather crown. The Dzonokwa’s eyes are half-closed and deeply sunken into their sockets, while the Swaihwe has protruding cylindrical eyes. Whereas the lower jaw of the Swaihwe hangs low, allowing a tongue to protrude through the mouth, the Dzonokwa mouth is rounded in a way that prevents any protrusion of the tongue. Finally, where the Dzonokwa represents an anti-social monster that threatens the biological continuity of the social group, the Swaihwe represents the founding ancestors of the highest lineages of Salish society, the embodiment of the biological continuity of the social order.

Levi-Strauss writes that “The masks do not have a single meaning. Rather, like condensed dream images, they are the result of multiple series of semantic associations that relate to their specific cultural contexts.” (The Way of the Masks, 1975) Taken together, the many masks of Pacific Northwest tribes form an extraordinarily complex network of associations linked to the mythologies, social structures, and economic systems of the peoples that design them. The masks, in other words, are like a kind of language. To the uninformed eyes of someone like Wente, however, they’re probably little more than an unrelated bunch of funny faces.

Reading Wente’s column, I was reminded of how insidious racism can be in Canada. Canadians are rarely exposed to histrionic expressions of racism so commonly seen in the United States, and which were so glaringly displayed during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Instead, Canadian racism takes the form of “common sense”. This isn’t unusual: historically, injustice has often been rationalized by whatever was the common sense of the times. The common sense underlying Wente’s position can be traced back to the European Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment holds an honoured place in Western cultural history. It was because of the Enlightenment, so the story goes, that the forces of reason rose up against the tyranny of superstition and ignorance. The Enlightenment challenged the arbitrary powers of the church and the nobility, and made possible for the first time the development of societies governed by science and rationality. Our modern world’s major political and economic ideologies, both on the left and the right, are legacies of the Enlightenment. Unfortunately, not all legacies are benign.

The Enlightenment divided humanity into two camps: the rational, who were the torchbearers of a utopian future, and the irrational, those who would douse the fire beneath the filth and stupidity of the past. It was the moral duty of the former to “enlighten” the latter by whatever means were required.

This belief was common among major Enlightenment figures and their intellectual progeny. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, (2007) John Gray writes that “Voltaire subscribed to a secular version of the pre-Adamite theory advanced by some Christian theologians that suggested that Jews were pre-Adamites, remnants of an older species that existed before Adam was created.” In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), Immanuuel Kant wrote that “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling.” In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill described China as a stagnant civilization: “…they have become stationary—have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be improved it must be by foreigners.” Karl Marx, meanwhile, felt that colonial rule in India was a useful means for overcoming the torpor of village life. Gray writes that “Whether the disabilities of other peoples were innate (as was believed in the case of Africans) or due to cultural backwardness (as was supposed to be true of Asians), the remedy was the same. All had to be turned into Europeans, if necessary by force.”

These philosophers added something completely new to the cultural landscape: “Before the Enlightenment, racist attitudes rarely aspired to the dignity of theory. Even Aristotle, who defended slavery and the subordination of women as part of the natural order, did not develop a theory that maintained that humanity was composed of distinct and unequal racial groups. Racial prejudice may be immemorial, but racism is a product of the Enlightenment.”

Margaret Wente defends Dick Pound’s description of First Nations people as “savages” because she buys into the Enlightenment belief that cultures evolve from immoral and ignorant anarchy through various stages in which the human potentials for art and science, politics and economics achieve ever-higher levels of expression. This belief conveniently places modern Western civilization at the pinnacle of human development: all other societies are, in this scheme, at best trying to catch up.

The belief that other societies were “less evolved” than European civilization was used to justify European domination of the globe. This domination was portrayed as the “White Man’s Burden”, the noble responsibility of the Enlightened West to drag backwards people into a beneficent modernity. In doing so, Enlightenment ideologies prevented Europeans from perceiving their own nihilistic brutality.

