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)