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	Aboriginals Seek Answers By Sean Condon Vancouver Westender [Canada] December 1, 2005 Payoff to residential school victims lets churches off easy, elder says Wilfred Price, a 57-year-old Haida elder, knows the sort of damage residential schools can do to a family. Both his father and uncle were snatched away from their village when they were children and taken away to a residential school in Alert Bay, on Vancouver Island. They spent eight years in the school and were completely cut off their family. "When my father went to school, his father did not know that he had been in school for five years," says Price, who's helping organize a series of protests and sit-ins at churches across Vancouver, starting Dec. 4. "The principal asked [my father], 'How come [you don't] get gifts?' My father says, 'My dad doesn't know we're alive, and letters that are sent home only reach an Indian agent who throws them away.'" Run by the Anglican, Catholic and United churches, residential schools operated across Canada for more than a century. The system, sponsored by the federal government, forcibly removed aboriginal children from their communities in order to assimilate them into white culture. The school environment was rife with physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Price says his father and uncle would later tell him horror stories of seeing large numbers of aboriginal children being buried in unmarked graves. Although the federal government announced last week it would pay $1.9 billion for residential school survivors, Price says the deal lets the churches off the hook. He says he won't be satisfied until the churches admit they killed thousands of aboriginal children and help begin to uncover their remains. "They would take kids as young as two or three and wipe out whole villages," says Price. "Half the children were dying and there was never an official explanation. Still isn't. Survivors and victims of residential schools were the ones they made carry the bodies of the dead out, whether they be pregnant 13-year-old girls, a child that died from TB or from beatings." Aboriginal activists and their supporters claim that at least 50,000 dead children have been unaccounted for. Frustrated with the lack of response from the Catholic, Anglican and United churches, the activists say this weekend's protests are the start of a civil-disobedience campaign against the churches. "The government and the churches have successfully diverted the whole issue to one of compensation for the survivors rather than criminal liability for the people who did these things," says Rev. Kevin Annett, a former United Church minister who is helping organize the protests. "The full range of what's happened hasn't been disclosed and the embodiment of that is the remains of the kids. This is really a matter for the [United Nations] and an international inquiry." Last week the federal government announced a landmark $1.9-billion compensation package for residential school survivors. Roughly 86,000 residential school survivors will qualify and can earn as much as $30,000 each. Annett says he is pleased that the government is setting aside $195 million for a truth and reconciliation commission, but says it will only be successful if it includes criminal charges. Although the government is offering a massive payout, churches are still financially liable. Last October, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that churches are 25 per cent responsible for the abuse that occurred at their schools. Many churches have already paid out millions of dollars in out-of-court settlements with survivors and are expected to have to pay out millions more. But while the churches admit that terrible atrocities were committed at their schools, they deny the claims made from Annett and Price. "There were deaths in schools, but we haven't seen any evidence that the number of deaths are out of line with the natural death rate or evidence of unmarked graves," says Doug Goodwin, executive secretary of the B.C. conference for the United Church of Canada. "We need to focus on what we did as a church and society, and the problem we have with Kevin [Annett] is that he is trying to find something very sensational that he has little evidence for and that distracts from the actual harm." Annett has a controversial past and has been called everything from a "renegade" priest to a "troublemaker". He was defrocked from the United Church in 1995 and has spent the last decade speaking out against churches on behalf of residential school survivors. He has been denounced by many aboriginal leaders who also dispute his claim of thousands of unmarked graves. Annett would not say which three churches will be targeted this weekend, but he adds that the sit-ins will be peaceful and participants will try to remain respectful to parishioners, and that he hopes people will start to boycott their churches.
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