"Unbelievers deserve not only to be separated from the Church, but also... to be exterminated from the World by death."
Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, 1271).
True Believers, on the contraty, are honoured and remembered, their names are immortified in US cities names...
Jeffrey Amherst and Smallpox Blankets
http://www.umass.edu/legal/derrico/amherst/lord_jeff.html
On April 10, 1818, the Town of Amherst was officially created by an Act of the Senate of the State of New York. This new town was named for Sir Jeffrey Amherst, an English lord who was Commander-in-Chief of the British troops in America in 1758-1763, before the American Revolution. King George III rewarded Lord Amherst by giving him 20,000 acres in New York, but Lord Amherst never visited his new lands. [From: A Brief History of the Town of Amherst, (Amherst Museum, 1997)
Colonel Henry Bouquet in his letter to General Amherst, dated 13 July 1763, suggested in a postscript the distribution of blankets to "inocculate the Indians"; Amherst in his letter to Colonel Henry Bouquet, dated 16 July 1763, approved plan in a postscript and suggested as well as "to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race." (This postcript spans two pages.) These letters also discuss the use of dogs to hunt the Indians, the so-called "Spaniard's Method," which Amherst approves in principle, but says he cannot implement because there are not enough dogs. In a letter dated 26 July 1763, Bouquet acknowledges Amherst's approval and writes, "all your Directions will be observed."
There is a letter from Bouquet to Amherst, dated 23 June 1763, three weeks before the discussion of blankets to the Indians, stating that Captain Ecuyer at Fort Pitt (to which Bouquet would be heading with reinforcements) has reported smallpox in the Fort. This indicates at least that the writers knew the plan could be carried out.
Several other letters from the summer of 1763 show the smallpox idea was not an anomaly. The letters are filled with comments that indicate a genocidal intent, with phrases such as:
'...that Vermine ... have forfeited all claim to the rights of humanity' (Bouquet to Amherst, 25 June)
'I would rather chuse the liberty to kill any Savage....' (Bouquet to Amherst, 25 June)
'...Measures to be taken as would Bring about the Total Extirpation of those Indian Nations' (Amherst to Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of the Northern Indian Department, 9 July)
'...their Total Extirpation is scarce sufficient Attonement....' (Amherst to George Croghan, Deputy Agent for Indian Affairs, 7 August)
'...put a most Effectual Stop to their very Being' (Amherst to Johnson, 27 August [292k]; emphasis in original).
Genocide in Canada: The Untold Story
by Kevin Annett Sunday, Dec. 31, 2006 at 5:40 PM
http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org
'I believe the conditions are being deliberately created in our Indian boarding schools to spread infectious disease. The death rate often exceeds fifty percent. This is a national crime.'
Dr. Peter Bryce, Chief Medical Officer, Department of Indian Affairs, April 15, 1907
'Then he kicked her. She went rolling down the stairs. She just lay there. She wasn't moving; she wasn't breathing. I see that all the time.'
Harriett Nahanee, eyewitness to the murder of Maisie Shaw, age 14, by Alberni Indian Residential School Principal Alfred Caldwell on December 24, 1946
The chief American Prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials, Robert Jackson, claimed that under a regime that practiced genocide and mass murder, the oral testimonies of the survivors of that genocide are sufficient evidence to indict its perpetrators, since such a regime will never admit its culpability or provide written records to prove that the crimes occurred.
In Jackson's words,
'Any civilized nation must be willing to accept the truth found within the shattered lives of the survivors of crimes against humanity ... Their accounts are the ultimate evidence that must be placed on the scales of justice.' (November 3, 1946)
Since December 18, 1995, hundreds of eyewitnesses to crimes of mass murder and genocide in Indian Residential Schools across Canada have come forward publicly to accuse the government of Canada and the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of every act defined as Genocide under the United Nations' 1948 Convention on Genocide, which Canada ratified in 1952. And yet, since that date, not a single person has been indicted or jailed for any of these crimes, despite the fact that, according to the Canadian government's own records, over 50,000 aboriginal children died while in the residential schools between 1895 and 1984.
