Chapter Eight: Coming of Age in Kanata

I was agreeably surprised when I came here to discover what a rich land it is. You can grow corn, wheat and any kind of crop with hardly any dung. Here there are no game wardens or lords over you, no poor laws, scarcely any taxes. This is a land of liberty and plenty where we are held in esteem by our neighbours. We aim to keep it that way.                                                                                                                                                      – Philip Annett, Upper Canada farmer and participant in the 1837 Rebellion, in a letter to his relatives in Wiltshire, England, March 30, 1824

None of us are obligated to hold allegiance to a foreign criminal regime like the Crown of England. Its authority has rested on a false jurisdiction violently imposed on all of us. If we are ever to wipe away the stain of genocide in Canada it will only happen through a Republic that reclaims the land and its wealth for all the people within a federation of equal nations. We must recover the dream of equality of our ancestors.                                      – Kevin Annett in a speech delivered to the Founding Convention of the Republican Party of Kanata, Winnipeg, January 15, 2015

All these battles fairly won had left me feeling like an exile who had earned the right of return. In truth, there was no home for me to come back to. I remained a pariah in my own country, at least at the official level, still blacklisted, shunned and wiped from the memory of the nation, despite having been vindicated. The Empire remained intact, if shaken, and could no more acknowledge me or my legacy than it could take responsibility for what I had unearthed.

But that was just the appearance of things. Beneath the entrenched lie and board room agendas churned the real state of the nation in countless towns and villages or sheltering from the night behind downtown city dumpsters. Returning to Canada in the fall of 2014, I encountered a general discontent everywhere, but especially within me.

Had it been enough? Was there more I had to do? The answer stared back at me as plainly as the eyes of a survivor, or the words of Wolf-Dieter Zimmerman, a pastor of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church:

“I could no longer bear the shame of calling myself a citizen and associating with a nation soaked in the blood of innocents. I refused that association and its complicity by finding a new identity among those who had been condemned to death by my government. Along with them, I looked to a new nation that would arise from out of our sacrifice, cleansed of mass murder and lies, and worthy of the righteous.”

That sentiment consumed me in the wake of my twenty-year long campaign. I could not in good conscience associate any longer with Canada as it was presently constituted. The source of its sickness had to be expunged or its slaughters would continue. And then I remembered that the vision of what could replace it had been gifted to me already by one of my own ancestors: a farmer and blacksmith named Philip Annett who was my great-great-great Grandfather.

Philip had come from England in 1820 and settled with his family on land near what is now Watford, Ontario. His letters to other relatives in England brimmed with a joyous enthusiasm for the “land of liberty and plenty” he had discovered. Those like Philip had found their real home and were determined to hold on to it. They shared the land in peace with the local Chippewa Indians and resisted the incursions of British colonial speculators and Anglican Bishops who hungered for the same land. And one day in the long winter of 1837, Philip and his neighbours took up arms to overthrow Crown authority in Canada and establish what William Lyon McKenzie called “a Republic of Free and Equal Peoples”.

Sadly, our homegrown revolution was crushed by Tory militia. Somehow Philip Annett survived the hangman and deportation, and with his wife Sarah he raised six sons, including James, who begat Calvin, who begat Ross, who begat William, who begat me. Through our blood line has persisted the dream of a Republic in Canada: what the traditional Six Nations still call the Two Row Wampum of Equality between the pale settlers and the indigenous tribes.

We call it Kanata. And in the new year of 2015, I gathered in convention with two hundred other people in Winnipeg to make the dream a reality by forming the basis for such a Republic. Sixty thousand murdered children had led me there.

“Kanata” is a Haudenosaunee Iroquois word meaning “our village”, or more exactly “where the people sit as one around the council fire”. People gather in that way naturally as free-born men and women, and government and economics and the law and religion would operate that way in a free society. But Canada has always operated in the opposite way, by the rule of the few over the many: through the whims of Executive Orders in Council, of foreign financiers, of a corrupt judiciary and a puppet Parliament owing its sole allegiance to a doddering idiot in London. What else but continued lies and bloodshed must attend it all? For it is this political arrangement that has caused our domestic Genocide and compelled it to continue.

Turning sixty years of age prodded me to take up where my ancestor Philip had left off. For too long, my determination to see justice done for the innocent caused me to become type cast within a single issue of residential school victims. But the time had come for my natural political bent to renew itself on a broader field of action.

After our second successful conviction of Vatican criminals during 2014, I knew it was time to bring the battle back to the scene of the crime. Besides, I’ve always loved kicking the biggest butt in town, and there is no more tempting a target than the institution and idea of monarchy. So, declaring for the Republic in Canada and working to establish it as an alternative to the bloody legacy of “the Crown” seemed to be the next obvious step, building on my struggles and our campaigns over the previous decades.

