Facing up to Canada's dark history | |||||||
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From the late 19th Century up to the 1970s, an estimated 150,000 native children in Canada were seized from their parents and sent far away to state-funded, church-run schools to learn how to think, speak and act like white people. The country is still coming to terms with the disastrous results.
Maybe I picked a bad day to visit. The place is a ghost town. I came here with the idea of taking a mental snapshot of life in Kahnewake, exclusively populated by members of the Mohawk nation, at the beginning of an important year for Canada's relations with its native peoples. In the coming months, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission will start touring the country to heal the scars of the residential schools system, a policy that resulted in thousands of deaths and devastated lives. With an estimated 80,000 former pupils still around today, many of whom witnessed or suffered sexual, physical and mental abuse, the debate over how much truth will be needed for reconciliation is stirring controversy. Bitter memories Back in the freezing present, I duck into a smoke shop, selling tax-free tobacco, for shelter. Star Eagle greets me from behind the counter and, eyeing my numb face with bemusement, offers me a coffee. "Truth and reconciliation? I ain't never heard of that," she says when I ask whether she is aware of the new commission. Now in her 50s, she has bitter memories of the residential schools regime.
"People here are heart-broken about what they went through," she tells me. "They show their hearts on their faces and they don't know it." "I call it hard face," she says. Her eyes deaden and her features tense in a depiction of life in Kahnewake. Away from the reserve, in Ottawa, the Canadian capital, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has suffered some loss of face. Launched last year, it has had trouble getting off the ground. Its chief commissioner, a Mississauga Indian and a judge on the Ontario Court of Appeal, resigned in October after tussles over the body's mandate. As the politicking over his replacement continues, the public spotlight has been shifting from the healing of the living to the raising of the dead. It is accepted knowledge that a large proportion of the children, some estimates run into tens of thousands, died of tuberculosis in the cold, filthy schools. Spirit of the dead But recently, the story has taken a darker turn, as allegations of secret burials in mass graves, death by torture and fatal medical experiments have begun to surface. The man behind the new allegations is Kevin Annett, a defrocked Vancouver priest who was thrown out of the United Church in the mid 90s for exposing the schools scandal and challenging the clergy's sale of native lands.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission cannot, under the terms of its mandate, subpoena documents or witnesses to investigate the claims. It has, however, ordered research into possible burial sites. It has also floated the idea of holding traditional ceremonies to ask the spirits of the dead children to return home to communities like Kahnewake. Annett tells me this is a cover-up. He wants a Nuremberg-style tribunal to hold government and church officials accountable for genocide. He also wants the children's bones to be dug up, forensically tested and returned home. I ask some native people about their views on Annett's campaign and receive a complex set of responses. While most say there is an element of truth in the shock allegations, not everyone supports the former priest. Willie Blackwater, a Gitxsan Indian, is well known in Canada for his landmark victory against the church and the government in a sexual abuse lawsuit in the 90s. He resents the idea that Annett, a white man who has never attended residential school, has somehow become the public face of the dead children. He believes Annett has "disgraced" native people with his public demands for the dead to be repatriated. I ask Blackwater what kind of outcome he would be happy with. He supports the truth and reconciliation process, but thinks that native people should be in charge. 'Locked in pain' I get the sense from my discussions with him and others that native people feel the Church and state, the white establishment, are driving the whole healing process. They feel excluded from the real decisions on truth and reconciliation. Maybe it stems from the experience of everyday life on reserves like Kahnewake, cut off from mainstream Canadian society, with no political or economic clout. The segregation is both enshrined in federal laws that define native status and self-imposed by wary native communities that frown upon intermarriage with outsiders. People in isolated reserves like Kahnewake are still haunted by memories of the residential schools era. For many, it is a world of drug and alcohol addiction, violence and high suicide rates. "Sometimes I feel people get annoyed with me for trying to be happy," says Star Eagle. "They're all locked in together with their pain." There is a real sense of foreboding as Canada prepares to come to terms with its dark history. Whatever emerges from the process of truth and reconciliation, the ghosts will not go quietly. From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 31 January, 2009 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times. | |||||||