Quite simply, the churches and government of Canada have gotten away with mass murder.
For the past twelve years, I have had the honour of assisting many aboriginal people who survived the residential school nightmare to record their stories, gather their courage, and confront their torturers in what is surely the greatest David and Goliath struggle in Canadian history. Unfortunately, in this case, Goliath seems to have won.
Over the past several years, the Canadian government and churches that killed so many innocent children in their residential schools have absolved themselves of their crimes by redefining the entire issue as a matter of monetary “compensation" to the survivors rather than their own criminal liability. Adolf Hitler would have done no less had he won World War Two and held an “inquiry" into the fate of Jews in Europe. But in typically Canadian fashion, this reinventing of history to suit the needs of the perpetrators has meant that there is no actual redress possible for aboriginal survivors of genocide, despite the mountains of “healing and reconciliation" rhetoric being pumped out of the public relations machines of church and state in Canada.
Let me give you one example of the fraud being perpetrated on aboriginal people, and the Canadian public, by this system of cover-up and denial.
William Combes is the English name of a fifty two year old interior Salish man who was held prisoner in the Catholic residential schools in Kamloops and Mission, BC for eleven years of his childhood. In 1963, at the age of nine, William was tortured on a rack by a priest named Brother Murphy at the Kamloops school after he took some fruit from a neighbouring orchard one night, after having not eaten for two days. In the same orchard, William and another boy had witnessed the same priest bury the bodies of children who had died in the school. Sodomized every day for years, flogged, his joints dislocated, William spent years in prison for minor offences.
Today, William is a homeless man in Vancouver, suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. And yet he has received not a penny in aid or compensation from either of the organizations that ruined his life, the Canadian government and the Roman Catholic church.
Since 1989, William has tried to win legal recognition of his torture in the residential school system, to no avail. Like most residential school victims, his case has been sidelined and ignored, while lawyers profit from his suffering. And, contrary to the government's claim that every residential school survivor will be rewarded $10,000 without conditions, William was recently informed that he was not eligible for even this paltry sum because his claims against Brother Murphy and others could not be “verified" .
Last month, at the downtown eastside cafe where we meet and talk, William told me that since September, five of his aboriginal friends have either committed suicide or died of diabetes. They were all under the age of fifty, and had gone to the Kamloops residential school with him. And not one of them had ever received a penny of compensation or a day in court.
William and his deceased friends are typical of most of the residential school survivors across Canada: alone, impoverished, diseased, and dying at a rate of five to ten every day, they are the dwindling reminder of the worst crime in human history: the extermination of aboriginal nations in the New World at the hands of Christian Europe. And yet most of “Canada" carries on, oblivious to their fate, and hoping that they, like the uncomfortable fact of what we did and still do to them, will simply fade away.
And yet, as Robert Jackson observed, the fact of their testimonies remains as the “ultimate evidence" that indicts a genocidal system we like to call “western civilization" : a system that continues to despoil the land and ravage the lives of those without money, property or influence, like most aboriginal people, who remain prisoners in their own land.
Voltaire once wrote that all that we owe to the dead is the truth. In that sense, the only thing that Euro-Canadians can do in relation to aboriginal people is to fully disclose the truth, and be held personally accountable for the effects, of the residential school crimes. And yet that is the one thing that we are unwilling to do.
For example, the churches that ran these schools continue to refuse to open their records or identify the buried location of the tens of thousands of children who died in them. Normally, a mass murderer would be compelled to say what he did with his victims' bodies, but when the perpetrator is a clergyman or employee of a Christian church, a frightening sort of immunity from prosecution has allowed such murder to go unpunished.
This is not surprising, when one considers how the churches' chief partner in crime, the government of Canada, has dutifully passed legislation that absolves the Catholics, Anglicans and United Church from any liability for the residential school crimes, and even lays the burden of the legal expenses of these churches on Canadian taxpayers! Now, every tax paying family in Canada will personally aid these churches in avoiding any responsibility for murders and other crimes they committed on generations of innocent children.
