Canada's Holocaust: The Sequel

Reader “G” sends a fascinating link, in response to my posting on “Canada’s Holocaust,” concerning the Indian residential schools:

“I think you should think again ... after you watch this documentary.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6637396204037343133

Christianity was forced upon them on pain of death. Children who didn't convert were often killed. Traditional children and adults were sterilized, a key giveaway of genocidal intent. Why did children die from TB in the schools at a rate 7 times higher than any population in the world EVER?

If they converted so willingly to Christianity as you would like to think, why did the government find it necessary to outlaw their spiritual traditions, and hunt them down in the bush and jail them if they held 'potlatch' in secrecy?

If they went so willingly to the schools, why did the RCMP round up the children with a gunboat?

If the schools were so wonderful as you would like to think, why were the children who escaped hunted down by police with dogs?

You are trying very hard to paint Canada lily white, but you are only lying to yourself: No one believes that.”

Od:
Thanks for this, G. The video, “Unrepentant,” features charges leveled against the United Church and their residential school in Port Alberni by former United Church minister Kevin Annett. It raises some challenging questions. If it is true, we had a genuine holocaust in the Indian schools, involving, as you say, forced sterilizations and outright murders.

However, it is hardly a balanced account: the writer and producer is Kevin Annett himself. This is a bit deceptive, since he is interviewed in the film as if he is its subject. Annett makes very serious charges against the United Church, the residential schools, and even the Indian leadership, up to and including murder, mass murder, and genocide, but does not interview anyone from those bodies. We are left with the case for the prosecution; we have not heard from the defense.

So all we can do with this is try to evaluate the inherent probability of the charges.

Here’s the executive overview: to believe Annett’s case, we must accept the existence of a conspiracy against him, ultimately lasting generations and involving the active participation of the staffs of all the residential schools, the RCMP, the medical profession, the Canadian publishing industry, the Canadian and BC governments, Macmillan-Bloedel, the United Church, the University of British Columbia, the UN, the Indian leadership across Canada, and Annett's wife.

How likely is this?

William of Occam, would that thou wert living at this hour. Or at least your barber.

Annett seems sincere. So are many other believers in many other conspiracy theories. But the charges he makes in this movie are quite reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. If leveled against Jews, or native people, instead of against white Christians, it would constitute a hate crime.

His historical references which can be checked are demonstrably false. He complains, for example, about the Indian Act keeping Indians second-class citizens. To be fair, he should have mentioned that it is the Indian leadership, not the Canadian government, that wants to keep the Indian Act. To quote the Canadian Encyclopedia, “The Chrétien government (1993-2004) stated that it was prepared to abolish the Act, continuing a line of similar commitments made for over a century.” A Canadian government White Paper again proposed abolishing it in the Sixties—and the plan was dropped in the face of widespread native protests. No
Indian Act means natives would have the same rights as all other Canadians. That means no treaty rights.

Annett cites the deliberate transmission of smallpox by infected blankets. To hear him, it was standard procedure, and was used against the Miqmaqs, Algonquins, and Hurons, as well as “all up and down Vancouver Island.” “In reality,” the narrator intones, “smallpox was a chief weapon in the deliberate germ warfare waged by European powers against native peoples.” An honest historian should have pointed out that there is no evidence of it ever having been done anywhere but once, at Fort Pitt, in the US—if then. And it is disturbingly reminiscent of stories of the Jews poisoning wells, isn’t it? It is a standard folk explanation for any epidemic. The designated scapegoats, the foreign element, did it.

Annett, and G above, makes much of the fact that the RCMP rounded up native children who tried to leave their residential schools; one of the ex-rev's native informants calls the Mounties “terrorists.” In fairness, he ought to have mentioned that non-native truants from school received the same treatment. And still do.

Annett claims at one point that Dr. Peter Bryce, the medical officer for the Department of Indian Affairs, found rates of death from tuberculosis at “the schools” of “nearly 50%”; at another point he says “over half” in “all the schools on the coast and in the prairies”; at another point he says the rate “in the West” was 69%. These figures seem to contradict one another. Which is it? The New Scientist claims Bryce’s data showed the overall rate as 24%. A Canadian Dimension piece gives the same figure.

Of course, a 24% rate of tuberculosis is shocking enough. But, as I pointed out in my original piece, “Canada’s Holocaust,” tuberculosis was also rampant—and still is—in native communities. Nor can the residential schools be faulted, as Annett repeatedly claims, for not curing it—there was no known cure. Nor is there any evidence, as Annett claims, that there was a deliberate policy of killing off native children. In the opinion of Professor Milloy of Trent University, who has written the book A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System--not an apologia--the problem was a lack of funding for the schools: “It has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of ‘Let’s get them sick with tuberculosis and wipe them out as a species on the earth.’ It’s the fact that the feds won’t spend any money on this, and that’s what it leads to.”

