Canadian opposition to the inclusion of “cultural genocide” in the convention was prompted by the consideration that it was neither within the Economic and Social Council’s terms of reference, nor properly included in a convention designed for protection of human life. (121)
This narrow attitude – that safeguarding a peoples’ culture had no connection to saving their lives – reflected the re-conceptualizing of genocide being foisted by Canada, the USA and Britain on the United Nations: namely, that this crime consisted essentially of the outright physical extermination of a people, and that, contrary to all the evidence, destroying the culture or social life of a group was not genocide.
The Canadian government took immediate advantage of this new restricted and emasculated version of the Genocide Convention to ensure that even this diluted document could never be applied to its own actions within its borders. The government did so by blocking any domestic enabling legislation that would have allowed the Convention to be applied within Canada.
Speaking in Canada’s House of Commons on May 21, 1952, External Affairs Minister - and future Prime Minister and liberal paragon - Lester B. Pearson actually argued that such legislation was unnecessary in Canada:
I am further of the opinion that no legislation is required by Canada at this time to implement this convention, inasmuch as I cannot conceive of any act of commission or omission occurring in Canada as falling within the definition of the crime of genocide contained in this convention. (Hansard, Spring Session 1952, House of Commons, Ottawa)
Pearson made this statement at the same time that hundreds of aboriginal children were being deliberately starved, tortured and killed every month in Canada’s Indian residential school system. Later that week Pearson commented again, echoing a statement by a Parliamentary human rights committee and explicitly stating that residential schools “must not be considered to be a crime”. In Pearson’s words,
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The concept of genocide must be limited to physical destruction of a group since otherwise it is an
offense to transfer children from one group to another in order to destroy them. Could it then not be
argued that the proposals to impose integrated education on the children of Doukhobors or Indians for
example might fall within this prohibition? Clearly, this must not be considered to be a crime. (122)
In other words, we don’t want to be tried for genocide, even though it’s happening here; so let’s just
redefine genocide to get ourselves off the hook! And that’s precisely what happened.
Not surprisingly, while ratifying the Genocide Convention “in principle” in 1952, Canada did not pass
any enabling legislation related to the Convention at that time, and didn’t do so for another half
century, during the spring of 2000.
However, this law, entitled “The Crimes against Humanity Act” actually prohibits the prosecution of any crime of genocide that happened within Canada if it occurred before the year 2000, thereby barring any prosecution for genocide in the residential schools, which closed in 1996. By such self- serving actions, Canada has consistently protected itself from being prosecuted for actions within the country that were clearly genocidal, like transferring children to another group, preventing births, causing deaths and the long term destruction of a group, and other acts that were planned and occurred throughout the entire Indian residential school system.
It is therefore not surprising that mainstream Canadians have not been capable of recognizing that what happened to native children in these schools constitutes genocide, since their understanding of the latter has been conditioned to not recognize it when it occurs in their own country. Nevertheless, this attitude does not lessen or restrict the guilt and liability of Canada and its Christian churches for their proven crimes against humanity. Under domestic laws, genocide was legal in Canada, as it was in Nazi Germany. But under the principle of “post ipso facto” justice employed and established at the Nuremburg Tribunals after World War Two, even if a crime was legal under the laws of one country at the time they were committed, it still constitutes a crime under international law and can be prosecuted. Generally speaking, these examples go far to demonstrate that normative genocide is not only a matter of legal custom and language. For as a hegemonic system of control, it is invisible to its participants, whether they are the conquerors or the dominated nations. Such indeed is the experience of genocide in Canada, and of how that destruction is continuing.
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Footnotes: Part Two: Concealment, Containment and Deception
(95) From the July, 2008 interview with Peter Yellowquill.
(96) Correspondence of June 19 and 24, 1903. RG 10 series, File 7733. (Figures 116 and 117)
(97) See the discussion of the Bryce report in Section One of this report, and in its entirety in Appendix One and at www.hiddennolonger.com .
(98) From the Hansard Parliamentary Reports, Ottawa, June 8, 1920, p. 3278. The average of a 69% death rate at the File Hill School was first reported in the Ottawa Citizen on November 15, 1907 in its discussion of Dr. Peter Bryce’s report (see Figure 1). That is, a two thirds die off rate had not diminished at the File Hills School in thirteen years.