Despite this sorry charade, and the real despair felt by most residential school survivors today, truth and international law are on the side of the survivors. Canada has already been condemned at the United Nations for its genocide of native people, and Cuba, Iran, and Guatemala recently tabled a motion to have Canada tried for crimes of genocide. Thanks to the work and the publications of our Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada, including a just-released documentary film on the subject entitled “Unrepentant" , many people and groups around the world are becoming aware of the crimes committed by Canada and its churches against indigenous people.
The question now becomes, when and how will Canada and its mainline churches be brought to justice?
If the problem lies not in the stars, but in ourselves, as William Shakespeare observed, so too does the solution. Every Canadian citizen has the moral duty and the necessity under international law to refuse to patronize or fund any institution that committed and is concealing crimes against humanity, like the government itself, and the Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada. It's up to each of us to withhold all money from these churches, and even from the government, until they are held accountable for their crimes against aboriginal people.
But on a deeper level, we need to undo the ideas, the economics, and the practices that caused this genocide in the first place - assuming we are even capable of recognizing these evils in our nature, and overcoming them.
Before she died suddenly in January of 2004, my friend Virginia Baptiste of the Osoyoos Nation said to me,
“I don't expect you white people to drag yourselves into court for what you did to us. You sterilized my relatives, you murdered my brother Bugs, you beat my cousin to death at the Cranbrrok school. You've gotten away with it, for now. But there's a higher judge you all have to answer to, even if you don't believe it. You can see that judgement already in the dying rivers and the global warming and the rising suicides among your own children. You were really killing off yourselves, not us, by your genocide, because we'll always be here, but your way is going to fade and die. And then once it's gone, you may finally learn what your own teacher Jesus tried to show you but which you forgot, that his kingdom isn't in this world, it isn't about churches and money and who's got the power. It may take you all dying for you to finally learn that."
Let us act now, while there is still time.
2 documentaries have been released recently on genocide of native Indians in Canada:
UNREPENTANT by Kevin Annett
UNREPENTANT is many things, but for me it is a mirror, held up to my own Euro-Canadian culture and people. In the time left to us, we need to accept the image that stares back at us as what we have become. As I have so often done when presiding at the funeral of friends and others, I am counselling and speaking to the dying in this film: to the members of a collapsing culture whose ways are causing their own planetary self-destruction in the wake of their extermination of millions of indigenous people.
I hope the terrible irony of this situation will not be lost on the viewers of UNREPENTANT, conditioned as many of us "white" people are in the role of ruler, judge and ultimate "fixer" of any problem. The truth is, we have no solution to our own demise, any more than we can handily "heal" the genocidal horror we unleashed and still inflict on aboriginal people. For that horror has never been halted, but has turned back upon us in the unstoppable fury of global ecocide, and is devouring the air we breathe and the land we cling to.
In that sense, UNREPENTANT is not about setting anything right, ultimately, for it's much too late for that. Imagine a chapel filled with people come to mourn a dead stranger, only to discover that they are all about to die, and you will begin to sense the deeper meaning of this film.
Before he was killed by a landowner's death squad, a defrocked Guatemalan priest once led me through a refugee camp filled with sick and starving people. When I asked him what I could do to help them, he said,
"Nothing. Stop thinking you can help, and you may learn something."
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/7-1-27/51050.html
Documentary Exposes Ugly Secret of Colonialism in Canada
By Joan Delaney
A hard-hitting documentary that made its debut at the Gabriola Island Film Festival last weekend dwells on a theme that would surprise and shock most Canadians: Canada's genocide.
Even the words sound strange. Who knew that a genocide lurked within Canada's relatively civilized history?
According to Kevin Annett, co-writer and producer of Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide , the time has come for Canadians to learn the truth about what really happened to the aboriginal people from the start of colonialism until today.