In Canada, as well as throughout much of the world, European domination imposed commercial economies upon subsistence-based tribal societies. Indeed, commercial societies, which depend on unlimited growth, are economically driven to expropriate the resource base of subsistence-based economies. Anthropologist John H. Bodley, in Victims of Progress (1989), shows that whenever this happens, subsistence peoples are violently subjugated. Their economies are destroyed and their lands’ resources become raw materials for the industrial machine. Even if they aren’t enslaved, the survivors are left destitute, traumatized, and excluded from the power structures of the new society. Many, of course, don’t survive at all.

Bodley estimates that between 1780 and 1930 tribal populations worldwide fell by 30-50 million people. These figures don’t include the rapid population loss that occurred in the centuries immediately following European colonization of the Americas. Bodley writes that prior to contact with Europeans, the tribal population of North America was approximately 7,000,000, while the tribal population of Lowland South America was 8,500,000. At their lowest point after colonization, these numbers had fallen to 390,000 and 450,000 respectively. Bodley’s figures may be conservative: Scholars like W.E.B. DuBois, Walter Rodney, Cheik Anta Diop, Joseph Inikori, and Basil Davidson estimate that the European slave trade alone was responsible for the loss of between 50 and 100 million African lives.

While she makes passing mention of the exploitation of First Nations people in Canada, Wente ignores the way that the Enlightenment beliefs that she espouses helped legitimize that exploitation. To take the most obvious examples, Canada’s residential schools were designed to “kill the Indian in the Indian”, to strip Aboriginal people of their language, culture, and religion in order to assimilate them into what was viewed as an inherently superior Canadian society.

The schools tried their hardest to murder the inner Indian, and in doing so they decimated the matrix of traditional beliefs, practices, and relationships that helped First Nations people cope with the anguish of the human condition, the feelings of grief and guilt, fear and despair that threaten all of us with psychological and social disintegration. According to a report prepared for the Law Commission of Canada by Rhonda Claes and Deborah Clifton (Institutional Child Abuse: Needs and Expectations for Redress Of Victims of Abuse at Native Residential Schools, 2002), children as young as four were beaten with wooden boards, sticks and pointers, whips, studded belts, and leather and rubber straps--straps that sometimes had tacks, nails, or wires embedded in them. Some children had needles pushed through their tongues. Some were burned and scalded. Electrical shock devices were used on physically restrained children. Kids were sometimes beaten into unconsciousness; blood was drawn, bones were broken. The sick were occasionally made to eat their own vomit. Children were locked in closets, publicly strip-searched, and forced to parade wearing soiled bed sheets over their heads. They were denied contact with their parents, and had no recourse to anyone who could conceivably protect them. In addition to these punishments, the children suffered from gross physical neglect. The schools were poorly designed. Ventilation, heating, and plumbing were typically inadequate, and the children lacked decent medical care. Diseases like tuberculosis spread fast through the student population. A 1907 report by Dr. Peter Bryce, a former Medical Inspector for the Department of Indian Affairs, announced that students in these schools had an average death rate of 30%. Many of the children who died in the residential schools were buried in unmarked graves. These institutions surely met the moral criteria for “savagery”, even if the students who attended them didn’t. Wente writes about the exploitation of First Nations people in the past tense, but the abuse is ongoing. The collective trauma inflicted by the residential schools over the course of generations makes it much harder for Aboriginal people to organize, with whatever meager resources remain at their disposal, to defend their interests against the predation of wealthy corporations and their quisling governments. It is the structurally-imposed disadvantages they encounter in defending their interests that are responsible for the marginalization of Aboriginal people in Canadian society, and not what Wente derides as their “neolithic culture”.

