Folly and arrogance

Read, if you haven’t already, this recent comment in the National Post. Besides the gross biases and assumptions, beyond the disingenuous distortions, apart from the fact (I can assure you) that aboriginal perspectives continue to be given extremely slight credence and authority in our justice system, this article raises important concerns that merit both meditation and action. To begin with, there is no doubt in my mind that this man, his family, their community, and all of society recognises what happened that night as an awful tragedy, a deep wrong. There is no point musing upon how these deaths would have been interpreted or dealt with by some long ago Pre-Contact clan, because their catalyst, and the crucible within which they occurred, are entirely different. This is not a problem for an anachronistic, static culture; this is a problem for a people whose continuity has threaded through, and been shredded by, the manifold challenges and changes of recent centuries. The appropriation of land and language. The damnation of families and familiar rituals. The externalised control and the internalised chaos. And also the amazing, enduring alchemy that welds tribal pride to web servers, hunting to hamburgers, that accommodates (if is not quite accommodated by) the entirety of an evolving, integrated age. This is a problem for present-day people, and, as I’m sure Mr. Kay will agree, it’s one whose causes and responses thrust forth shared responsibility. But (as unfortunately resonates throughout his opinion), unless we are to use this tragedy as justification and opportunity to continue the colonial experiment to its existential end, to finish ‘em off through their weakness, we must take great care, as members of a surrounding, overpowering society, to endeavour to understand what our justice system is doing. Its effect upon indigenous minority cultures is almost as profound, in my view, as its impact on individuals. So let us open our minds.

A community justice process, such as a sentencing circle, is no more or less than a means of empowering those closest to a crime to contribute to its resolution. As with any mechanism, it is not magic, and although it may benefit from culturally appropriate insignia, a circle is not the purview or birthright of any particular group. Far from knocking its supposed inauthenticity, Mr. Kay might have applauded the Yellow Quill circle as a testament to compromise and adaptation, as a worthy and crucial attempt to wrestle with the demons of ill-doing without entirely submitting to a framework of dependency and alienation. But instead he was aggrieved, he was disgusted by the spectre of a corrupt and irresponsible kleptocracy, a clique of propped-up hollow-moralled aboriginals presuming to control the noble workings of that most honour-bound, most spit-polished system of justice ever produced (God bless her Majesty)! And, if indeed this is what is happening in the unsightly fiefdoms She was gracious enough to reserve for the dying tribes, he’d have every right to be offended, as would we all. But Mr. Kay has not appealed to his readership’s assessment of the evidence, nor even tried to relay the sadness and muted hopes of a small village that has lost two most precious members. He has, with ghastly accuracy, relied on the well of righteousness, ignorance, and prejudice that is yet replenished in our enlightened age, to sell that same old story: they can’t be trusted, or not, at least, out there.

I’ve never been to Yellow Quill, and I’d wager that the same holds true for Mr. Kay. Even to be able to check it off the endless list of destinations would be to risk falling into the white-eyed trap of presuming to know a place for having been there. But I’m willing to guess that, if our tightly-wound justice system deigned for it to take place, the community’s sentencing circle must have been supported by those who were most affected by this crime, whose tears fell closest to where it took place. And it takes a breathtaking ‘traditionalist’, Mr. Kay, to seek to put the state’s foot down in the way of such small progress.