Twelve Outlawed Memories
None of the boys had eaten anything for three days, besides some rotting food thrown away by the staff. So, even working together, they had barely enough strength to drag their bloodied friend Arnold off his maggot-infested mattress.
The catholic priest who had beaten Arnold senseless, Brother Murphy, ordered the boys to bury him in the back field.
“But he’s not dead,” one of the boys whispered to another. “I saw his eyes move!”
“Shh! You’ll be the dead one if Murphy hears you!”
After they had pushed their friend into the hole and covered him with soil and foliage, the boys stumbled tiredly back to their dormitory. But the boy who’d had doubts couldn’t sleep that night. He kept thinking of his friend in the ground.
“So, I went back there early the next morning,” the boy described, many years later. “And sure enough I was right. One of Arnold’s hands was sticking up out of the ground. He had tried digging his way out of that grave. We had buried him alive.” (1)
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The young Mohawk girl had been in the Hole for days. She was slowly starving to death in the concrete cistern, but she had stopped screaming for help. She knew it wouldn’t make any difference. Her fate was sealed the moment she had tried defending her little sister from the raping priest named Bob Bennett: the future Anglican Bishop of Huron Diocese.
“They don’t call that place the ‘mush hole’ because of the slop they fed us,” explained Rebecca Hill, the cousin of the victim. “That’s just the cover story. Whoever got put down that hole never came out alive. They came out as mush.” (2)
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Johnny ‘Bingo’ Dawson had forgotten the most basic rule of street survival: never go into an alley alone when it’s dark. The cops were waiting for him there. They had been watching him with lethal intent ever since he’d led the occupation of a downtown United Church with his fellow ‘residential school’ survivors and he began naming the names of churchly child killers.
The first blows from the cops’ clubs shattered Johnny’s nose and then his jaw. As he tried to cry for help, the three Vancouver policemen threw him down and methodically beat him unconscious. The cop wearing sergeant chevrons hammered Johnny again and again on the head, even as he lay motionless. Then the three cops strolled away.
Johnny Dawson was pronounced dead the next morning. The Provincial Coroner took five months to issue her report. The official cause of death was “alcohol poisoning”, despite the absence of alcohol or drugs in Johnny’s bloodstream.
The sole witness to Johnny’s murder, Ricky Lavallee (bottom left, below) was also found beaten to death less than three months later. No cause of death was issued. (3)
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Because he was a white man and a public figure, Kevin Annett was not beaten with a club by the policeman who confronted him outside CKNW radio station on the evening of June 3, 1996. The assault took a different form.
“You’re making some pretty wild allegations about children being killed in the Indian residential schools,” exclaimed the cop, whose name was Sergeant Gerry Peters of the RCMP. “So, for your own safety, you should check with us before issuing any more press releases.”
“But why should I, when you guys refuse to look into their deaths?” Kevin replied.
“We couldn’t investigate every report of a murdered residential school child!” blustered Gerry Peters. “It would be too huge an investigation!”
Perhaps sensing his faux pas and no doubt annoyed by Kevin’s ironic smile, Peters cried,
“Look, Reverend, some people are getting very upset at what you’re doing, and they might try to stop you. So, for your own safety, you’d better play ball with us.”
Kevin declined the Mountie’s offer. Four days later, on June 7, 1996, the brake lines on Kevin’s car were cut and he collided into a telephone pole, barely avoiding death. (4)
Meanwhile, the fix was already in.
Barely two months earlier in Port Alberni, a secret agreement had been made between the top officials of the west coast Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council (NTC) and the United Church of Canada. The latter offered to pay ‘limited’ compensation to some of the survivors of their local ‘Indian residential school’ internment camps, but only if the NTC chiefs agreed never to sue the church for the deaths of children therein, and to never support Kevin Annett’s campaign to expose such deaths.
The four ‘chiefs’ agreed to this blood money arrangement, provided that they each received personal remuneration in the amount of $25,000. The United Church officials present – General-Secretary Virginia Coleman and Moderator Marion Best – were only happy to oblige.
