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.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
the cutting edge
What Tom meant, I think, was that his community – and the individuals within it – have little control over how justice ‘works’ for them. A couple of planeloads of lawyers and court staff fly in every month or two, spend the day in a re-arranged community hall, and make decisions about who’s guilty of what crime, whose case can’t be heard yet, who goes to jail, who stays behind. How are these decisions made? Tom perceived – correctly, for the most part – outsiders meeting in private, strange doctrines debated, facts bartered and bargained for, shortcuts taken. All this happens (I know, because I’m one of the outsiders) according to quite a well-developed legal, logical and ethical framework – ours is a system that’s evolved in tinkers and increments over several centuries. As long as everyone plays their roles properly, the majestic mechanism of the law is maintained. So why do both Tom and I sense that it’s all so wrong?
I believe that the problem lies in the enduring ‘outsider’ nature of the work we’re trying to do. Here’s an example: I have a trial tomorrow, in a community about 700 kms north-west of Thunder Bay. I’ve never met my client, or even spoken to him – we don’t even share a language. All I have is an inch-thick folder detailing some heinous offence he supposedly committed, and the clues to a deeper tragedy buried within it, words like “sniffer” and “seven months pregnant”. Setting matters down for trial is a strategic business in northern reserves. Even if you are inadequately prepared, entirely unconvinced, or horrendously incompetent, chances are that Crown witnesses won’t show up, and the case will collapse. Hooray, a victory for the defence. But why does this happen with such shameful frequency? Again, I believe it’s because we are outsiders, and, as professional as we may be, we really don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to helping justice manifest in Tom’s community, and the few dozen others we pretend to serve.
I believe that the problem lies in the enduring ‘outsider’ nature of the work we’re trying to do. Here’s an example: I have a trial tomorrow, in a community about 700 kms north-west of Thunder Bay. I’ve never met my client, or even spoken to him – we don’t even share a language. All I have is an inch-thick folder detailing some heinous offence he supposedly committed, and the clues to a deeper tragedy buried within it, words like “sniffer” and “seven months pregnant”. Setting matters down for trial is a strategic business in northern reserves. Even if you are inadequately prepared, entirely unconvinced, or horrendously incompetent, chances are that Crown witnesses won’t show up, and the case will collapse. Hooray, a victory for the defence. But why does this happen with such shameful frequency? Again, I believe it’s because we are outsiders, and, as professional as we may be, we really don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to helping justice manifest in Tom’s community, and the few dozen others we pretend to serve.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Holes that make the net
Last week I started working as a lawyer again, this time with a couple of senior counsel known around Thunder Bay as the “left wing fringe”. Mostly criminal defence, plus Aboriginal Rights litigation. I’m half in the office working on appeal arguments, and half in tiny planes and tiny towns trying to make some kind of positive difference in the lives of people clutched up by the overgrown fingernails of the Canadian justice system. It may be One World, One Dream, but it’s hard to believe that the One Law, One Society rhetoric is working for the smaller places and nations our country encompasses. Already I’m struck by how little I’ll be able to accomplish, at such great cost.
Pickle Lake bills itself, on the wonky wooden sign on the highway into town, as Ontario’s Last Frontier. This description is accurate insofar as it’s the furthest-most point most people would want to drive in the province, before the road sinks into dust and muskeg, permitting only frozen-season forays further north. Other than that, the slogan is merely another of the many signals that we don’t understand the full reality of life here. Ontario’s last frontier – and far beyond – also happens to be the centre of the universe for the Ojibway and Cree nations whose communities dot the trackless map of the north-west interior.