(99) The November 6, 1919 letter criticizing Dr. Stuart states clearly that a local smallpox epidemic was deliberately spread from the St. Mary’s Catholic Indian school in Mission to the surrounding reservations.
(100) From an extended interview with Kenny Quatell in Nanaimo on May 8, 2005. Some of Kenny’s remarks can also be viewed in the film Unrepentant.
(101 ) Harry’s affidavits describing these incidents are in Figures 77 and 78. (102) From a statement of Irene Starr to the IHRAAM Tribunal, June 14, 1998.
(103) From a statement by Kevin Annett at a Vancouver public forum on February 9, 1998.
(104) These rulings by the Alberta and Ontario Supreme Courts were followed quickly by federal legislation that restricted the scope and conditions of any future residential school lawsuits, and even denied “healing funds” to survivors engaged in litigation against the government of the churches.
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(105) See Hidden No Longer: Genocide in Canada , Appendix 4. (www.hiddennolonger.com) (106) For a transcript of these incidents and statements, see Appendix Two.
(107) These allegations were made as recently as June 5, 2014 (RCMP) and October 9, 2011 (United Church). The RCMP desk sergeant in the Port Alberni detachment even claimed to Kevin Annett during a phone call that “There never were any reported deaths in the residential school here”. Annett then asked him if he reads the newspapers.
(108) See “Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse” by Antony Barnett, The Observer, August 17, 2003 (London)
(109) A complete transcript of Crimen Sollicitationas can be found in Appendix Four, along with a copy of the London Observer article reporting its discovery.
(110) See http://humansarefree.com/2014/03/pope-francis-charged-in-trafficking.html and http://itccs.org/2014/02/02/pope-francis-is-named-by-former-argentine-junta-insider-as-prime-mover-in- child-trafficking-network-francis-concealed-vatican-crown-of-england-holyrood-agreement/
(111) The language of benevolent extermination goes back centuries in British culture to the time of Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon. “Assimilation” literally means to eat another person, or people, and to thereby extinguish and absorb them into the “body” of the State. See Hobbes’ work Leviathan (1659) for the context behind this term.
(112) From a speech given by Kevin Annett on August 30, 2008 at the International Humanist Convention in Carlingford, Ireland.
(113) Of equal significance is the fact that Nora Bernard was murdered on December 30, 2007, on the eve of the government’s major spin and containment operation known as the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC). No motive was ever ascribed to her killing besides an undisclosed “family dispute”, and the media quickly buried the story despite its topical nature.
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(114)From an interview with Delmar Johnny on August 4, 2005 in Duncan, British Columbia.
(115) Lea, Henry Charles, The Inquisition of the Spanish Dependencies (1908), p. 421. See Bibliography.
(116) This Imperial custom of “reconciling” the conqueror and conquered on the terms of the former entered into Roman catholic theology as one of its so-called sacraments, “the penitential act of reconciliation”, otherwise known as the “confessional”, whereby sins are supposedly absolved by a priest acting for the “divine emperor”, ie, God. The message of re-subordination to a higher power remains the same. See Lea, ibid.
(117) For a discussion of the Biblical origin and nature of an “apologia” as a “reasoned defense of an argument” see http://biblehub.com/greek/627.htm .
(118) Axis Rule in Occupied Europe by Raphael Lemkin (Washington, 1944), pp. 3-4
(120) Much of this account of the events at the United Nations are taken from Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention by John Cooper (Herald Press, 2008) and from Lemkin’s own self-published account in his Totally Unofficial Man autobiography.
(121) This incident and Lester Pearson’s remarks are discussed extensively in Cooper, ibid.
(119) The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future by Richard Rubenstein (1978), p. 31.
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(122) Cooper, ibid. p. 141. |
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Part Three: The Ongoing Crime
A former official of the Indian Affairs Department who spent two years in Eskimo communities charged that there is an unofficial policy of recommending sterilization of Eskimo women ... - The Globe and Mail, January 12, 1979, “Native women told birth control pills vitamins: nurse”.
An organized system of abduction, exploitation, torture and murder of large numbers of women and children appears to exist on Canada’s west coast, and is operated and protected in part by sectors of the RCMP, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), the judiciary, and members of the British Columbia government and federal government of Canada, including the Canadian military. - From the Memorandum on West Coast Human Trafficking, Issued by the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (FRD), May 26, 2006, Vancouver (See Appendix Seven)
Social services can grab an Indian mother’s kids anytime without a warrant or any procedure. More
Indians die in prison here than any other group, and a third of the inmates are aboriginal. Hell, the prison
officials are given twice the amount of money by the government for a native inmate than a white one.