Bruce Gunn, an eyewitness to these proceedings, commented later that he was surprised at how readily and cheaply the NTC brass were bribed, considering how they were exonerating the United Church for the deaths of thousands of their relatives and saving the church millions of dollars in the process.
“The church’s tab that night was only a hundred grand,” remarked Gunn to Kevin Annett later. “That was not even half of what they spent firing and defrocking you, Kevin. I guess the old cliché is true that even the most powerful Indian can be bought easily.”
Those who wonder why no aboriginal leader has ever criminally prosecuted the churches for the deaths of over 60,000 indigenous children should recall that formative sellout event of April 14, 1996. For it set the pattern for all the subsequent coverups of genocide in Canada by the churches and government that did the killings, in tandem with their loyal aboriginal accomplices in mass murder. (5)
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It was not always so. A spark of resistance endured.
One July morning in 1970 in Alberta, some Cree men and women whose children were prisoners in the Bluequills catholic ‘Indian residential school’ invaded the premises. They were armed with rifles. Quickly taking the principal hostage, they told the RCMP and the press that unless the priests and nuns vacated the school immediately and for good, the principal would die.
Two days later, Ottawa ordered the clergy out. Soon after, the feds began phasing out church control over the ‘Indian residential schools’. It took the barrel of a gun to make it happen. (6)
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Irene Favel was not surprised when the Catholic priest appeared in the kitchen bearing a newborn baby. Although Irene was only ten years old, she had seen it all before. The cleric walked quickly past her and ordered the nun who was baking bread to open the oven door. In an instant he threw the baby into the flames, alive.
“It gave a little cry and then you could hear its body go ‘pop’. There was an awful stench and you could smell its flesh cooking. It was the child of one of the girls who had got pregnant from the priest, and they got rid of it. That happened all the time.”
Irene Favel’s words had caught the shocked CBC interviewer off guard. The cameras stopped rolling. By the next day, Irene’s interview had been erased from the CBC website. (7)
Like genocide, a coverup is an abstraction until it has you by the throat.
“He pushed me into a corner and started choking me,” recalls Kevin Annett. “He told me that if I didn’t stop looking into the dead residential school children, I’d be dead, too. He said that Eddie John had sent him to tell me that.”
The assailant seemed an unlikely one, at first. After all, Dean Wilson was an aboriginal man who’d been incarcerated in ‘residential school’ himself. But his boss was ‘chief’ Ed John from the northern Carrier-Sekani tribe, a close confidant of the feds and a notorious child trafficker.
It was June 12, 1998: the opening day of the first public Tribunal to investigate the Canadian ‘Indian residential schools’. By the end of that day, Dean Wilson had scared into silence many of the survivors who had come to tell their stories.
“Dean’s done that all his life,” explained one of the survivors who watched him assault Kevin Annett. “He was an enforcer for the whites at the Lejac rez school. If you spoke your language, he’d beat you with a club. He could rape and kill anyone he liked. Just like now.”
Violence goes only so far. The swamp had been stirred, and more debris began to surface. (8)
Kevin Annett giving his testimony at the first residential school Tribunal, Vancouver
June 12, 1998
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“It’s from a child, alright,” said the Ontario coroner. “A very young one.”
Greg Olsen turned the brown bone over in his hand and asked the obvious question.
“We found it right next to the old school, tangled in the roots of a tree,” answered Kevin Annett. “Along with these buttons. They’re off the school uniforms.”
“They always made us plant a tree over top of where we buried the kids,” explained the aged Mohawk man named Geronimo Henry. “There’s lots of them stuck in those woods.”
Greg Olsen stared at the buttons and bone with a troubled look.
“This isn’t the first time that children’s bones have turned up here,” he said quietly. “Back in ’94 we found a whole mass grave of them on the other side of the school. But we were told to leave them alone. The Mounties came and got rid of them all.”
Greg Olsen let out a sigh and shook his head.
“I’m sorry. I’d like to help you, but I’ll lose my job if I get involved here.”