Mishkeegogamang, also known as New Osnaburg, or Oz, sits about twenty minutes south of Pickle Lake, its reserve broken in half by a government surveyor’s 1911 decision to exclude a resource-rich island from the community’s scant treaty settlement. They’ve spent the past several years – and about seven million dollars – trying to convince the Crown to give it back. “We’ve read the Land Commission documents,” my tour guide grumbles as we drive up to the gravesites that aren’t theirs anymore, “they told ‘em not to give the Indians any lands which might have wealth”. Tom Wassaykeesic is one of the five band councillors here, interrupted in the middle of serving his grandkids lunch by the local probation officer with two curious lawyers who want to have a look around. Fifteen minutes later he finds us at the Nashnawbe-Aski police station (basically a mobile home with a cell-block stuck to the side), honking his horn to announce his engagement as our chauffeur. There's to be quite a lot of honking over the next two and a half hours, Tom’s way of greeting folks sitting on their porches or wandering by on the washboard roads. We pass several cousins and a brother while he points out a few of the highs and lows of Mishkeegogamang’s situation.
Some things hardly need to be said, just somehow understood. The main reserve is scattered with a few two-storey vinyl-sided home (“we built ‘em when there was money for that thing”), but otherwise people live in long narrow trailers beached on concrete pads. Many of the small windows on these overloaded homes were broken. Tom speaks bluntly: “drunks, they’re the ones who just break the windows like that. Got no accountability. All the band money is going to fix them things. Some people don’t care.” He points at a couple of places where houses should have been. “That one got burned down. They had a fight, those people, so they burned it right down. And that one we just use for a basketball court.” It was the only paved spot visible, at least until we continue past Bottle Hill along Sandy Road and catch sight of the beautiful school, a multicoloured four-winged bird perched proudly at the edge of the Albany river. Tom's obviously just as proud, and leads us out to skirt the perimeter, peering in through blessedly unbroken windows at the section reserved for the youngest kids, the classes for grades 3 through 10, the soaring central space where hot lunches are served and children can sit in a great steel-and-pine tepee beneath flags and old photos commemorating the signing of Treaty 9. The place breathes a sense of what kept promises (and enough money) can accomplish.
Finally, after introducing us to the guy spinning Christian country classics on the community radio station, showing us where the bones of ancestors sometimes wash up, and indicating Mish’s mandatory relocations over the past century because of the lake’s hydro-induced flooding, Tom drops us back off in front of the police trailer. Along the way, I get a chance to ask him, especially since he’s the councillor in charge of justice issues for the band, what he thinks about the court that flops down in Pickle Lake every month or so. “Never go to them things anymore,” he spits with disgust, “they already have everything all figured out even before we ever get there.”
Pickle Lake bills itself, on the wonky wooden sign on the highway into town, as Ontario’s Last Frontier. This description is accurate insofar as it’s the furthest-most point most people would want to drive in the province, before the road sinks into dust and muskeg, permitting only frozen-season forays further north. Other than that, the slogan is merely another of the many signals that we don’t understand the full reality of life here. Ontario’s last frontier – and far beyond – also happens to be the centre of the universe for the Ojibway and Cree nations whose communities dot the trackless map of the north-west interior.
Mishkeegogamang, also known as New Osnaburg, or Oz, sits about twenty minutes south of Pickle Lake, its reserve broken in half by a government surveyor’s 1911 decision to exclude a resource-rich island from the community’s scant treaty settlement. They’ve spent the past several years – and about seven million dollars – trying to convince the Crown to give it back. “We’ve read the Land Commission documents,” my tour guide grumbles as we drive up to the gravesites that aren’t theirs anymore, “they told ‘em not to give the Indians any lands which might have wealth”. Tom Wassaykeesic is one of the five band councillors here, interrupted in the middle of serving his grandkids lunch by the local probation officer with two curious lawyers who want to have a look around. Fifteen minutes later he finds us at the Nashnawbe-Aski police station (basically a mobile home with a cell-block stuck to the side), honking his horn to announce his engagement as our chauffeur. There's to be quite a lot of honking over the next two and a half hours, Tom’s way of greeting folks sitting on their porches or wandering by on the washboard roads. We pass several cousins and a brother while he points out a few of the highs and lows of Mishkeegogamang’s situation.