It's not a pretty story. Unrepentant documents the "deliberate and systematic extermination" of non-Christian indigenous people within the Indian residential school system by the Catholic, United, Presbyterian and Anglican churches, in collusion with the federal government.
The film, which made its American debut last November at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival where it won Best Director of an International Documentary, is based on Annett's groundbreaking book, "Hidden From History: The Canadian Holocaust." Unrepentant will also be screened at various film festivals around the world.
"We want to generate international pressure on Canada and the churches to start to have full disclosure about what went on so that there can be some healing; real healing can only happen when there's been that kind of complete disclosure," Annett told The Epoch Times from his home in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.
First-hand testimonies from residential school survivors are interwoven with Annett's own story of how, as a United Church minister in Port Alberni, he was fired, publicly defrocked, and had his reputation maligned by church officials after he uncovered evidence of murder and other crimes committed by the church through its Indian boarding schools.
Around 1929, the churches were given legal guardianship of all the children who attended the schools, and Annett says this gave school staff free rein to perpetrate any atrocity upon their wards without having to answer to anyone.
The list of crimes is long, and includes beatings, electric shocks, forced sterilization, medical experimentation, starvation, rape as well as various other forms of sexual abuse, and murder.
As the residential school survivors in Unrepentant tell their stories, the pain evident on their stoic faces, an understanding of what went on in those institutions gradually emerges.
Some spoke of young girls becoming pregnant as a result of rape, or nuns becoming pregnant after sexually abusing boys; some described being made to dig graves for the babies who would be killed after birth.
Rick Lavalee talked about hearing the agonized cries of his only brother as he was being tortured with a cattle prod. The boy died on the spot. Belvy Breber recounted how her brother was hanged in the gym of the Kuper Island school. She was told he'd committed suicide, but she didn't believe it. While the boy was still hanging, the other kids were paraded through the gym as a warning that this could happen to them if they didn't behave.
Of the 100,000 who went through the schools, it is estimated that at least 50,000 were killed. Many of those who died were buried in unmarked graves on or around the school grounds; most of the bodies were never returned to the families.
Harriet Nahanee, who spent five years at the Alberni Residential School, said she remembered the RCMP arriving at her village in a gunboat to round up the children who were to be taken to the school. Children as young as three were often taken even though the schools weren't supposed to accept anyone under the age of seven.
If the parents fought this abduction of their children, they were liable to be arrested under the provisions of the Indian Act, something Annett calls "a piece of race-based legislation" in that it almost completely took away the rights of the native peoples.
Germ warfare was also used. Narrator Lori O'Rorke said deliberately-spread smallpox epidemics in the 1700s and 1800s killed "untold millions" of the world's indigenous people and wiped out many Canadian aboriginals even before the residential schools began operating. Annett says approximately 98 percent of native populations on the west coast were decimated by smallpox.
Survivors in Unrepentant describe how, during a tuberculosis outbreak, they were made to play and sleep with infected children so that they too would become infected with the highly contagious disease.
While most of the schools had closed by 1984, the last federally run facility, the Gordon Residential School in Saskatchewan, closed in 1996.
The legacy of Canada's residential schools, says Annett, is evident in the high rates of suicide, substance abuse and poverty seen in aboriginal communities across the country. He believes he can help change this by "raising an awareness of what actually happened here and the long-term effects it's having on aboriginal people."
"The aboriginal people need recognition and to be treated with dignity and respect, and that's not happening right now. Anyone who's been abused in any way needs the crime to be recognized and named, and it really hasn't been."
HOPING AGAINST HOPE
Hoping Against Hope? The Struggle Against Colonialism in Canada
by Kim Peterson Wednesday, Mar. 07, 2007 at 12:24 PM
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Mar07/Petersen05.htm
Review of a three-part audio documentary series, Hoping Against Hope? The Struggle Against Colonialism in Canada -- produced by Praxis Media Productions and the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group, which examines the current reality of colonialism in Canada.
