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FEBRUARY – MARCH 2002 www.nexusmagazine.com NEXUS • 35The following is an edited extract from the report, "Hidden From History: The Canadian Holocaust – The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples byChurch and State in Canada – A Summary of an Ongoing, Independent Inquiry intoCanadian Native 'Residential Schools' and their Legacy", by Rev. Kevin D. Annett,MA, MDiv. The report is published by The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada, a public investigative body continuing the work of previous Tribunals into native residentialschools: The Justice in the Valley Coalition's Inquiry into Crimes Against AboriginalPeople, convened in Port Alberni, British Columbia, on December 9, 1994, and TheInternational Human Rights Association of American Minorities Tribunal intoCanadian Residential Schools, held in Vancouver, BC, from June 12–14, 1998. Editor. FOREWORD Jasper Joseph is a sixty-four-year-old native man from Port Hardy, British Columbia.His eyes still fill with tears when he remembers his cousins who were killed withlethal injections by staff at the Nanaimo Indian Hospital in 1944. I was just eight, and they'd shipped us down from the Anglican residential school inAlert Bay to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, the one run by the United Church. Theykept me isolated in a tiny room there for more than three years, like I was a lab rat,feeding me these pills, giving me shots that made me sick. Two of my cousins made abig fuss, screaming and fighting back all the time, so the nurses gave them shots, andthey both died right away. It was done to silence them. (November 10, 2000) Unlike post-war Germans, Canadians have yet to acknowledge, let alone repent from, the genocide that we inflicted on millions of conquered people: the aboriginal men,women and children who were deliberately exterminated by our racially supremacistchurches and state. As early as November 1907, the Canadian press was acknowledging that the death rate within Indian residential schools exceeded 50% (see Appendix, Key Newspaper Articles).And yet the reality of such a massacre has been wiped clean from the public record andconsciousness in Canada over the past decades. Small wonder; for that hidden historyreveals a system whose aim was to destroy most native people by disease, relocation andoutright murder, while "assimilating" a minority of collaborators who were trained toserve the genocidal system. This history of purposeful genocide implicates every level of government in Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), every mainstream church, large corpora-tions and local police, doctors and judges. The web of complicity in this killing machinewas, and remains, so vast that its concealment has required an equally elaborate campaignof cover-up that has been engineered at the highest levels of power in our country; acover-up that is continuing, especially now that eyewitnesses to murders and atrocities atthe church-run native residential "schools" have come forward for the first time. For it was the residential "schools" that constituted the death camps of the Canadian Holocaust, and within their walls nearly one-half of all aboriginal children sent there bylaw died, or disappeared, according to the government's own statistics. These 50,000 victims have vanished, as have their corpses—"like they never existed", according to one survivor. But they did exist. They were innocent children, and theywere killed by beatings and torture and after being deliberately exposed to tuberculosisHIDDEN FROM HISTORHIDDEN FROM HISTOR YY TTHEHECCANADIANANADIAN HHOLOCAUSTOLOCAUST Through the Canadian residential school system, the Christian churches along with state authorities, the judiciary, doctors and the police implemented a policy of genocide against the native population. by Rev. Kevin D. Annett, MA, MDiv © 2001 The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada Email: kevinannett@yahoo.ca Email: kevin_annett@hotmail.com Website: http://annett55.freewebsites.com/