The Last Hundred Years

The system also drew in some Presbyterian schools alongside the Catholic, Anglican and United Church ones. In 1920 Parliament amended the Indian Act itself to make attendance compulsory for children aged seven to fifteen. Indian agents and truant officers could remove a child from home, and parents who refused could be prosecuted; by then, in many communities, withheld rations were the difference between eating and not.

The deputy minister in charge said what the system was for, to a parliamentary committee, in 1920, and it is on the record: "I want to get rid of the Indian problem… Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and no Indian Department."

There was a third effect too: it turned the children into a labour force, because a school that had them working half the day on its own farm cut its costs again.

The punishments went beyond the funding formula's arithmetic. Children were punished for speaking their own languages, many were abused, and thousands died and were buried without their families ever being told.

Bryce inspected thirty-five schools on the prairies in 1907, and at one school the death rate, including children sent home to die, ran over forty percent. He said plainly that the buildings themselves were the cause: no ventilation, healthy children put to sleep beside tubercular ones, and sick children sent home to infect their families in turn.

Nobody acted on his recommendations. His department cut his funding and eventually pushed him out, which is why the pamphlet came fifteen years later, under his own name.

The stated aim of the system, in the words of the man who ran the closely parallel American system, was to kill the Indian and save the man.

The commission itself said the true number was certainly higher than the three thousand it could name, and its report also issued 94 Calls to Action, specific, numbered steps to be taken; most of them still have not been completed.

In 2021, a ground-penetrating radar search at the site of the former school at Kamloops reported about two hundred possible unmarked burials, and searches began at other sites. I will be careful here, because this book does not overstate: those are radar readings, not excavations, and the interpretation has been argued about publicly since. What is not in dispute is the commission's own register of named children who went to a school and never came home.

In 2022 a pope came to Maskwacis, in Alberta, stood in front of survivors, and apologised.

That report had a title of its own: in English, Human Relations and the South African Scene in the Light of Scripture, from a church that was not just influential but was the church of the cabinet and of most of the men who wrote the laws.

Acts 17:26 was not the only verse pressed into service. The report also reached for Genesis 11, the tower of Babel: humanity tried to stay in one place as one people, and God scattered them and confused their languages, so separation into distinct nations was said to be God's own act, one that keeping people apart only honoured.

You have seen this move before in this unit, quoting half a sentence and dropping the half that ruins it, in Ephesians 6 and in 1 Timothy. Here it is again, in 1974, in a printed report, with footnotes.

The Alliance made that declaration at a meeting in Ottawa in August 1982, and suspension meant something concrete: no seat at the table, no delegates, no standing. Afrikaner theologians were cut off from the worldwide Reformed family whose approval they had always assumed, told by the very tradition they belonged to that they were now outside it. At that same meeting the Alliance elected as its president a South African minister from the community apartheid oppressed, Allan Boesak.

The daughter church that drafted the Belhar Confession had a name, the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, and the confession itself took its name from the township where it was written. It says that unity is a gift and an obligation, and that God is in a special way the God of the destitute and the wronged.

That is not a protest resolution. It is a confession of faith, in the same category as the historic creeds, which means it cannot be dismissed as politics. It was written in Afrikaans, in the same tradition, using the same theology, and it has since been adopted by Reformed churches on several continents. The reversal that began in 1986 was not complete until the 1990s.

Naudé was about as inside as it is possible to be: son of a founder of the Afrikaner nationalist movement, a member of the secret Afrikaner brotherhood that ran the country, and moderator of his own regional synod.

When his church told him to choose between the institute and his congregation, he preached a farewell sermon on the text we must obey God rather than men, took off his robes, and walked out. He lost his ministerial status, and his own congregation, many of them family friends, mostly turned away from him.

The seven-year ban meant he could not be quoted, could not meet more than one person at a time, and could not leave his district. He lived to see it end, and to be honoured by his country afterward.

Some estimates put the death toll above a million.

Before colonial rule those categories were social and could shift: they had to do with cattle, status, lineage and marriage, and a person could move between them. Then Europeans arrived with a theory, taught as science and as scripture: that the taller, cattle-keeping Tutsi had come from somewhere else as a superior "Hamitic" people naturally fit to rule, and that the Hutu were naturally fit to be ruled.

The church then staffed the colonial administration from the group it had decided was the ruling one, and educated its children. The identity cards themselves came out of a census the Belgian administration ran in 1933 and 1934.

People fled to churches for sanctuary as they always had, because in earlier massacres the churches had been safe.

Around two thousand people took refuge in Seromba's church. The tribunal found that he refused them food, told the militia where they were, and finally directed the bulldozer driver where to push so the building would come down with them inside. He was convicted in 2006 and his sentence raised to life on appeal in 2008.

Elizaphan Ntakirutimana was a Seventh-day Adventist pastor at Mugonero. Seven Tutsi pastors sheltering in the complex, men who had worked under him, wrote him a letter on 15 April 1994 that began: we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. They asked him to intervene with the authorities. He did not, and the attack came the next day. He was convicted by the tribunal in 2003.