“No nation has a right to denationalize another nation." -- Kahentinetha Horn
On 24 July 1534, the French explorer Jacques Cartier landed at Baie de Gaspé on territory inhabited by the Haudenosaunee. The French erected a large cross there and Cartier claimed possession of the land in the name of the French king François I. When confronted by the Haudenosaunee, Cartier lied and said the cross was merely a navigational marker. [1] Later, Cartier was guided to the village (kanata) of Stadacona (present day Québec City) by two Haudenosaunee youths. Cartier designated the entire region north of the St. Lawrence River as “Canada." Canada is a colonizer’s designation that came to encompass a massive swath of Turtle Island, where a nation state was born on hundreds of nations already existing across the breadth of what is now called Canada.
A three-part audio documentary series, Hoping Against Hope? The Struggle Against Colonialism in Canada (HH) -- produced by Praxis Media Productions and the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group, examines the current reality of colonialism in Canada.
HH notes that Indigenous communities throughout Canada are “beset with record levels of suicide, high infant mortality rates, rampant sexual exploitation, epidemic levels of gas-sniffing, and alcohol, drug and solvent abuse. Furthermore there is an over-representation of indigenous people in the prison system, and chronic levels of desperate poverty."
Most societal explanations blame the Original Peoples. Dr. Roland Chrisjohn, a Onyota’a:ka (Oneida) from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Director of Native Studies at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, disagrees.
He asks people to imagine what would have happened if the World War II Holocaust had never stopped. A horrific answer stems from the Holocaust suffered by the Original Peoples of the western hemisphere. [2]
What was the reason this holocaust happened?
Historian Michael Parenti states that colonization of the “New World" was an extension of the economic colonization that had already occurred in Eastern Europe. But colonization is much more.
Chrisjohn explains,
Colonialism is not just the theft of territory, and populating it with new settlers and their way of life. It also involves the destruction of the social, political, and economic institutions of the original inhabitants.
Since many Indigenous nations were crucial allies of the English the during the colonial wars they cannot be said to be conquered. Thus, Canada was left with the problem of how to steal Indigenous land by other means.
The solution to the Indian Problem became a reduction of those who were “officially" considered “Indian." The Indian Act came into existence in 1876, nine years after Canada morphed from a British colony into a country, superseding over 600 sovereign indigenous nations.
The Indian Act imposed a colonial form of government in place of traditional indigenous government with a band council system.
Unsurrendered Territory
Since most of Canada is unceded territory, legally, there is no right to implement laws over the still sovereign Original Peoples. Bear Nicholas points out that, in the maritime provinces, most treaties were nation-to-nation agreements -- peace agreements between the encroaching settlers and Original Peoples. They were not land treaties.
Says Chrisjohn,
Nova Scotia is not surrendered territory. Canada has no right to write Canada across Nova Scotia, to collect taxes from the people who inhabit the land, cut down trees, to allocate natural resources, to pollute water in Nova Scotia. At least 90% of Quebec is not surrendered territory. About 75% of Ontario is not surrendered territory. The status of the Prairie treaties, which do appear to be surrenders are questionable on two bases; One, The Indians have no memory of land surrender being raised… And there is actually documented evidence of the people who were signing the treaties as saying: “Ha! Ha! We put one over on the Indians. We didn’t tell them what they were actually signing. We mistranslated it!" Or John Macleen is a really great one for that, he says; “the people we wanted to sign the surrender wouldn’t, so we found some other people, liquored them up and declared them the Chief and tribal council and got them to sign it!" In a fair court, how much would hold up? So the status of the real surrendered land is still questionable. Seventy-five percent of British Columbia is not ceded territory; only the far Northeastern arm it’s covered by Treaty 8 in Alberta may be surrendered territory. The Yukon Territory is not ceded territory. Where did Canada get the right to write ‘Canada’ across that? When you add it all up, about 90 percent of Canada. Even under the best possible scenario -- there is no legal transfer of title from the Aboriginal inhabitants to the Crown.