Cowardice did not cause the children’s bones to be shoved out of sight once more. They continued their journey into a greater spotlight and one day even forced a pope to resign. (9)
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The day that twelve-year-old Harry Wilson was to report to the Nanaimo Indian Hospital to be sexually sterilized, the X-Ray machine that would bombard his testicles broke down. But a reprieve was not possible for Harry, since his I.Q. score was too high.
So, after being held overnight in a small cell, Harry was manhandled into an operating room where a United Church missionary doctor named George Darby awaited him. Darby proceeded to surgically castrate Harry Wilson for the crime of being a smart Indian.
For his efforts, Dr. Darby received the standard payment of $300 from the Department of Indian Affairs. This was in accordance with a long-standing church and state policy and practice that the especially intelligent members of an inferior race would not be allowed to breed. (10)
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Slowly but inexorably, and against every odd, the evidence of the Canadian Holocaust gathered in that way, surfacing like a dying boy struggling to crawl out of a grave.
Like the Mush Hole bones, the sexual sterilization records and witness of those like Harry Wilson eventually helped to convict Christian Canada of genocide in an international court. But many more were to die before that victory.
Decades before, a starving boy named William Combes and his brother Ernie were caught running away from the Kamloops ‘Indian residential school’. For that ‘offense’, they were not only flogged by the priests but locked in the school’s tuberculosis ward with sick and dying children: a common extermination practice as old as the first ‘residential school’ in 1891.
At first, the two boys tried sleeping under their beds to avoid the contaminated kids. But when the dorm supervisor caught them there, she had them both tied into bed with the sick children. After a week, the two boys were released. William survived the germ warfare. Ernie did not.
“I think I was kept alive so I could see Queen Elizabeth kidnap those ten kids,” William told Kevin Annett. “Now the whole world’s going to know about it.”
Shortly before William Combes was to speak of these incidents at a London human rights forum in early March 2011, he was killed by arsenic poisoning at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver.
But the hangman was cheated by William. He had already scored his victory over Goliath, just blocks away, in the company of those like him. (11)
The heavy doors of Holy Rosary Catholic Church stood wide open that Sunday morning of March 16, 2008. The church’s usual protective barrier of Vancouver police and Knights of Columbus goons was nowhere in sight.
“That’s a sign, everyone,” exclaimed Kevin Annett to the crowd of fifty mostly native people who stood with him. “Let’s go in!”
William Combes was there that day. And Harry Wilson. And all the other genocide survivors who had once been victims and now were threats.
Strike at what your enemy loves and it will be rendered powerless, recalled Kevin as he and Squamish elder Kiapilano led the Fifty into the ornate cathedral.
Sure enough, the priests and their minions were not expecting the invasion of scruffy Indians, despite the rounds of picketing that had hit their church for weeks. The befuddled catholics watched as the survivors occupied the front of the cathedral and unfurled a large banner that declared, “All the Children Need a Proper Burial”.
“This is for you guys,” said elder Kiapilano, handing the head priest a legal eviction order that banned the Catholic Church from his Squamish peoples’ traditional territory, encompassing all of Vancouver. “You have forty-eight hours to vacate this building.”
Meanwhile, some of the Fifty had spread out among the pews and were handing copies of the eviction order to the shocked parishioners. One of the priests had already headed out the back door of the church. But the head cleric named Glen Dion finally lost his cool and grabbed Kevin by the arm.
“I’m asking you to leave, right now!” Dion spewed at Kevin, his eyes daggers of hatred.
“And we’re asking you where you buried all the native children your church killed,” Kevin replied calmly.
That seemed to break the monster’s back, as counting coup always does. Despite the priests’ pathetic efforts to continue the service amidst the eyewitnesses to their great lie, something had collapsed, and everyone felt it. After a while, three native elders began drumming and singing, and they slowly led the Fifty out of the cathedral.
And as they left, the entire congregation rose.
The shock wave launched by the Fifty swept the media and the country after that. All three guilty churches went hysterical, demanding police protection and bolting their doors, to the laughter and joy of every survivor and the few whites who had stood with them. And the next week, the Canadian government hurriedly announced a “missing children’s investigation” along with the upcoming issuing of a “formal apology” for the ‘Indian residential schools’.
