Author's Note:

This article below was offered to the Canadian media as an

exclusive piece last week, and was rejected or ignored by

the following newspapers:

The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Montreal Gazette,

The Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, The Ottawa Sun, The

Winnipeg Free Press, The Edmonton Sun, The Vancouver

Sun, The Province, The Alberni Valley Times, The Epoch

Times, and the Victoria Times Colonist:

Why an Apology is Wrong, and Deceptive:

Bringing Humanity to Bear on the Residential

School Atrocity
by Rev. Kevin Annett

Rend your hearts, and not your garments
Joel 2:17

Imagine for a moment that your own child goes

missing and never comes home. Years pass,

and one day, the person responsible for your

child's death is identified, but he evades arrest

and imprisonment simply by issuing to you an

"apology" for your loss. He even speaks of

seeking "reconciliation" with you.

How would you feel?

Hold on to that feeling, and now multiply your

loss by many thousands of children, and make

the guilty person the government and churches

of Canada. Do so, and you will have arrived in

a human way at the Indian Residential Schools

atrocity.

One of my former parishioners put it another

way:

"What we did to those native children was an

abomination, and abominations aren't resolved

with words and money. We need to have our

hearts torn in two and be changed. We've got

to stand, ourselves, under the judgment of God."

I doubt that Stephen Harper would be satisfied

with an apology if his own kids were hauled off

and killed for being practicing Christians. Yet on

June 11, 2008, he will stand up on our behalf and

try to apologize to other nations for having

exterminated their children.

The whole effort seems more than ludicrous, or

obscene. One cannot, after all, apologize to the

dead. But the truth is, the government's planned

"apology" to native people is an enormous exercise

in deception - primarily self-deception.

Do we even know the meaning of that easily

uttered term, "apologize"?

It actually has a double meaning, according to the

internet Dictionary: a) "an acknowledgment of

regret for a fault or offense" and b) "a formal

justification, defense or excuse for one's actions".

That is, in our vernacular understanding of the term,

an "apology" can be a genuine regret for one's acts;

but it can equally be a way to evade responsibility

for one's acts, by justifying oneself before one's

victim.

The legal understanding of the word, however, is

more specific, and has nothing to do with regret:

"apology" is defined simply as "a disclaimer of

intentional error or offense".

A disclaimer.

Now, I'm assuming that the government of Canada

relies on legal definitions - operating, as it claims,

"under the rule of law" - rather than popularly

understood ones. So we must realize that when

the government and its Prime Minister uses the

term "apology", its understanding of the word is the

legal one: namely, "a disclaimer of intentional error

or offense".

In other words, on June 11, Stephen Harper will

issue to the world a disclaimer to the effect that the

Indian Residential Schools were not an intentional

offense.

It's not surprising that the Prime Minister will be

making such an outrageous and unsupportable claim,

since if he ever admitted that the residential schools

were intentional, he'd be the first defendant in the

dock at an international war crimes trial.

But more important, this effort by our government -

and the churches it is protecting - to be absolved of

their own crimes is taking place under the illusory

pretense of making amends with native people, when

its purpose is simply to legally exonerate itself of

culpability for the deaths of thousands of children.

This, indeed, has been the norm for both church and

state ever since the first lawsuit was launched by

residential school survivors in February of 1996. An

army of court scholars and legal experts has

generated a mountain of "holocaust denial" at every

level of Canadian society during the past dozen

years, to convince the world that the daily death and

torture at the residential schools was not intentional

at all.

Such an "apologetic" agenda defies logic and common

sense, as in the statements from the government's

misnamed "Truth and Reconciliation Commission"

scholars that, while evidence shows that residential

school children were being buried "four or five to a

grave", and that the death rate in these schools

stayed constant at fifty percent for over forty years,

these deaths were "not intended".

To believe that, one has to ignore the evidence of

senior government officials like Dr. Peter Bryce, who

found that children were regularly being "deliberately

exposed to communicable diseases" in residential

schools, and left to die untreated. The word Bryce

used was "deliberately". How else, after all, do so

many children die?

All of this legal hoop jumping and evasion of

responsibility might make sense to the government,

and pay the salaries of their intellectual mercenaries,

but it does nothing to advance the cause of truth

telling and humanity in Canada, and snuffs out the

lives of our victims ever more quickly.

