Defrocked Priest Looks at his Former Church
June 19, 2011
Kevin Annett ,left, was defrocked for exposing the full extent of Canadian church and government involvement in the genocide of Indian children. He is the only priest ever expelled in the history of the United Church of Canada. "We loved to mock chubby clerics like Reverend Gordon Turner who once justified his annual personal expense account of $8000 with the comment, "My parishioners are used to be taken out to expensive restaurants"."
by Kevin D. Annett
Reconciliation (N.), from the Latin re-concilio, to restore a relationship or re-assert an authority ... as in the historic practice of re-establishing the authority of the Roman Emperor or his Legate over rebellious subjects ...
The last native person who tried leading a protest at St. Andrew's Wesley United Church in downtown Vancouver was beaten to death by three cops in an alley shortly afterward. So far be it for me to endanger yet another innocent by suggesting we once again provoke the Beast who lives there.
Unfortunately, I came across something today that demands comment, and even action, in the latest congregational bulletin from that church: namely, an invitation to attend an "Indian Residential Schools Healing Night" in the church sanctuary on June 20.
Since there are no actual survivors of that particular church-run slaughter in the pews at St. Andrew's Wesley, one must assume the "healing" is for everybody else, as one might gather from such ludicrous bulletin remarks as, "What were our ancestors thinking when they created the residential schools?"
It's an odd question: kind of like asking, what was in Attila the Hun's mind when he surveyed the next unsuspecting village?
But time fogs such an obvious truth, and allows this kind of remark, too:
"What role do we have to understand the ongoing impacts of our shared history and engage in the process of reconciliation?"
Horror needs to be mentally sanitized with misleading and foggy language like this in order to be digestible to the guilty. So I get the nonsense of this wording. What eludes me is why these church types feel the need to keep telling themselves they're okay.
I'd normally put it down to a latent and massive feeling of culpability by those who are still part of the church that murdered so many kids. The culpable need continual reassuring, after all, especially if the collection plates are to stay full. But unfortunately, there's more at work here.
Consider the place:St. Andrew's Wesley is a home for the wealthy, and was always generically known as "A and W" to my fellow seminarians and I, who looked down our noses at the namesake fast food religion dispensed there so competently by its smiling clergy. We loved to mock chubby clerics like Reverend Gordon Turner, the head guru there during the 1990's, who once justified his annual personal expense account of $8000 with the comment,
"My parishioners are used to be taken out to expensive restaurants".
"Five Course" Gordo has moved on to similarly lush pastorates, but the spirit remains. Comfort is the bottom line at A and W. The present pastor, Gary Paterson, oozes a smug charm that I suppose some people find captivating, and his message is always the same: We're alright, Jack.
I remember the Sunday that my native friend Bingo Dawson, who got killed for his act, had the balls to carry a banner decrying the murdered residential school children into the middle of an A and W church service with a few compatriots, in the face of Gary and his comfy congregants. The Indians weren't smiling that morning, but Gary sure as hell was. He didn't miss a beat.
"We have some special friends with us today" he announced with gay condescension, bouncing around like the professional entertainer he is, the stumbling, tortured victims just more grist for him.
"We welcome them here in our midst and want to remind them of our efforts to bring about healing and recovery ...".
The minister's wooden, lawyer-crafted phrases were not as revealing as his eyes that day, for they belied his own words: they were ice cold and calculating and deadly as they surveyed Bingo and the others.
(l. Johnny Bingo Dawson, Nis'ga Nation1957-2009)
That's the two headed Beast for you, and we confront it at our own risk. Bingo knew the danger, and he went ahead anyway, and for that I will always love him. For Bingo and what he represents will always be feared by the very people who will gather next Monday at St. Andrew's Wesley and pretend and even believe that they only want to do what's right by Indians.
To safeguard their illusions, the right kind of Indian will be there that evening: not Bingo and his raw pain, and truth, but "Chief" Bobby Joseph, the brown equivalent of Gary Paterson: the kind of smiling and forgiving red skin who white liberals love to be around.
Bobby is a happy guy - who wouldn't be, on a quarter of a million dollar government salary - who goes to all the white church conferences and says what the pale folks want and need to hear: that everybody can get over mass murder without having to face it, let alone do time for the crime.
Along with Chief Bobby will be a government guy, and a theologian from my old alma mater, the Vancouver School of Theology, completing the traditional trinity of church, state and hired Indian collaborator that made the residential schools massacre possible. So it's a fitting arrangement, I suppose, if we are to actually understand how the genocide was possible.
The Bobby Josephs were the white man's trackers, sent out to round up all their own children and cart them off to certain rape and torture and often death in the places called schools by their bosses. For that, they were rewarded well, and they got in the habit of thinking like the white man.
"Nothing will be gained by pointing fingers" Chief Bobby likes to say to people like Bingo, and me. Certainly nothing will be gained by Bobby, who knows the accusing finger is aimed not just at the white people.
But that's the wonderful world we Canadians have made, and it reminds me of what Bingo used to say to me, with such unusual seriousness, whenever we held a church protest.
"I feel like I need a bath whenever one of them Christians shakes my hand."
And yet the churchgoers at A and W extend their hands to each other with such apparent ease every Sunday, in their place of reverence, where they and all things are reconciled.
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Independent Tribunal Planned
www.hiddennolonger.com
www.hiddenfromhistory.org
Kevin can be reached at kevin_annett@hotmail.com
