Activists Demand Canadian and British Government and Religious Leaders Reveal Fate of 50K+

First Nations representatives are keeping up the pressure on church and government authorities. They have served Demand Letters to authorities in the US, Canada, Great Britain and Rome over centuries’ of human rights atrocities perpetrated by government and church run Indian residential schools.

Former students of Canadian Residential Indian Schools and their representatives continue the pressure on government authorities over the status of more than 15,000 missing children. The children attended government and religious sponsored residential schools between 1840 and 1940, as part of a mandated government policy to Europeanize and detribalize Native societies in Canada. Critics say the schools were hotbeds of human rights atrocities, which include infanticide, medical experimentation, and sexual and physical abuse of residential students.

A record multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit has already been settled, but the families continue to press Catholic, Anglican, and Church of Canada authorities, as well as government officials to reveal the fate and whereabouts of the missing children. Former Church of Canada cleric, Reverend Kevin Annett was reportedly kicked out of the church for his role in uncovering and publicizing the centuries’ old role of Canadian churches in the atrocity.

In a press release, Annett, who is also known as Eagle Strong Voice, says that in his role as a spokesperson for the bereaved families, he has delivered a demand letter to Canadian authorities:
On behalf of the disappeared residential school children and their families, Kevin Annett - Eagle Strong Voice hand delivered a Letter of Demand this morning to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, requiring that he identify the cause of death and burial site of these children within thirty days or face international sanctions and escalating protests.

Kevin delivered the Letter to the Prime Minister's Office in Ottawa at 10 am today, where he was interviewed by reporters, including Aboriginal Peoples' Television Network (APTN). The event will be broadcast nationally on APTN tonight at 6:30 pm. (Press Release)

Annette is part of a multi-national group of activists and writers, who singularly, and en mass continue to raise awareness of atrocities against indigenous tribes in the United States and Canada via the residential school system. Annette notes that the level of horror perpetrated by organized churches against native populations in North America, particularly by residential school authorities are nothing new, and not entirely unknown to church authorities here and abroad.

Rulers of Church and State have known for centuries how to continually rewrite history in order to conceal their bloody deeds and make their obvious crimes appear virtuous. In Canada, such rulers have had ample opportunity to practice this occupational skill in relation to their bloodiest act: the extermination of non-Christian Indians. (Kevin Annette, “A Chronology of Deceit: Phases in the United Church's "Spin" Campaign around Crimes in Indian Residential Schools”)

According to Annette, the schools operated for well over a century, and the level of atrocities committed within their walls didn’t surface in mainstream media until the late 1990’s. And even then, it was treated as isolated incidents of physical or sexual abuse, rather than an institutional, genocidal campaign waged against aboriginal children.

The Christian Genocide of aboriginal children and others in the so-called "Indian Residential Schools" didn't break into "mainstream white" consciousness in Canada until the early 1990's, and only because the system that perpetrated the crime decided it was time to present it in a "containable" language. In 1990, government-funded native politicians like Phil Fontaine publicly, and carefully, presented and redefined the genocide in residential schools as a limited issue of tort damages, of "physical and sexual abuses", rather than as the criminal conspiracy to destroy other races and religions that it was. Fontaine's action was, and remains, an aiding and abetting of a crime against humanity. (Ibid)


The continuing activism, awareness and self-healing is bringing more survivors out of the shadows. They are now sharing their stories, putting a human face on an atrocity, which has lasted for more than a century. Many point to the current social chaos among tribes in the United States as a phenomenon, which can be traced directly to the assault on tribal culture by the residential schools. A Native American activist noted the high levels of sex abuse among native populations and says much of it can be traced directly to the residential schools. "There's a lot of incest and child abuse going on in our Native American communities" — behavior that originated in large part at boarding schools, said Phil Lane Jr., CEO of United Indians of All Tribes in Seattle. (Ibid)

