Conger

Indian activists disrupted Palm Sunday services at St. James’ Cathedral in Toronto, unfurling a banner and denouncing the Anglican Church over its role in Canada’s Indian residential school’s scandal.

An activist group called “Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared” (FRD) have accused the Anglican, Catholic and Congregationalist churches of Canada of having been complicit in the “genocide” of Indian children. It has demanded the church reveal the burial sites of children who died while in the church’s care over the past two hundred years.

Protestors attempting to read a statement before the altar were stopped by the Cathedral vergers and escorted from the building by police. The Palm Sunday incident followed a protest the previous Sunday at the city’s St Michael’s Roman Catholic Cathedral.

On May 18, 2007 FRD activists staged a sit in at the headquarters of the Diocese of New Westminster in Vancouver demanding residential school records.

“Eyewitnesses describe how Anglican Church officials flogged children to death at the St. George’s residential school in Lytton, B.C. in 1952″ alleged FRD’s Kevin Annett. “Rows of little skeletons were unearthed at the Anglican school in Alert Bay, B.C. in the late 1960’s. Eyewitnesses were sterilized with an X Ray machine at the Anglican Carcross school in the Yukon, during the 1950’s. This church is responsible for genocide,” he claimed.

On April 15, 2006 the Indians activists wrote Bishop Michael Ingham asking him for his cooperation in their investigations, and seized the building after not having received a response for over a year.

While FRD’s claims have not been substantiated, the legacy of European-Indian relations in Canada remains controversial. In 1993 the Anglican Church of Canada issued an apology for its role in any abuses that may have taken place in Church-affiliated residential schools.

On March 5, Archbishop Fred Hiltz said he represented a “church that was complicit in a system that took children far from home and family, took their clothing, cut off their hair and punished them when they spoke their own language. Some of our staff abused children. The Anglican Church has so much for which to be so sorry.”

The Canadian government has announced plans to form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine the legacy of the schools system which operated up through the 1970’s.