Kevin Annett  

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/hiddenfromhistory/2009/08/02/voices-of-the-canadian-holocaust

Harriett Nahanee of the Pacheedaht Nation died three years ago this week.

You can't listen to a youthful "activist" in Canadian radical - indigenous circles these days without hearing at some point an obligatory reference made to "warrior and elder" Harriett Nahanee, who, although largely ignored by the same activists while she was alive, has suddenly gained a quasi-mystical status in their minds.

Idolizing a stranger is usually the most handy way to dismiss who they actually were and what they were fighting for, and that certainly fits Harriett and her treatment by trendy activists.

I knew Harriett Nahanee for over a decade until her judicial murder, and together we made public the first eyewitness account - hers - of a murder of a child in a United Church Indian residential school: little Maisie Shaw, who was kicked to her death by Rev. Alfred Caldwell in 1946, right in front of ten year old Harriett.

Harriett's post-humous fans never mention this little fact in all their hosannas to her, but to expose Maisie's murder and similar killings of countless children in Christian Indian residential schools was Harriett's purpose in life: something she kept saying, time and again, to the handful of people who would come to our rallies and public meetings from 1995 to January of 2007, just weeks before her death, when I last met her outside the church we were picketing.

The real Harriett Nahanee was ornery, filled with rage, and apt to turn on you if you disagreed with her. She often said that she hated whites and wouldn't work with them, since she didn't trust them. She loathed sharing the spotlight with anyone, because she was consumed with her purpose, like a prophet. And over and over, she spoke out about Maisie's murder and called for the United Church of Canada to be brought to justice.

For years, nobody listened to us, including all the activist groups who claim to own her now. And even today, when it's safer to talk about massive deaths in residential schools now that the Globe and Mail has given official sanction to the issue, the same activists will never mention Maisie Shaw and Harriett Nahanee in the same breath. Indeed, the residential school murders, like Harriett, now seem to be history.

To dismiss the real Harriett and what she was fighting for in this manner is to defame and dishonor her. And the fact that a cloak of misinformation has been imposed on Harriett and her efforts to expose residential school murders is not accidental, since she was killed just a month before the opening of the campaign by our network that would eventually force an "apology" and national exposure regarding the residential schools genocide.

Harriett Nahanee, being aboriginal and an eyewitness to a residential school murder, was not intended to survive to give credence to that campaign. And her relationship with me, which caused the first Tribunal into Canadian residential schools in 1998 and the eventual success of our work, has also faced a deliberate misinformation campaign by the very churches and state that stood to lose by our exposure of their crimes.

The undercover operative who destroyed our 1998 tribunal, Jim Craven, likes to speak on the internet about how I "dishonored" Harriett, including by not attending her funeral, not mentioning, of course, that I was out of the country when it happened. What he's also not mentioning is the letter that Harriett gave me that last time I saw her, that describes the smear campaign started against me by Craven, and how he asked her to be part of it.

So the present falsified image of Harriett Nahanee so espoused by her erstwhile acolytes, as an aboriginal warrior who blockaded roads but whose witness to murder and hatred of the churches is censored out of her activism, is something generated by the very government and churches that killed her. Once again, the capacity of the state to guide and control supposed radical movements with its own version of reality has blinded a new generation of militants to the truth.

Harriett would mourn the fact that, last Sunday, only eight of us stood outside a downtown church with a banner "All the Children Need a Proper Burial", after we had emailed over five hundred people about our action. It's the same place, Christ Church Anglican, where I saw her for the last time. I remember she smiled at me that day, and said how I was the only white man she'd met who cared enough about dead Indian children to protest about them, year after after.

"That will never change" she said sadly. Then she smiled again and said,

"So f### them all".

I agree with Harriett, and I'll be outside Christ Church cathedral again this Sunday, with a few others. And Harriett Nahanee.

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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

Why Seals are More Cute than Indians,
and other Canadian Curios
by Kevin Annett

Last October when I spoke in various European capitals about our homegrown extermination of people with brown skins, I stood in Trafalgar square in London where an enormous billboard still regales Britons about the cruelties of the Canadian seal hunt.

The pleading eyes of the baby seal about to be bludgeoned to death got me imagining a similar image, emblazoned in our public squares and depicting an aboriginal child in Kamloops, or Edmonton, facing the same fate at the hands of a priest or nun, now safely retired and beyond the law.