In March, 1932, for example, Indian Affaris sent a directive to the schools that “as a result of spending cutbacks, it cannot authorize admitting children with tuberculosis to a sanatorium or hospital unless the patient requires ‘care for relief of actual suffering.’”

Bad enough—but to be fair, would the problem of crowding and therefore transmission have been any better in a poor home back on the reserve; or indeed in a traditional longhouse? Probably not; when you are poor, you cannot afford a separate home for a sick family member.

The film stresses that, when Arnett was delisted as a United Church minister, he was not allowed to know the charges against him; and that this violated "natural justice." Leave aside the question whether one's employer is obliged to meet the standards of a court of criminal law before letting you go; the charges against Arnett were obvious. He himself notes being previously informed that, in order to continue in the ministry, he would have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and take further training in pastoral care. And that he refused to do this. Here Annett seems less than honest.

In Annett’s film, many native people recount horrifying stories, not just of sexual abuse, but of sterilization, torture, and murder in the schools. They certainly seem sincere—those tears are real. But are their memories plausible?

One old man, for example, recounts a punishment in which he was put in a bathtub of hot water, to which was added a pail-full of snakes: “black and yellow” snakes, he recalls. The snakes then writhed in the hot water as they died.

Now, if you were a teacher in a residential school, and you wanted to discipline—or even to torture—small boys, is it likely you would find it worth your while to collect a bucketful of snakes for the purpose? For one use? It’s possible; but it sounds a bit dreamlike. A bit too symbolic.

Another informant recalls a classmate killed in front of her by a nun who kicked her in the neck. The child fell dead, and the other children were told to step over her into class.

Imagine that scene—a nun able to high kick and kill with one blow. It does not sound entirely human. It sounds more like the powers demons have in folk tales, or in dreams. And this, I note, reputedly happened not in a residential school, but in a day school in North Vancouver. Those children would have reported home to their families that night.

But nothing was said? Even the dead child’s parents did not notice anything?

Another informant saw a child thrown to her death by a nun out a second storey window. Certainly physically possible—but how likely is it that a woman, even a psychopath, would risk a hanging with such audacious public behaviour? What mere child's life would be worth it? How likely then that no member of the staff of the school would contact authorities? How likely then that the medical officer who signed the death certificate would not alert the police to possible foul play? That the parents would not suspect something? The odds winnow down…

Another informant describes himself and other native boys being sterilized by something like an x-ray. Nefarious, certainly. But if this is possible, why has it not by now become a popular procedure? Lots of men go for vasectomies; this would be much less intrusive. Odd that a residential school should have such advanced technology, generations later still unknown to everyone else. Damned clever, those Jesuits.

So, to accept the tales as true, one must accept a rather high level of improbability. This being so, there is an interesting, and disturbing, alternative possibility. There is such a thing as mass hysteria. And there is such a thing as a false memory.

Five million Americans, for example, remember being abducted by aliens.

Childhood memories are especially unreliable. Even we adults, let alone small children, sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between dreams and the waking world. My two stepchildren once reported an encounter with Dracula at the head of the apartment stairs. They still both retain that vivid memory, as teenagers, though they cannot explain it.

Annett’s anecdotes are just that—anecdotal. It seems possible that all the natives interviewed have false memories. Many of these interviews, according to the film, were recorded on Vancouver’s east side. With all due respect, I think I could go to Queen Street, in Toronto, and with relative ease find as many informants who would report being the rightful king of some place or other, and many who are currently the subjects of CIA experiments.

False memories may even be more common in native cultures than in the Canadian mainstream: traditional hunter-gatherer cultures just about everywhere put a premium on dreams, and hold them to be supremely significant. It is dreams, not the waking world, that reflect the true, spiritual nature of things. The barrier between the imagined and the “factual,” physical world, which seems so solid most times to modern Northern Europeans, is not so to many other cultures; or is, to them, ultimately irrelevant. They do not equate "imagined" with "untrue." Truth is found in the dreamtime.

If we accept this possibility, it too has remarkable consequences. If native or childhood memories are unreliable, for the sort of purposes we might associate with a court of law; if you can find some native to remember anything it is possible to imagine, even quite improbable things; then what about those memories of sexual abuses in the schools, on which the current large cash payments to natives are largely based? What about the native “oral traditions,” now given equal weight with the written treaties in determining just what the deal between natives and Europeans is, and who owns what land by aboriginal right? Can we count on two-hundred-year-old communal memories to be so trustworthy?

One begins to see why even native leaders dislike what Annett is doing. His work tends to discredit the whole enterprise.

And beyond native issues: with childhood memories so unreliable, is it right to drop the statute of limitations, uniquely, in the case of pedophilia charged against Catholic priests?

No; here we are entering the land of nightmare.