Some things hardly need to be said, just somehow understood. The main reserve is scattered with a few two-storey vinyl-sided home (“we built ‘em when there was money for that thing”), but otherwise people live in long narrow trailers beached on concrete pads. Many of the small windows on these overloaded homes were broken. Tom speaks bluntly: “drunks, they’re the ones who just break the windows like that. Got no accountability. All the band money is going to fix them things. Some people don’t care.” He points at a couple of places where houses should have been. “That one got burned down. They had a fight, those people, so they burned it right down. And that one we just use for a basketball court.” It was the only paved spot visible, at least until we continue past Bottle Hill along Sandy Road and catch sight of the beautiful school, a multicoloured four-winged bird perched proudly at the edge of the Albany river. Tom's obviously just as proud, and leads us out to skirt the perimeter, peering in through blessedly unbroken windows at the section reserved for the youngest kids, the classes for grades 3 through 10, the soaring central space where hot lunches are served and children can sit in a great steel-and-pine tepee beneath flags and old photos commemorating the signing of Treaty 9. The place breathes a sense of what kept promises (and enough money) can accomplish.
Finally, after introducing us to the guy spinning Christian country classics on the community radio station, showing us where the bones of ancestors sometimes wash up, and indicating Mish’s mandatory relocations over the past century because of the lake’s hydro-induced flooding, Tom drops us back off in front of the police trailer. Along the way, I get a chance to ask him, especially since he’s the councillor in charge of justice issues for the band, what he thinks about the court that flops down in Pickle Lake every month or so. “Never go to them things anymore,” he spits with disgust, “they already have everything all figured out even before we ever get there.”
Monday, August 11, 2008
Learning Home
The universe is a circle. Sylvia has chalked it on the board, one round disk floating on a background still ghosted with the notes of a previous lecture. Just a circle, the one thing about existence, Sylvia tells us briskly, that is absolutely certain. Her elders taught her this, and now she is convincing a group of mostly 20-something, mostly non-Native listeners who crane forward in plastic chairs attempting to catch and comprehend this Truth. Blending the confidence of a tenured professor with an encompassing, grandmotherly warmth, she draws two more diagrams, one a square box with a circle inside it, the other a circle encompassing a smaller box. “You see, if it weren’t just one circle, then what would this other stuff be?”
Sylvia’s talk is entitled “Life Cycle Responsibilities”, one of a dozen or so sessions that comprised this year’s Elder’s Gathering at Trent University, an unadvertised, unpretentious convening of Indigenous wisdom from across North America. She has come to teach us about the eight stages of being human, as understood by the Mohawk. Four lines soon pie the circle, then Sylvia’s chalk curves the bottom of another orb, just above the one she’s divided into wedges. “This is the spirit world,” she indicates, dotting a path between it and the human sphere. “All of us begin here – we are spirit before we are born”. Our grey-braided, blue-eyed teacher points to a woman in the audience cradling an infant: “that baby is so important. The couple has to prepare for it. They’ve got to understand what it means to invite a spirit down. They should be ready. For two years, according to our teachings, they should be getting ready.” To help us understand, Sylvia adds a word or two inside each of the eight wedges in the central circle, which represent the stages of human experience, as well as our corresponding responsibilities as we move through them. As this magnetic Mohawk auntie illustrates, via legend, anecdote, and the symbol of the circle, to be created is to take part of a process that involves and requires all, excludes none: the responsibility of infants is joy. For toddlers it is leaning about safety and environmental awareness. For children it is truth. For youth, rejection. For young adults, the work of the people. Parents are to provide. Grandparents give life teachings. And elders instruct the people’s spirit.
