Not “abuse” but mass murder! A Memorandum on Genocidal Crimes at the Catholic Kamloops ‘Indian Residential School’

Based on archival records and eyewitness interviews (1998-2020) and the research and public campaigns of Kevin Annett and The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada (2000-2005), The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (2005-2012) and The International Tribunal of Crimes of Church and State (2010-present)

Source of quotes and statistics: Murder by Decree: The Crime of Genocide in Canada – A Counter Report to the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ (2016) – See www.murderbydecree.com

1. From its inception as an Oblate Catholic mission in 1890, the Kamloops “residential school” was an especially notorious Special Treatment center designed to inflict particularly cruel and severe punishment, experimentation and torture on native children who resisted or ran away more than once. Accordingly, like a similar Catholic facility at Mission, B.C., and at the Anglican school in Alert Bay and the United Church school in Port Alberni, the average death rate at Kamloops was among the highest of these “schools”, remaining well above 50% for much of its duration.
2. The Kamloops school was also an early location for involuntary sterilization programs, which according to survivors and government sources began as early as 1929 and continued until well into the 1970’s. Especially intelligent or defiant children were targeted for sterilization. Survivor Sam Adolph was sterilized in 1959 at the age of fourteen, as he describes: “They called us the ‘red tag boys’. At the end of each term, they’d hand out the red tags and if you had one you had to report to the clinic. That’s where I got cut. I don’t know who the doctor was, he was from somewhere else and we never saw him again. But he fixed me so I could never have a kid.”
3. The National Defense Research Board in Ottawa and the National Defense Medical Center in Toronto conducted experiments on generations of children at the Kamloops school, often with fatal results. These tests included denying children food and vitamins and monitoring their physical degeneration; inserting experimental birth control devices into girls as young as seven; involuntary drug testing in conjunction with Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies; pain threshold studies in which children were burned, eviscerated, electrocuted, starved to death, immersed in ice water for prolonged periods, and subjected to chemical and biological warfare agents; mind control programs using electric shocks, prolonged sensory deprivation and hypnotic barbiturates; experimental sterilization methods including tubal ligations, surgical castration, prolonged genital exposure to X-rays and indiscriminate drug testing; and dozens of other tortures all of which are Crimes against Humanity under the law.
4. A particular focus of these grisly experiments at the Kamloops school was the testing of experimental vaccines on native children. These began in the 1930’s but intensified in the late 1940’s and continue to the present day. Kamloops school Principals received financial incentives from the federal government, the Catholic church and various drug companies for providing batches of children for vaccination testing. According to a former Kamloops school employee, “It’s a fair estimate to say that a third to a half of those kids didn’t survive their use as lab rats.” This was and remains a common practice, since under Canada’s apartheid Indian Act, it is a punishable offense for people on reservations to refuse medical or drug treatment Former national aboriginal official Matthew Coon Come states “Back in residential school days, our elders remember being used as guinea pigs by having vaccines tested on them when they were children without their permission or their family’s permission.” However, these practices are not a thing of the past. The present experimental COVID-19 vaccine, along with the SARS vaccine and numerous other untested serums, were routinely tried out first on native people.
5. These deadly experiments occurred not only at the Kamloops residential school but adjoining Indian hospitals operated by Indian Affairs, the Canadian military and the Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada. As early as 1942, Kamloops children were routinely shipped to the Charles Camsell Indian hospital in Edmonton, the Coqualeetza hospital in Abbotsford and the Nanaimo Indian Hospital, all of which were operated by the United Church. According to Indian Affairs minister Neil Parker, “The indiscriminate transfer of residential school students to church-run Indian hospitals is responsible for an inordinately high death rate among our wards. I can say accurately that half of them fail to survive to take advantage of the education we offer.” (1949)
6. The Kamloops center was a traditional hotspot of cultic activity involving the ritual torture and murder of children by top officials of the Anglican/Church of England and the Vatican/Roman Catholic Church. These rituals involved the centuries-old Satanic child sacrificial cult described in secret Vatican archives as the Ninth Circle. A similar Catholic-Anglican collusion occurred in the Mohawk Anglican school in Brantford, Ontario and its sister facility, the St. George school in Lytton, B.C. (See Addendum on the testimony of Kamloops survivor William Combes’ witnessing of the abduction of ten Kamloops children by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip on October 10, 1964, and of Combes’ subsequent death by arsenic poisoning at the Catholic St. Paul’s hospital in February 2013, according to eyewitness and attending nurse Chloe Kirker).
7. In conjunction with these grisly experiments and cult ritual killings, an extensive child trafficking network operated out of the Kamloops center, as in many other Indian residential schools. Sixteen separate Kamloops survivors have described how as children as young as four years old they were lined up “like at a slave auction” and bought for sex “and worse” by local residents and RCMP, church and government “visiting dignitaries”. Kamloops school Principals managed this aboriginal slave trade and personally profited from it, with the knowledge and collusion of Indian Agents and their bosses in Ottawa. The same Principals also routinely hired out students as unpaid slave laborers to local white farmers for monetary kickbacks.
8. Local aboriginal officials were aware of these crimes and actively cooperated in them. Chiefs and Councils were notified by Indian agents and the federal government as early as 1922 that their own children could avoid confinement in the Kamloops school if they rounded up the other tribal children and brought them to the school and tracked down runaways. An RCMP report in June 1933 concerning the recapture of runaway Kamloops school children refers to the “helpful and willing cooperation of the Siwash (Indians) and their Chiefs”. Sadly, this collusion by tribal chiefs included helping to conceal the deaths of children and dispose of their remains in secret graves. This fact undoubtedly explains the refusal of band councils to search for such graves until they were guaranteed immunity from prosecution by the Trudeau government in 2019.
9. Correspondence between Kamloops Principals, the Catholic church, and the federal government for much of the 20th century indicates a constant concern about maintaining substandard health and dietary conditions in the facility to ensure a consistently high death rate, while publicly blaming the huge mortality on “underfunding”. One of the primary methods of achieving an apparently required death rate quota of between one third and one half of the students was the routine practice of exposing healthy children to those sick and dying of tuberculosis and then never treating them. This practice was described by government inspector Dr. Peter Bryce in his 1909 visit to the Kamloops school and a half century later by Kamloops survivor William Combes, referring to the year 1965: “Many of us children who weren’t cooperative were put in with the children who were sick or dead with the tuberculosis. Me and my brother Ernie were forced to sleep in the same beds with the sick kids after we tried running away. They even put me with a dead kid once. Lots of kids died that way.”
10. Body disposal at the Kamloops school involved either incineration or interment in secret graves that were located as far away as thirty kilometers from the school. One of these outlying sites was at Dead Man’s Creek*, forty kilometers west of Kamloops, where three separate mass graves have been identified by William Combes, Jesse Jules, and other survivors. Closer to home, Combes described “At the school they had a furnace going twenty-four seven, but it was totally out of bounds. But me and a friend saw Brother Murphy and a nun take some little bodies and shove them into the flames.” The incinerated included the living, specifically the newborn babies of schoolgirls who became pregnant from staffers. Fellow Kamloops survivor Eddy Jules corroborates, “When I was in Senior B, the girls would get pregnant, but they’d never have their kids, you know … It was scary, you’d hear the incinerator door being opened and hear the big clang and we’d know they’d be getting rid of the evidence. We’d wonder how many kids got thrown into that incinerator.”

