An Open Public Letter to the Vancouver School Board. Why are you censoring the truth about genocide in Canada

If it was up to me, student radicals like Kevin Annett would be permanently expelled and barred from our schools. - Vancouver School Board trustee Peter Westlake, October 12, 1973

Look, Kevin, your work has made you persona non grata with the Vancouver School Board. - Lord Byng Secondary School Principal Damian Wilmann to the author, November 24, 2023

I’m as gentle as a lamb, but they take me for a ram; they go wild, simply wild, over me. – T-Bone Slim, “The Popular Wobbly”, 1920

Dear Vancouver School Board Trustees,

Good old Mark Twain once wrote, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education”. Besides being accurate, that maxim was also the title of the first leaflet I ever wrote, in the fall of 1973, that called for a Bill of Rights for Vancouver high school students.  

After being disseminated like a simmering virus in a dozen schools, my cheeky flyer provoked an incredible hysteria and hatred towards me among the Vancouver School Board trustees, who warned the media, school principals and the public that I was a pariah to be avoided at all cost.

My, oh my, how little things change!

Last November 24, I was invited by several teachers to attend an educational event about “First Nations issues” at Lord Byng Secondary school. Barely an hour into the event, I was accosted by the Byng Principal, Damian Wilmann, and told to leave the premises. Mr. Wilmann didn’t give me a reason for my banishment, although he did remark that I am “persona non grata with the Vancouver School Board.” 

Is that true, people? Or was Damian just making it up?

Being Canadians, you’ve no doubt “heard” many things about me, thanks to the RCMP and their ilk. Like Mark Twain also said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Criminals in high places rely on lies and character assassinations to keep their critics at bay and the truth and bodies buried - including the bodies of children.

And that, of course, is the issue that is provoking the same frenzy nowadays that calling for equal rights for students did in my youth: the little matter of the mass murder of native children in our own backyard.

Thanks to years of sanitizing and whitewashing by the churches and government responsible for genocide in Canada, and by their loyal ab-original accomplices, our biggest and oldest crime remains as fogged and misrepresented as the quarter-century campaign to expose and prosecute it that I helped launch in the spring of 1998. That is the way of all genocidal regimes: bury the homegrown crime with a false narrative that minimizes, normalizes, and de-criminalizes it. But to succeed, such a duplicitous rewrite of history must be infused in the minds of the next generation of public school students.

That’s where you folks come in.

Your school board is deliberately obfuscating proven Crimes against Humanity and dumbing down the youth who will one day be responsible for either confronting those crimes or perpetuating them. Last year, when I sent each of you my court-documented proof of intentional genocide in the Indian residential schools and urged you to include its evidence in the Grade 11 and 12 “First Nations” curriculum, you not only ignored my offer but issued a memo to social studies teachers to ignore me and spurn this verified evidence.

Last September, a group of twenty-four indigenous clan mothers asked your Board to stop disseminating the genocide-denying accounts that falsely claim that only a few children died in the ‘residential schools’, when our research has revealed a constant fifty percent death rate in these places that spanned nearly a century. That’s a mortality rate double that of the Auschwitz death camp.  (www.murderbydecree.com) These clan mothers, too, were ignored by you. And when some Vancouver teachers recently showed a willingness to look at our material, they were quickly threatened and reprimanded by your Board for doing so.

Concealing genocide, as a matter of fact, is a crime under the law because it obstructs justice and protects still-living perpetrators. Unfortunately, you’re not alone in your felony.  School boards across Canada have blocked every attempt by me, genocide survivors, and traditional native elders to share with students our voluminous evidence of the Canadian Holocaust and how it is continuing.

Similarly, public librarians from Vancouver to Halifax have confirmed that my name and works are on a proscribed list of banned authors, indicating that overt national censorship is at work. The church, police, and government authorities are, after all, the historical perpetrators of this Crown-sanctioned Holocaust. They are hiding behind a deceitful camouflage of empty “healing and reconciliation” rhetoric to mask the generations of children’s blood on their hands. 

There is no legal statute of limitation on murder or its concealment. And so, by your actions, each one of you trustees is complicit in that coverup and is thereby liable under the law.

That said, this letter is not intended as a threat, but an invitation. It is time for all Canadians to take responsibility for the atrocities that have been done in our name with our tax money and active or silent consent. As those with the power to educate the next generation about the truth of what we have done and continue to do to indigenous people, you can play a vital role in making real Canada’s unfulfilled obligation to undo the murderous legacy of church and state sponsored genocide.

Such an important step will not happen through the feel good “reconciliation” babble that I heard at Byng school last November 24. Instead of the well paid ab-original government flunkies who dished out that babble at Byng, educators need to provide a platform for the indigenous eyewitnesses who suffered gang rape, slave labor, sexual sterilizations, witnessed murders and buried their fellow students at the death camps misnamed “Indian residential schools”: the same survivors whose children are still being trafficked and killed today. And the hard evidence of that continuing Holocaust must be made freely available in the school course curriculum, and not censored and banned as it is now.

Regardless of whether you take this morally and legally required step, genocide survivors and their allies are doing so.

Throughout this year and beyond, our movement and its indigenous elders will continue to hold public teach-ins and seminars at Vancouver schools and colleges to teach the truth of past and ongoing genocide in Canada, and of its institutionalized coverup. This grassroots educational effort is part of a national Banishment and Reclamation campaign by nine traditional indigenous nations to expel the genocidal Catholic, Anglican, and United churches and crown authority from their territories, including from the city of Vancouver.

As illegal squatters on indigenous Squamish and Musqueam land, you school board trustees can earn the right to remain here by no longer obstructing justice and allowing the slaughter of 60,000 children to go unknown and unpunished.

I have attached some of the evidence that belongs in the hands of every student and teacher in Vancouver, and Canada, including an invitation from the clan mothers of the Traditional Indigenous Elders’ History Project.

Sincerely,

Kevin Annett, M.A., M.Div. (angelfire101@protonmail.com) 

cc: world media and public, indigenous elders