Al, You Can Do Better Than This

The Republican platform promises to do better. I don’t think they've done so bad.
- Everybody’s broke but them. - Will Rogers

(SASKATCHEWAN) - I've pondered for a long time – oh say about the last 20 years – why my son Kevin can't buy a headline, let alone a feature story, in the mainstream media. Can't, hasn't, won't - in Canada, mostly, because that's where he first became newsworthy, but also in the big American dailies, the newsmags, the supermarket tabloids, the visual media. Or with the biggies of TV stardom, Rachel Maddow, Ed Shulz, Anderson Cooper, you know the gang.

If you haven't heard – perhaps 30 million Canadians and 300 million Americans haven't – Reverend Kevin Annett blew the whistle on the three major church organizations in Canada, aided and abetted by the federal government, the RCMP and the silence of the brain-dead Canadian media.

What he uncovered, documented and has testified to for 18 years on two continents was a 150-year history of sodomy, rape, torture, medical experimentation and murder in 141 Indian residential schools across Canada. What happened to him as a result shouldn't happen to a dog, as the saying goes, least of all a minister whose sole transgression was that he insisted on the truth. He was thrown out of the United Church of Canada and his livelihood, ostracized, hounded, verbally and physically assaulted.

Two or three years ago, when the extent of the atrocities against women and children came to light in Ireland, a tiny (pop. 4 million) country totally submerged for centuries by the Roman Catholic empire, (which the residents had mistakenly judged to be marginally preferable to British domination) the American media went ape with scoops, interviews with newsmakers such as Sinead O'Connor, the lot. Of course, that news cycle, too brief as always, was all about atrocities involving little white faces, not little brown faces. Let's face it, for “the million-footed manswarm,” as Thomas Wolfe labeled his countrymen, Indians and their problems are not only passe, but a bit of a bore. (Not only that, but it couldn't have happened. The churches and church people aren't like that, right? Nasty Muslims, yes; God-fearing Christians, of course not.)

“Whenever we run something on Native Americans,” a reporter from “60 Minutes” told Kevin in an interview several years ago, “our viewership goes to zero.”

You guessed it – that interview with Kevin has yet to be aired on that program.

So I experienced a strange sense of elation – or at least satisfaction – the other night when I flicked onto the Current TV Network and caught their major prime time show “Vanguard,” announcing an hour-long feature with the title “Rape On The Reservation.” No kidding, I thought, somebody in the rarefied air of network television has finally got the message. (I almost phoned Kevin, who at the moment was deep in Mohawk country, practising what he preaches.)

After he was elected President of the Unite States but vetoed by the Supreme Court because recounts in Florida were so bothersome, Al Gore teamed up with a businessman named Joel Hyatt to launch a new and adventurous television network (the parent company's name: Current Media, Inc.). The plan progressed into making a viewer-generated channel aimed at an audience demographic age 18–34.

Current TV has successfully evolved in the decade since, the corporate and personnel details being slightly involved but equally unimportant, except that Gore is still around as a principal, and it has recently blossomed into the socio-political arena with heavy-hitter Keith Olberman (Countdown), who left or was thrown out of MSNBC – again, unimportant which, for our purposes – after a career based mostly on bashing Fox News and other righties.

But it was Current TV's flagship gutsy-investigative-reporting feature “Vanguard” that caught my attention because its announced feature's title sported those two magic words (the alliterative combo “rape” and “reservation”) which would suitably rivet any channel-switcher languishing in front of the set at 9:00 P.M.

Sure enough, it began with that sterotype shot of a typical native village, this one that of Rosebud, South Dakota, the stark shabby bungalows, the skulking dogs and grubby children, the wrecked cars parked in the tumbleweed, en passant a cam sequence of the intrepid woman reporter shot from the passenger seat of a SUV, with the introductory voice-over setting the scene.

The one-hour narrative focused on two cases, a teen-age girl gang-raped and murdered, an older woman raped by her friend's uncle. In both cases, the narrative included tribal cover-up and stonewalling by everyone from band council to the woman's own husband, reminiscent of primitive Middle Eastern condemnation and stoning of rape victims.

For an hour, the reporter and cameraman explored the village, the tribal poverty, its reported “sovereign status,” its totally inadequate tribal and government imposed justice, the degree of drugs, debt and delinquency that saturated its total intergenerational breakdown. The male youths who admitted they believed in male power and control, the native cops, hopelessly understaffed, who testified that this stuff happens literally every night, the elders powerless in the face of absolute departure from their traditional culture.

I waited for some mention of the exterior cause, the abominable history of legislation, of church missions and brutal involvement, of a national government that had totally dropped the ball – and continues so today - while creating the intergenerational genocide that has decimated and conditioned to hopelessness some 550 “nations” in North America, huddled on more than 300 varieties of “the rez,” today, ranging from small communities to towns of 10,000 like Rosebud.

The reporter pointed hopefully – don't they always? - to a band council meeting where the sympathetic elders vowed to tear down the abandoned house where the teenager was murdered. It turned out that they didn't.

She introduced us to the kindly white folks who constitute the South Dakota Legislature, offering sympathy and even hosting “healing sessions” for victims of communal rape and murder.

Unmentioned was the fact that the same South Dakota legislature just last year allowed the attorney for a Catholic Church school in Rosebud to draft the legislation – which the legislature obediently passed unanimously – making the statute of limitations four years concerning any legal action against any priest, nun or school employee accused of rape or other felony. In other words, a kid raped at the age of six now has to get his/her legal act together by the time he/she is ten years old, or forget about it.

Also unmentioned by the courageous reporter and the probing camera was the slightest examination of what caused this totally sick, desolate collapse of a once great culture.

Like I say: Al, not to mention all the other television networks, you can do better than this.

Bill Annett grew up a writing brat; his father, Ross Annett, at a time when Scott Fitzgerald and P.G. Wodehouse were regular contributors, wrote the longest series of short stories in the Saturday Evening Post's history, with the sole exception of the unsinkable Tugboat Annie.

At 18, Bill's first short story was included in the anthology “Canadian Short Stories.” Alarmed, his father enrolled Bill in law school in Manitoba to ensure his going straight. For a time, it worked, although Bill did an arabesque into an English major, followed, logically, by corporation finance, investment banking and business administration at NYU and the Wharton School. He added G.I. education in the Army's CID at Fort Dix, New Jersey during the Korean altercation.

He also contributed to The American Banker and Venture in New York, INC. in Boston, the International Mining Journal in London, Hong Kong Business, Financial Times and Financial Post in Toronto.

Bill has written six books, including a page-turner on mutual funds, a send-up on the securities industry, three corporate histories and a novel, the latter no doubt inspired by his current occupation in Daytona Beach as a law-abiding beach comber.