Where the cars have no plates

The (now defunct) Law Commission of Canada's Report on Aboriginal Peoples and Criminal Justice was delivered to the Federal Justice Minister in 1991. This document, an effort by dozens of academics, jurists, and indigenous leaders to grapple with the obvious injustices of the Canadian system's interaction with Native peoples, is rife with alarming statistics and hopeful proposals. The commissioners were able to state plainly, with conviction that for meaningful justice to re-manifest in Native lives and communities, there was simply no other way: "The time has come to co-operate in the creation of Aboriginal-controlled systems of justice...". The time has come. 1991.

And so here I am, reading these well-meant, well-thought, nigh-well urgent appeals for a country to sit up and take notice of its complicity in the systemic degradation of the individual, communal, and national rights of Native peoples to own and understand that most crucial, ephemeral, palpable human concept: justice. And here I am, still participating in a justice system that "delivers" itself into communities that, at best, endure its intrusion, withstand its ignorance. In so many ways, we assumed we knew what was best for the cultures we enclosed, and in so many ways we were wrong. The evidence, if we can bear to admit it, is obvious. The question, at least in relation to justice issues, is why we persist in such arrogant error.

I think I'll spend my life with this challenge, although hopefully towards a dissolution of our arrogance, a de-coupling of our (yes, still) colonial need to control and monopolise the concepts of governance. But as the 1991 commissioners now know, and I'm uncomfortably learning, even good ideas are pretty cheap currency if we don't spend our best selves upon them. That's why I feel such a feverish need to tell these small stories, from this frontier, for they echo the truth to a country that for the most part still neglects to listen, until the most egregious tragedies force a moment of notice, and, all too often, fallow, unfortunate finger-pointing.

We’ve thusfar only given credence to appeals to formal equality in our justice system’s evolution. Thus, all Aboriginals are presumptively entitled to our laws, our rights, our ideas about how to take the necessary steps from allegation to outcome in justice matters. We’ve constructed elaborate and expensive mechanisms to bring the institution closer to (by our eyes) remote communities, the places where our roads don’t go. And yet, for all our single-minded efforts, it’s mighty hard to sense that progress has been made.

The northern reserves, at their worst, are unfenced gulags, composites of nowhere. Who wants to live in an immovable trailer with a dirty water tank lurking in its biggest room and a dozen relatives interminably crashing in the others, even if it is "free"? Who wants to boil their drinking water every day for nine years, disguise the leaden taste with grape Kool-Aid? Who wants to die too young of violence or diabetes? Who wants their most important decisions to be mandated or mediated by utter outsiders, folks who flit in and out like bossy fairies? The answers to these questions, at least, seem clear. And we must try and feel the truth of one another, or die. But I admit of very few other certainties.