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Sunday mass is out on a cold and rainy Vancouver morning, but parishioners exiting the Holy Rosary Cathedral on Richards Street downtown hear more than church bells.
"Where are the children?" screams a man through a megaphone outside the massive front doors. "Where are they buried?"
Confused churchgoers slalom between handfuls of protesters accusing the Catholic church of murder at Canada's now defunct Indian residential schools. Reporters circle for positional advantage while documenting the protest.
As Canada grapples with its troubled history of native residential schools, defrocked minister Kevin Annett continues to accuse churches and governments of genocide. Serious historians dismiss him.
CBC is there in force. As is CKNW, News 1130, CTV, the Province, APTN and others. The focus of the media frenzy is on organizer Kevin Annett, a former United Church minister who had a bitter split with the church in 1995. Now an author, filmmaker and activist, the balding, bespectacled and soft-spoken Annett claims more than 50,000 children died at Canada's residential schools and rest in unmarked mass graves across the country.
In a gesture inspired by Martin Luther, Annett tapes a letter of demand to the doors of the cathedral. The note threatens the Catholic Archbishop of Vancouver with legal action and asks him to release the whereabouts of the buried remains and surrender the names of those responsible for their deaths.
"We know that there's mass graves behind the school in Port Alberni, in Alert Bay, in Mission," Annett tells reporters. "Right next to the grounds of the Mission Folk Fest, there's a mass grave there."
Holy Rosary priest Glenn Dion beams a smile and casts doubt on Annett's allegations, saying they're fuelled by emotion, rather than facts. This is nothing but a fuss made for the sake of notoriety, he says.
It's a response dismissed by Annett and his group, the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared, who have gained significant media attention since a front page article in the Globe and Mail in January pitted Annett against the newly minted Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a body set up by Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada to hear from former students and from those who ran the schools.
While the TRC is not a criminal tribunal and will not carry out criminal investigations, the RCMP has been told to get ready to investigate criminal allegations.
But Annett wants more. He feels justice won't be served until Canada is tried before a United Nations tribunal on charges of genocide as laid out in the 1951 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Although he has been a thorn in the side of government and church authorities for more than 10 years, Annett remains, despite recent media coverage, a marginalized and lonely voice in Canada's debate about the residential school legacy. Aboriginal people are divided in their opinion of him, serious historians dismiss his claims for lack of evidence and despite his highly public activism, he remains an intensely private man.
But now that a $1.9-billion settlement between the federal government and former residential school students has been reached and the painful saga enters its final phase through the upcoming work of the TRC, he's impossible to ignore.
Annett ran afoul of the United Church of Canada while working as a minister in Port Alberni in the mid '90s. According to church documents, Annett submitted his resignation in writing to the church's presbytery Jan. 8, 1995 after being found unfit to perform ministerial duties. Annett disagrees, saying he had been disciplined for poking around in the church's dirty laundry.
He claims that by 1994 he had increased the size of his small congregation in Port Alberni fourfold to nearly 100 members, many of them First Nations people. He opened a food bank, visited non-members and infused his sermons with messages of social justice. His "open pulpit policy" allowed members of the congregation to speak their minds, and native people began speaking out on residential school abuses. Some mentioned beatings and sexual assaults. Others spoke of murder.
Soon thereafter, Annett says, church officials threatened him with firing unless he closed the food bank and ended his social justice preaching. That's when he resigned.
An ugly delisting hearing followed in 1996 after Annett refused to undergo the psychiatric examination church officials felt was needed to explain his inability to function as a minister. According to the panel decision, which remains posted in the B.C. Conference section of the United Church of Canada's website, Annett failed to maintain the peace and welfare of the church and refused to recognize its authority.
Of the 165 exhibits entered as evidence into the hearing, a written quote by Annett sealed his fate with the church: "My closest definition of evil is that which causes blind destruction; by this measure, the United Church of Canada is an evil institution."
Annett the minister was dead. But Annett the activist, the crusader for aboriginal justice, or the raving polemicist--depending on whom you ask--was born.
Annett defines the meaning of the private person. While countering queries about residential schools with elaborate personal tales and historical rants, he fields questions about his private life like someone dismissing an annoying salesman. He was born in Winnipeg, the middle child of a cabdriver and a homemaker, and is the grandson of 1930s Alberta writer R. Ross Annett, whose work remains known in Prairie writers' circles thanks to a children's literature award given out annually in his name. His family moved to Vancouver and settled in student housing on the UBC Endowment Lands while his mother took a degree in fine arts.
After taking degrees in anthropology and political science at UBC, Annett took a master of divinity in 1990 and was ordained that same year as a United Church minister. But he does not claim to be overly religious, saying he's learned there's a difference between the teachings of Jesus and the doctrine of the church. Theological radicalism runs deep in his family history, he notes.
"There had never been a minister in our family in living memory, but we Annetts are from rebel Huguenot background," he says. "French Protestants, burned out of France by Cardinal Richelieu in 1572."
After his marriage crumbled alongside his church career, he moved on. His ex-wife retained custody of the kids, and he got a liberal access court order, which allowed him to see his two daughters twice a week and on every second weekend. He says he sees them more now that they're of age and make their own choices. He's 52 and lives in an old house in Nanaimo's old city quarter with partner Lori O'Rorke, an ESL teacher.
He describes himself as a public lecturer and consultant with various native and community groups. He considers himself a non-denominational community minister in the Downtown Eastside. "In the last year I've probably been across the country five times," he says. "And that's all been paid for by colleges and native bands."
The honoraria payments for his lectures and occasional donations from supporters cover most of the bills, he says, and casual gigs performing funerals bring in extra cash. "Anyone can do a funeral and get paid for it," he says, with a laugh. "If you're running out of money, show up, say a few words, 150 bucks."
To save money, he no longer takes his car on his weekly journeys to Vancouver. When he's in town, he's got a free room on Hastings Street, just east of Main, another donation from what he calls "people in his network."
He talks little about hobbies, claiming only that he loves to write, hike and read. And no escapist fiction for him. The last memorable book he read was Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, by Steven Newcomb, cofounder of the Indigenous Law Institute in California. It discusses how specific church laws allowed the white occupation of native land in North America.
The one subject that gets him talking is his obsession with residential school horrors. Asked for evidence to back his claims of genocide, he quickly produces all kinds of papers, many from the microfiche archives of UBC's Koerner Library. They include a scathing 1907 report by Dr. Peter Bryce, then head medical officer for the Department of Indian Affairs, which claims more than half of the children in western Canadian residential schools were dying of exposure to tuberculosis. "Schools aid white plague," reads a front-page headline in the Ottawa Citizen that same year, pointing out absolute inattention to the bare necessities of health. A 1911 photo shows two boys with active tubercular sores sitting in a classroom of healthy children. A 1922 pamphlet penned by a frustrated Bryce calls Canada's residential schools a national crime and appeals for justice for the country's aboriginal people.
Those scattered historical glimpses, and the stories of his former parishioners, provided enough proof for Annett to conclude the deplorable living conditions in residential schools were deliberate. He feels the tuberculosis epidemic was but one step toward the planned eradication of Canada's aboriginal population. "Fifty per cent of children died in these schools," says Annett. "How could you have that level of death if it was accidental? If you were to claim that about the Nazis, you'd go to jail for Holocaust denial."
More than a decade has passed since Annett began preaching his message equating residential schools with genocide. He interviewed scores of former residential school students and self-published a book on the subject, titled Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, which spawned a weekly public affairs program of the same name on Vancouver Co-op Radio and an autobiographical documentary film called Unrepentant, which picked up the best director nod at the 2006 New York International Independent Film and Video Festival.
