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HIDDEN FROM HISTORY THE CANADIAN HOLOCAUST HISTORY FROM HIDDEN CANADIAN THE HOLOCAUST 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. The following is an edited extract from the report, "Hidden From History: The Canadian Holocaust - The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by Church and State in Canada - A Summary of an Ongoing, Independent Inquiry into Canadian 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 residential schools: The Justice in the Valley Coalition's Inquiry into Crimes Against Aboriginal People, convened in Port Alberni, British Columbia, on December 9, 1994, and The International Human Rights Association of American Minorities Tribunal into Canadian Residential Schools, held in Vancouver, BC, from June 12-14, 1998. Editor. FOREWORD His eyes still fill with tears when he remembers his cousins who were killed with lethal 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 in Alert Bay to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, the one run by the United Church. They kept 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 a big fuss, screaming and fighting back all the time, so the nurses gave them shots, and they both died right away. It was done to silence them. (November 10, 2000) Jes: Joseph is a sixty-four-year-old native man from Port Hardy, British Columbia. 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 supremacist churches 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 and consciousness in Canada over the past decades. Small wonder; for that hidden history reveals a system whose aim was to destroy most native people by disease, relocation and outright murder, while "assimilating" a minority of collaborators who were trained to serve 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 machine was, and remains, so vast that its concealment has required an equally elaborate campaign of cover-up that has been engineered at the highest levels of power in our country; a cover-up that is continuing, especially now that eyewitnesses to murders and atrocities at the 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 by law died, or disappeared, according to the government's own statistics. These 50,000 victims have vanished, as have their corps "like they never existed", according to one survivor. But they did exist. They were innocent children, and they were killed by beatings and torture and after being deliberately exposed to tuberculosis 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/ by Rev. Kevin D. Annett, MA, MDiv NEXUS ¢ 35 FEBRUARY — MARCH 2002 www.nexusmagazine.com