Saturday, January 31, 2009
In pictures
Whatever emerges from the process of truth and reconciliation, the ghosts will not go quietly 
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Thursday, January 01, 2009
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 17th 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)
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
by Rev. Kevin Annett
The whole sorry and self-serving charade called Canada's "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" into Indian Residential Schools is exactly like a sexually abusive parent calling all his family together to discuss why everyone seems so troubled and hurt ... without, of course, ever looking at his own behaviour, or surrendering his tyranny over them. When the abuser runs the show, whose truth will be allowed? And who, and what, can possibly be "reconciled"? If you'll allow me for a moment to push this analogy, here's the answer: the only truth allowed in such an abusive family system is whatever doesn't upset the arrangements of abuse - and everyone involved must be "reconciled" to that fact. Having dealt with many such situations at the family level, I am amazed at how similar is our condition in the much larger family called Canada, as we gather now at the behest of those responsible for our suffering to be told that it's time to look into why we have suffered. The institutions of church and state that planned and carried out conquest and murder have declared that the truth of what they did will now be told, in a self-appointed inquiry called a truth and reconciliation commission, or "TRC". (Gee, the letters almost form the word "trick"). Like the raping and brutal parent who has called his family together to "share", those who have suffered from his blows will not be allowed to speak of what he has actually done to them. The TRC public forums will not permit residential school survivors to name the names of their torturers, or even discuss "wrongdoing" in the schools. Nor will they be legally protected from the consequences of anything they say. In short, a simple message to survivors: Watch what you say, or you'll get whacked again. If a rapist posing as a parent tried that, his deception would be obvious, but only to those outside his family system of dysfunction and fear. To those quivering under his rule, his hypocrisy would seem generous and inspiring, a sign that perhaps he is changing and will stop beating and raping them. The big problem in Canada is that most of us, native or white, are part of the quivering mass who have grown up under the absolute rule of colonial church and state. We cannot stand outside the dysfunction called Christian Canada and see the lies for what they are. But in any abusive situation, there are those who are able to see their torture for what it is, and seek help in confronting the Big Rapist: not easily, or quickly, but through courage, reason, and thinking outside their family system, as well as by their the capacity to suffer the outrage of all their fellow abused, quivering family members. From the beginning of the whole debate around "truth and reconciliation", no-one in "authority", and few outside it, have asked the most obvious and fundamental question:
Are we, as a nation, capable of either truth or reconciliation?
Did truthfulness or the desire to be reconciled at any point guide the policies and actions of the Canadian government or its Anglican, Catholic and United churches towards native people?
Was it truthful or reconciling to house the sick with the healthy in residential schools, and stand by as thousands of children were killed off over a century?
Or, to suppress the evidence of this crime by secretly burying or burning up the dead, and incinerating documents, and silencing witnesses?
Or, to allow the churches responsible for these crimes to evade prosecution and set up the TRC inquiry into what they did?
Even today, is a desire for truth guiding the TRC, when it is muzzling what survivors can say at the behest of church lawyers - and when it has declared that, even though criminal acts and homicide occurred in the residential schools, there will be no criminal investigation into these schools?
Protecting the perpetrators and minimizing the cost of the whole thing: those are the two fundamental purposes of the TRC, and its government and church backers: not seeking "truth and reconciliation".
After all, truth is a pretty simple thing to do: you just let people talk, freely and openly. You disclose what you know and surrender the guilty. You disinter graves and give the murdered a proper burial, tell the whole sordid history, and create memorials and museums to honour the dead. And most of all, you stop doing the crime.
Maybe, after generations of such truthful action, "reconciliation" may be possible. But that's not in our hands.
The truth is, none of these basic things are happening in Canada.
Everything related to the residential schools is being carefully managed so that the churches will not have to suffer anything, or be held accountable for their murder of children, and no political fallout will beset the government. Once these primary abusers are protected, then sure, we'll be able to have all the "truth and reconciliation" we want: all that is due anyone in an abusive family. And then "justice" will have been done - on the terms of the abuser, of course.
