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	Investigate Former School's Burial Site: Researcher Mohawk Institute Is 'Natural Place' to Look into Deaths of Native Children By Susan Gamble Brantford Expositor February 6, 2008 http://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=890039 STAThe well-treed yard of the Woodland Cultural Centre is as good a place as any to look for evidence of Canada's "genocide" against natives, says former United Church minister Kevin Annett. Speaking at Laurier Brantford at the beginning of an Ontario tour, the B.C. man said Tuesday the former residential school, called the Mohawk Institute, was the oldest in the country and certain to contain evidence of what he calls the systematic culling of native children. Annett has spent 12 years researching and documenting a litany of horrors perpetrated against native children in Canada's 100-plus residential schools. He wrote a book called Hidden From History and created a documentary called Unrepentant, screening a portion of it at Laurier Tuesday. When people call themselves "survivors" of the system, he said, it's with good reason, since collectively they have survived physical and sexual abuse, punishment for singing, laughing and speaking in their own tongue, forcible sterilization, and the withholding of all forms of love and normal touch. Exposed to diseases But more than that, said Annett, children in residential schools were sometimes murdered and deliberately exposed to fatal diseases in an effort to reduce their numbers. "I've talked to a number of survivors from (the Brantford school) and this is a natural place to start an investigation," Annett said after his Laurier presentation. "We want an investigation into the burial site behind the school and we want to start that in conjunction with the elders from various native groups." Annett said he's been told by a former student that each tree represents a grave since trees were planted when a student was buried. He recalls that, during a visit to the former school last year, he saw a poignant bit of graffiti that had been retained on one of the walls. It said: "Help me." At one point in the history of residential schools, the mortality rate was between 50 and 69 per cent of students per year, Annett said. Century 21 Grand Realty Inc. Kathy Slavin. Annett and the group, Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared, are pushing for more specifics on what happened to those children. According to his research, some died because they were exposed to smallpox and tuberculosis in a deliberate way. Survivors remember how healthy children were ordered to sleep with or play near the ill. One school text book even has a photo of children with open TB sores sitting beside healthy students. "People say they had no idea that was happening," said Annett, "but it was front-page news in the Ottawa Citizen in 1907." That was the year a government doctor documented how residential schools were deliberately spreading TB among the children and then denying them medical treatment. "This is a national crime," Dr. Peter Bryce wrote at the time. But the United and Catholic churches today - along with the Canadian government - have downplayed any wrongdoing at the schools, Annett said. One Catholic priest who was challenged by Annett's group last month said it was more an emotional issue than a factual one and a "bit of a fuss" made for the sake of notoriety. Angered by reaction It's that kind of reaction that angers Annett. "They know very well what they did and to pretend it didn't happen is inhuman. I've been shocked at how indifferent officials are to the human reality." The former minister found his world unravelled after he took a job at St. Andrews United Church in Port Alberni, B.C. The first thing he noticed was, despite the high native population, there were no natives in his congregation. When he asked natives about that, he learned that people knew of friends and neighbours who had been murdered or injured at the hands of residential school administrators. "They described children being killed and pedophile rings where children were passed around," he said. When he pushed his church for answers, he was dismissed, he said. At the Laurier presentation, several people who are descendants of school survivors rose to thank Annett or tell a bit of their own story. John Garlow said that he's trying to start a class lawsuit for the "survivors of the survivors." "I carry on my back scars of how (my father) was taught to discipline children," Garlow said. Janie Jamieson, one of the leaders in the Caledonia land dispute, said her people were made guinea pigs. "My mother was not a survivor of the residential schools because, when I was three, she shot herself while I was home with her. "When I say we survived, I mean it to the fullest extent and yet people tell us: 'Why don't you just get over it'."TJA
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