Two Benedictine nuns, Sister Gertrude and Sister Maria Kisito, were tried and convicted in a court in Belgium in 2001, for their part in the deaths of people who had sheltered at their convent at Sovu.

Gisimba hid people in the ceiling and in every room of the orphanage, keeping them fed and holding the militia off at the gate for weeks on end.

Wilkens stayed even after every other foreign government had evacuated its citizens. He spent the hundred days driving around Kigali, negotiating at roadblocks for water and food, and at one point intervened directly to stop the massacre of the children at Gisimba's orphanage.

The senator behind the inquiry was Charles Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, and he asked about salaries, private jets, houses, and whether donations were being used for personal benefit.

Name the six, since this unit names people: Kenneth Copeland Ministries, Creflo Dollar Ministries, Benny Hinn's World Healing Center Church, Bishop Eddie Long's New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, Joyce Meyer Ministries, and Randy and Paula White's Without Walls International Church. Only two cooperated fully, Joyce Meyer Ministries and Benny Hinn's organization; Meyer's ministry afterward joined a voluntary accountability body and began publishing audited financial statements.

Your local food bank has to file a Form 990, and any donor can read it for free and see the salaries. Churches and their integrated auxiliaries do not, by the letter of the tax code, and a second law, passed in 1984, sets special limits on when and how the tax authority may even begin an inquiry into a church. That is not a loophole. It is a deliberate provision meant to keep the state out of religion, a serious purpose, and this is the price of it.

The inquiry closed on 6 January 2011.

The full warning named more than the robes and the prayers: love of the greetings in the marketplaces, the best seats in the synagogues, and the places of honour at dinners. And I watched that widow from a particular spot, sitting opposite the treasury itself.

I said the same thing elsewhere in plainer words: you cannot serve God and money (Matthew 6:24), and where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21).

She started that paper on 1 May 1933, in the worst of the Depression, and kept the price at one penny for decades even as costs rose.

She was arrested repeatedly over the years, the last time in her seventies, on a picket line with farm workers.

The appointment came his way because the men who chose him thought him quiet and safe, a bookish conservative acceptable to the government; the country's landowners were reported to be relieved.

Grande was killed on 12 March 1977, along with an old man and a teenage boy who were riding with him in the jeep. He had been at Romero's own ordination. Romero drove out that night and stood over the bodies, then did three things in a week: he demanded an investigation and got nothing, he refused to appear at any government ceremony until there was one, and on the following Sunday he cancelled every mass in the country except one, in the cathedral square, so that everybody had to come to the same place and hear the same thing.

The newspapers would not print the names, which is why the radio list included every disappearance and every body found. In his last broadcast he also asked the soldiers, in the name of God, to stop the repression.

The United Nations commission that later examined the killings of that war found the assassination had been ordered by a former army officer who led the political right, and nobody was ever convicted of it in El Salvador.

At his funeral six days later, with a crowd of tens of thousands filling the square in front of the cathedral, bombs went off and shooting started. Between thirty and forty people were killed in the crush and the gunfire, at the funeral of the man who had read out the names of the dead.¹⁷

The soldiers entered the university at night. The Atlacatl Battalion was an elite unit, created and equipped by the United States and trained by American advisers, including at an American army school in Georgia, during a war in which the United States was funding the Salvadoran government at a rate of more than a million dollars a day.

The same battalion had, eight years earlier, killed something close to a thousand villagers, most of them women and children, at a place called El Mozote.

The UN commission found that the order for the university killings came from the Salvadoran high command. Elba and Celina Ramos were in the building that night because they thought it would be safer than home.

Some of what got compressed into that paragraph deserves its detail back. The stone barn was filled because of a law that made the tenth compulsory. The war preached as penance was called at Clermont; a legate later wrote home from Béziers to boast of the dead. The treasury of forgiveness had a printed price list, and a bank's agent held a key to the very chest. The permission slip was signed in Rome and enforced even against other Christian kings. A pamphlet told the princes to stab the peasants, and a hundred thousand of them died. Between forty and sixty thousand people were executed as witches, three in four of them women, with the cost of the wood billed back to their own families. The commandment was left in even as the escape was cut out. My own people were slandered for eight hundred years by an accusation that cancelled debts.

Here are the names themselves, one from nearly every century: Alcuin, Valdes, Francis, Marguerite Porete, Wycliffe, Hus, Žižka's farmers, Montesinos, Las Casas, the peasants of Swabia, Müntzer, Castellio, Spee, Gaule, Salazar, Sewall, the Diggers, the four men at Germantown, Benjamin Lay, Woolman, Equiano, Boukman and Toussaint, Sharpe, Knibb, Tubman, Bonhoeffer, Bryce, Naudé, Gisimba, Day, Romero, and Elba and Celina Ramos.