Harriett Nahanee - Tsebeoilt : 1935-2007
Harriett once said to a group of fellow survivors of church terrorism, "I used to be a victim. Now I'm a threat!" That threat was finally stilled, or so it seems, on Saturday evening, February 25, when Harriett died at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, where so many of her people have been killed.
Harriett was murdered by Judge Brenda Brown, who condemned her, a seventy two year old woman with severe asthma, to imprisonment for two weeks in a cold, unhealthy prison cell for the "crime" of defending her land. Harriett was legally killed by the same colonial system that jailed and tortured her at age ten in the United Church's Alberni Indian Residential School. That system has finally closed her mouth; but as Harriett reminded us so often, it was never able to claim her spirit... www.hiddenfromhistory.org
