Hidden from History:
The Canadian Holocaust

A Reply to the Standard Lies: Clearing the Fog Generated by the United Church of Canada, Part One

by Rev. Kevin D. Annett

The bigger the crime, the bigger the lies needed to conceal them. That goes without saying, of course. But when the crime, and the lies, are taking place in our own lovely backyard, and are being generated by Christian churches, such common sense becomes strangely absent - especially when it concerns the death and disappearance of 50,000 or more aboriginal children in church-run internment camps called "residential schools".

The United Church of Canada is oddly silent about where all these children went, in the "schools" they ran for nearly a century. Government records show that these kids were dying like flies - half of the school's population, every year like clockwork. Eyewitness testimonies describe routine killings, tortures, and involuntary sterilizations in United Church schools and hospitals. And yet, still the church says nothing.

However, its silence doesn't extend to those critics, like myself, who have helped to document and make public its crimes. Since their abrupt and arbitrary firing of me in 1995, United Church spin doctors and lawyers have had a field day assassinating my character and credibility over the internet and in church, media and academic circles.

Anyone who scans the internet will see the array of lies and distortions these overpaid officials have concocted about me. Of course, no-one knows they are lies except the very few of us who have either been at their receiving end, or have long enough memories to know what has really gone on since the evidence of genocide in residential schools began surfacing publicly, nearly ten years ago.

I've made a point of not descending to the level of responding to the lies, since such diversion is the whole purpose of a smear campaign: to confuse and misdirect attention away from all those little corpses. But because so many well meaning people have time and again been misled by the internet babble about me, it's my duty to help pierce this fog of lies.

The main lie advanced by the United Church is that the allegations of murder and other crimes in Indian residential schools are all my personal creation, and that they are not substantiated. Apparently, claims the lie, I have not even reported the evidence to "the police"; and "native people" (whoever they are) do not support the allegations or my work.

To believe this lie one must assume that I am personally endowed with superhuman powers, to have convinced some 200 or more native people to make up the same story of genocide, complete with names, dates, and even scars they bear from tortures inflicted on them.

One must also assume that I deliberately chose to destroy my family, job, livelihood, public reputation, and any semblance of security simply in order to make unfounded allegations against the United Church.

Even if one dwells in such a fantasy world - and I don't for a moment believe that Jon Jessiman and the other church lawyers who crafted these lies about me actually believe them - one has to face certain hard facts which even the United Church can't ignore.

Their main allegation, which they seem obsessed with propagating everywhere - that "Kevin never reported the allegations to the police" - is simply a lie.

After having taking the evidence of the murder of Maisie Shaw and other native children to the United Church, and been fired and eventually defrocked for my efforts, I approached the RCMP Residential School Task Force in December, 1995, and again in early March, 1996, and offered them the testimonies and supporting documents indicating the deaths of children at the Alberni residential school.

Not only did the RCMP's investigators Paul Willms and Gerry Peters refuse to accept the evidence, on the flimsy grounds that "the perpetrators are probably dead by now", but they actually threatened me and Harriett Nahanee not to probe further into these deaths.

(I have a transcript of a conversation with Paul Willms in which he thus threatens me, in the parking lot of CKNW radio in June, 1996).

Notwithstanding any of this, how can the United Church be so absurd as to suggest that going to the RCMP with evidence of crimes in residential schools is any kind of proper procedure, when the RCMP itself is implicated up to its eyebrows in the residential school crimes? As truant officers and "trackers" of runaway Indian children, the RCMP is a complict actor in the very crimes they (not surprisingly) refuse to investigate.

As to the other serious lie the church pushes - that a generic "native people" are disenchanted with me and don't support my work - one has to then ask, how can so many native people have shared their testimonies with me if they didn't support my work?

Some Indians hate what I do: the state-funded "leaders" and their flunkies who have been threatened by the feds with a suspension of their largesse if they come within a mile of me or my work. But those same "leaders" have helped bury the evidence of crimes and silenced their own people for decades, which doesn't do much for their credibility when it comes to the residential schools.

Finally, I'm surprised that the United Church would dare to claim that Amnesty International doesn't endorse my efforts. I am looking at a letter from Amnesty's Canadian Director that assures me that the attacks that I have faced from the government and its lawyers is causing them to consider monitoring my case, if I am ever brought to court. This letter was sent to me by email in November, 2002.

The next time the United Church tries smearing my name and credibility, it had better do a better job checking its facts. But then, since when does a church have to do a reality check, or answer for its crimes?

http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org