Exclusive Report By Kevin Annett

On the Road with the Not the Royal Tour Tour:

An Exclusive Report

By Kevin Daniel Annett with Carol Annett

We waited patiently, but the Royal Couple never responded to our invitation. They didn’t even phone us. Hell, I would have accepted the charges, since they’re traveling on our dime as it is. But that’s inbred ingratitude for you.



The way I see it, Willie and Kate had their chance. They could have taken a break from the smiling crowds shipped in from Sycophants Anonymous, and seen some of the real country and its people. Instead, they chose to feast on canned aboriginal dancing, redneck rodeos and photo ops with Stevie “Lizard Eyes” Harper. So to hell with the ungrateful little brats.

Undeterred, Carol and I took to the road last week from our Vancouver Island abode to hold our own visit of Canada in what we called The Not the Royal Tour Tour.



Our ambitious itinerary originally included a grand sweep through all the major cities, where delegations of local politicians, school children and representatives of Canada’s major churches were scheduled to welcome us, culminating in an official state dinner chaired by Truth and Reconciliation Commission chairman Murray “Eats Many Muffins” Sinclair.



Unfortunately, we got as far as Revelstoke, B.C., at which point our money gave out.



With typical Emerald Isle élan, however, our determined caravan made the best of things, pausing to visit the grave of my ancestor Daniel O’Neill and converse with Revelstoke denizens like thirteen year old child worker Cole, who’s toiled at the local MacDonald’s as an eager if underpaid employee for over three years now.



As synchronicity would have it, the politician who gave young Cole the chance to help revive the glorious English tradition of child labor, former Premier Gordon Campbell, was just appointed Canadian High Commissioner to England this week, and will be lunching in regal splendor with Willie and Kate upon their return to England.



Like my Highland ancestors always said, What can you expect from a Campbell?



The cheering crowds were nowhere in sight as we approached the cemetery holding the atoms of my mother’s grandfather, on a bluff overlooking the perfect valley where he raised seven children and died a hero’s death in January, 1912.



Surviving as a child an Irish plague ship that wiped out his entire dispossessed family, Grandpa Daniel O’Neill worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway – the CPR – and died in a snow slide coming to the rescue of strangers trapped in Rogers Pass.



One of the people Grandpa saved was a CPR supervisor named Kilpatrick, who subsequently screwed Grandpa’s widow out of his pension on a technicality, driving her and the children into a destitution that eventually killed her and scattered the kids to different families. But the CPR was saved a chunk of money by Kilpatrick’s act, proving he had the right corporate stuff.



One of the children, my grandmother Grace, told me the sorry tale when I was twelve, and over the years I’ve imagined derailing CPR freight or at least finding out where that Kilpatrick scumbag is buried so I can ceremonially piss on his grave.



But attacking the CPR in Canada is like mocking the British royals, since, as a symbol, the railway is to Canada what the sea is to an Englishman or the frontier is to Americans. It’s what made us. Or that’s what I was always taught, at least. But the CPR also made land monopolies, mega profits for the British Crown, and lots of corpses – Indians, Chinese laborers, ruined settlers – and my great grandfather, Daniel O’Neill.



But that’s all just preamble. For I’m taking some of Grandpa with me back to Ireland soon, in a lump of earth mingled with his atoms from his grave. Grandpa, not Kilpatrick or the CPR, will have the final word, as the epitaph on his headstone declares:



Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for others.



Our O’Neill ancestors were the traditional High Kings of Ulster, and Grandpa Daniel was everything a King should be: upright, honorable, and the protector of the helpless and suffering. Everything, in short, that the English royals are not.



Note to Willie and Kate Windsor: Take a day off from your busy schedule of smiling and partying, and make a pilgrimage to Revelstoke.



Buoyed by our communion with my grand dad, our Tour struck west towards a spot familiar to the English royalty: Dead Man’s Creek, near the former Catholic Indian Residential school in Kamloops.



Note to my readers: Reading this next part may cause you anxiety and concern over possible repercussions affecting your income and credit rating. So feel free to skip this bit, especially if you’re an average Canadian.



Dead Man’s Creek is a dry and barren place, well away from the main road, where ten little Indian boys and girls were last seen in October, 1964, in the company of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip. And then were never seen again.



The last surviving witness to this apparent royal abduction, William Combes, died suddenly in March in a Vancouver Catholic hospital, after he went public with what he saw at Dead Man’s Creek. And I was banned from re-entering England on May 29, after I spoke publicly about all this, including William’s unexplained death.



But I guess that all just a coincidence.



Carol and I hung around Dead Man’s Creek for awhile, listening to the lonely wind and the happy birdsong echo among the sagebrush and rocks. The sound of occasional vehicles on the nearby Trans Canada Highway was barely audible. A few dilapidated shacks and abandoned cars – the local Indian reservation – decayed in the blazing sun as we leaned over a bridge spanning the Creek.



