All the Children Need a Proper Burial

Two events made themselves known to me this past weekend. One brought me to tears; the other just left me feeling disgust. The first event I learned of was the April 10, 2008 document released by the International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada (IHRTGC), a non-governmental body established by indigenous elders. It lists the location of twenty eight mass graves of aboriginal children murdered in the Indian Residential Schools across Canada.
The other event was Pope Benny the PeaBrain mumbling mass at Yankee Stadium and exhorting the benighted faithful to concede the authority of the church. Since being named as the latest successor of Peter, the pope has stressed his opposition, among other things, to administrative transparency within the church. That is not all he opposes, of course. Pretty much anything that seems to require a functioning brain on the part of church congregants is against what this man wants. After having spent some hours shaking my head in sorrow and incomprehension over the sadism inflicted on the innocent Aboriginal children victimized by the residential schools, looking at any picture of Benedict parading in his fancy robes was like looking at something vaguely pornographic.
The list of mass graves was distributed to the world media and to United Nations agencies, and yet it has not made the big splash in the media that the pope's latest departure from rationale has. Why is that?
By now, the list will have been presented at the United Nations, and the request will have been made that United Nations' agencies protect and monitor the graves as part of an independent, non-governmental inquiry and judicial prosecution of those responsible for what the First Nations are calling the Canadian Genocide and the Aboriginal Holocaust. (When you know that the United Nations' definition of genocide includes "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" you know you are seeing a finger pointed directly at the government-sanctioned Indian Residential Schools.) Hereditary Chief Kiapilano of the Squamish Nation, Chief Louis Daniels (Whispers Wind), Anishinabe Nation Chief Svnoyi Wohali (Night Eagle), Cherokee Nation, Lillian Shirt, Clan Mother, Cree Nation Elder Ernie Sandy, Anishinabe (Ojibway) Nation Hereditary Chief Steve Sampson, Chemainus Nation, and Ambassador Chief Red Jacket of Turtle Island will serve as the presiding judges of the inquiry's Tribunal. They have indicated in their press release a total lack of confidence in the "institutions of church and state that are responsible for these deaths (to) conduct any kind of impartial or real inquiry into them." Imagine the Native Peoples lacking confidence in an institution headed by someone like Benny the PeaBrain.
They have sent a letter of demand to his Better Than Thou-ness and demanded the details of how the children died in the catholic-run schools, and where each one of them lies buried. I do hope none of them is holding their breath on a reply. Benny would just as soon see them all dead as he would acquiesce to their demands for his hierarchy to be held accountable.
Those schools were run by the Catholic, Anglican and United churches of Canada, and they were places of horror, at best. Officials of all three churches want to pretend now that they never existed and so they have refused to respond to the native demands for disclosure of all burial sites, resulting in peaceful occupations of churches across the country, with some of them taking place here in Toronto. Most of the occupations consisted of a group of aboriginal protesters marching up to the front of a church during a Sunday service, and there unfurling a banner demanding the return of the victims' remains, and declaring "All the Children Need a Proper Burial". Some of the protesters are school survivors. I would imagine the pope would like to see residential school survivor Rick Lavallee of the Cree Nation silenced in any way it took to stop him from telling how he saw his brother Randy murdered by a catholic priest at the Pertage La Prairie school. Lavallee and other vocal survivors like him are challenging the authority of the church and demanding administrative transparency, aren't they? Such impudence.
At Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Vancouver, Lavallee handed one of the letters of demand to the priest, Glen Dion. Dion took the letter, smiled at Lavallee and said, "You people are just exaggerating. No children died in our schools."
Such an attitude is commonplace among the clergy of the three churches complicit in the murders of the children, even though it flies in the face of mounting evidence; even though Bob Watts, head of the government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has stated that criminal acts had gone on in the schools - acts that accounted for the deaths of "unknown" numbers of children.
The children who died were the innocent victims of the hate perpetrated by members of the clergy; clerics who saw the children as less than human. Those murderers were members of a clergy who saw themselves as above the need for accountability. You just know they all espoused the same unquestioning acceptance of the authority of a clergy who have lost all sight of the gentle founder of the faith. It is time for the churches who took part in this genocide to stand up and publicly admit their guilt. It is time for them to be held accountable.
Above all, it is time for them to see the children are given proper burial.