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By Steve Weatherbe
KEVIN ANNETT is back in the spotlight.
The one-time United Church of Canada (UCC) minister has made a second career
attacking the residential school system, and accusing certain churches of
genocide.
Based in Nanaimo, Annett makes ends meet by officiating at funerals, and showing
Unrepentant – an award-winning documentary about his 1995 dismissal by the UCC.
Now he’s teamed up with Vancouver Island director Louis Lawless, on a fictionalized
retelling of the same story. The Diary, co-scripted by Annett and Lawless, was shot this summer in the Duncan area
using Island actors and First Nations members.
Lawless, an old Hollywood hand who returned to B.C. in the 1990s, and directed Unrepentant, said the film never found much of a market, despite winning the New York
Independent International Film Festival’s best documentary director prize in 2006.
The Diary, he hopes, will do better. A story so controversial, he reasons, will get lost
in questions of truth and evidence when presented as a documentary.
“It will absolutely do better as fiction. People can dismiss it as far as its
truth claims, and accept it as drama,” he told BCCN. The story recounts how a young clergyman comes to a coastal B.C. community, and
alienates his white congregation by ministering to natives.
The latter reveal their stories of oppression and sexual abuse in residential
schools, including their claim that they were deliberately infected with
tuberculosis. A diary is discovered that proves to be “the smoking gun,” in Lawless’ words.
Annett’s thesis, readily available on his website (hiddenfromhistory.com), is that officials of the Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and
United churches collaborated for several generations in an intentional campaign
to kill the native children in Canadian residential schools.
The evidence for this lies chiefly with the claims of a public health officer
named Peter Bryce – who, after studying conditions in the schools for the Department of Indian
Affairs, released a 1922 expose of conditions there, entitled The Story of a National Crime.
He alleged the schools were overcrowding their students to the extent that
infectious diseases were endemic, and accounted for a death toll between 30 and
60 percent. Annett has extrapolated this into 50,000 children killed over a
century. The evidence for it being intentional, he said, is that the alarming
numbers held true for a half century. “Nothing was done about the conditions.”
He also claims knowledge of a 1910 meeting of church and government officials
about the plan, and about unmarked burial sites at the schools where school
officials engineered a literal and massive coverup.
None of these hidden gravesites have been uncovered, however. Nor have native
leaders in these communities, or school graduates, come forward to support
these claims. On the contrary, the native community has largely condemned
Annett and his allegations. The UCC goes so far as to urge anyone who knows of
evidence to support these claims to come forward.
When Annett took to the streets several years ago, confronting Catholics leaving
Easter mass at Vancouver’s Holy Rosary Cathedral with demands to admit the crime and reveal the graves,
the Catholic church responded by challenging him to produce the evidence for
the police to investigate.
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Annett said most inquiries have fallen to the RCMP to investigate. As the arm of
the federal government that apprehended the children in the first place and
brought them to the schools, he said “they are complicit” – and therefore cannot be trusted to pursue complaints with any dedication.
Annett said his personal faith in God has been strengthened by the various
events he has been through, but added: “I make a distinction between local congregations and big institutions.”
The UCC’s version of events in Annett’s career as a clergyman differs markedly from the heroic tale now getting its
second movie treatment – according to their lengthy record of his disciplinary hearings, which led to his
‘de-listing’ as a UCC minister.
The UCC maintains that he resigned his posting (and was not, as he claims,
fired) at St. Andrew’s Port Alberni after the district presbytery refused to replace the committee
reviewing his conduct.
The review, they contend, was not for delving into the UCC’s secrets, but for running a one-man show in a very democratic church, and
refusing any direction from the elected officers of the congregation. Far from
being racist, they insisted, his congregation had made notable efforts to help
the poor and include natives in their ministry.
Once he came under scrutiny, he publicly called the UCC “an evil institution” and, after testifying at disciplinary hearings, refused cross examination.
While the UCC as well as the other churches involved in residential schools have
issued apologies, there are those who defend them.
Notably Rodney Clifton, an education professor at the University of Manitoba and former teacher at a UCC residential school, has listed the benefits provided by the
schools on the Frontier Centre for Public Policy’s website.
These include teaching the three Rs, as well as basic life skills; identifying
and treating illnesses such as TB, which students brought with them from their
reserves; and risking their lives in fires and epidemics, to save the children
in their charge.
Clifton also deplores the failure of church leaders to “honour the dedicated service of most residential school employees . . . They
have failed to defend their own integrity, and they have failed to defend the
integrity of their innocent employees.”
September 2009
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