Those interests are under constant threat. To take only one case, the Alberta government has allowed resource industries to ravage the traditional territory of the Lubicon Cree, a people whose land claims have never been resolved, who lack even a single reserve to call their own, and who live in abject poverty. The Lubicon aren’t being compensated for the damage done to their resource base, damage so severe that the water from the Athabasca River is now unsafe for human consumption. Fish from the river often have tumours, and moose in the area are so sick they can’t be eaten. The United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) issued rulings in 1990 and 2005 in defence of the rights of the Lubicon, demanding that the Alberta government consult the Lubicon “before granting licenses for economic exploitation of the disputed land, and ensure that in no case such exploitation jeopardizes the rights recognized under the [International] Covenant [on Civil and Political Rights].” The government has thus far ignored these entreaties. Similar abuses are being inflicted upon First Nations people across Canada.

The Enlightenment’s unsavoury legacies continued into the Twentieth Century, and their ill effects spread far beyond Indigenous populations. In I Don’t Believe in Atheists (2008), Chris Hedges argues that the Enlightenment was, and continues to be, an expression of millennialism, the myth of collective moral progress: “The dangerous myth that confuses moral progress with material progress permits us to believe that we have discovered a way out of the human predicament. It places faith in an empowered elite to guide us toward a new world. Science increases not only our power to protect life and encourage virtue, but also our capacity to inflict death and destruction. The industrial slaughter and genocides of the past century were all products of the Enlightenment and their satellite ideologies, from liberal imperialism to communism to fascism. All preached collective moral progress through exploitation, repression and violence. All were utopian. And all unleashed science and technology, in the service of war and profit, to kill human beings on a scale unseen in human history. The Enlightenment vision, because it renders all other values subservient to reason and science, allows us to divide the human species into superior and inferior breeds. It sanctifies inhumane abuse of the weak to push the human race forward. This corruption was built into the Enlightenment from its inception. The Enlightenment may have encouraged an admirable humanism, but it also led to undreamt-of genocide and totalitarian repression.”

It’s this myth of collective moral progress that makes Wente’s views so attractive. By persuading us, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that we’re progressing from moral savagery towards something better, it makes us feel a little more secure, a little more confident about the future. It gives us a sense of righteousness, of a privileged place in the evolutionary order, and diverts our attention from the grotesque cruelty of our civilization.

It seems clear that modern civilization isn’t morally superior to the cultures of Aboriginal peoples, but how about our other measures of progress, such as our scientific and technological achievements? The question must be asked: what are we progressing towards? Once we factor in global resource depletion, climate destabilization, the chemical pollution of our ecosystems, cascading economic disasters, and the increasing ease with which we create and disperse weapons of mass destruction, it seems that we aren’t heading to the stars, but rather marching over the edge of a cliff. Subsistence societies endured for many millennia, but for all we know our industrial civilization may well have a lifespan of only a few centuries.

We like to think otherwise; indeed, to the degree that we’re committed to Enlightenment mythology, we have to think otherwise, regardless of the evidence. To abandon the faith is to confront the horrors our civilization has wrought—horrors like the Trail of Tears, Passchendaele, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima—without any ideological anaesthesia. But as long as we hold onto the faith we blind ourselves to the evils we inflict upon others; indeed, we blind ourselves to reality. Paradoxically, it’s only when we give up the belief in collective moral progress that we have any hope of acting morally. It’s only then that we begin to take responsibility for our own moral limitations and to strive to develop empathy for those who seem radically different from ourselves. It’s only then that we stop seeing savages where there are only people, and start taking the savagery in our own hearts and in our own cultures seriously.

