blockages and flows

I have been thinking about energy, in relation to criminal justice. If we (as a system) are not effectively engaging with the energies that necessarily arise in consequence of conflict or wrongdoing, we are effectively engaged in their frustration. So the value of such a system, perversely, becomes centrally that of the containment or neutralization of such energies. They are penned up by abstruse procedures, drowned out by inaccessible language, ruled out of order by the lords of this game.

I see my client seething, head in his hands, wanting only to release himself from a prison of body and mind. I hear myself telling him it can't be done, not today, not without scheduling this and filing that. We both look at a letter that has been carefully dictated by aging parents, pleading for him to return home, help them with the early springtime chores. But these frail, unilingual elders, the court says, will have to somehow traverse the winter road 200kms south if they want to make their support for their son official. Just to plead for his release. Our energies swirl, like a mad yet insufficient tempest, within the walls the law throws up. I escape, of course, at the end of every day, but men like these must live within them.

Sioux Lookout...

...is nestled where I could set out into the forest, stand, turn full circle, exclaim 'This is it!', and know it to be true for days in every direction. The unsubtle sovereignty of the boreal land, its many shades at once mute and loudly signalled in the very names of its trees - red pine, white pine, yellow cedar, black spruce. All still green despite four months of deep snow and sap-stilling temperatures. From 10,000 feet up, where I spend more and more of my mornings and sunsets, these colours and textures blend into more abstract patterns, of broad white lakes and dark woodlands, ivory rivers and bald cut-blocks, repeating outwards in apparently endless variety. Dotted down there, where I spend most of my middays, are the 49 communities of the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation. They range in size from a few hundred inhabitants to two thousand or more, and are only roughly summed up in terms of common features - there are at least three major indigenous languages (Cree, Oji-Cree, and Ojibway), three different treaties (9, 5, and 3), and histories as diverse but interconnected as the river systems that weave through its France-sized vastness.

I have no business, anyway, in describing the essence or identity of any of these places. Their similarities and differences may be plotted on any number of variables, and in any case, such graphs would map out only the merest of true stories. It is enough to say that I am sent in to all of these habitations with identical orders, as a member of a culture that prides itself on consistency and culture-blindness. It is enough - and true - to portray the justice system in this so-called 'remote' region as a paradigm of "us and them", because, although the system's values officially eschew such a reality, it is glaringly reflected in the faces of those who comprise criminal courts in all the reserves I've visited. On one hand, there is the 'us' (or 'them') of the professional suit-and-robe wearing cohort that descends from the southern horizon to call court in session, and retreats back there when the work is deemed done. On the other, the 'work' themselves - folks in boots, hats, or shackles, the ones whose surnames might mantle the very gyms the court erects itself in, whose families personalize a community's schools and clinics and gravestones. To one side the lawyers, to the other the (supposed) source of law. It is for the benefit of these people, our leaders proclaim, that legal arts are administered.

As defence counsel, of course, I needn't be disturbed by the absurdity of such claims. I could just put my head down and chew through the files, profit from the abundance of charges that bleed out of these communities. I help my clients navigate the labyrinths of the trouble they find themselves in - but it is a trouble increasingly defined and determined by the assumptions, (mis)conceptions, and judgments of a politically rigged system, not the environment of grounded, intelligible, and accountable justice that our politicians apparently promise. I could just keep doing this job. But my anger suggests that I shouldn't. Who would want hollow words to drown out the sound of wisdom?