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and other diseases by paid employees of the churches and govern- | PART ONE: Summary of Evidence of Intentional Genocide ment, according to a "Final Solution" master plan devised by the in Canadian Residential Schools . . Department of Indian Affairs and the Catholic and Protestant Article II: The intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a churches. national ethnic, racial or religious group; namely, non- With such official consent for manslaughter emanating from Christian aboriginal peoples in Canada Ottawa, the churches responsible for annihilating natives on the lhe foundational purpose behind the more than one hundred ground felt emboldened and protected enough to declare full-scale Indian residential schools established in Canada by govern- war on non-Christian native peoples through the 20th century. ment legislation and administered by Protestant and Catholic The casualties of that war were not only the 50,000 dead chil- churches was the deliberate and persistent eradication of aborigi- dren of the residential schools, but the survivors, whose social nal people and their culture, and the conversion of any surviving condition today has been described by United Nations human _native people to Christianity. rights groups as that of "a colonized people barely on the edge of This intent was enunciated in the Gradual Civilization Act of survival, with all the trappings of a third-world society". 1857 in Upper Canada, and earlier, church-inspired legislation, (November 12, 1999) which defined aboriginal culture as inferior, stripped native peo- The Holocaust is continuing. ple of citizenship and subordinated them in a separate legal cate- This report is the child of a six-year independent investigation gory from non-Indians. This Act served as the basis for the feder- into the hidden history of genocide against aboriginal peoples in —_al Indian Act of 1874, which recapitulated the legal and moral Canada. It summarises the testimonies, documents and other evi- inferiority of aboriginals and established the residential school dence proving that Canadian churches, corporations and the gov- system. The legal definition of an Indian as "an uncivilized per- ernment are guilty of intentional genocide, in violation of the son, destitute of the knowledge of God and of any fixed and clear United Nations Convention on belief in religion" (Revised Statutes of Genocide, which Canada ratified in British Columbia, 1960) was estab- 1952 and under which it is bound by lished by these Acts and continues to international law. We invite you to remember not the present day. The report is a collaborative effort Then, as now, aboriginals were of nearly 30 people. And yet some only the 50,000 children who considered legal and practical non- of its authors must remain anony- died in these residential school entities in their own land and, hence, mous, particularly its aboriginal inherently expendable. contributors, whose lives have been death camps, but the silent This genocidal intent was restated threatened and who have been Gano 6 time and again in government legisla- assaulted, denied jobs and evicted victims today who suffer i our tion, church statements and the corre- from their homes on Indian reserves midst for bread and Justice. spondence and records of missionar- because of their involvement in this ies, Indian agents and residential investigation. school officials (see Documentation As a former minister in one of the section). Indeed, it was the very rai- guilty institutions named in our son d'étre of the state-sanctioned inquiry—the United Church of Canada—I have been fired, black- Christian invasion of traditional native territories and of the resi- listed, threatened and publicly maligned by its officers for my dential school system itself, which was established at the height of attempts to uncover the story of the deaths of children at that | European expansionism in the 1880s and persisted until 1984. church's Alberni residential school. By definition, this aim was genocidal, for it planned and carried Many people have made sacrifices to produce this report, so _ out the destruction of a religious and ethnic group: all those abo- that the world can learn of the Canadian Holocaust, and to ensure _riginal people who would not convert to Christianity and be cul- that those responsible for it are brought to justice before the _turally extinguished. Non-Christian natives were the declared tar- International Criminal Court. get of the residential schools, which practised wholesale ethnic Beginning among native and low-income activists in Port cleansing under the guise of education. Alberni, British Columbia, in the fall of 1994, this inquiry into As well, such "pagans" were the subject of government-funded crimes against humanity has continued in the face of death sterilisation programs administered at church-run hospitals and threats, assaults and the resources of church and state in Canada. tuberculosis sanatoriums on Canada's west coast (see Article Id). It is within the power of the reader to honour our sacrifice by According to an eyewitness, Ethel Wilson of Bella Bella, BC, a sharing this story with others and refusing to participate in the United Church missionary doctor, George Darby, deliberately institutions which deliberately killed many thousands of children. sterilised non-Christian Indians between 1928 and 1962 at the This history of official endorsement of, and collusion in, a cen- R. W. Large Memorial Hospital in Bella Bella. Ms Wilson, who tury or more of crimes against Canada's first peoples must not dis- is now deceased, stated in 1998: courage us from uncovering the truth and bringing the perpetra- Doctor Darby told me in 1952 that Indian Affairs in Ottawa tors to justice. was paying him for every Indian he sterilised, especially if It is for this reason that we invite you to remember not only the they weren't church-goers. Hundreds of our women were 50,000 children who died in the residential school death camps, sterilised by Doctor Darby, just for not going to church. but the silent victims today who suffer in our midst for bread and (Testimony of Ethel Wilson to International Human Rights justice. Association of American Minorities [IHRAAM] Tribunal, (Rev.) Kevin D. Annet Vancouver, BC, June 13, 1998) Onn, 7 We invite you to remember not only the 50,000 children who died in these residential school death camps, but the silent victims today who suffer in our midst for bread and justice. (Rev.) Kevin D. Annett Secretary The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada Vancouver, British Columbia, February 1, 2001 According to Christy White, a resident of Bella Bella, records of these government-funded sterilisations at the R. W. Large 36 ¢ NEXUS WWW.NeXU smagazi ne.com FEBRUARY — MARCH 2002