Even with the staged coverup, whitewash, and self-exculpation by Canada that followed the March 16 triumph, nothing was the same after that. And it was all due to the Fifty and the legions of avenging souls that accompanied them in their own Valley of Elah.
Carry it on. (12)
Kevin Annett (right, in hat) and survivor Ricky Lavallee speaking to the press
after the March 16, 2008 occupation of Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Vancouver
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Notes
(1) Eyewitness: Jasper Joseph, Interior Salish. Location: Kamloops Catholic ‘Indian residential school’. Date of Incident: April 1965
(2) Eyewitness: Rebecca Hill, Mohawk Nation. Location: Anglican Mohawk Indian residential school (aka ‘Mush Hole’). Date of incident: Spring 1969. Reported October 9, 2011 to Kevin Annett.
(3) Eyewitness: Ricky Lavallee, Plains Cree. Location: Main and Hastings Street, Vancouver. Date of Incident: December 9, 2009
(4) Eyewitness: Kevin Annett. Location: CKNW Radio, Vancouver. Date of incidents: June 3, 7, 1996.
(5) Eyewitness: Bruce Gunn, United Church minister. Location: St. Andrew’s United Church, Port Alberni, BC. Date of incident: April 14, 1996. The four NTC ‘chiefs’ who made the deal and took the bribe were George Watts, Nelson Keitlah, Cliff Atleo, and Charlie Thompson.
(6) Eyewitnesses: Stewart Steinhauser and Lillian Shirt, Cree Nation. Location: Bluequills catholic ‘Indian residential school’, Saddle Lake, Alberta. Date of incident: July 4-7, 1970.
(7) Eyewitness: Irene Favel, Plains Cree Nation. Location: Muscowequan ‘Indian residential School’, Lestock, Saskatchewan. Date of incident: August 1944. Date of CBC broadcast: July 8, 2008.
(8) Eyewitnesses: Kevin Annett and Ethel Wilson, Carrier-Sekani Nation. Location: IHRAAM Tribunal, Maritime Labor Center, Vancouver. Date: Friday, June 12, 1998. (IHRAAM is a United Nations non-governmental organization with consultative status at the UN).
(9) Eyewitnesses: Kevin Annett and Geronimo Henry, Grand River Mohawk Nation. Location: The Anglican Mohawk ‘Indian residential school’ (aka ‘the Mush Hole’), Brantford, Ontario. Date: November 23, 2011. (“We are running out of space and have been forced to bury the children two and three to a grave.” – Principal John Zimmerman, Anglican Mohawk school, March 4, 1948). For details of the forced resignation of Pope Benedict that is referred to, see the evidence of the International Common Law Court of Justice (July 12, 2012 to February 25, 2013) at www.murderbydecree.com (‘ITCCS Archive’).
(10) Eyewitnesses: Harry Wilson, Hesquait Nation and Sarah Modeste, Cowichan Nation. Location: Nanaimo Indian Hospital, Nanaimo, BC. Date of incident: Spring 1967.
(11) Eyewitnesses: Kevin Annett and William Combes, Interior Salish. Location: Kamloops Catholic ‘Indian residential school’. Date of incident: October 1965. Date of William’s death: February 26, 2011. Eyewitness to his murder: St. Paul’s nurse Chloe Kirker.
(12) Eyewitnesses include Kevin Annett, Gerry Kiapilano, and forty-two members of the Squamish, Cree, Hesquait, Chilcotin, Salish, and Metis Nations who participated in the church occupation. See a video record of the March 16, 2008 occupation of Holy Rosary Cathedral at this link: Exclusive! The day we turned the tables on child killing churches: Historic footage of the church occupation that forced out the truth – Murder by Decree .
Note: This piece was written by Sarah J. Webster (sarahjwebster101@gmail.com) in consultation with Kevin Annett and all of the surviving witnesses named. All quotes, references, and supporting documental evidence related to these twelve incidents are found at www.murderbydecree.com and in the material referenced on that site.