Is there another way?
There is, actually, but it probably won't happen - for it begins with us, "white" Canada, looking at ourselves honestly, and healing ourselves first - like any abuser must do if genuine peace and health is to return to his family.
The town pedophile always hides behind a veneer of liberal humanitarianism, and Canada is no different. Canada was built on murder and conquest, and sustains itself by raping the land of its resources as quickly as our foreign corporate rulers dictate. That's never changed. And native people are simply in the way of that huge grab, as they always were, which is why they are being killed off at nearly the same rate they were a century ago.
Most of this isn't obvious to the sheltered "white" citizenry, who get along with and sustain the Big Rapist by paying their taxes, doing their jobs, and believing the Family Lie. And so they won't be convinced about who and what they are very easily, not this side of their cozy world collapsing.
Of course, it is collapsing, and quickly. All the raped resources can't last forever. When we've outlived our usefulness to GoldCorp and Teck Cominco and Power Corporation, and to the United States government, we'll be tossed aside and watch as all the stuff on which we base our optimistic view of ourselves vanishes - watch, indeed, as our air and lakes and rivers finally die, and we finally learn that it wasn't just little Indian kids that we were murdering in the residential schools.
Those scientists who aren't on the corporate and government leash - and there aren't many - believe that we're actually past the point of no return when it comes to planetary survival, and that ours could very well be one of the last generations of humanity - let alone life - on mother earth.
So let's stop pretending that we, as a people, can heal, be truthful, or be reconciled, about anything. Clearly, we can't - not about our own history and nature, at least. And when death approaches, all that is needed is telling it like it is.
Death is approaching, because of us - because of the rapacious greed of European culture, its corporate capitalism spawned by a Christian imperialism that said we had and have the right to conquer anything, and anyone. We are all now the victims of our very civilization, which is destroying us and our perfect planet. The horror we unleashed in the Indian residential schools was just one manifestation of that sickness.
So it's time for all that to end, as it should. We will never stop our depredations, our crimes, our cozy rationalizations and arrangements - so that's all being ended for us.
My answer to my fellow Canadians, and its absurd "Truth and Reconciliation Commission", is this: Stop trying to be what you're not. We are neither truthful nor reconciling. We are a culture and a people of the Lie, a conquering, arrogant culture that will surrender nothing, regardless of the individual exceptions to that rule.
Here, instead, is what we need in Canada - something much more in line with our true nature: An Irreconcilable Untruth Commission, which openly declares this to our aboriginal victims:
Yes, we conquered this land and its indigenous people, because we wanted your lands and resources. We did what we had to do to steal this land, and we will not surrender any of it to you, the survivors of our conquest. Sure, we'll grant you Indians crumbs now and then, especially to the few among you we've trained to be our loyal servants. But the rest of you are expected to die off quietly and to help us terminate you.
In the meantime, to keep everything in our hands and sustain our international reputation and credit rating, we'll admit to some things.
Of course we killed off children in the residential schools. How else were we supposed to destroy your hold on the land and yourselves, once and for all? How else were we supposed to so traumatize you that you'd not fight us and would sink into the oblivion of poverty and self-destruction? How else would you come to love competition and murder and shopping and self-gain?
Get real. That's how our world operates. It's called western civilization.
If only we Canadians had the clarity and the courage to know this, and to speak thus. But we don't, which is why the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" will carry on, spreading the reality that makes us feel most comfortable and reassured.
It's all about us, after all. The ones who matter.
May we rest in peace.
..............................
Friday, October 24, 2008
Award winning documentary film
UNREPENTANT:
Kevin Annett and
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Award winning documentary film
UNREPENTANT:
Kevin Annett and
Kevin Annett joins us at Skydragon Centre Tuesday October 28 at 7 pm
Two Row Wampum Treaty
"It is said that, each nation shall stay in their own vessels, and travel the river side by side. Further, it is said, that neither nation will try to steer the vessel of the other." This is a treaty among Indigenous Nations, and with Canada. This is the true nature of our relationships with Indigenous Nations of 'Kanata'.