I lean back in my chair, uncertain how to either argue or accept such a beautiful and intriguing evocation of life’s gentle, relational purposes. What about when stages break down, are missed? Do we have to go through them all? How can Sylvia not sense our civilisation’s awful tendency to puncture and pollute the circle, especially as an elder in a tradition that holds it sacred? I don’t ask, but she responds to my anxiety with another figure on the board, this time the outline of a human torso, riddled with ragged holes. “This is what happens when our souls are wounded – you can’t see the holes, but there they are.” Each stage is essential, but if we are not taught properly, not loved as we are called to be, they can be missed or misunderstood. Sylvia startles me with her diagnosis. “We have to be careful of the language we let children learn. If we are confused, so they will be too. One language, that’s best.” I sense she’s not using the word in the linguistic sense. But perhaps in implicit recognition of the damage inherent in this babbling age, she turns from the circle’s pleasing ideals to discuss ways of healing its breaches. “The holes, they stay with us, you know. They don’t easily go away. If a woman had all that she needed, she wouldn’t be fifteen and giving away sex for a ride into town. A man wouldn’t be trying to prove himself by making babies and leaving them for her to raise. And so they miss such an important stage, and all of us miss what they can give us, these young people who are going straight from being youth, to being parents, without taking the time to prepare.” Yet, Sylvia concludes gently, we can always go back to learn the things we missed. And we can always practice healing, no matter how many holes we’ve accumulated. That’s what an elder’s teachings are about.
I’m not indigenous to here. Both of my parents trace their lineages back to Europe, and if we like we can get on planes and return to lands where our ancestors farmed, fought, or built ships and sailed away. Those lands, of course, in both demographic and environmental terms, have radically changed. They are no longer identifiable as home for my parents, and they are certainly not home for me. Home, as near as I can articulate it, is located somewhere within – or perhaps all over – this massive country, this land symbolized as Canada. There’s lots of room, but I really have nowhere else to go, not if I expect to nurture and develop that most essential human treasure, that warm certainty of belonging. Somehow, here’s where I have to find it.
But if I can readily identify the need, the reality of its lacking follows close behind. This is not a simple place to call home, not if I expect to share in the concept with a rich spectrum of others, with other languages, histories, and ideas about what’s required to make it work. But I’m convinced that, unless I’m prepared to endorse a competitive, zero-sum, and ultimately brutal notion of belonging (more for me means less for you), I have to open myself to these different experiences, and try to understand the particular struggles of other people who co-exist in this time and space. As a non-indigenous Canadian, there seems to be no more crucial place to begin this exploration than by listening to the land’s first peoples. It’s not merely a matter of who was here first. It’s about mutual recognition, and a long foregone rebalancing of wisdom. For generations, even centuries, Aboriginal peoples have been forced to acknowledge, not merely the existence of arriving European cultures, but their authority, their ascendancy, their power. It’s resulted in a serious, deeply scarring imbalance in the relationships we’re living out as a blended nation, and there’s a long way to go before we reach a healthy equilibrium. But I sense the way forward. This conference tells part of the story of how, and why it matters to all of us.
Beverley Hungry Wolf is Blackfoot, from the rainshadow hills of southern Alberta. Standing in the warm window-wrapped room within another oval of students, her childhood stories are told through the searing, lucid senses of one whose own eyes had been nearly blinded, whose tongue had been nearly cut out.
“Boarding school made a very strong impact in our lives,” she begins simply. “We were raised by priests and nuns. Such a cold place, a very cold place – we couldn’t even touch our best friends. I got into trouble when they asked me my name. I said I am so-and-so’s daughter, so-and-so’s granddaughter, but…” She contorts her body as if she’s grabbing a small cuff of neck, and channels the mad authority of a teacher into a suddenly enraged “I din ask you who your family was girl! I asked for your NAME!!” The charged air presses against my skin, and I wince a little at the violent re-enactment. This was Beverley at five. Mercifully, she doesn’t stay there, but invites us strangers into Blackfoot ways, one hand moving like a feather, her fingers tracing long ways home through the sunlit air. “Blackfoot girls stay close to their mothers. The English thought we were strange – oh we thought they were so strange! We never had aunts or uncles, only mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, grandparents. Everybody was your relative back then. I remember how we used to visit – go out for a month, put up our camp and visit!” Beverley, like most elders, is a mother, grandmother, burier of the dead “six in the past two weeks”, keeper of traditions and teller of stories. She is absolutely honest and sincere in what she tells us, even though so much of it can never be measured by the narrow barometer of fact. To be an elder is to tell the truth. But listeners have to, in turn, accept and honour those truths, or they are as worthless as X’s on the old treaty papers. This is not a passive relationship. Listening becomes a partnering in a dance, or an accompaniment along a path that would otherwise be overgrown, closed off. Although Beverley stands before us without wavering for almost two hours, these old people are no longer physically sturdy – most of what they teach, except the visiting, and the gentler protocols of ceremony, is for others to take up and practice. They realise that it’s no longer their job to sustain cultures, but rather inspire and guide the ones who will.
