© the other press ¢ Opinions February 25, 2004 Genocide in Our Own Backyard Part One: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Legal Murder of Indians in Canada Kevin D. Annett OP Contributor The faded photograph of the man shows him to be a typical Victorian bureaucrat—stern and foreboding, gazing at the camera and the world as at a wayward child. Yet the eyes betray even more—cold and hard, like the policies they oversaw for over 30 years. Duncan Campbell Scott ruled Indian Affairs in Canada during the formative early decades of the 20th- century, when the legal Genocide of native people was enshrined in the law and put into practice in church- run “residential schools” across the nation. He oversaw what he termed “the final solution of the Indian prob- lem,” with the result that more than 50,000 native children died in the residential schools. But evil is more than banal when it comes to men like Duncan Campbell Scott. Some Maritimers remember Scott as an award-winning poet, a native of New Brunswick whose vers- es were read by generations of school- children, and is described in many Canadian anthologies as one of early Canada’s foremost poets. In his poems, Scott extols the virtues of the so-called “noble sav- age,” the very people who he helped imprison, and destroy in the Indian residential schools. The Indians were a dying race to Scott, a common enough attitude in Victorian Canada—and yet, ironically, it was Scott himself who did more than any- one to make sure that Indians did in fact die off, and in record numbers. For one thing, as Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Ottawa, Duncan Campbell Scott repeatedly turned an official blind eye to murderous prac- tices by staff in the residential schools, including the deliberate exposure of healthy Indian children to communi- cable diseases like tuberculosis. In May 1908, Scott wrote to his counterpart in British Columbia in criminally complicit language, “It is true that Indian children die at a much faster rate in our residential schools than in their own villages. We must accept as a matter of course that many children will die of tuberculosis in these facilities.” One of Scott's employees, Dr. Peter Bryce, had studied the health condi- tions in the residential schools the previous year, and had discovered that over half the children were dying every year in these “schools” because of a “deliberate policy by staff” of contaminating and then not treating children, with the result that they died en masse. Dr. Bryce’s, report cit- ing an average annual death rate of 69 percent of native children was quoted on the front page of The Ottawa Citizen on November 15, 1907. However, not only did Duncan Campbell Scott refuse to act on Bryce’s report, which recommended that the churches be stripped of their control over the residential schools because of their “complicity in manslaughter,” but he fired Bryce and buried his report. Three years later, in November 1910, Scott actually abol- ished the post of Medical Inspector for the residential schools and made it mandatory for all native children to be incarcerated in the schools. As a result, the death rate from tuberculo- sis among Indian children nearly tripled. With such overt complicity in criminal actions by the top civil ser- vant for Indians in Canada, it is a small wonder that the abuse, torture, and murder of Indians became the as : . Duncan Campbell Scott norm in residential schools through- out the 20th-century. According to a UN affiliate, IHRAAM, which con- ducted a Tribunal in June, 1998 in Vancouver, “all five of the acts defined as genocide by the UN Convention on Genocide occurred with official sanction by church and state in Canadian Indian residential schools, between 1895 and 1984.” Since 1994, I have personally heard hundreds of stories from survivors of these “schools,” who describe ritual torture, involuntary sterilizations, murder, slave labour, and organized pedophile rings perpetrated by employees and clergy of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and United Church, with the knowledge and consent of the government of Canada. This joint operation was sanc- tioned at the dawn of the residential school era by Duncan Campbell Scott and his associates in Ottawa, who devised a plan of systematic extermi- nation of non-Christian Indians across Canada in league with the top officials of these churches, at a confer- ence in Ottawa in November 1910. The truth of such intentional Genocide has been officially buried for many years in Canada, and is only now being recovered. And yet its effects can be seen so tragically in every surviving Indian community in our country: A legacy of a near-suc- cessful attempt to ethnically cleanse Canada of its aboriginal people. In future articles, I will document the why, and how of this legal geno- cide. I urge readers to examine the evidence for themselves at . | The Only Good Indian is a Dead Indian, Judicially Speaking: The Bad Guys Win Again Kevin D. Annett OP Contributor This is a tribute to all of the native men and women who will die this week because of a legal verdict that absolves the so- called United Church of Canada for any responsibility for its resi- dential school crimes. You won't hear about the deaths of these people. Alone, mostly impoverished, and awash in a sudden despair born of the knowledge that, once again, the criminals have won, they will end their lives because there is nothing left for them to do. Instead, you'll hear about the people responsible for killing them. United church leaders, for instance, will happily congratu- late Judge Esson, and the BC Court of Appeal for laying the blame for the residential schools entirely on the government. of Canada, thereby saving their churches millions of dollars. But you wont read a single newspa- per editorial that condemns such savings as being nothing more than blood money. Why would you? There’s never been anything wrong, legally or morally, with killing Indians here in Canada. Judge Esson and his cronies were very clear in their decision that par- doned the United Church— they said through their actions that a century or more of mur- ders, tortures, rapes, and steril- izations are not punishable offenses when Christians com- mit them against “pagan” Indians. For if they were, there'd be a lot of priests and nuns and United Church officials sitting in jail by now. It’s always refreshing, in a per- pee Page 10 http://www.otherpress.ca verse sort of way, to be awakened to the shit one is really a part of, when it is suddenly rubbed into one’s face. This latest abomina- tion committed by men in robes is an opportunity for “main- stream” Canadians to wake up to the murder we are still commit- ting on Indians. I would even dare to say that the suicides and sufferings of the residential school victims really have no meaning at all unless they awak- en us in this way. I don’t expect this to happen, of course—why would a killer culture like “white, Christian society” suddenly abandon itself, and admit its crimes? And that is why this is a tribute to the dead, and not to the living, for it is the dead who are more real these days than the so-called impor- tant people, and more worthy of my hope. When justice and hope have been murdered so eas- ily and legally, and lie in an unmarked grave with so many innocent children, then what is left in this land of ours besides the utter absence of justice, and hope? What name do we have for such a horrible void that fills what was once peopled by the living? Or do we even have one? Until we do, and can name what we are, I speak only to the dead, and award them my highest trib- ute. For this land of Canada no longer has room in it for anyone but those who can kill, and pro- tect the killers, and pay for it all. To the dead, waiting to arise, I say only this: your time is com- ing—just as surely as our time is over.