Holes that make the net

Last week I started working as a lawyer again, this time with a couple of senior counsel known around Thunder Bay as the “left wing fringe”. Mostly criminal defence, plus Aboriginal Rights litigation. I’m half in the office working on appeal arguments, and half in tiny planes and tiny towns trying to make some kind of positive difference in the lives of people clutched up by the overgrown fingernails of the Canadian justice system. It may be One World, One Dream, but it’s hard to believe that the One Law, One Society rhetoric is working for the smaller places and nations our country encompasses. Already I’m struck by how little I’ll be able to accomplish, at such great cost.

Pickle Lake bills itself, on the wonky wooden sign on the highway into town, as Ontario’s Last Frontier. This description is accurate insofar as it’s the furthest-most point most people would want to drive in the province, before the road sinks into dust and muskeg, permitting only frozen-season forays further north. Other than that, the slogan is merely another of the many signals that we don’t understand the full reality of life here. Ontario’s last frontier – and far beyond – also happens to be the centre of the universe for the Ojibway and Cree nations whose communities dot the trackless map of the north-west interior.

Mishkeegogamang, also known as New Osnaburg, or Oz, sits about twenty minutes south of Pickle Lake, its reserve broken in half by a government surveyor’s 1911 decision to exclude a resource-rich island from the community’s scant treaty settlement. They’ve spent the past several years – and about seven million dollars – trying to convince the Crown to give it back. “We’ve read the Land Commission documents,” my tour guide grumbles as we drive up to the gravesites that aren’t theirs anymore, “they told ‘em not to give the Indians any lands which might have wealth”. Tom Wassaykeesic is one of the five band councillors here, interrupted in the middle of serving his grandkids lunch by the local probation officer with two curious lawyers who want to have a look around. Fifteen minutes later he finds us at the Nashnawbe-Aski police station (basically a mobile home with a cell-block stuck to the side), honking his horn to announce his engagement as our chauffeur. There's to be quite a lot of honking over the next two and a half hours, Tom’s way of greeting folks sitting on their porches or wandering by on the washboard roads. We pass several cousins and a brother while he points out a few of the highs and lows of Mishkeegogamang’s situation.

Some things hardly need to be said, just somehow understood. The main reserve is scattered with a few two-storey vinyl-sided home (“we built ‘em when there was money for that thing”), but otherwise people live in long narrow trailers beached on concrete pads. Many of the small windows on these overloaded homes were broken. Tom speaks bluntly: “drunks, they’re the ones who just break the windows like that. Got no accountability. All the band money is going to fix them things. Some people don’t care.” He points at a couple of places where houses should have been. “That one got burned down. They had a fight, those people, so they burned it right down. And that one we just use for a basketball court.” It was the only paved spot visible, at least until we continue past Bottle Hill along Sandy Road and catch sight of the beautiful school, a multicoloured four-winged bird perched proudly at the edge of the Albany river. Tom's obviously just as proud, and leads us out to skirt the perimeter, peering in through blessedly unbroken windows at the section reserved for the youngest kids, the classes for grades 3 through 10, the soaring central space where hot lunches are served and children can sit in a great steel-and-pine tepee beneath flags and old photos commemorating the signing of Treaty 9. The place breathes a sense of what kept promises (and enough money) can accomplish.

Finally, after introducing us to the guy spinning Christian country classics on the community radio station, showing us where the bones of ancestors sometimes wash up, and indicating Mish’s mandatory relocations over the past century because of the lake’s hydro-induced flooding, Tom drops us back off in front of the police trailer. Along the way, I get a chance to ask him, especially since he’s the councillor in charge of justice issues for the band, what he thinks about the court that flops down in Pickle Lake every month or so. “Never go to them things anymore,” he spits with disgust, “they already have everything all figured out even before we ever get there.”