double vision

This is the season of still fire in the leaves of the matchstick stands
of birch that huddle within changeless swaths of spruce and pine.

And the most diseased human habitation I have ever witnessed exists in the midst of this beauty - vast lands of unlogged forest, measureless waterways of lake, marsh, and river.

This is where the law's dissonance booms. It sounds like the sighs of a court party forced to (literally) pick the locks of doors to set up its temporary chamber, and begin its proceedings (literally) in the dimness of a hall whose lights it has no power or knowledge to operate. It sounds like the echo of names called into the sparse lobby of a community centre that, although recently built, is already scarred by the stone-throws and scrawlings of gas-addled youth; names of witnesses or accuseds whose absence prompts frustrated warrants of arrest, and the consequent lumbering of police trucks along pockmarked gravel roads.

Disengagement feels like the bruise my spirit accepts in the knowing that so many of my clients will run the whole course of their legal ordeals without ever facing a single fact of their enfetterment, and that they will be turned back, in the end, into the whip of a suffering/harming cyclone. It is the sadness of hearing a client tell me that his accuser will fare far worse than himself "because no one likes a rat round here". And it lies in the silence of victims who, in bowing to this granite logic, put their own necks into the law's headlock.

No one amplifies their voices, the way I do on my clients' behalf. Therein lies, as even Conservatives know, a crucial question, a distorted twist of truth. But does the answer lie in ramping up the rhetorc of war, of pounding ever harder on these rickety tables that we erect in the centres of communities whose ills and rhythms we yet weakly pretend to comprehend?

This of course is the rub, the nub of it. The elephant whose hulk rests unaddressed in this district's rootless courts, in our so-called universal law, and in the ongoing collision of our cultures. As I go about my work, I just want to acknowledge this.

Why I Stay

Sioux Lookout recommends itself to anyone who wants to shimmy free of derivative living. It is not a place of easy, anonymous consumption, or complacent spectatorship, but somewhere that invites headlong participation in the joys and challenges of community, in all its streaming, messy diversity. In this month alone, we have gathered for the town's first annual Pride picnic (which was said to have attracted more folks than twenty-times-larger Abbotsford's parade), the fifteenth Take Back the Night walk, and (next week) the vigil for missing and murdered Aboriginal women. We've also gone from working to lake swimming in under ten minutes, hiked up the town's namesake "mountain", and successfully completed several Sioux Lookout triathlons (cycle, paddle, potluck). The latest of these forays took place during a six-hour power outage - an annual event in early fall where transmission line maintenance sends the whole town back a century or so. This year's iteration gracefully fell on a warm and sunny Sunday, and it seemed like everyone spent the day joyfully outdoors, bedding gardens, cording firewood, or fishing from the train trestle in unhindered defiance of trespass laws. Despite all that you may read here, this is a good place to be human, and to call home.

statistic stories

A recent one day snapshot of the inmate makeup of Kenora's District Jail (our 'local' detention centre) provides the following:

Jail's official capacity: 95 inmates
Total number of inmates on Sep 23, 2011: 165
Percentage in custody awaiting trial: 52 (86 persons)
Percentage of total inmates who are Aboriginal: 83
Percentage of total inmates who are women: 18 (30 persons)
Percentage of women who are Aboriginal: 100

Numbers alone, of course, provide slight and insufficient insight into cause, meaning, and consequence. But for me they are irrefutable reminders of how colonial injustices, sown into lives and communities sometimes years before their very birth, continue to fester, to provoke fresh spasms of anguish, violence, injury and loss. And how our legal culture of individualistic capture, blame, and punishment pays so little heed to these long-embedded facts. These numbers scream, but are, most horribly, being less and less listened to by those with the power to create different outcomes, less sickening stats.

fissures and fusions

Sioux Lookout seems to possess far too many amputees, refugees, folks with spent gazes and lost body language. Its dysfunctions are evident on court dockets, in hospital notices warning against sanitizer theft, in the surfeit of well-padded police officers who attend to haul off the drunks seeking warmth in the old bank lobby. Too many people with nowhere to go, or else desperate to be gone. But despite such indicia, the town cannot be cast off as wart or war zone. Its wounds and indignities are not shared equally, of course; it is not a gross overestimate to suggest that half the population earns a handsome keep tending to the other half's frailties. But perhaps because we are so small, our problems so manifest and distilled, Sioux Lookout is also a nest of remarkable, even exemplary responses to social ills.

The connections I touch here astound me - the tight, if fraught, relationships between people, both here and in the small communities in its surrounding vastness, threads cinching geography and time. Sundered lives are stitched within strong family webs, where great need and great capacity telescope together. The leathery drunk weaving on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, I discover, is my client's father, the same man he spoke about with rage and tenderness. A man who, at one time, held positions of great authority within their band. The next morning introduces me to this same client's daughter, shackled in the courthouse cells, and a flood of other family members who mobilize to set her free. Hands and voices span across the massive territory, phone calls seek out helpful aunts, nephews drive eight hours to bring elders into court. These old ones sigh and chuckle that they've been leaned against before, stood firm in times worse than this.

All this happens in the face of a parallel manoeuvring, that of witnesses and no contact orders, medical reports and forensic notes: I foresee, with one eye, a case likely to proceed to trial, while with the other gaze with awe and worry over this one family's tethers.

The views from here

Lakes, at this height, are laid out on the land as wild and haphazard as droplets of mercury. I see the sun as the sun sees us, brightly replicated in innumerable mirrors. This morning the air we thrum through is smooth, but often, and invisibly, our passage hits updrafts that kick me into awareness of how measly small these vehicles are. I have learned, as well, to expect the slap of clouds, the urge to hold my breath and armrest as a plane dips into the woolly medium of an overcast day, or bombards through the battlements of cumulous afternoons. Here, in these ambient cocoons, (mostly) men sit in (mostly) wordless company, working or dozing. Lawyers flip naked fingers through indices of the day’s business, each sheaf encasing a story of evidence, evidence of many stories. Proof, our currency, rests in abeyance for a time, like this plane that trajects the open space between defined places.

I usually like the law quite well in this setting. Controlled environs, earplugs and peanuts, folders full of interesting material, plum for highlighting and scrawling queries or deductions in the margins; yellow notepad held close to sketch out clever arguments. My mind, in these times, takes the shape of a polished courtroom, assigning strengths and challenges to each of two opposing sides, squinting at my case the way I think a judge would. It’s at least as fun as Sudoku.

Paper-thin rules don’t apply so predictably after landing, however.