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When we use the genocide label for other kinds of killing (e.g. death through neglect, or bureaucratic elimination) do we diminish the weight of the word genocide? Many non-Indigenous Canadians bristle at the notion that a label like genocide applies to Canada.
As early as November, 1907, the Canadian press was acknowledging that the death rate within Indian residential schools exceeded 50% (see Appendix, “Key Newspaper Articles”).
And yet the reality of such a massacre has been wiped clean from public record and consciousness in Canada over the past decades.
Small wonder; for that hidden history reveals a system whose aim was to destroy most native people by disease, relocation and outright murder, while “assimilating” a minority of collaborators who were trained to serve the genocidal system.
This history of purposeful genocide implicates every level of government in Canada, the RCMP, every mainline church, large corporations, and local police, doctors, and judges.
The web of complicity in this killing machine was, and remains, so vast that its concealment has required an equally elaborate campaign of cover-up that has been engineered at the highest levels of power in our country; a cover-up that is continuing, especially now that eyewitnesses to murders and atrocities at the church-run native residential “schools” have come forward for the first time.
For it was the residential “schools” that constituted the death camps of the Canadian Holocaust, and within their walls nearly one-half of all aboriginal children sent there by law died, or disappeared, according to the government’s own statistics.
Overt Killings of Children
More overt killings of children were a common occurrence in residential schools, according to eyewitnesses. The latter have described children being beaten and starved to death, thrown from windows, strangled, and being kicked or thrown down stairs to their deaths. Such killings occurred in at least eight residential schools in British Columbia alone, run by all three mainline denominations.
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Deliberately Infecting Children with Diseases
This policy of deliberately infecting children with diseases under unhealthy conditions originated at the highest level of power in Canada; a fact attested to by the response of Indian Superintendent Duncan Scott to Dr. Bryce’s report.
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Official Consent from Ottawa
With such official consent for manslaughter emanating from Ottawa, the churches responsible for annihilating natives on the ground felt emboldened and protected enough to declare full-scale war on non-Christian native peoples through the twentieth century. The casualties of that war were not only the 50,000 dead children of the residential schools, but the survivors, whose social condition today has been described by United Nations human rights groups as that of “a colonized people barely on the edge of survival, with all the trappings of a third-world society.” (November 12, 1999). The Holocaust is continuing.
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The Murder of Native People Continues
This is an ongoing story, for the murder of native people continues. The standard of living of Canadian Indians today ranks sixty-fourth in the world, below that of Mexico and Thailand (Globe and Mail, Oct. 12, 1998) In my former parish of Port Alberni, infant mortality among native families is as high as in Guatemala. On many occasions between the years 1992 and 1995, when I ministered there, I presided at the funerals of aboriginal babies who had died of malnutrition, pneumonia and other illnesses caused by poverty and substandard housing. It was common for me to deliver food to Port Alberni native families who had not eaten in days, and whose children could not even stand up because of hunger-induced exhaustion.
Such miserable conditions in one of the world’s richest nations are primarily caused by the systematic theft of native lands and resources by multinational corporations like the U.S. logging giant Weyerhauser, and corporate fishing monopolies like the Weston and Pattison groups. Sadly, this theft is enabled by governments, churches, and privileged native leaders on state-funded reserves. Pop
Perpetrators of Canadian genocide: Church, State, and Police
The institutions which perpetrated this home-grown Canadian genocide— church, state and police—are still intact, as is their general moral legitimacy, at least among the mainstream populace. Accordingly, within the mindset and legal regime of this dominant culture there exists no basis to expose or prosecute the system and criminals who killed and tortured native children in the residential schools, since that murder originated precisely within these present-day “legitimate” institutions and their foundation ideology of “Christian Superior Dominion.”
I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our residential schools to spread infectious diseases… It is not unusual for children who are dying from consumption to be admitted to schools and housed alongside healthy children. This is a national crime. [Dr. Peter Bryce: The Story of a National Crime: Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1904 to 1921. (Ottawa, 1922)]
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My Sister Maggie Was Killed by a Nun
My sister Maggie was thrown from a three story window by a nun at the Kuper Island school, and she died. Everything was swept under the rug. No investigation was ever done. We couldn’t hire a lawyer at the time, being Indians. So nothing was ever done.” (Testimony of Bill Seward, Duncan, BC, August 13, 1998)
Originally published on 2021-06-14
Author: Volubrjotr
Source: Political Vel Craft
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