A Requiem for the Living and the Dead

The word is said so easily, so casually, so lifelessly: Genocide. 

The word means nothing to most people. To the rest, it is little more than the self-serving rhetoric of politicians and popes. 

But when I hear the word, I hear the tortured screams of little children that never stop, day or night.  

I see a Vancouver Island priest electrocuting a five-year-old boy with a cattle prod until he dies, his body tossed onto a pile of other small corpses and then buried in a secret grave barely a mile from where I would work one day.  

I smell the sickly scent of burning flesh as other dead children and even living, newborn babies are incinerated in the Christian death camp furnaces that burn day and night.  

I watch as children are made blind in deadly experiments and others have their teeth yanked out without painkillers by upstanding Canadian doctors.  

I see other children battered and raped and left to starve to death by men and women who sing Christian hymns the next Sunday in church. 

I watch as Harry Wilson shows me the scar on his tongue through which United Church minister John Andrews shoved a needle when a young Harry spoke of the dead girl he found.

I witness a lone and stumbling survivor named William Combes, too crushed to speak publicly of his tortures but somehow willing himself to, against every odd, even as the world hates him for it and finally kills him without consequence: just another dead Indian.  

I hear Jackson Steene describe how his testicles shriveled and died as he was sterilized under an X ray machine at the Anglican hospital in Alert Bay, along with all five of his brothers.

I listen as Ricky Lavallee sobs and describes being forced to bury the body of his brother Ernie by the same catholic priest who had just flogged him to death.

I witness the people of my country and its churches commit or excuse or pay for these abominations decade after decade, and still today, without a flicker of conscience or remorse; and then, when they are exposed, they destroy the evidence and the secret graves of their victims while absolving themselves, rewriting and normalizing their wrong, and getting away with their mass murder of over 60,000 children by issuing some pay cheques and a glib apology. 

And I wonder how people can do such things so easily and still consider themselves human beings.

I also remember how some of us fought so long and so hard to confront this murder and coverup until the truth was finally exposed at an enormous cost, including the death of seven of my friends. But then I watch as what we exposed is buried again and a false, sanitized history of the Canadian Holocaust is reissued by the killers and adopted as if none of these atrocities had ever happened.  

And finally, I witness the world and everyone I know turn their indifferent backs on this carnage as if it doesn’t matter; as if it has nothing to do with the plague that is now sweeping the world and all of them. 

I know these things so deeply because my own life has been shattered by them. It is not another issue. It is all completely personal to me, for it has been my life for almost thirty years. And still do the spirits of the fallen walk with me and struggle to cry out through my inadequate and solitary voice, knowing that our screams are inaudible to the legions of the walking dead, and that whatever is spoken and attempted now will not stop the abomination from continuing. 

There now stands only that judgement that is on all of us.

So, in these last days, remember as an epitaph that whatever justice has come from the seeds we sowed is only because they were watered with our blood and suffering. Perhaps some of you will earn and redeem this sacred inheritance by your own sacrifice: the cost of your departure from this bloody Land of No-One.