I understand
that you have postponed your European tour to attend the repatriation service for the body of a Canadian sailor who died tragically
in a submarine fire off the coast of Ireland this past week. As a descendent of Irish and Scottish settlers who have
lived in Canada since 1820, and as an adopted member of the Ojibway and Metis Nations, I ask you to show equal concern and
compassion for the repatriation of the bodies of more than 50,000 aboriginal children across Canada who have never been
returned to their homes for proper burial. I am referring to the children who died or were killed in the church-run “Indian
residential schools” funded and overseen by your government. According to the statistics of your own Indian Affairs
department, more than half of the children incarcerated in residential schools died while in custody there, between 1895
and 1984.
As an ordained minister, I have counseled and worked in aboriginal
communities for nearly twenty years, and for ten of those years I have recorded the stories and eyewitness testimonies
of over one thousand survivors of the so-called residential schools. Their stories speak again and again of the murder
and death by neglect of thousands of innocent children, who were buried in secret graves attached to the church schools. I
have personally been taken to eight locations where survivors believe that residential school victims are buried. And yet
requests by these survivors to the local police and RCMP for an investigation of these burial sites have repeatedly been
ignored. I have documented many of these stories, and attending evidence, in a book entitled “Hidden from History:
The Canadian Holocaust”, which I have mailed to you separately. This book has been quoted recently by United Nations
officials, and by the Belgian Foreign Ministry in its denunciation of crimes against native people in Canada. Ever since
June, 1998, when an international tribunal in Vancouver found your government, the RCMP, and the Catholic, United, Anglican,
and Presbyterian churches guilty of acts of Genocide against native people, the world has waited to see if your government
and the churches in question would respond to the charges brought against you by survivors of the residential schools. Your government and these churches have shown by your silence that you do
not dispute the charges of mass murder and Genocide being made against you. Accordingly, I am holding you, Paul Martin,
the Prime Minister of Canada, personally liable and accountable for the crimes of Genocide committed by your government and
its state-subsidized churches against generations of my adopted people. Since your personal silence on this matter
can and must be interpreted as a condoning by you of these acts of Genocide, I therefore expect and call on you to present
yourself to the International Criminal Court to face the charges brought against your government and the churches in question.
Until you act in this manner in accordance with international law and the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide, which
is binding on Canada, I will consider myself personally absolved from any duty or obligation towards your government and
its laws, on the grounds that the latter are in violation of the Nuremburg Legal Statutes of 1950 and countless United
Nations Human Rights Conventions. I will be urging Canadians as a whole to engage in a similar stance of non-cooperation
with your government, including by withholding their tax payments to Revenue Canada, until those persons and institutions responsible for the Genocide of native people in Canada are brought to
international justice.
Sincerely,
Reverend Kevin D. Annett, M.A., M.Div.
Secretary, The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada
