[Indigsol] For Immediate Release: First Communique from New, Independent Genocide Tribunal in Canada - please post and circulate

Tue Apr 15 15:21:31 PDT 2008

 The International Human Rights Tribunal 
into Genocide in Canada (IHRTGC)

IHRTGC Communique No. 1

IHRTGC Officially launched at Ceremonies commemorating Fourth Annual Aboriginal Holocaust Memorial Day

More Mass Grave Sites Revealed at former Indian Residential Schools

Squamish Nation Territory ("Vancouver, Canada")
April 15, 2008

Hereditary leaders of five indigenous nations, residential school survivors and their supporters officially launched the International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada today, on the Fourth Annual  Aboriginal Holocaust Memorial Day.

At the event, an expanded list of mass graves at former Indian Residential Schools was issued, detailing thirty one such sites in five provinces across Canada. (see www.hiddenfromhistory.org, April 10 update, for a list of most of these sites)

This list will be presented to indigenous delegates to the United Nations this Friday, April 18.

Greetings were also read from the Defensoria Indigena, a Mayan organization from Guatemala, and a Cypriot human rights group, both of whom will be monitoring the work of the IHRTGC through their role as international observers.

The investigative work of the IHRTGC commences today, as teams of researchers will travel to every region of Canada and document the first-hand testimonies of residential school survivors, as well as documentary and forensic evidence related to the death and disappearance of children at these schools and at  Indian Hospitals.

Accompanying the researchers will be Tribunal judges, who will convene formal hearings to consider the evidence and issue reports, including recommendations for the establishment of aboriginal courts of justice to try and sentence perpetrators of crimes against native people.

The presiding elders of the IHRTGC call upon all people to cooperate with their work as an alternative to the fraudulent "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" of the government of Canada, which has no power to subpoena, summon witnesses or evidence, or bring to trial those responsible for the residential school crimes.

The IHRTGC will issue a final report to the international community at an undisclosed time and place, and will be part of a wider process of establishing popular courts of justice to try the guilty and lay the basis for truly sovereign and independent indigenous nations across "Canada".

The IHRTGC also issued today the following Declaration  (below), which we urge you to reprint and circulate to all people and the media.

In the cause of justice and in memory of the murdered children,

We are The Elders and Judges of the IHRTGC
contact: genocidetribunal at yahoo.ca
pager: 1-888-265-1007 (Canada only)
www.hiddenfromhistory.org

..............................................................................................

A Founding Declaration

Today, as we offer prayers for the children murdered in church-run Indian Residential Schools and hospitals, we begin a long journey to tell the truth about officially sanctioned genocide in Canada, and to bring those responsible to justice.

We are taking  this step in the face of centuries of extermination, of land theft, and of mass murder in the name of a foreign god. And as we do so, we are confronted by the same monster that did these crimes, and is still destroying our lands and our peoples.

The occupation of our lands by this monster has not extinguished our sovereign identity as distinct peoples, our claim to our land, and our capacity to act as nations, with our own language, culture and courts of law. This self-awareness is a direct challenge to the monster and its constant efforts to destroy us, throw us off our land, and hide and justify its murder of so many of our people, including thousands of innocent children.

That monster is the corporate state of Canada, its state-sanctioned churches, and the wealthy foreign interests it serves. No words of "apology" or hush money from this monster can change its nature, its deadly impact on our world, or its culpability for crimes against humanity.

We  have established our Tribunal to confront this monster and to end its reign of terror and tyranny over us.

That terror began centuries ago as part of a deliberate criminal conspiracy known as European Christendom, of which Canada and its churches are but one branch. That conspiracy has murdered more people than any Empire in human history, and continues to poison and rape our Mother Earth in its new guise as international corporate capitalism.

We know that this murderous Empire destroyed many non-indigenous people as well, and by warring against the rural and poor people of Europe, driving them from their land and displacing them to Turtle Island, caused the genocide of our peoples under the guise of "Christian civilization".

We stand with all the victims of this Empire, including the descendants of European and other settlers who came here as traumatized victims of capitalism and Empire, and who still suffer as we do at the hands of the wealthy  oligarchy that rules Canada and the world.

Twice in our common history have Europeans and indigenous people taken up arms together to fight this imperial and religious oligarchy, during the MacKenzie-Papineau rebellion of 1837 and the Riel Rising from 1869 to 1886. Both times, Empire crushed the forces of true democracy in Canada, imposing a colonial, church-dominated government on all our peoples that persists to today, and has caused the evils of the Indian Act, the Residential Schools and the continued destruction of our lands and people.

Ordinary "white" people have as little to gain from the continuation of this neo-colonial "Canada" as do indigenous people, and accordingly, through our Tribunal, we hope to unite all people in an effort to reinvent "Canada" morally and politically. This, then, is a spiritual declaration of independence form a long and terrible legacy of Empire, greed, religious bigotry and murder.

Our Immediate Tasks

Most of us who are establishing the IHRTGC are veterans of years of political and spiritual struggle against the monster we have described.

Over these years, we have witnessed how nothing is improving for our people, and how a small elite among aboriginal nations have enrichened themselves at the expense of their own people and lands.

We work every day with people of all races who are trapped in a culture of intergenerational poverty and sickness, in the heart of the richest nation on earth. White, Asian, or aboriginal, they continue to suffer and die every day from the effects of a Genocide Machine that has never been turned off.

The most obvious and single cause of this institutionalized murder of  aboriginal people is the so-called "Indian residential school" system, which was clearly a program of deliberate ethnic cleansing and de-population masked as religious education.

This system was an intentional plan of genocide against native people designed by the Roman Catholic church during the mid 19th century, and adopted by this church in union with the government of Canada and the Protestant churches at a formal meeting in November, 1910 in Ottawa.

The purpose of this plan was not to "assimilate" aboriginal people, but to destroy them in order to secure their lands and resources. The codified language of genocide masked this intent under a rhetoric of "civilizing and Christianizing", and this great myth has come to dominate Euro-Canadian culture. But the evidence speaks otherwise, for under this system, more than half of the children imprisoned in residential schools died there.

This evidence of intentional genocide has been so well documented  over the years, including by the government and its churches, that a reiteration of it is not required here. Our aim is not to convince the perpetrators of a crime of their own culpability. Rather, we seek to bring these criminals to justice, on the terms of their victims, and according to international and indigenous standards of morality and justice.

Since the spring of 1996, when the first residential school lawsuits began against the United, Catholic and Anglican churches and the Canadian government, we have tried and failed to win justice for the victims of this genocide through the courts of Canada.

With the aid of state-funded native collaborators like the so-called "Assembly of First Nations", Canada has defined its genocide of our people as a matter of "physical and sexual abuse" in an absurd effort to avoid responsibility for mass murder. By accepting this absurdity and allowing those who murdered us to tell us what justice will be, we have reaped  only further despair, suicide and injustice. While white lawyers and native politicians have profited off our lawsuits and our re-traumatization, those who raped and killed our children have remained free and unaccountable.

This is not accidental. In a secret communique from the Indian Affairs department in the spring of 1997, it was declared that a court process that limited residential school crimes to minor tort offenses like sexual abuse was the cheapest and safest way to contain the whole matter. And yet, the truth could not be contained.

Through the persistent efforts of our network, and especially Kevin Annett Eagle Strong Voice, the evidence of genocide and murder in residential schools has been unearthed, documented and publicized over the past ten years. As a result, we have forced the government to publicly admit that children died en mass in these schools, and that criminal acts occurred in them. And accordingly, we are now at a great historical  crossroads.

Canada and its churches now stand revealed as parties to a crime of genocide spanning several centuries; a crime that they continue by their efforts to conceal what they did, protect perpetrators, and delay and deny justice to their victims. Yet these guilty parties are the "law of the land", protected by the courts and police, and accountable only to themselves.

This simple fact means that the only way to secure justice for residential school survivors is by refusing to recognize the authority of the colonial Canadian state and its churches, and to create in their place legitimate, responsible bodies.

Any oppressed nation seeking to overcome a colonial power faces exactly our challenge today in Canada. To quote one great Irish sovereigntist, Bernadette Devlin,

"We started out trying to win civil rights and reforms from a government that was not our creation. And after a lot of blood and a lot of  grief, we had to realize that the only way to reform a colonial system is by overthrowing it." (Belfast, 1972)

Our Irish brothers and sisters won their independence by first acting as sovereign nations, and winning their spiritual and mental independence from the British Empire long before their political. Their independence movement, Sinn Fein, means "Ourselves Alone" in Gaelic. They established their own courts of law and their own parliament, the Dail Eirean, under the noses of the occupying British forces, and cut all ties with the Empire in their daily lives. But to do so effectively, they had to first unite among themselves: they had to destroy all collaboration between their own people and the British.

The face of Empire is no different in Canada, beneath its chic image of benign "niceness" and liberality. Native lands and people are dominated and ruined through collaborating native agencies established by the Canadian state. These puppet bodies  like the "Assembly of First Nations" (AFN) are the chief roadblocks to genuine sovereignty and justice for native people today, including residential school survivors.

We must therefore follow the only path laid out for us at this crossroads moment: that of real sovereignty, of declaring our independence from the forces that are destroying our people and our lands. This is the motive force behind our work as a Tribunal, since it is only by doing so that we can gather the evidence and begin the process to put on trial the genocide of native people in Canada.

We ask that this spirit and intent be the guiding force to unite the work of all the different groups that are gathering around our Tribunal at this time.

In practical and immediate terms, this requires the following steps:

1. The establishing of local IHRTGC committees in your own community, with the blessing of tribal and hereditary elders. These  committees will do the advance work of the IHRTGC, gathering residential school survivors, recording their stories and other evidence, and inviting the IHRTGC judges and researchers onto their land to convene formal hearings.

2. Supporting the Eviction Notice of Squamish Chief Kiapilano, issued to all Catholic, Anglican and United churches on his territory, by issuing similar notices to these churches on your territory. 

3. Ending support for or involvement in any government-funded colonial aboriginal bodies such as band councils and the AFN; and establishing traditional indigenous bodies in their place.

4. Creating indigenous courts of justice with our Tribunal to try and sentence perpetrators of residential school and other crimes.

We believe that taking such practical steps towards sovereignty can be the main lever to force change and win justice for not only residential school survivors but all our suffering people.

This will be a  long and dangerous journey, but it is the only one left to us. If we are to survive the ongoing genocide, and prosper again as nations and as human beings, there is indeed no other path left for us to take.

We commit our lives and our sacred honour to this purpose, under the guidance of the Great Mystery and the Creator of all peoples.

signed,
The Elders of The International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada

Issued this day, April 15, 2008, to the people, indigenous nations and media of the world, from sovereign Squamish territory.

Contact: genocidetribunal at yahoo.ca

www.hiddenfromhistory.org

Read and Hear the truth of Genocide in Canada, past and present, at this website:  www.hiddenfromhistory.org 

“Kevin is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past.”
-  Dr. Noam Chomsky 
   Institute Professor Emeritus
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“A courageous and inspiring man." (referring to Kevin Annett)
 - Mairead Corrigan-Maguire
   Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
   Belfast , Northern Ireland

The very lands we all along enjoyed
they ravished from the people they destroyed ...
All the long pretenses of descent
are shams of right to prop up government.
' Tis all invasion, usurpation all;
' Tis all by fraud and force that we possess,
and length of time can make no crime the less;
Religion's always on the strongest side.

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