But reaction to Annett's message is mixed.
"He's a total insult to us, a total disgrace. I don't even want to be seen near him," says William Blackwater, former student at the Alberni Indian Residential School and now programs and services supervisor at Stó:lo Nation Health Department in Chilliwack. He's the same Blackwater from the precedent-setting Blackwater v. Plint case, in which the Supreme Court of Canada awarded punitive damages against both Canada and the church to former students of the Alberni Indian Residential School. The decision paved the way for a string of cases dealing with physical and sexual abuse at residential schools across the country.
"I don't know where he's getting his information from in regards to everything he's talking about," continues Blackwater. "And what does he know about the Indian residential school experience? He's never experienced anything he's talking about, so how does one start to believe and support him? His intentions are for his personal glory."
But Annett has supporters, many of them First Nations people who experienced Canada's residential school legacy firsthand.
"I've known Kevin for a long time and I feel he's doing a good job," says 48-year-old Rick Lavalie, former student at a residential school in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. Lavalie disagrees with Annett's critics, saying he's selflessly fighting for the rights of Canada's First Nations people.
Sylvester Green agrees. He says he was a student at an Edmonton residential school, where he says he helped bury a small boy. He first told his story in Annett's documentary.
"There's some controversy about what he's doing, but so far he hasn't said anything that I would be against."
Carol Martin is another friend of Annett's. She became a ward of the court after authorities learned her mother--a former residential school student--was beating and starving her. "Everything they did to her, she did to me and my sister," she says. Martin is now a victim services worker in the Downtown Eastside. She praises Annett's crusade. "It takes one person like him to get up and question the church," she says. "Things are not getting any better for our people. And they never will unless you have people looking at our history."
John Milloy, a professor at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., has done just that. His 1999 book A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 was named one of the 100 most important books in Canadian history by the Literary Review of Canada. Milloy says the book wrote itself when he was senior researcher for the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, during which he scoured the vaults of Indian Affairs Canada and ended any doubts about physical and sexual abuses in residential schools.
But Milloy is uncomfortable with Annett's allegations of genocide. He agrees children died due to egregious living conditions in the schools, but feels the deaths were not deliberate.
"It's essentially neglect, there's no doubt about it," he says. "These people take the children in under their care, they take them in ideologically and they take them in legally. Once they're guardians, they have certain legal and moral responsibilities, which I would argue were not lived up to. The government was a neglectful parent."
Milloy says the 50 per cent death rate cited in the infamous Bryce report was alarming, but said nothing in the historical records supported Annett's claims of a deliberate spread of tuberculosis.
Instead, argues Milloy, many deaths occurred because of overcrowding at the schools, which in turn resulted from a per-capita funding system from the government toward the schools: more students equalled more money, so sick and healthy kids alike were packed into the schools like sardines.
Above all, Annett's suggestions are irresponsible, says Milloy. "He takes things out of context and interprets them according to the agenda he already has and gee, they prove what he wants."
He says Annett's attacks on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission do a disservice to former students who want to hear the truth.
Frank Chalk, a history professor at Montreal's Concordia University, agrees with Milloy. Chalk co-authored a book in 1990 titled The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies and lectures on genocide at conferences and universities around the world. He's former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. Chalk points to Article Two of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which reads: "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
"Intent" is the key word in the legal definition above, argues Chalk, no matter how many of the aforementioned events may have taken place in the schools.
"The point is, the Government of Canada decided to eliminate as much as possible the culture of the native people and to substitute the western Canadian idea of industry and modern skills so that native people could contribute to the growth of the Canadian economy but also have a better life themselves," he says.
Chalk echoes Milloy in saying there was never any intent to destroy natives by murdering them. According to Chalk, the legacy of Canada's residential schools is a case of stewardship gone terribly wrong. "Any suggestions that they were actually trying to murder them and spread diseases like tuberculosis among them deliberately are nonsense," he says.