A lot of other people in Canada agreed with me: nearly 60% of them, who when polled in 2013 said they want an end to any ties with the British monarchy. We also had affirmation from International Law, whose statutes say that a government that commits crimes against humanity has no right to expect allegiance from its citizens.

Something unseen brought the two hundred of us together in 2015 to establish the vision and the first steps towards the Republic of Kanata. It was no accident that we gathered in Winnipeg, which has always been the unstated heartland of our nation, the source of new life and repeated efforts to rebel. On the first day of our Kanata Convention, we stood at Louis Riel’s grave in St. Boniface and remembered.

A new spirit animated all our words and decisions. Our gathering was not a typical political convention. We spoke not of electioneering but taking back our local communities; not of voting away our authority to others but actively reclaiming it through Republican neighbourhood assemblies. But imagining let alone taking such steps requires a personal quality missing in too many people: the capacity to take responsibility for oneself and our world in the face of a growing corporate tyranny.

My Metis relatives embodied that spirit of self-reliance when they called themselves Oo-tee-pem-soo-uck, which means, “The people who own themselves”. That’s a hard concept and an even more difficult practice for Canadians, who for generations have been born and bred into a colonial servitude as self-described “subjects” of a foreign monarch. The idea of self-governance, that the people and not the state are the source of sovereignty and authority, is the basis of our vision of Kanata. And yet it is a treasonable notion within “official” Canada.

Nevertheless, over the years that followed our formation of a Republican movement we struggled in a hundred different communities to make that vision a reality. We issued a Proclamation that declared our sovereign independence from the Crown and offered citizenship to people who renounced their allegiance to that foreign power. We established local Republican Assemblies and broadcast our message through a new radio program called Radio Free Kanata – and later, Here We Stand. And we replaced “Crown” legal authority by creating local Common Law Courts and trained Republican Sheriffs to enforce their warrants and verdicts.

Naturally, many of these first efforts failed. Our resources were meager and our numbers too few. More importantly, we learned firsthand the unwillingness of people to risk and embrace a revolutionary change in the absence of a working alternative to the status quo - something they can safely belong to. Even the most enthusiastic Republicans have retained a “wait and see” attitude to the movement, expecting someone else to bring in the new society for them.

If I thought child torture and genocide were tough mental sledding for most people in Canada, it pales in comparison to their reaction to the idea that they are free to take the law and political authority into their own hands. They don’t seem capable of even imagining doing so.

In his own campaign to free his people from their many attachments to the British Empire, Mohandas Gandhi observed that without first winning their mental and spiritual independence from that power, political sovereignty would be impossible, since the Indians would simply replicate the old masters in new form. History proved him right.

Canadians have still not come of age or won their independence. They don’t know how to do so, having missed the liberating catharsis of revolution and civil war that cuts the umbilical cord to the past and allows a new self-definition.

Ruled and bled by successive Empires, dependent on foreign markets and agendas, our country’s objective condition was best summed up in the 18^th century by Louis the Fourteenth’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, when she declared,

“Canada exists only to provide me with furs.”

Replace the latter with fish and timber, then wheat, oil, uranium and natural gas, and change the speaker to the British, then the Americans, and now the Chinese, and you’ll have a concise economic history of Canada.

Our political condition has remained equally retarded and colonized, ruled as we are by a Governor-General appointed by a foreign monarch to whom every politician, cop, judge and civil servant takes an oath of personal loyalty. Such a dependent animus imbues our entire culture, producing the deadly but accurate cliché of the terminally “nice” Canadian who will sacrifice anything, starting with his own ethics and convictions, rather than upset authority and convention and thereby develop a personality.

In many ways, Canadians are just like the Indians they made into enslaved “wards of the state”, stuck in infancy without a legal or sovereign personhood. Canada is invisible to the rest of the world, and especially to America, because in a real sense it doesn’t exist. It’s not a nation that was born as much as an arrangement that was made. And never having found its own birth-bestowed identity, Canada’s maturation has remained arrested, like a toddler who never learns to move and think freely or develop an individuated personality.

Coming home to such infantilism after having unsettled the oldest criminal power in the world made my ostracism by my own people easier to bear. I had found the broad view and learned not take Canada too seriously, especially as I encountered once again the smug self-satisfaction possessed by Canucks of every political stripe. Struggle as I did to raise the banner of the Republic of Kanata in the face of the endemic fear and caution of Canadians, I knew that my efforts were for now like tossing seeds onto parched prairie soil. It might take many seasons and storms for any of them to sprout.

In the meantime, I began to chronicle all that I had done.

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Over the next four years I wrote ten books. My tomes included all my research on the Canadian Holocaust, several biographical pieces, the case for the Republic of Kanata and a series of “how to” manuals on the common law and surviving as a whistleblower. I also crafted a play called “The Land of No-One”, which showed the impact of the murderous medical extermination of Indian children on the life of one of the white Canadian families responsible for it.

