UNREPENTANT: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide

When I was a little girl, I was pretty cute, if I do say so myself with my blond, curly hair, blue eyes, shy smile and friendly nature. My biggest worry was finishing homework early enough so I could go outside and play. My life was made up of going to school with teachers whom I mostly adored; having fun at a free day camp during the summer; camping; piano, tap dance and swimming lessons; sleepovers; learning how to sew with my mom; pick-up sports with the other baby boomer kids on the block; and family board game nights.

That was life in small town, white Canada.

Had I been copper skinned, I would have known none of these things. Despite my black, silky hair, brown eyes, shy smile and friendly nature, my worries would have been many. I would have been taken from my parents somewhere between the age of three and seven. I would have been sent to a school run by people I didn't understand and who didn't understand me. Punished for speaking my language or following my culture's rules of courtesy, I would have been sexually, physically and emotionally abused. At least fifty per cent of my friends and siblings would not have made it through school alive. When I made it out of school, my relationship with my family would have changed, we may no longer have spoken the same language or had the same values. My community would have been broken as it could only have been when abused people fill the houses.

That was life in small-town, red Canada.

The residential school system in Canada -- where Native children were taken from their parents and sent to live in schools runs by religious orders -- was made possible by the Indian Act. This Act became law in 1876 and stemmed from the Bagot Commission . Legislation was guided by the Catholic and Anglican Churches.

The Indian Act makes Native peoples legal wards of the Canadian State with the same status as children or those who are mentally incompetent. One of its goals was the Christianizing and assimilation of Native peoples into white society.

One of the tactics used for assimilation were residential schools established in the 1840s. Native parents were forced to surrender the guardianship of their children or face jail. The last residential school was closed in 1990.

While the Canadian government and religious groups have recently apologized for the abuse and other suffering that took place at residential schools, no one has admitted to the murder, medical experimentation and sterilization that also took place.

These are the facts and stories featured in one of the most disturbing documentaries imaginable, Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide which you can watch online.

The documentary was the winner of Best International Documentary at the 2006 Los Angeles Independent Film Festival and Best Director for an International Documentary at the 2006 New York International Film Festival.

"This documentary reveals Canada's darkest secret - the deliberate extermination of indigenous (Native American) peoples and the theft of their land under the guise of religion. This never before told history as seen through the eyes of this former [United Church] minister (Kevin Annett) who blew the whistle on his own church, after he learned of thousands of murders in its Indian Residential Schools..."

According to Wikipedia: "Genocide is the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group.[1] While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, the most prominent definition in international law is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of the CPPCG defines genocide as 'any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• killing members of the group;


• causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;


• deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;


• imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and]


• forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.'"

It isn't important to know our history so we can point fingers at each other. Unless we know what has happened, we can't understand the present or move into the future. I invite you to sit back and watch the documentary. (The information shared is disturbing but not graphic.)

To find out more, including what has taken place since the documentary came out, visit Hidden From History.

The United Church's rebuttal is posted here.

Colleen