By Steve Weatherbe
Canadian Christianity
August 28, 2009
http://www.canadianchristianity.com/nationalupdates/090827genocide.html
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The one-time United Church of Canada (UCC) minister has made his second career attacking the Canadian residential school system, and accusing the churches which ran them of genocide.
Based in Nanaimo, Annett makes ends meet by officiating at funerals and showing Unrepentant -- an award-winning documentary about his 1995 departure from his posting at a Port Alberni congregation, and his subsequent accusations.
Now he's teamed up with Vancouver Island filmmaker Louis Lawless, who directed the documentary, on a fictionalized retelling of the same story.
Named The Diary, the script was co-written by Annett and Lawless. The film 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, said Unrepentant 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 CC.com.
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, 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 that the schools were overcrowding their students to the extent that infectious diseases, especially TB, were endemic, and accounting for a death toll between 30 - 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 November, 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 Annett's contentions. On the contrary, the native community has largely condemned him and his claims.
The United Church has gone so far as to urge anyone who knows of evidence to support Annett's 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.
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 personal 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. 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."
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