I just watched a restrained but extremely disturbing video on the abuse and murder that took place at the the Canadian Residential Schools that took possession of over 100,000 of the children of Canada's First Peoples during the twentieth century.
Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide
I had a friend who was sent to one of those schools when he was six. In the middle of the Canadian winter, he ran away with another boy. After a long odyssey, his friend was caught. Jerry escaped and went to work for a farmer. He was eleven years old, but he was lucky. His friend was caught and returned to the school, where he died. Like 50,000 other children, many of whose bodies are unaccounted for.
I had thought the US had really been outclassed when Canada finally apologized for its treatment of its native peoples and the forced internment of so many children in the schools. But this documentary really opened my eyes to the calculated nature and scope of Canada's genocide, parts of it, such as the sterilization of the children of tribal leaders, taking place into the early 1980s, and to the extent to which Canada has suppressed its ugly history--and present.
[I am unable to embed the video, which available at the link above at Google videos. Below is the first of 8 parts on youtube--the google is film is complete as one.
Jerry and other children like him were signed away by their parents, who were threatened with arrest if they did not sign away their guardianship to the principal of the school. They quickly learned to behave. Jerry described being made to watch with all the other kids the beating of kids who misbehaved by speaking their native tongue, etc. "You what that means to have the shit beaten out of you? It means the nuns standing around with wooden sticks and literally beating kids until their bowels gave way."
But the Protestant schools did not take a back seat in terms of hellishness. Kevin Annett, a United Church of Christ minister who started doing outreach among the Native American community in British Columbia in 1992, started turning over his pulpit to survivors of one such school run by his sect, the United Church of Christ, and doing research on exactly how awful these schools had been. [For this he was de-commissioned by the UCC as "unfit."]
His conclusion? That the schools were part of a calculated genocide that began with the distribution of smallpox blankets hundreds of years before and became more "civilized" with the forced sterilization of tribal leaders and their families, male and female, and the culling of the population through these schools, at which well children were forced to play and sleep with actively tuburcular children, which does a lot to explain the high death rate.
But murder by abuse occurred not infrequently, and outright murder as well of those who seemed liable to spill the truth of what was going on. Listening to the stories told by these adult survivors, in their 50s to 70s when the film was made in 2006, is almost unbearable. The restrained tone of the film does not sensationalize this history, or the link between moneyed interests and the churches--wealthy donors often ended up buying at bargain prices the land that the churches were supposed to be holding in stewardship for the tribes. The Indian Act had essentially made all Indians wards of the state, as if they were children or mentally defective.
Much of the film concerns how the powerful in Canadian government, Mounties, and especially the churches have leaned on any who have tried to publicize the genocide, smearing and sometimes physically attacking survivors who testified publicly and outsiders like Kevin Annett who have worked with them. Any of those who sued and won a settlement have gag orders.
The film is not new. It won awards in 206, when it was made. But I was struck that it has had such a low profile. It deserves wider recognition.
Jerry was an amazing man. He recovered from substance abuse and worked as a counselor until his death. Annett describes the ravages of substance abuse and the number of tribal people who die on the street in Vancouver and Seattle each year, and the thousands who live in the streets, as the legacy of the genocide. That's what it looks like from their end. And what does it look like from ours?
When all those people were so gung ho about invading Afganistan and Iraq, and Tony Blair had that religious feeling about it, it had the same smell: the moneyed interests/Christianists rearranging the dark people's world for their own good. How does this ever get repaired? Does it? Can it?
As the survivors in the film say, there is no healing from the murder and rape and medical experiments (yes, a mirror to the Nazis), but there can be acknowledgment. The film closes with a quote from Voltaire: "One owes respect to the living. To the dead, only truth."