I know this all too well, having spent most of my

waking hours for years as a counsellor, advocate and

chronicler for many aboriginal survivors of the death

camps we like to call residential schools. And what

I've learned from such work is that we cannot come

to grips with something that we don't understand.

The truth is, Euro-Canadian society still doesn't

understand what these "schools" were, either at a

"head" or a "heart" level. If one believes the officers

of the churches and government, the residential

schools "issue" is all about money and verbal

gymnastics. Yet none of these officials, as far as I

know, have broken down and wept in public over the

deaths of so many innocent ones; nor have they even

offered to return their remains to their families for a

proper burial.

Oddly enough, the very same officials continually and

glibly speak about "healing the past", without even

knowing their own history, and about "solutions" to

the "residential school problem", as if they understand

what that problem is - not realizing that, to quote

William Shakespeare, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in

our stars, but in ourselves."

For in truth, there is not now, nor has there ever been,

an "Indian problem" in Canada. Rather, the problem is a

"white" one. The problem is with us.

I won't point to collapsing eco-systems or troops in

Afghanistan to prove this point. Nor need I pose the

paradox of how educated men and women, with families

of their own and a professed "Christian morality", could

drive needles through infants' tongues at Indian

residential schools, throw three year olds down stairs,

sterilize healthy kids, and deliberately allow children to

cough their lives away from tuberculosis, and then bury

them in secret graves.

The evidence of the problem is more immediate, and far

closer to home, in our continued segregation of aboriginal

people into a lower standard of humanity that allows

them to die at a rate fifteen times greater than other

people of this country.

After all, if we Canadians are who we imagine ourselves to

be - an enlightened society that "assimilated" native

people into our ranks, and made them our equals - then

why has not a single person ever been brought to trial for

the death of a residential school child? Why is the

disappearance of tens of thousands of native children in

these schools not the subject of a major criminal

investigation? And why is there an Indian Act, and not an

Irish or an Italian Act?

Being, in reality, an unofficially apartheid society that

operates, in practice, with two standards of justice - one

for native people, and one for the rest of us - Canada can

no more cure the legacy of the residential schools than it

can stop chewing up the earth for short-term comfort and

profit. At least, not this side of a fundamental moral and

social revolution.

The fact that we are far from such a change struck home

to me a few months ago when the the government's

fraudulent "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" announced

that, although criminal acts did indeed occur in the

residential schools, there would be no criminal investigation

of these schools: an unbelievably brazen subversion of

justice that evoked not a murmur of protest in the media or

among the good citizens and politicians of Canada.

Regardless of this, there are things that can be done to

overcome the genocidal residential schools legacy, and do

justice, for once, to the survivors.

Rather than issuing verbal and self-serving "apologies"

which change nothing, or staging a sham "Truth and

Reconciliation Commission" that has no power even to

subpoena evidence, the government and all of us could take

these kind of bold measures:

1. Declare an Official Nation-wide Day of Mourning for

Residential School Victims, dead and living.

2. Fully disclose what happened in the residential schools -

naming the crimes, the perpetrators, and the cover-up - by

launching an International War Crimes Tribunal with the

power to subpoena, arrest and prosecute those responsible.

3. Bring home the remains of all children who died in these

schools for a proper burial, and establish public memorial

sites for them.

4. Create National Aboriginal Holocaust Museums.

5. End federal tax exemption for the Catholic, Anglican and

United Church of Canada, in accordance with the Nuremburg

Legal Principles concerning organizations complicit in crimes

against humanity.

6. Abolish the Indian Act and Indian and Northern Affairs.

7. Recognize indigenous sovereignty and return all stolen

lands and resources to indigenous nations.

An Irish relative once told me that the way her country is

evolving away from eight centuries of warfare is through a

simple formula:

"First you remember; then you grieve; then you heal".

Instead of skipping the first two steps, as Mr. Harper and

too many of our people are trying to do "apologetically", it

is

time that Canadians found the courage to truly remember

and admit to the world what we did to the first peoples of

this land, and grieve our actions in the manner of people

who truly rend their own hearts and want to change.

Perhaps then "healing and reconciliation" can become

something more than an overworked political catch-phrase.

Rev. Kevin D. Annett
260 Kennedy St.
Nanaimo, B.C. V9R 2H8
250-753-3345

email: hiddenfromhistory@yahoo.ca
website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org

Kevin Annett is a community minister in Vancouver who

is the author of two books on Indian Residential Schools

and an award-winning film maker.

Posted by MNN Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com