Hiding Genocide
The crimes against Original Peoples demand reparations, the return of what has been stolen, and atonement. How to avoid this? Bear Nicholas details the method: genocide. A bounty was offered for the scalps of Original Peoples.
It was state sanctified violence that has mainly been purged from Canadian history textbooks, a process Bear Nicholas calls “historicide."
As well as disappearing the history, there has been an attempt to disappear the people. Keetowah Cherokee and professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Boulder, Colorado, Ward Churchill states, “There’s a whole sort of revitalized eugenics movement going on now… How many parts Indian are you?�
Chrisjohn warns,
By accepting this genetic determinism for race, look at what we do to ourselves. There are all kinds of First Nations people or Indigenous people that we deny a relationship to on the basis that well, they haven’t met some other kind of race-based litmus test for inclusion as one of us. “Oh, the Métis? Well, you know the Métis they’re not really Indians."
According to Bear Nicholas, neocolonialism is assimilation.
There are aspects of colonialism that people will talk about as very overt, open kinds of colonial behaviour on the part of say, provincial governors or people in control, but they don’t realize that when our own people have accepted jobs, have become part of their system, there’s this sense that somehow we’re doing the best in an impossible situation as prisoners in a jail might react. We need to get the best for each other by cooperating, by working with them, by doing their bidding and perhaps, if a few of us can “get ahead" then maybe that will spread to the rest of us and we’ll be better off; we’ll be fed, we’ll have houses, we’ll be taking care of our basic needs. But in fact, one of our biggest struggles today is the issue of our own people accepting jobs and basically working with the opposition.
HH narrates “plenty of examples of genocide against Aboriginal people by the Canadian state; from bounties for scalps to the forced sterilization of Native women. Residential schooling is a poignant example of assimilation as a form of genocide."
According to HH, this genocide remains concealed because Canadians and the Canadian state benefit from it.
The Canadian government and the churches have been evading responsibility for their crimes, focusing instead on healing Native people rather than providing justice. Somehow, it is the victims of genocide who are the sick ones, not the perpetrators. When genocide is brought up, it’s denied.
Laments Chrisjohn, “The crime of genocide is being covered up. Now it’s a double crime. People who didn’t commit the first crime are committing the second."
Schools are complicit in the assimilation of Original Peoples. Bear Nicholas says,
The public schools are being run according to an ideology based in capitalism. An ideology that is actually alien to our own way of life, our own forms of life -- it’s very blatant that education is being used in this direction. So that, when we say that sending our children to school is harmless and benign, we as aboriginal people don’t even realize how seriously not benign that school program is. The subtle things (of teaching such things as entrepreneurialism) are actually antithetical and destructive of our way of life and there is a sense that all people, in order to survive in the modern world need to not only know that entrepreneurialism is good and is useful and is fine, but that our people need to understand how much of an assault on our form of life, if our children are being taught to think of number one, themselves only… Where’s our community?
While the capitalist ideology of possessive individualism was alien to the Original Peoples, that is not to say that they did not engage in trade. [3] Concomitant with capitalist indoctrination is cultural extinction. In particular, the death of Indigenous languages: linguicide -- a term coined by University of Roskilde linguist Tove Skuttnab-Kangas.
According to Bear Nicholas, “Linguicide … carries with it the idea that the languages that we speak, indigenous peoples around the world, are not just dying out by some sort of natural force that happens to every minority language, but that there’s an actual deliberateness, there’s actually agency involved.
Bear Nicholas argues that to preserve Indigenous languages, the Original Peoples must receive their education in their own tongue.
Jeanette Armstrong of the Penticton Indian Band in British Columbia argues,
You have the right to save yourself from an impending doom. You have not only the right, but perhaps the obligation as human beings in this world to act with other human beings, your relatives in this world to preclude this future from occurring for you and us alike.
“I am hoping," says Chrisjohn, “hoping against hope, that the average Canadian will read what their Government did in their name to human beings… what their churches did to human beings in their name, because their churches are not telling them. The government is not telling them. They will not allow the word genocide to come up in discussion."
