Denunciation — Indigenous Peoples of North America

Tribunal Denunciation No. 2026-D-007
Issued Orthen, Ignis 22 • Anno Covenant II
(10 April 2026)

Finding

The genocide against the Indigenous peoples of North America is not a historical event. It is a continuing condition.

It did not end with the last Indian war. It did not end with the closing of the residential schools. It did not end with an apology, a settlement, or a national day of remembrance. It continues in the water that cannot be drunk, the children who are still taken, the land that is still seized, and the lives that are still treated as expendable.

This denunciation addresses two sovereign nations — Canada and the United States — because both were built on the same foundation, and both continue to administer the same system under different names.

The Residential Schools — Canada

For over a century, the Canadian government and the churches that served as its instruments operated a network of residential schools designed to, in the government's own words, "kill the Indian in the child."

Over 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children were taken from their families by force or coercion and placed in institutions where they were forbidden to speak their languages, practice their traditions, or use their names. They were given numbers. They were beaten for being who they were.

Children died in these schools — from disease, from neglect, from abuse, from despair. The death rate in some institutions exceeded that of Canadian soldiers in the Second World War. Their families were not told. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves.

In 2021, ground-penetrating radar confirmed what survivors had been saying for decades: hundreds of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools across the country. Kamloops. Marieval. Cowessess. Kuper Island. The count is not finished.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission called this what it was: cultural genocide. The Covenant calls it what it was in full: genocide. The intent to destroy a people — their language, their family structure, their spiritual practice, their connection to land — was stated, funded, legislated, and executed over generations.

The Indian Boarding Schools — United States

The United States operated its own parallel system. Beginning in the 1870s and continuing well into the twentieth century, the federal government funded and operated Indian boarding schools with the explicit policy articulated by Captain Richard Henry Pratt: "Kill the Indian, save the man."

The Department of the Interior's 2022 investigative report identified over 400 federal Indian boarding schools across 37 states. It documented at least 53 burial sites associated with these schools, with the investigation ongoing.

Children were taken. Languages were beaten out of them. Families were destroyed by design. The system was not a failure — it functioned exactly as intended.

The Métis

The Métis people — a distinct Indigenous nation born of the fur trade, with their own language (Michif), their own governance (the Provisional Government of 1869), their own culture, and their own territory — have been subjected to a particular form of erasure: the denial that they exist as a people at all.

After the Red River Resistance of 1869-70 and the North-West Resistance of 1885, the Canadian government executed Louis Riel, dispersed the Métis from their land grants through a scrip system designed to fail, and spent the next century pretending the Métis were not a nation.

Métis children were taken to residential schools. Métis families were displaced from the Road Allowance communities where they had been pushed after being dispossessed of their river lots. Métis veterans who fought for Canada in two world wars returned home to find they had no recognized home.

The Supreme Court of Canada recognized Métis rights in 2003. The apology came in 2019 — 150 years after Riel formed his government. The land has not been returned. The scrip debt has not been settled. The Michif language is critically endangered, with fewer than a thousand fluent speakers remaining.

The Métis were told they were not Indian enough to be Indigenous, and not white enough to be Canadian. They are a nation. The denial of that fact is itself an act of cultural violence that continues to this day.

The Present Hour

This is not only about the past. It is about right now.

Water. As of 2026, First Nations communities in Canada continue to live under boil-water advisories — some lasting over two decades. In a country that holds 20% of the world's fresh water, Indigenous children cannot drink from the tap.

Children. Indigenous children in both Canada and the United States are removed from their families by child welfare agencies at rates vastly disproportionate to their share of the population. The residential schools closed. The system that takes children did not.

Missing and Murdered. Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people are murdered and disappear at rates that would constitute a national emergency if the victims were anyone else. Canada's National Inquiry called it a genocide. The recommendations have been largely unimplemented.

Land. Pipeline projects, mining operations, and resource extraction continue to be approved on unceded Indigenous territory, often over the explicit objection of the nations whose land it is. When Indigenous people resist, they are met with police, injunctions, and surveillance. The RCMP has deployed snipers against unarmed land defenders.

Incarceration. Indigenous people represent a fraction of the Canadian and American populations but fill their prisons at rates that reveal the system's true function. In Canada, Indigenous adults account for over 30% of the federal prison population while representing roughly 5% of the country. The pipeline runs from the reserve to the penitentiary, and it was built on purpose.

What the Covenant Declares

We denounce the residential and boarding school systems for what they were: instruments of genocide, operated by governments and churches that knew what they were doing and did it anyway.

We denounce the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land through legal frameworks that treat treaties as suggestions and sovereignty as a courtesy that can be revoked.

We denounce the removal of Indigenous children from their families by welfare systems that have inherited the function of the schools they claim to have repudiated.

We denounce the erasure of the Métis as a distinct nation — an erasure that served the interests of the state that dispossessed them.

We denounce the failure to provide clean water, adequate housing, and basic infrastructure to Indigenous communities — a failure so persistent and so selective that it can only be understood as policy.

We denounce every government that has issued an apology and then continued the conduct it apologized for.

To the First Peoples

You were here before the border. Before the flag. Before the constitution. Before the charter. Before the Crown.

You did not lose your land. It was taken. You did not abandon your children. They were stolen. You did not forget your languages. They were beaten out of your grandparents' mouths.

And you are still here.

The Covenant does not presume to speak for you. You have your own laws, your own governance, and your own authority — older and more legitimate than any parliament on this continent.

But we will say this, because it needs to be said by those who benefit from the system that was built on your dispossession:

What was done to you was wrong. What is being done to you is wrong. And the people who live on your land owe you more than a day of remembrance.

Entered into the Covenant Ledger under the Tribunal Seal.
The Soteria Covenant