(*Note: This Creek was the same location where on October 10, 1964 William Combes observed Queen Elizabeth leave with the ten Kamloops school children who were never seen again.)

11. These deadly practices were applied to all children in the Kamloops residential schools as a matter of policy, even the collaborators. Of the thirty nine Kamloops survivors interviewed by our investigators, all of them described undergoing the following tortures while interred as young as five years old at the Kamloops school: a) routine rape and beatings with leather straps, clubs, metal rods and whips, b) denial of regular meals and proper food, c) unheated, dirty and unventilated dormitories, d) being locked in closets or a special underground prison for days without food, e) exposure to those with tuberculosis in their dorms and cafeteria, f) no regular medical care, g) constant death of children around them, h) immediate punishment for speaking their language including from beatings, imprisonment, denial of food, and tortures like having needles shoved through their tongues, penises and hands, and i) regular forced labor. But the continued position of the Canadian government and its native band council agents, as well as the guilty churches and the media, is that most of the deaths of residential school children were due to “natural causes”.
12. This massive Group Crime and Group Denial is common to a genocidal regime like Canada, as is the attending coverup, rationalization and normalization of the crime. Under the law, the concealment of a crime is as indictable as the original crime itself. The practice of camouflaging the residential school genocide is an old one in Canada, established first by Church and State and continuing today. The most recent and blatant coverup was the government’s misnamed “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC) established by the very Church-State parties responsible for the crime. The TRC indemnified the churches and allowed them to whitewash their archives, censored out of its records any names, references to deaths or actions of a criminal nature, and prevented any lawsuits to arise from testimonies. Not surprisingly, the TRC produced the absurdly low figure of only 3200 residential school deaths spanning more than a century. This Holocaust-denying claim, which is routinely quoted by the media, contradicts the government’s own published records from 1909, 1934, 1948 and 1969 that an average 40% to 60% of children died in the schools, or between 60,000 and 100,000 children between 1889 and 1996. The still-official claim of only 3200 deaths would mean that only one child died every year in every fifth residential school! This nonsense is belied by our records that show that in one month alone, in March 1946, the Kamloops school infirmary recorded the death of six children.
13. In this light, the present secret disinterring by the state-funded Tk’emlups Band Council of the remains of children at the former Kamloops residential school is a deliberate destruction of a crime scene and an obstruction of justice. Under international law it is an indictable offense for the perpetrators of genocide or their agents to conduct the investigation and compose the official narrative of their own crimes, as Canada is doing with the active collusion of the media, the courts, and aboriginal people, who are all co-conspirators in an ongoing Genocide.
14. The government of Canada, its churches, and their sponsors in London and Rome have been tried and convicted of the Indian residential school genocide in common law court proceedings held during 2012 and 2013. Canadians and indigenous people are obligated by law and morality to enforce the verdict of that court and of history upon the Canadian state, its churches, and their agents. The opening of the Kamloops school graves allows all of us to recover justice by overcoming the historical amnesia imposed on us by a criminal Church and State. The present disinterring of these children by agents of the criminally-convicted Crown must stop. A publicly supervised forensic examination of these children must occur to determine how they died and at whose hands. Criminal charges and arrests must be made, and the children’s remains must be given a proper and traditional burial. To do anything less is to defile their memory and any hope for a society free of the murderous legacy of state and church sponsored Genocide.
15. We are issuing this Memorandum and statement to the governments and people of the world. We call for them to bring sanctions against Canada and charge its government and churches with Crimes against Humanity. We call for the arrest and trial of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Governor-General Richard Wagner, and all their accomplices in the concealment of crimes at the former Kamloops Indian residential school and similar Christian death camps across Canada.

Submitted on May 30, 2021 by Kevin Annett, Canadian Field Secretary of the International Tribunal of Crimes of Church and State (itccsoffice@protonmail.com , www.murderbydecree.com )