Every hospital in town has an unofficial “do not resuscitate” policy when it comes to Indians in
Emergency. And practically every homeless Indian is there because he lost his land up north somewhere
to some fat cat company. You learn all these things as a cop right away, but like in the residential schools,
everybody’s supposed to look the other way and just go along with the genocide.
- Former RCMP Constable George Brown, Vancouver, April 18, 2005
Genocide has always been a necessary tool of state and of religion. The extermination of indigenous
nations established Canada and has ensured its prosperity. Today, that same annihilation of
indigenous nations is not only continuing but is expanding.
The simple reason for this is because such genocide continues to profit the resource extraction-based
Canadian economy, and consequently, has become institutionalized in the very fiber of government
and society.
It’s not just our women who are going missing. Whole families are disappearing, starting with the children. Our northern indigenous communities are being terrorized and wiped out for their land by big corporations and their hired RCMP thugs. It's the residential schools genocide taken to its next step. – Vancouver native activist Carol Martin, June 5, 2009
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Put simply, both foreign capital and domestic politics require that Indians in Canada continue to be made landless, impoverished and eradicated, and profitably milked in the process. The foreign corporate-driven plundering of Canadian resources is hardly a new phenomenon, anymore than is the fact that traditional native people stand in the way of that huge land grab. Yesterday, Indians were annihilated so that British and American companies could harvest the furs, lumber and minerals of Canada. Today, this plundering is led by Asian capital and the American military-based Uranium industry that is poisoning and killing northern Cree and Inuit peoples off their lands. (123)
The different manifestations of this crime and its social consequences need to be seen in this context and not viewed separately or in isolation, as the corporate media does when it examines, for instance, “the disturbingly high rates of teenage aboriginal suicide”, or “the prevailing poverty rates among on-reserve natives.” Such conditions are neither accidental nor unconnected to the continued genocidal requirement of, to quote article two of the U.N. Genocide Convention, “fostering conditions designed to cause the long term destruction of a group”.
The clues lie everywhere concerning the deliberate Canadian state policy of fostering such destruction of aboriginal nations. The very existence of the apartheid Indian Act, that denies citizenship rights to Indians on reservations and makes them legal wards of the state, is the most obvious example. Such legal segregation of a targeted group is a tell tale sign of genocidal policy. Its aim of keeping Indians poor and dependent is evident in such policies as the Indian Act statute that forbids local band councils from using government money to make their tribe economically self- sufficient by creating local jobs or businesses on reservations.
Significantly, the same restriction applies to any “compensation” money given to Indian residential school survivors by the government. Such money can only be awarded to individuals in the form of a cheque rather than as a group endowment that, for example, could go towards building proper drinking water, sewage and sanitation facilities on the over half of reservations across Canada that still lack such basic necessities.
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The Indian Act also restricts the amount of money a band council can spend on children on their reserve, and even denies the right of reserve Indians to modify or improve their homes, causing many aboriginal homes to become moldy, disease-breeding firetraps. “They can put us in jail if we try ventilating or insulating our own homes” said Harriett Nahanee to Kevin Annett in December, 1995 during his visit to her Squamish reservation slum dwelling in North Vancouver.
The obvious question is, if Canada is not trying to make Indians permanently unhealthy and impoverished, then why would it continue to impose on them by law such draconian, unhealthy conditions?
Another sign of this intentional ongoing genocide by the Canadian state is the institutionalized practice of “two standards” when it comes to aboriginal health care, child protection and civil liberties.
“My social worker Sally Heather told me I had to have a tubal ligation if I ever wanted to see my daughter again after they took her from me” describes Eliza Stewart, a west coast aboriginal woman in Vancouver. “Two Mounties came to my house and grabbed me and brought me to a north shore hospital. That’s where they did it to me. It’s not like I had a choice or anything. Then I had to sign a form saying I’d never sue them for what they did to me.” (124)
Such forced sterilizations and assaults on native women are routine across Canada, and are allowed by the subordinate, second class status of Indians under the law. Under provincial child protection protocols, children in native families can be seized without a warrant or the kind of review and appeal process that applies to non-aboriginal families on social services.