Despite its “controversial” theme, the play was enthusiastically picked up on two occasions by theatre companies in Duncan, BC and Toronto, during 2017 and 2018. Both times, the play was shut down before it could be produced. While none of the erstwhile supporters of cast and crew wanted to say why they suddenly bailed on the play, its extinguishing was undoubtedly caused by the same forces that routinely cause my books to vanish without a trace from libraries across Canada.

This shutdown campaign sometimes reaches ludicrous proportions. In the spring of 2019, one of my supporters in the small town of Owen Sound, Ontario booked me in to the local library to read from my latest book The Border. Two days later, my friend called me up in a very distraught state to say that the library had cancelled my event.

“The head librarian said they didn’t approve of you as the author” he said. “When I pressed her why, she actually admitted that she’d been instructed not to allow you to speak or even to carry your books.”

Ah, the joys of the Blacklist. Oddly, these incidents have bothered me less the more they’ve happened. In fact, I’ve learned to take inspiration from such persecution, in the attitude of the native man who told me long ago in a healing circle in Nanaimo,   

“If you got canned by the United Church, you must have done something right!”.

Being under a big boot can crush us or raise us to new heights. Repression has elevated me. Rather than feeling discouraged by being attacked and marginalized, I learned that such unrelenting repression is the lot of anyone who poses a genuine threat to the system. Joe Hendsbee taught me that when I was eighteen. The old guy used to take delight in recounting as if they were battle honors the litany of firings, assaults and smear campaigns he’d endured non-stop for a half century. These unrelenting attacks were reassuring to him at the end of his life because they were the living proof that he had never sold out or given up, and that he still had the bad guys worried.

That’s something our supposedly bigger enemies don’t understand - that all their arrows and calculated venom aimed our way only help us over the long run because they keep us strong and our example and memory alive. Provided we don’t ever give up, our corporate adversaries don’t know how to handle us. And so short of killing us, which just creates a martyr and an enduring place for us in history, they can only use their fixed methods of trying to isolate and discredit us. It’s like engaging with a stuck record. And anything stuck can be outmaneuvered.

I learned this from time and suffering and have tried to pass on what I know to younger generations. But even notwithstanding their mental befuddlement by their mind-numbing technologies, the latter have been somewhat less than willing to listen. For as another good buddy of mine named Antonio Gramsci pointed out from within one of Benito Mussolini’s prisons in 1937,

“Illusion is the most tenacious quality of the human mind. History teaches but it has no pupils.”

As our slice of history, our own experience is our best teacher. But none of us have been taught to believe in ourselves or our own judgements and lessons. In the workshops that I conduct with people, the first question I pose to them is this:

“What have you learned?”.

And then I ask them,

“How are you applying what you’ve learned in your own life?”.

The rest is up to them. But that step requires a self-reliance that is still foreign to most people. Continually I am asked,

“Okay Kevin, I agree with you, but what do we do next?”.

“That’s for you to answer” I reply.

That response is the litmus test that separates the chosen ones from the herd. A few people know what to do and go about doing it. They become the spark that ignites others, often unintentionally. But they are usually only a very few.

I’ve spent my recent years seeking out that remnant. Most of them are in hiding, often from themselves. A few of the few remain public and clear-sighted and resolved to fight the Thing to the death. But over time and from their many wounds, they’ve become the ultimate individualists, unable to believe that trusting and working with others like them will yield anything but more defeat.

In fairness, I find the same distrust in myself: one of the downsides of having had too much experience. With growing awareness of what we face comes a world weariness that can immobilize the best of us. Even love must rest, wrote Byron.

That said, my life, like New York City, somehow keeps managing to continue. I’ve been blessed throughout my years with a sense of high purpose and a resolve that’s brought me through the worst of times. But as well, and even as a boy, I’ve enjoyed an inner peace and equilibrium that intensified the older I became and has remained unaffected by circumstance. I call this the ability to find the eternity that is present within each moment. As an aged man I’ve appreciated more than ever the best prescription of Marcus Aurelius: namely to find our best recreation and recovery within the sanctuary of our own mind. All else seems secondary, like a passing wind outside our home.

Perhaps that is why it’s been possible for me to write sixteen books amid all my battles. In the created written word translated from our deepest heart, the corruption and madness of the world has no place. To create, to find meaning, to love completely and to fight to the end for who and what we love: these are our very human answers to the Great Cosmic Shrug. Without them we become the well-clad ghost people who wander city streets and daily routine in a journey that leads nowhere.

The Republic we imagine begins as a place for the righteous remnant, the realm of eternity that Jesus spoke of and ushered into the world by being it. Like our virtues and our failings, that new nation cannot be denied even if it cannot be perceived. 

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