Carol finally turned to me and said,



“If you wanted to get rid of a bunch of kids’ bodies, this would be the place to do it.”



We photographed the spot, as we did the Kamloops Indian residential school and its hillside orchard where William Combes saw a dead child get buried one night by a priest named Brother Murphy, among many other small corpses. Standing there, I recalled twenty seven other mass graves near other residential schools across Canada that I’ve reported, and that everyone is studiously ignoring.



It was time for a break, and the air was sweltering, so our Tour made an unscheduled stop along what pales call the Thompson River, in an abandoned campsite set among quiet cottonwood trees.



Doing a quick appraisal of our provisions, we discovered that, far from the caviar, roast beef and assorted wines promised us on our Tour, a pile of canned goods and crackers was all that stood between us and hunger.



“I guess we should have skipped the all you can eat Chinese buffet in Aldergrove” I muttered to my loyal, if not royal, companion.



The hamlet across the river from us was called Spence’s Bridge: ten buildings and a crumbling store, stocked with maybe twenty items. The proprietor, a plump, smiling woman, didn’t seem to recognize me, but she did offer us water from her garden hose with the comment,



“There’s a boiled water alert out, some old lady just died. But you’re welcome to take your chances like the rest of us.”



We shared our riverside campsite with a cluster of busy ant colonies, and hanging there with the bugs brought back for me a distant childhood memory, of my Dad demonstrating to me in a Manitoba park how so-called fire ants will sacrifice and immolate themselves to protect the entire colony from flames.



Staring with incredulous seven year old eyes as Dad lit a match and dropped it into dry grass near a fire ant mound, I saw that it was true. Ant after tiny ant threw themselves live into the flames, which slowly died under their collective weight. Their nation was safe.



I sensed then what I realize now: that insects know something we don’t.

……………….



Coming out of the mountains at Hope always reminds me of a birth, as angular rock opens suddenly to broad fields and sky; and the quiet womb of forested valley yields to the clatter we call civilization.



Kate and Willie will return home this week, just as we will: they to a palace, us to our house in Nanaimo with the freaky next door neighbors who go ballistic over the state of our yard, but where children's laughter is always heard.



I don’t doubt that the two Windsors did a lot of smiling on their Canadian tour, but I suspect they never honestly laughed the way children do, with heartfelt joy, because you laugh like that when you know you belong somewhere and you’re finally coming home.



Canada has always been my beloved home, but not its government, or imperial ties, or its legacy of murderous missionaries and ruthless robber barons. The real heart of my country lies in a spirit the Mohawk people called Kanata, meaning Our Village: a place where people live as equals and in peace with each other and the earth. That spirit beams out at me through the land, and from those of our people who have remained free from crown and church and corporate empires: a dream, like Avalon, of a once and future realm.



Carol and I passed through Kanata on our journey, as Kate and Wiliam Windsor were conducted through Canada during the same days, as in two worlds, forever separate. For Canada is the legal fiction created to ship furs and forests and oil to foreign lands – while Kanata is a living world of ancient tribes and sacred forests and plains, and of exiled and immigrated people seeking a way to finally live in liberty.



My Dad’s father, Ross Annett, survived the carnage of World War One trenches to become the first popular prairie writer in Canada. During the worst of the dust bowl years, Grandpa supported his family in Consort, Alberta by writing a series of syndicated short stories for the Saturday Evening Post about a widowed farmer named Joe who struggled to hold onto his land and raise a daughter, Babe, and a young son, Little Joe.



In one of his tales, Grandpa describes the British Royal Visit of 1939, when King George and his wife toured Canada and its countless impoverished towns to buck up patriotic fervor and the next group of bullet-catchers on the eve of another world war. Joe and his kids nevertheless hurry to the local train-stop town to catch a glimpse of the royalty, and by the happy circumstances allowed by fiction, the scrubby trio actually meet the King and Queen.



Taken by the young girl Babe, the Queen gives her a picture of her own young daughters, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.



Facing the royal couple, Joe places his hand on the curly head of his thin, beloved daughter Babe, and declares to them,



“We got a Princess too.”



As a Canadian soldier who knew firsthand the ease with which the English crown sacrificed the lives of their colonials, my grandfather Ross survived the worst moments of battle by never obeying the orders of any British officer.
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................................................................................................. Read the truth of genocide in Canada and globally at: www.itccs.org www.hiddennolonger.com www.hiddenfromhistory.org This email is hosted by Jeremiah Jourdain on behalf of the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS) and Kevin Annett - Eagle Strong Voice (adopted May 2004 into the Anishinabe nation by Louis Daniels - Whispers Wind). Kevin can be reached at hiddenfromhistory1@gmail.com or kevin_annett@hotmail.com .

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For so long as there shall be but one hundred of us who remain alive, we will never give consent to being subject to the English Crown. For in truth, it is not for glory, nor riches, nor honors that we fight, but for liberty, for that alone, which no honest man surrenders but with life itself.
The Declaration of Arbroath, Scotland, 1320