Amnesty International notes widespread, systemic human rights violations occurred in both US and Canadian Indian Residential schools, as well as elsewhere in the world:
Sammy Toineeta (Lakota) helped found the national Boarding School Healing Project to document such abuses. “Human rights activists must talk about the issue of boarding schools,” says Toineeta. “It is one of the grossest human rights violations because it targeted children and was the tool for perpetrating cultural genocide. To ignore this issue would be to ignore the human rights of indigenous peoples, not only in the U.S., but around the world.” (Amnesty International)

According to historical record, the schools operated on a shoestring and did everything they could to maximize child labor as an income stream.
Both BIA and church schools ran on bare-bones budgets, and large numbers of students died from starvation and disease because of inadequate food and medical care. School officials routinely forced children to do arduous work to raise money for staff salaries and “leased out” students during the summers to farm or work as domestics for white families. In addition to bringing in income, the hard labor prepared children to take their place in white society—the only one open to them—on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder. (Ibid)

More than an income stream, the children also provided a captive population for sexual predators. For more than a century, the schools provided a seemingly limitless menu of native children, who served as a veritable smorgasbord for child predators:
Native scholars describe the destruction of their culture as a “soul wound,” from which Native Americans have not healed. Embedded deep within that wound is a pattern of sexual and physical abuse that began in the early years of the boarding school system. Joseph Gone describes a history of “unmonitored and unchecked physical and sexual aggression perpetrated by school officials against a vulnerable and institutionalized population.” Gone is one of many scholars contributing research to the Boarding School Healing Project. (Ibid)

In one case during the late 1980s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that a single Bureau of Indian Affairs schoolteacher had allegedly molested more than one hundred boys at an Arizona BIA school:
In 1987 the FBI found evidence that John Boone, a teacher at the BIA-run Hopi day school in Arizona, had sexually abused as many as 142 boys from 1979 until his arrest in 1987. (Ibid)

Now in their late fifties, or older, Canadian and US survivors of these schools tell haunting stories of past abuse, memories which are etched in their minds forever. Genevieve Williams, an 85-year-old former residential school student, tells a haunting story of a strap hanging on a wall:
She sees herself as a little girl. Marching everywhere in a line. Scrubbing floors on her hands and knees. Being forced to stand silent
for hours in a dark hall. Watching children get strapped for speaking their native language. (Seattle Times, 2-3-08)

Randy Fred, an activist who is a survivor of a residential school says that he tried suicide twice. Fred noted that most of the people he talked to have attempted suicide and at least half of those on a list of students who were abused at the schools are dead.

Randy Fred (Tsehaht First Nation), a 47-year-old survivor, told the British Columbia Aboriginal Network on Disability Society, “We were kids when we were raped and victimized. All the plaintiffs I've talked with have attempted suicide. I attempted suicide twice, when I was 19 and again when I was 20. We all suffered from alcohol abuse, drug abuse. Looking at the lists of students [abused in the school], at least half the guys are dead.” (Ibid)

The psychological problems associated with Residential Indian Schools have now been identified as a syndrome. A Canadian medical journal says the symptoms are similar to post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Whether Indian residential schools are seen as an attempt at benevolence or a plan to annihilate a culture, many native people who attended the schools present with symptoms similar to those of post-traumatic stress disorder. This constellation of symptoms has come to be known as residential school syndrome. (BC Medical Journal, March, 2001)

Residential school syndrome (RSS) continues to claim victims in the United States and Canada. Long after the last hellhole masquerading as a school shut down, RSS victims continue drugging and drinking their pain away. Some take a more active approach and kill themselves, rather than continuing a life of painful madness.

The schools have done what they were set up to do—destroy the viability of Native and First Nations tribes. Now the tribes have a major task: to heal and to put back together what those mind wrecking Humpty Dumpties tried to destroy.

Monica Davis is an author/columnist currently working on a book on education and genocide. She has written hundreds of articles in the last decade on human rights, economics, agriculture and the history of black farmers. She is available for book signings and speaking engagements and may be reached at:
email: davis4000_2000 [at] yahoo.com
her author website is:
http://www.lulu.com/davis4000_2000