Baby seals, of course, don't evoke the kind of spasmodic fear and denial in most Canadians that a murdered Indian child does, which is why I doubt that a "Stop the Canadian baby aboriginal hunt" billboard would catch on with many of us: even when more and more native kids are being abducted into white foster homes, and face the kind of "look the other way" violence that Canada is infamous for.

Which brings us to Rome.

Part of my European sojourn last October involved a masochistic effort to hold witness for those missing native kids outside the Thing that killed so many of them: the Vatican. And as I stood there, offering prayers and an exorcism-like ceremony at the place where the New World genocide began, a revelation dawned.

Coming to Rome from Canada, you see, felt for me like the proverbial farm boy's first trip to a big city whorehouse. The spiritual and political corruption there isn't just sophisticated and ancient: it's foundational to our entire western world.

Standing in St. Peter's Square, I was struck with the same abhorred clarity that caused Martin Luther to break from Catholicism: the murderous New World Order started here, and caused all those kids to be buried in secret graves across Canada. Yet despite this bloody fact, the Romans and their Pope still parade their Lie in God-like splendor.

Canadians seem pretty bush league in comparison. Our politicians of church and state lack the certainty and the depth to lie very convincingly, which perhaps explains why they act so absurdly when it comes to their homegrown crimes.

For instance, the week I spoke in Rome, our cute-as-a-baby-seal Governor General, Michaela Jean, announced that "final truth and healing" had arrived in Canada's dealing with its Indian residential school survivors, in the form of a revived "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" which nevertheless, has no power to name names, issue subpoenas, lay criminal charges or describe crimes in these schools.

More than being ridiculous, our poster girl head of state was committing the most basic sin a ruler can do, according to the Renaissance Italian writer Machiavelli, and that is to disown or fog necessary acts of state - in this case, Canada's requirement of obliterating and containing the original peoples of our land.

Obviously, Michaela has never read Machiavelli, since that advisor to Popes and Kings warned rulers never to conceal their own actions by misleading or false words, lest they appear to be disowning such acts, and their own authority, which is suicidal to any ruler.

By pretending that their own genocide of natives in Canada wasn't intentional or planned, and is something they should "heal", the Governor General and most Euro-Canadians appear as pathetic and contemptible as the schoolyard bully caught with a bloody rock in his hand, and who defiantly exclaims, "I didn't do anything!."

Canada needs to take a page from Machiavelli's The Prince and its astounding political realism when it comes to addressing its homegrown genocide. Church and state need to put aside Canadians' pathological need to look good to themselves, and start acting from integrity and strength, by taking complete ownership and responsibility for their slaughter of so many.

If Machiavelli or the Vatican ran Canada, here's what they'd do: issue a public statement that the germ warfare against Indians in Canada, the Indian Act, the residential schools and all the other genocidal events were necessary acts of state to allow Christian European conquest of the land and the establishment of Canada. And that would be that: no farcical and self-serving "apologies" to our victims that change nothing; no pretences of "reconciliation and healing"; no nauseating "celebration of aboriginal culture" at the 2010 Olympics while Indians continue to die in droves.

To display that kind of refreshing and very un-Canadian honesty might allow us the possibility of seeing ourselves for what we actually have been, and still are today, and perhaps even cause that scenario to change. But don't hold your breath.

I believe there is no chance for that kind of clarity to happen in this country, simply because we "white" Canadians have never had to grow up and accept responsibility for what we are a part of, since we have always enjoyed the benefits of Empire without their obligations. As junior partners to the French, British and now American empires, Canadians have prospered off the fruits of slaughter without having to deal with their consequences. But now the crows are all coming home to roost. Visit any aboriginal reserve, or East Hastings street in Vancouver, and you'll see what I mean.

Our cozy arrangements don't have that much time left. But before the end, if only for a sense of peace that any dying person deserves, Canadians need to take a long and honest look in the mirror, and see there the faces and corpses of millions of people. We must look at our own terminal condition, and ask ourselves what has brought us here.

But I doubt that we will. We are, after all, bastard children of Rome.

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Kevin Annett is a community minister, educator and award winning film maker who lives and works in the downtown eastside of Vancouver.
250-753-3345 or 1-888-265-1007
www.hiddenfromhistory.org

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