“The child welfare system is just another residential school, only worse” says Chief Peter Yellowquill of the Long Plains Anishinabe Nation in Manitoba. “Today, there are more of our children in government institutions or white foster homes than were ever in residential schools. They’re still trying to wipe out our culture and our families.” (125)
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Yellowquill is not exaggerating. Even Canadian government statistics show that growing numbers of aboriginal children are being incarcerated in non-native homes or institutions, including by their deliberate criminalization at a young age by the police and court system across Canada. Over half of all children in foster care in Canada are aboriginal, despite being barely 2% of the population. (126) Other government statistics reveal that of the approximately fifty indigenous languages still in use in Canada in 1996, only three will still be in existence by 2025. (127)
The general picture of aboriginal life expectancy and standard of living in Canada is equally dismal, and is not improving. In 2007, mortality rates among Indians were five times the national average, infant mortality three times higher, tuberculosis eight to ten times higher. Only one third of native communities had adequate housing or regular sewage disposal. None of these figures had improved, and tuberculosis levels had actually worsened, since a similar survey was conducted by the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) in October, 1998. (128)
The DIA study of 1998 was discussed in a front page Globe and Mail article of October 13, 1998 entitled “Canada’s squalid secret: life on native reserves; Income, education, life expectancy worse than in 62 countries.” Aboriginal people’s standard of living in Canada ranked below Thailand and Brazil when grouped as a nation. Native children in British Columbia have the same chance of dying as an Indian child in Guatemala, according to the study.
The telling fact is that life in Canada is becoming constantly worse for Indians despite an annual expenditure of over $6 billion towards “Indian affairs”. None of these funds are reaching most Indians for they are not meant to. In the words of former Assembly of First Nations (AFN) chief Wilfred Price of the Haida Nation,
“The whole system is structured to benefit a handful of aboriginal insiders, the AFN chiefs and their families on reserve. We calculated that over 96% of the government ‘Indian Affairs’ money ends up either in their hands or is used up in the DIA administration, which is run entirely by white bureaucrats. Nothing gets down to the people on reserve who are dying off quicker every year. That’s no accident either. The local chiefs are supposed to starve their own people off their land and off the reserve with a minimum ‘cut off quota’ every year. That’s why I quit.” (129)
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Wilfred Price’s description of the destructive role of reservation Chiefs towards their own people has been confirmed by Les Guerin of the Musqueam Nation in Vancouver and by AFN documents surfaced by him in October of 2004. The documents are transcripts of a closed, top-level AFN gathering in Calgary from October 20 and 23, 2003 that discussed how to implement what AFN leaders called “the Agenda 21 agenda” on their own reservations.
In the words of the Chairman of the meeting, Wendy Grant, “There’s a whole new society coming and we’re going to be running it. We’ve got to get rid of the dead wood and all the useless mouths, Agenda 21 and all that” (130)
“Agenda 21” is the designation of a program launched at the United Nations “Sustainable Development” Conferences during the 1990’s which aims at limiting and reducing human population levels under the guise of “environmental sustainability”. In keeping with the aims of this Agenda, Wendy Grant – an official as well of the Musqueam band council – has since 2003 forced over one third of all Musqueam families out of their housing on the reserve and denied them education and health subsidies in order to expel them from Musqueam land altogether. (131)
Under the language of normative genocide, “sustainable development” is a code word for the de- population of indigenous and poor people. Numerous advocates of Agenda 21, like former US Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara, are proponents of the massive sterilization of black and aboriginal people, and of imposing “austerity measures” on the same groups of the kind enacted at Musqueam and many Indian reservations across Canada.
Two former members of the Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council in Prince George, British Columbia confirmed this practice in their testimony before the IHRAAM Tribunal into residential schools in June, 1998 in Vancouver. According to that testimony, Frank Martin and Helen Michel were forced into exile from their traditional lands after Chief Ed John – Wendy Grant’s husband – arranged the murder of their family members and terrorized them to surrender their land title.
