A-list message, [A-List] Part 2 Response to Canadian Government Proposals

Response:

The proposals of the Canadian Government amount to a rapist proposing that the rape victim be "grateful" for pulling it out part of the way. First Nations have had their own traditional systems of governance, law and cultural/physical survival--far advanced of those of the Wasicu--for thousands of years and will never submit to those intent on our extermination determining anything about our legitimate forms, scopes, content and institutions of self-governance. Nationhood, a matter of facts on the ground and international law, not dependent in any way upon recognition or non-recognition by any other nations or parties, once established, confers automatically, under international law, derivative rights to sovereignty, independence, self-detrmination and freedom from extermination or meddling in internal affairs covered by sovereignty. We ask for and beg for nothing from the U.S. and Canadian Governments we simply demand, and will continue to demand in any venue we can reach, that the genocide stop, that reparations be paid, that our rights to sovereignty, independence, self-determination, self-governance (as defined by the Blackfoot collectively and in accordance with traditional Ways) be recognized under the same authority that nations like the U.S. and Canada assert the same for themselves.

Jim C.

"Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination--by starvation and uneven combat--of the 'Red Savages' who could not be tamed by captivity." ("Adolf Hitler" by John Toland, p. 702)

"Set the blood-quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed...and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens,the federal government will finally be freed from its persistent Indian problem." (Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West" p338)

Government paper warns of risks of apologizing for residential schools

WENDY COX July 27, 1998 from Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA (CP) - Government officials were urged two years ago to provide a compensation package to aboriginal people who suffered in residential schools as an attempt to control the potentially explosive costs of lawsuits, an internal document shows. The report, stamped Secret and obtained by The Canadian Press, compares the pros and cons of forcing claimants to go to court with offering financial redress to victims. It concludes that in the long run, compensation would be cheaper.

"The number of individual claims as well as any negative implications for the federal government in defending such actions (lawsuits) would likely be minimized if a government policy, including some form of redress package, were adapted," says the 20-page report. The document also warns against using the word "apology," preferring instead "an acknowledgment or _expression_ of regret." "It could be worded in such a fashion so as to not lay blame on anyone."

Government officials confirmed the report, which is titled simply Residential Schools Discussion Paper, was written in late 1995 or early 1996 for Ron Irwin, then the minister of Indian Affairs. It may also have been prepared for the Justice Department. The report never reached current Indian Affairs Minister Jane Stewart and the advice in it never formed the basis for actions she later took, officials say. Earlier this year, Stewart issued a Statement of Reconciliation, saying the government was "deeply sorry" for those who suffered the "tragedy" of physical and sexual abuse at the schools.

The statement also included a $350-million healing fund. "It was critical that the apology meant something to us," said Shawn Tupper, spokesman for the minister on the residential schools file. "We can point to (the $350-million healing fund) and say we're actually doing something substantive to back it up." The statement has been accepted by national Chief Phil Fontaine, however other native leaders said at the time that it wasn't good enough. But critics who have read the 1996 document say the federal government has followed the advice to the letter. They say it's evidence the statement is not an apology at all but merely an attempt to control costs. Ovide Mercredi, a former national chief, said the document shows "the minister didn't follow her heart or her sense of justice." "She followed legal advice and the advice was to reduce legal liability at all costs and the government measure is designed to do that." Fontaine was unavailable for comment.

The document advises that forcing former students to take the government to court would ensure they would have to prove their claims. As an added advantage, it would also limit lawsuits, the report states.

"There is a general disinclination by persons who have suffered abuse to testify on such a personal and painful matter in a public and adversarial forum," the report says.

"A litigation approach may well keep the number of claimants down to a minimum."

However, going to court would cost the government dearly in money and in bad press, the report concludes. The author, who is unnamed, recommends a compensation package instead. Since the report was written, thousands of former students have joined class action suits or have filed individual lawsuits against the federal government. A landmark B.C. court ruling last month declared for the first time that both the federal government and the United Church are legally liable for widespread sexual and physical abuse at a Port Alberni, B.C., school and ordered them to compensate about 30 former students. A figure for the compensation has not yet been decided. The mounting lawsuits are anticipated in the 1996 report, but the document also cautions that apologizing is dangerous territory.

"Whatever it is called, the department will want to ensure that the statement cannot subsequently be used to establish a cause of action against the Crown in any particular individual cause," it states. "It would appear that this government is committed to looking ahead and in these tough economic times, it would not want to be involved in anything that is too expensive or linked to the past." Tupper said the department's thinking has evolved since the report. When asked at a news conference last January if the statement of reconciliation was an apology, Stewart responded yes. "In our view, the statement of reconciliation is not an acknowledgment of guilt in a court of law," Tupper said. It is an acknowledgment of a historic policy and the negative impacts of that policy and it is a commitment to do something about it."

However, John McKiggan, a lawyer for about 800 former students at the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School in Nova Scotia, said the internal document reveals the federal government's strategy. "There is an amazing similarity between the present and suggestions made in the paper," he said. "The statement of reconciliation does not apologize for government actions. It recognizes the pain. It doesn't admit responsibility for that

From "Hitler and his Secret Partners: Contributions, Loot and Rewards, 1933-1945" by James Pool, Pocket Books, N.Y. 1997

"Always contemptuous of the Russians, Hitler said: 'For them the word 'liberty' means the right to wash only on feast-days. If we arrive bringing soft soap, we'll obtain no sympathy...There's only one duty: To Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.'[Hitler's Secret Conversations, p. 57]. He saw a parallel between his effort to conquer and colonize land in Russia with the conquest of the American West by the white man and the subjugation of the Indians or 'Redskins'. 'I don't see why,' he said, 'a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don't think about the despoiled Indians.' [Ibid. p 57] " (Pool, pp. 254-55)

"Hitler did not approach the problem of extermination of the Jews haphazardly. He had carefully studied some of the most prominent examples of mass murder in history. His four principal inspirations were the slaughter of American Indians, the killing of the Armenians by the Turks, the Red Terror during the Communist revolution in Russia, and the Japanese butchery at Nanking in 1977." (Pool, pp 272-273)

"Hitler drew another example of mass murder from American history. Since his youth, he had been obsessed with the Wild West stories of Karl May. He viewed the fighting between the cowboys and Indians in racial terms. In many of his speeches he referred with admiration to the victory of the white race in settling the American continent and driving out the inferior peoples, the Indians. With great fascination he listened to stories, which some of his associates who had been in America told him about the massacres of the Indians by the U.S. Calvary.

He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government's forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate p[olicy of extermination. Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations for his plans of the Holocaust is hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large 'reservation' in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease." (Pool, pp. 273-274)

"It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the FINAL SOLUTION OF OUR INDIAN PROBLEM."(Department of Indian Affairs Superintendent D.C. Scott to B.C. Indian Agent-General Major D. McKay,DIA Archives, RG 10 series). April 12, 1910 (emphasis added)