Aboriginal leaders excluded from 'Museum for Human Rights' ceremony Aboriginal leaders say government excluded them from important international ceremony Posted By The Daily Graphic staff Updated 20 hours ago Aboriginal leaders in Manitoba say the government has insulted their people and their culture by excluding them from the sod turning ceremony of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights at the Forks in Winnipeg Friday. While Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other national and provincial leaders broke ground on the museum, First Nations were not represented, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) said. "I am extremely disappointed that a museum devoted to educating the world about human rights, a museum built on traditional Treay One First Nation territory, would exclude the Treaty One Chiefs of Manitoba, AMC Grand Chief Ron Evans said. Evans also said appropriate ceremonial protocols were not followed during the event, which was disrespectful of First Nations people. At an assembly held at Dakota Tipi First Nation last fall, museum representatives told aboriginal leaders from Manitoba that First Nation history would be an integral part of the museum, the press release said. Aboriginal people from Canada voted to support the museum with the hope that their history could be told from their perspective, Evans said. The museum is to contain a wing devoted to First Nation history, as well as employment and training opportunities for aboriginals and tourism links to sites such as the Indian Residential School Museum of Canada being established at Long Plain First Nation's urban reserve just southwest of Portage la Prairie. "Unfortunately, the ceremony demonstrated not only a lack of knowledge of our culture but a lack of understanding of what the term consultation means," Evans said. "If this is how the organizers handle the sod-turning, then how will they handle the building of the First Nations wing of the museum?" In addition to Harper, the ceremony was attended by Minister of Canadian Heritage James Moore, Premier of Manitoba Gary Doer, Deputy Mayor of the City of Winnipeg Justin Swandel, Gail Asper and members of the Museum's Board of Trustees. The Daily Graphic newspaper and www.thedailygraphic.com will follow this story as it unfolds. news.dailygraphic@shawcable.com

- Canada -

A Very Polite Genocide

BY Alison Fleming December 08, 2008 15:12

Editorial Rating:

To Dec 21. Tues-Sat 8pm; Sun mat 2:30pm. $18-$25; Sun PWYC; students at door $15, groups of 10 or more $10/ticket. Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander Street. 416-975-8555. www.artsexy.ca.

Falen Johnson, who plays the pivotal character of Josie Pichette in Native Earth Performing Arts’ premiere of playwright Melanie J. Murray’s A Very Polite Genocide, points out that we treat Canada’s residential schools as recorded history, something we put in a box and regard from afar. Josie herself embodies this distance at the beginning of the play as she delivers a formal academic presentation to her Aboriginal studies class while privately agonizing over the ramifications of her recent discovery that she herself is of Aboriginal heritage.

As Josie searches for her roots, her family members, particularly her broken and rootless uncle Robbie, she demonstrates that the wounds created by separation and abuse never go away. Murray wisely leaves Josie’s own mother conspicuously absent from the narrative by constructing her as nothing more than a voice at the other end of a telephone. Her silence leaves a broken link between generations.

Director Yvette Nolan makes both the time-shifting between generations and the play’s magic-realism work purposefully. A minimal set featuring bare branches and poignant archival photographs, and the faded colours of Anna Treusch’s costumes effectively create a reality made of emotion and memory rather than one rooted in a specific place and time. Even though the device of interweaving the threads of many stories together does eventually work, it’s choppy at first. A few longer anchoring scenes would have set a more stable groundwork earlier on, although we do get some halfway through.

Paula Jean Prudat does a fine job of playing Josie’s grandmother Mary as a vivacious and defiant young woman who becomes increasingly bereft as the residential school system’s poisonous legacy infects her husband and robs her of her children. Also noteworthy is Waawaate Fobister’s assured handling two very different roles: Rougarou, a nightmarish trickster/werewolf, and a resilient prostitute who functions as an unlikely voice of hope.

A Very Polite Genocide definitely has a point to make, but at times it needlessly articulates the frustration and sorrow that the audience is feeling anyway, which results in an emotional pitch that seems a bit too tortured. Given the subject matter, though, this may be unavoidable: as Josie’s grandfather Elder Martin (Paul Chaput) warns us, “If I open up, I’ll pour my guts out all over the floor.”

