The tears of two Catholic Métis sisters spilled onto the sidewalk outside Vancouver's Holy Rosary Cathedral Sunday after they were yanked out of mass by police for objecting to a statement read by the priest.Ellen and Tatyana Dobrowolski, who were removed but not arrested, said they made plans to attend the Sunday Easter Mass at the cathedral without prior knowledge of a scheduled native protest that was under way when they arrived.
The protest, one of several organized in recent months by a group called Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared, was held to draw attention to alleged "germ warfare" that lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of native children in residential schools between the 1890s and 1970s.
More than a dozen aboriginal protesters stood outside the cathedral beating drums and chanting "shame! shame!" and loudly calling the parishioners "murderers."
Friends organizer Kevin Annett handed out copies of an April 2007 newspaper article stating that for four decades after a Department of Indian Affairs warning was issued in 1907, residential schools "made no effort to separate healthy children from those sick with [tuberculosis]."
The resulting death toll, Annett claims, was over 50,000 and amounting to "genocide" by the churches, including the Catholic, Anglican and United, that ran the schools.
"We want full disclosure from the church as to what happened and we want the remains of the children brought to their homes and for justice to be done," said Annett. "A lot of the perpetrators are still alive."
Inside the church Rev. Glenn Dion, the rector of Holy Rosary, was delivering a message from Vancouver Archbishop Raymond Roussin that was repeated at Easter masses throughout the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver.
"Mr. Annett . . . has spread false information and has been making bizarre allegations about genocide against natives for many years," Roussin's letter read.
The letter also said the Squamish Nation issued a statement last week saying Annett does not, as he claims, represent them.
That prompted Ellen and Tatyana Dobrowolski to stand up, uninvited, and address the reverend in front of the entire congregation.
"I said, 'Excuse me . . . discrediting the protesters is not deleting the truth,'" said Ellen after being escorted out by police, who were on site in apprehension of a disturbance caused by the protest.
Ellen claimed neither she nor her sister, who also made disparaging remarks during the priest's statement, are affiliated with Annett's group, and that she takes First Nations studies at Simon Fraser University.
"It was infuriating," she said. "Obviously they can't deny what happened, and so they tried to discredit the protests.
"We don't blame the people in the church because they are just listening to people they trust."
Paul Schratz, spokesman for the Vancouver Archdiocese, could not be reached, but wrote in a recent editorial for the B.C. Catholic newspaper that "Catholic bishops from Vancouver and Whitehorse offered apologies for wrongs committed at residential schools within their jurisdictions."
He also said work on a national Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission between church and native leaders is about to get underway, which will give those who suffered under the residential school system a chance to safely share their experiences.
Dion called the disturbance caused by the two Métis parishioners "pretty aggressive and pretty not-what-we're-about on Easter morning."
He said of the Friends protesters: "When you start using the word 'murdered,' you're taking a partial truth about the situation with the residential schools and a health crisis and you're escalating it to a non-truth."
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