According to some, Annett exaggerates his influence and support among aboriginal people, including residential school survivors.
Ten years ago, from June 12 to 14, 1998, he organized what he called an International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada. Held in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, it was meant to collect testimony from former students and relay it to the United Nations via a non-profit organization called the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities (IHRAAM). A press release dated May 25, 1998, bearing the IHRAAM letterhead, claimed the association was in possession of hours of videotaped testimony from former students and letters of request for an in-depth investigation of Canadian residential schools.
But a second press release from IHRAAM, dated July 8, 1998, denied active involvement with Annett's tribunal. It even put into question the validity of the May release: "IHRAAM holds no recordings of the testimonies delivered, and no official IHRAAM communiqué has been released to the media or to any other official body with regard to the proceedings of the tribunal."
A few years later, as Annett's popularity grew across the country, the Indian Residential Schools Unit of the Assembly of First Nations issued its own statement Aug. 28, 2007. In an urgent notice posted on its website, the AFN said the following: "The Assembly of First Nations does not recognize the proposed hearings on Residential Schools by the self-proclaimed, non-sanctioned, 'International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada.' This tribunal is in no way related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission."
Annett's overall message, as summed up on page 38 of his self-published book, Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, ranges far beyond the residential school question. His discussion of international standards of morality morphs into an attack on capitalism and Western civilization and finally becomes a call for native independence: "To achieve such a paradigm shift, and justice for aboriginal people, requires nothing less than a revolution in Canada, since the very institutions and laws that allowed and enabled this genocide to occur and go unchallenged are still in power. Only by deconstructing and dismantling this entire murderous apparatus can its crimes be disinterred, exposed, and prosecuted."
And so it goes. Annett has been spreading his message for more than a decade. His latest trek is a speaking tour of universities, with stops for the odd protest and media event along the way. A Google search confirms his campaign through recent articles from news sources--Calgary Herald, Canadian Press, Toronto Sun, Epoch Times, Peterborough Examiner, Bay Area Indymedia--all of which have given exposure to his claims of bloody murder.
The TRC is getting ready for its own journey, but is taking a different approach. Much like a coroner's inquest, the commission will not find fault but will instead seek to rebuild and renew aboriginal relationships and the relationships between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians. According to its mandate, the commission has two years to cross the country and collect witness statements. It has five years to present its findings to Canadians. These will include a historical record on the policies and operations of the schools based on historical evidence and witness testimony.
Back in Vancouver, Annett is at work, nursing a fledgling series of evening healing circles for former residential school students living in the Downtown Eastside.
It's Monday night and a motley crew of white faces pile into a storefront on East Hastings. Those gathered include a filmmaker, a youth worker and a chatty elderly hippie spinning yarns about the good old days when herb was cheap and love was free. They're a group of Annett's friends and supporters here to witness the inaugural healing circle. Annett, clad in a green army sweater with shoulder straps, cargo pants and black boots, looks ready to fight a battle. As if on cue, he holds out a bleeding finger, which moments ago got caught on something jagged as Annett unlocked the barred gate out front.
Stigmata, someone jokes.
"A church official actually accused me of a messianic complex," he fires back with a smile.
They wait for an hour for aboriginal people to show up. A guest tells Annett he failed to come across any evidence showing deaths in residential schools were intentional. But Annett's resolve is unfazed.
"Because genocide is something that happens in exotic countries to dark-skinned people at the hands of Muslims," he replies.
But after 90 minutes, white faces are still the only ones in the room, and Annett is clearly dejected. "This was supposed to be the start of a healing circle for survivors," he says. "It was meant to be an open discussion."
It's not a good day for Annett's often lonely crusade. But for him, it's only one day in what he says is a lifelong fight to expose what he wholeheartedly believes is the truth. "I think more and more people are believing us out there," he says. "It's never going to strengthen at the top. It will be a miracle if it comes out, frankly."
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