Happy New Year. I've been busy having babies.

I did, however, manage to attend a by-law workshop last month. While this does not strike one as an especially interesting topic to write or think too deeply about, it provided some fascinating and disturbing perspectives on the challenges of reserve life. While local laws may concern such seemingly mundane matters as dog leashes and parking lots, in a First Nations context they embody both hope and despair for the self-determining, meaningful exercise of control and responsibility over what matters to the citizens of communities.

Most of the attendees were members of band councils, along with a few representatives from the federal government and police agencies. I was there as an observer and presenter upon one of the more ambitious (perhaps desperate) attempts of a community to gain some control over the alcohol and drug (and gas, glue, hairspray, lacquer, hand sanitizer, etc etc) epidemics that are throttling two generations - the first not to be directly throttled by residential schools.

In any case, it became clear that everyone was in agreement that the by-law system, as it currently exists in the First Nations of this region, is in a state of complete disarray. "We put these laws on the books in '77!" one councillor howled. "And not one of them's been enforced ever since! How do we do that?". He was talking about the things that most of us take for granted - about traffic regulations and animal control, about student truancy and the production of homebrew (not craft beer, but noxious concoctions of yeast, ketchup, and other unmentionables). The Indian Act, that noble 19th-century piece of legislation that still governs almost every aspect of Aboriginal life, has, in its beneficence, granted band councils the power to make laws regarding these concerns (subject to tight oversight and circumscription by the Minister in charge), yet it provides little nurturance for their enforcement. It is an absurd cycle of inaction: police officers are not laying charges, prosecutors are divesting themselves of any responsibility for charges that might be laid, and courts overloaded with a criminal caseload are poorly equipped to give any legitimacy to any process that might be instituted. The Act itself provides only the most laughable of options for punishment: traffic infractions, for example, are subject to maximum $50 fines. Other problems are of a more practical nature. We heard from one council member about how his community is overrun with half-wild dogs - yet implementing a control or sterilization program would cost thousands of dollars per animal. He was worried about a child getting bitten or dragged away. Another spoke movingly of the hard choices facing band councils strapped for funds and facing crisis: his community has had to hire someone to patrol the parking lot on Bingo nights, to stop the kids who are crouching down to get high on the exhaust fumes of idling cars.

This is how peril, apathy, or brusque, impotent anger seep into the lives of any human, or any community subject to such pressures. Loss of control and lack of resources dos-si-dos into dangerous territory, while us outsiders watch, or worse, look away.

I hope I will follow up on this post with more hopeful developments - no one knows these problems like those living on reserve, and there are many people working hard, with very little, to make life better.