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“I heard Eddie John say it himself at the Council meeting in the spring of 2002, how they had to consolidate the Nation, is how he put it. That meant throw half of us off our land and cut lots off the band’s welfare rolls. Where did all those people end up? I’ll tell you where, homeless and dying down here on the streets. And then the chiefs made a bundle selling off our land to B.C. Hydro and Interfor. Anyone who tried opposing Eddie got a one way trip to the lake.” (132)
Such band council-led terrorism and neo-genocide against indigenous people is closely tied to the corporate agenda and geo-politics of the 21st century, especially in the resource-rich, strategically vital economy of British Columbia and northern Canada.
Merv Richie is a former newspaper publisher in Terrace, British Columbia whose publication, the Terrace Daily News, was shut down in 2015 after it began reporting the genocide of local Indians and the crimes of the Catholic Church. According to Richie,
“It was the local Knights of Columbus who scared off all my advertisers, one after another. I even know the guy who did it. But that wasn’t just because of my editorial criticisms of the Vatican. For months I was reporting the Chinese connection to all the disappearances around here, and how China is heavily invested in the present day genocide. I also showed the RCMP’s involvement. The harassment’s never stopped since then.” (133)
Richie describes how he discovered that aboriginal lands and their resources in northern British Columbia are being bought up by Chinese cartels and colonized by Chinese settlers under secret agreements with the provincial government and Beijing that have been in place since at least the 1990’s. RCMP officers, native politicians and private mercenaries working for Chinese cartels are killing and terrorizing Indians off their lands to make way for this new wave of immigration.
“I was the only media covering this stuff. I covered the trial in 2007 and 2008 where it came out how Rio Tinto and Alcan through the provincial Premier Gordon Campbell had made secret deals with the Haisla Indian band to sell off their lands for nothing. I even discovered secret military maneuvers going on up north. I guess I just pushed too many buttons.” (134)
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Peter Yellowquill in Manitoba describes a similar regime of official terrorism against his people by the state-funded “chief and council” on his Long Plains reserve.
“The elected chiefs like Dennis Meeches are the ones dealing the drugs on our reserve and ripping off all the money. The feds use them to keep the rest of us in line. That’s why Meeches and his kind are put and kept in power by the government, to control and help wipe out their own people. Our house was burned to the ground and my kids got arrested and then targeted by the band council to force me to go along with their scams. Anybody who isn’t part of their crooked game gets chased out or rubbed out.” (135) Devoid of any authentic leadership and kept in fear by the “official” chiefs, aboriginals in Canada are kept defenseless against whatever violence and depredations church and state, the police and corporations choose to inflict on them, in the manner of any third world banana republic.
This neo-colonial reality partly explains the level and ferocity of the ongoing institutionalized violence towards them, which is and has always been aimed specifically at aboriginal women and children.
Disappeared Women and Children
( This section of the Report should be read in conjunction with Appendix Seven)
The genocide of our people began and it carries on with the targeting of our women and children for
destruction, because once the occupying powers break the aboriginal family that way, we will have no
more future.
– Dr. Douglas Wilson of the Haida Nation speaking at the University of Victoria, March 3, 2007
There is a pattern to the disappearances of all these women. We found they’re mostly related by blood
to the clan mothers from up north who are the original holders of the land. This is planned racial
targeting to get the land.
– Former RCMP Constable George Brown of the Community Inquiry into Missing People, Vancouver, January 5, 2002
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For many years the RCMP and corporate media contained and camouflaged the fact that hundreds of
aboriginal women and their children were vanishing along the corridor known as the “Highway of
Tears” in northern British Columbia: Highway 16 between Terrace and Prince George.
Since the late 1980’s when stories of missing west coast native women first appeared in cursory
media coverage, the RCMP has consistently ignored missing persons requests filed by aboriginal
families. Under pressure, the RCMP eventually produced a media cover story that claimed that only
sixteen women could not be accounted for: a number that stayed constant for years, despite
escalating reports of disappearances not just along Highway 16 but all over the province.
Even as recently as 2014, the RCMP have claimed that over thirty two years, between 1980 and 2012, only 40 unsolved aboriginal female murders and 36 missing cases in which foul play was suspected have occurred in British Columbia. (136) And equally remarkable is the fact that at no time did the RCMP identify where these disappearances were clustered: along Highway 16 and in Vancouver’s slum-ridden Downtown Eastside community.
George Brown, a now-retired aboriginal RCMP officer, ran afoul of his commander in Chilliwack, British Columbia when he began probing into the missing women as early as 1999.