And somehow, even though most of us who listen are not Mohawk, or Blackfoot, or Indigenous in any direct sense, that gift and burden is being passed to us as well. I remember being struck by the truth of what a Dene friend told me years ago. “It’s not only us who have treaty rights – your people signed the treaties too. You’re our partners.” An easy thing to forget, when the land, the water, the type and style of government, all appear to be so obviously and uniformly ours, and it is only those few Native throwbacks who seem to be standing in the way of our democracy’s onward march, reminding us of what sounds like strange, ancient history. But we shed such wisdom, and forget foundational promises, at our collective moral, ecological, and spiritual peril. Those ragged holes that Sylvia drew for us don’t only manifest in wayward Mohawk youth.
Near the end of the conference, a delightful Six Nations’ elder leads us anew through the familiar seasons in this part of the world, from winter (“a time for white foods: white corn, white bean, ash, beavertail soup”), to spring (“we purify ourselves with the maple sap. Drink four gallons right from the tree!”), through summer (“we’re berry people. It acidifies the urine – fights off bacteria”), and on again (“burdock root, the first year it grows. That’s your fall medicine”). Is this knowledge, and the culture that knows it, useless, now that we can all drag our bodies eighty years with processed foods and pharmaceuticals? Now that we can all mumble or bellow in English, and program our time by TV schedules? Powerfully I feel, the answer remains no. No, even after years of erosion, co-optation, and neglect. No for all of us, Indigenous or not, who left that conference hall inspired by the gentle, crucial message of these elders to keep recognising one another in the sacred space that this country still blessedly cradles. As surely and enduringly as the land itself exists, it seems that land-based peoples will remain those most able to channel its mysteries, translate its stories, guard and be nurtured by its gifts. But how can I, stranger, settler, home-seeker, best accept and cherish these truths I’m told?
It seems clear, as I blink out into the re-interpreted southern Ontario sunlight and get into my car to drive back to the city, that we’re not all called to actually live these traditional indigenous ways. I hold no personal membership in the nations that patchwork this earth, though I – and all of us, from generous elders to eager urban youth – belong to the country that contains them, that might yet kill them off or help them thrive. As such, all the wisdom-strewn stories shared during this weekend hold transcendent relevance, even if we never drink spring sap or attend a sunrise ceremony.
One thing about wisdom: it ain’t exclusive. The universe is a circle, and, know it, like it or not, we must hold our differences within it.
Sylvia’s talk is entitled “Life Cycle Responsibilities”, one of a dozen or so sessions that comprised this year’s Elder’s Gathering at Trent University, an unadvertised, unpretentious convening of Indigenous wisdom from across North America. She has come to teach us about the eight stages of being human, as understood by the Mohawk. Four lines soon pie the circle, then Sylvia’s chalk curves the bottom of another orb, just above the one she’s divided into wedges. “This is the spirit world,” she indicates, dotting a path between it and the human sphere. “All of us begin here – we are spirit before we are born”. Our grey-braided, blue-eyed teacher points to a woman in the audience cradling an infant: “that baby is so important. The couple has to prepare for it. They’ve got to understand what it means to invite a spirit down. They should be ready. For two years, according to our teachings, they should be getting ready.” To help us understand, Sylvia adds a word or two inside each of the eight wedges in the central circle, which represent the stages of human experience, as well as our corresponding responsibilities as we move through them. As this magnetic Mohawk auntie illustrates, via legend, anecdote, and the symbol of the circle, to be created is to take part of a process that involves and requires all, excludes none: the responsibility of infants is joy. For toddlers it is leaning about safety and environmental awareness. For children it is truth. For youth, rejection. For young adults, the work of the people. Parents are to provide. Grandparents give life teachings. And elders instruct the people’s spirit.
