Choosing Between Christ and the Church: A Little Matter of Genocide

Rev. Kevin Annett's documentary (below) reveals Canada's darkest secret: under the guise of religion, the deliberate extermination of native peoples and the theft of their land.

The Indian Residential School System in Canada was an extension in evolution of an older system of genocide that began as early as 1540 in Eastern Canada and during the 1840s on the Pacific coast. It's foundational purpose was the deliberate and systematic eradication of all indigenous populations that would not leave their lands and resources, abolish their own cultures and languages. That purpose has never wavered but has assumed different forms and strategies over the last century and adapted to the times and regions of which it played out as European conquest moved westward across the continent. By the time that residential schools were established across Canada, around 1900, "the plague" itself had exterminated most Aboriginal people in a genocide whose details are largely unrecorded and perhaps, forgotten.

The parents of the children who attended these schools were forced into signing away guardianship to the principal who ran the residential school in accordance with "The Indian Act", race based legislation that legally separates indigenous into a separate and inferior class of citizenship under the control of one man, the federal administrator of Indian Affairs. The Indian Act allows aboriginal people to be expelled from their homes on reserves lands, arbitrarily jailed, subjected to involuntary medical treatment and denied the right to elect their own leaders. Under the Indian Act, native people are legal wards of the Canadian state in perpetuity, having the same status as children or mentally incompetent. This racist legislation has remained relatively unchanged since it was enacted in 1876.

So approximately two decades ago, Annett blew the whistle on his own church, regarding the more than "50,000 children [at Indian Reservation Schools in British Columbia Canada] who died from beatings, starvation, rape and torture, or being deliberately exposed to tuberculosis and left to cough their lives away in squalor and terror: all at the hands of Christian men and women who have never been prosecuted for their crimes." The annual death rate at the Indian Reservation Schools was 50%!