“Their official line bore all the typical signs of an organized cover up, like right out of the old residential schools. I knew right away that an order was coming down to steer attention away from where and why the killings were happening because a wall of silence came down whenever I tried finding out these things, to trace a pattern behind the disappearances. None of us was ever allowed to go past a certain point even after we started investigating the missing women. That woke me up that somebody was being covered for.” (137)
Frustrated and alarmed, George Brown and a handful of friends began their own “Community Inquiry into Missing People” in the spring of 1999. Their investigation began in Vancouver’s downtown east side among the mostly-aboriginal street people and prostitutes who not only were related to many of the missing women, but who themselves were prime targets for going missing. Indeed, dozens of east side prostitutes, over 90% of them aboriginal, simply vanished without a trace during this same period.
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Brown and his colleagues quickly encountered Kevin Annett and his work with residential school survivors, some of whom were the very women being interviewed by Brown’s group. Annett had worked in the downtown east side as a street minister since 1985 and had just helped convene the historic IHRAAM Tribunal into residential schools the previous summer in the same neighborhood. Brown and Annett soon uncovered startling new evidence. According to Brown, “Cops were involved, for one thing. That was confirmed by many independent sources, and not just the women on the street who I assumed had a natural bias against any cop. I was told by fellow officers that they’d witnessed Indian women getting abducted by other Mounties and then gang raped in the lock up or out on a road somewhere. The ones who did it would actually joke about it. But then the woman would never turn up again, ever.” (138)
Based on their own investigations in Vancouver, the New York group Human Rights Watch issued two separate reports in 2007 and 2013 that confirmed that aboriginal people, especially prostitutes and the homeless, were being systematically targeted by Vancouver police for rape, torture and other attacks. But these reports never drew the connection between such deliberate assaults and the accompanying disappearance of native women. (139)
Brown’s group also began to do background checks into the actual women going missing. The majority of them in Vancouver and along Highway 16 who were documented by Brown were related by kinship to traditional chiefly families or clan mothers who were matriarchal “keepers of the land” among the northern tribes. These disappearances were clearly not random.
In Brown’s own words from an interview in January, 2002 while he was still engaged in the investigation, “There is a pattern to the disappearances of all these women. We found they’re mostly related by blood to the clan mothers from up north who are the original holders of the land. This is planned racial targeting to get the land.”
One of the women interviewed by Brown and Annett was Carol Martin of the Haida Nation who worked at the Downtown East side Women’s Centre. Martin described how the disappearances were engulfing more than aboriginal women.
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“It’s not just our women who are going missing. Whole families are disappearing, starting with the children. Our northern communities are being wiped out for their land by big corporations and their hired RCMP thugs. It's the residential school genocide taken to its next step.” (140)
Martin described how the common pattern involving disappeared native families was for children to first be unlawfully abducted on a flimsy pretext by the provincial Ministry of Children and Families (MCF) – an agency actually run by accused child trafficker Chief Ed John between 2000 and 2002 – and then, in response to complaints or non-cooperation by either or both parents, all of the children and then the parents would be apprehended, usually by the RCMP. The family would then vanish.
In more overt cases, native families driving in rural areas would simply disappear and the local police would claim to have no record of them. (141)
Kevin Annett has observed how a similar pattern characterized the systematic disappearance of homeless people and prostitutes in Vancouver during “Expo 86”.
“Dozens of people just vanished from the streets during Expo and were never seen again. In most cases
these were homeless people and prostitutes who had no money or mobility, and so would have found it
impossible to simply take up and leave on their own. The majority of them were also aboriginal.
I’ve spoken with locals who saw people being loaded into police vehicles and driven away and then never
return. When we checked with the Vancouver police about these people, they’d continually claim they
never heard of them and had no record of a disappearance.” (142)
At this time, between 2005 and 2009, the growing Canadian media coverage of Annett’s Vancouver- based campaign to confront local churches over their residential school crimes brought renewed attention on the missing aboriginal women and children. By 2006, downtown east side activists and native women – many of whom like Carol Martin appeared on Annett’s Hidden from History program - were conducting annual “Remember the Sisters” marches on Valentine’s Day that received wide media attention. Growing political pressure forced the federal government to begin making noises about conducting an inquiry into missing women while avoiding any actual investigation.
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