Harriett Nahanee - Tsebeoilt : 1935-2007

Harriett once said to a group of fellow survivors of church terrorism,

"I used to be a victim. Now I'm a threat!"

That threat was finally stilled, or so it seems, on Saturday evening, February 25, when Harriett died at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, where so many of her people have been killed.

Harriett was murdered by Judge Brenda Brown, who condemned her, a seventy two year old woman with severe asthma, to imprisonment for two weeks in a cold, unhealthy prison cell for the "crime" of defending her land. Harriett was legally killed by the same colonial system that jailed and tortured her at age ten in the United Church's Alberni Indian Residential School. That system has finally closed her mouth; but as Harriett reminded us so often, it was never able to claim her spirit.

The same cannot be said of the so-called chiefs of the Squamish Nation whom Harriett was trying to sue when she died so suddenly, in an attempt to stop their illegal surrendering of Squamish ancestral land to the 2010 Olympics machine: the same chiefs who tried for years to force Harriett off their reserve for being a constant threat to their whorish crimes, and who announced just after her death that they would not offer a penny of support to Harriett's surviving family.

"There are only two kinds of Indians left: the slaves and the sellouts" Harriett told me soon after we first met, at a picket line protest in December of 1995. "That's what residential school did to us."

Harriett was neither a slave nor a sellout, which is why she was murdered.

Harriett's life began in the village of Clo-ose on the west coast of what her murderers call Vancouver Island: a village nearly wiped out by germ warfare brought by Christian missionaries during the 1870's.

"Our population fell from 3,400 people down to 44 in just under twenty years" Harriett told me at our first meeting. "Then they took the surviving kids and tried finishing them off in the residential school."

Harriett remembered so vividly the day her head was shaved, the choking DDT, the beatings and gang rapes and maggot-filled porridge that was daily life at the United Church residential school in Port Alberni. She was transported there in 1945 when she was barely ten years old, in an RCMP gunboat crammed with screaming, vomiting kids stolen from their villages. Some of them died, and were thrown overboard by the Mounties. Not even half of them survived the horror that awaited them at the Alberni residential school.

One of the children who died there was fourteen year old Maisie Shaw from Port Renfrew. Harriett witnessed her murder, and until the week Harriett herself died, she never stopped talking about what she saw that night.

"She was standing at the top of the stairs, crying for her mother. Then the Principal kicked her. She went rolling down the stairs. She just lay there. She wasn't breathing; she wasn't moving. We never saw her again."

Harriett told this story to reporters on December 18, 1995, when she joined me at a protest outside the United Church's head office in Vancouver. The story was printed, only once, in local newspapers. But Harriett, and me, and a few others, kept talking about Maisie Shaw, and thousands like her.

Not many people want to hear these stories. But telling what we know is true is part of what keeps us who we are, and doing so keeps us free. Harriett Nahanee was a free soul, and so she never stopped telling what she knew - unlike most of her people, and mine.

When I was being publicly stoned - some liked to call it a "defrocking" - for telling what I knew about the crimes of the United Church of Canada against native people, Harriett was there, picketing the building where nervous church lawyers and bureaucrats plotted my demise, and hers, and carrying a hand made sign that proclaimed "504 Years of Genocide: Where is Justice in the United Church?".

Whenever any of us held vigils in memory of the disappeared residential school children, Harriett was always there: rain or shine, braving the shouts and smirks of church people, everything in her aging except her great devotion and courage. And Harriett was there, too, when we organized the world's first and only independent Tribunal into Canadian residential schools, as she tried, and failed, to bring the criminals to justice.

I saw Harriett for the last time on April 15, 2006, at our annual Aboriginal Holocaust Remembrance Day Rally outside Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver. She told me that the Squamish chiefs had threatened to kill her again.

"Why this time?" I asked.

"They're planning to sell off more of our land to the Olympics people. Some highway they're going to cut through our land. I told them I'd be out there trying to stop it."

"Who threatened you?" I said.

"Who doesn't matter" she replied, matter of factly. "They're all the same, those sellouts. They're whiter than the whites. They've been trying to get me for years. But I'm going to get them first."

Harriett tried to do so, too, with a recent Supreme Court lawsuit that sought to stop the Squamish chiefs from being able to sign away the land of their own people: an action akin to telling the fox that chickens are off the menu. Suddenly, Harriett was doing more than just telling what she knew: she was directly challenging the very foundation of the systematic land theft and ruination we like to call Canada. Harriett was threatening to cut the strings of the Emperor's loyal Indian puppets. And for that, she had to die.

In a few weeks, Harriett was arrested, tried, jailed, made sick, and died. The convenient swiftness of her death has not been questioned by the authorities, nor will it be, for medical murder is the standard Canadian way of dealing with those few aboriginals who are neither slaves nor sellouts, and who refuse to do the bidding of the state. In the past six months, I have counted nine such native activists who have suddenly "died of cancer" in a few weeks, like the state is claiming Harriett did, after they challenged drug dealing or other crimes by their state-funded chiefs.

Who will be next?

I will miss my friend, more than I can know; for how rare and few are the souls like Harriett, who remain unbroken and clear, undeterred from their simple task. I mourn not for her, for Harriett remained herself and fought to the very end, and that is her final victory.

Rather, I mourn that the "Sea to Sky" Olympic Highway will now go ahead, over Harriett's dead body. I mourn that 100,000 other bodies of little kids from the residential schools will stay forever buried and forgotten, their mass murder excused, the killers protected and hidden, waiting to strike again. And I mourn that those who read or hear these words will be sad or inspired for only a moment, and will then return to the numbing machine that holds most of us prisoner in order to devour and destroy our mother, this green and perfect world.

Harriett Nahanee showed us how to remain human, and how to resist the machinery of death. For her honour, and your own, share her spirit and do as she did - while you still can.

Kevin Annett / Eagle Strong Voice
February 27, 2007
Occupied Coast Salish Territory, Turtle Island
("Vancouver, Canada")
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