Traditional native elders -a revival of our sacred resources Posted By ERNIE SANDY Posted 1 day ago Someone once said that our elders are the walking-talking libraries of indigenous culture, language, legends, knowledge of the environment, restorative justice, governance, childcare, education and skills development needed for survival on the land, spirituality, hunting and fishing, and pride. So true, but what if those proverbial libraries were during the last hundred years or so? Whatever traditional knowledge that used to be passed down from one generation to the next would have come to a stop. Using the analogy of lost or forgotten resources, that is exactly what has been happening to my people for about five generations in terms of losing our way of life, but that has changed recently. Since the early 1960s, many First Nation communities, both on the rez as well in major cities in Canada and the United States, have witnessed a very interesting and welcoming turn of events. We are seeing our elders and seniors waking up from a long sleep of neglect, fear and shame. Neglect by not practising the thousands-of-year-old traditions and ceremonies. It came from fear of being arrested and jailed. The Canadian government outlawed all of the native traditions in the late 1800s as a means of trying to "civilize" or moulding a society of a proud, gentle and kind people into European likeness. Through the partnership of the colonial government and different churches, there was an assertive attempt to de-Indianize the original peoples of North America, or what we call Turtle Island. The shame came from my ancestors being told over and over again that the native traditions were barbaric and heathen.

It was pounded in our head that our way of life was useless and should be forgotten and abandoned. It is only by going underground that native spirituality survived the onslaught of government sanctioned genocide and assimilation policies.

One of other ways it survived was that ceremonies and other teachings were handed down through the native language and practised. Nothing was written for fear of discovery by the church or government official. One older gentleman once told me that they used to practise the ceremonies in the early 1940s and 1950s by erecting a sweat lodge or camp site deep in the woods so that the minister, priest or Indian agent could not find them. Today is a different story. We are no longer silent. We walk proud as indigenous nations as we take up the drum, songs, dances and ceremonies.

The spirit of the many First Nations has been awakened from a century and a half of slumber and is welcoming the teachings of the elders and the ceremonies. This is happening through personal healing and wellness programs. Special events are started with a ceremony such as smudge. This is a process of purifying the mind and spirit with tobacco or sage. Native powwows are becoming a regular events in dozens of First Nations every weekend during the spring and summer. Continued After Advertisement Below Advertisement In establishing an identity as an Anishnaabe, children and adults are seeking traditional names. Getting married by native custom is becoming a trend; funerals are being conducted in the way they were done prior to the arrival of Europeans. In addition, there are elders conferences in major cities throughout the year and talking circles are happening in First Nation communities. As an extension of pride, some communities are going back to their old names. For example, Cape Croker, the birth place of my grandparents and mother, is called Neyaashiinigmiing (pronounced neeyosheeng- g' meeng). I am glad to see in my generation, some of our elders and seniors taking their rightful place in our communities as moral leaders. Assimilation and forgotten lessons did not happen overnight, nor will the revitalization of culture and language happen at the snap of a finger. In the mean time, we need the knowledge and wisdom of the elders so we can pass it onto our children and their children's children, if they choose to learn about it. With respect to who is recognized as an elder, it should be understood that this distinction and honour is not simply a matter of chronological age or gender, but other qualities such as the following. He or she cannot be judgmental. It is necessary to have the respect of the community. The ability and comfort in working with children and youth is a critical factor. Being a role model in voice and action leads to credibility as a leader. Walking the talk of the Seven Grandfather Teachings or philosophy, namely, respect, humility, wisdom, courage, unconditional love, truth and honesty gives distinction. Above all else, he or must be free of drug and alcohol abuse. While fluency in the language would be an asset, it is not an absolute necessity. Those were only some characteristics of what constitutes a traditional native elder. About 25 years ago, I asked an elder, "How does someone become an elder?" I was still in my infancy of discovering my culture then. He replied, "Real elders do not have to tell anyone who they are. They are recognized and accepted by the community." As a Christian and a follower of the traditional way of life, I have the highest regard and respect for both. Neither is above or below the other. The lessons I learn from the "book" and the elders go hand in hand. Ernie Sandy is a member of the United Church, and the Elders Council at the Canadian Native Centre in Toronto as a Traditional Teacher. Article ID# 1214429