I lean back in my chair, uncertain how to either argue or accept such a beautiful and intriguing evocation of life’s gentle, relational purposes. What about when stages break down, are missed? Do we have to go through them all? How can Sylvia not sense our civilisation’s awful tendency to puncture and pollute the circle, especially as an elder in a tradition that holds it sacred? I don’t ask, but she responds to my anxiety with another figure on the board, this time the outline of a human torso, riddled with ragged holes. “This is what happens when our souls are wounded – you can’t see the holes, but there they are.” Each stage is essential, but if we are not taught properly, not loved as we are called to be, they can be missed or misunderstood. Sylvia startles me with her diagnosis. “We have to be careful of the language we let children learn. If we are confused, so they will be too. One language, that’s best.” I sense she’s not using the word in the linguistic sense. But perhaps in implicit recognition of the damage inherent in this babbling age, she turns from the circle’s pleasing ideals to discuss ways of healing its breaches. “The holes, they stay with us, you know. They don’t easily go away. If a woman had all that she needed, she wouldn’t be fifteen and giving away sex for a ride into town. A man wouldn’t be trying to prove himself by making babies and leaving them for her to raise. And so they miss such an important stage, and all of us miss what they can give us, these young people who are going straight from being youth, to being parents, without taking the time to prepare.” Yet, Sylvia concludes gently, we can always go back to learn the things we missed. And we can always practice healing, no matter how many holes we’ve accumulated. That’s what an elder’s teachings are about.
I’m not indigenous to here. Both of my parents trace their lineages back to Europe, and if we like we can get on planes and return to lands where our ancestors farmed, fought, or built ships and sailed away. Those lands, of course, in both demographic and environmental terms, have radically changed. They are no longer identifiable as home for my parents, and they are certainly not home for me. Home, as near as I can articulate it, is located somewhere within – or perhaps all over – this massive country, this land symbolized as Canada. There’s lots of room, but I really have nowhere else to go, not if I expect to nurture and develop that most essential human treasure, that warm certainty of belonging. Somehow, here’s where I have to find it.
But if I can readily identify the need, the reality of its lacking follows close behind. This is not a simple place to call home, not if I expect to share in the concept with a rich spectrum of others, with other languages, histories, and ideas about what’s required to make it work. But I’m convinced that, unless I’m prepared to endorse a competitive, zero-sum, and ultimately brutal notion of belonging (more for me means less for you), I have to open myself to these different experiences, and try to understand the particular struggles of other people who co-exist in this time and space. As a non-indigenous Canadian, there seems to be no more crucial place to begin this exploration than by listening to the land’s first peoples. It’s not merely a matter of who was here first. It’s about mutual recognition, and a long foregone rebalancing of wisdom. For generations, even centuries, Aboriginal peoples have been forced to acknowledge, not merely the existence of arriving European cultures, but their authority, their ascendancy, their power. It’s resulted in a serious, deeply scarring imbalance in the relationships we’re living out as a blended nation, and there’s a long way to go before we reach a healthy equilibrium. But I sense the way forward. This conference tells part of the story of how, and why it matters to all of us.
Beverley Hungry Wolf is Blackfoot, from the rainshadow hills of southern Alberta. Standing in the warm window-wrapped room within another oval of students, her childhood stories are told through the searing, lucid senses of one whose own eyes had been nearly blinded, whose tongue had been nearly cut out.
“Boarding school made a very strong impact in our lives,” she begins simply. “We were raised by priests and nuns. Such a cold place, a very cold place – we couldn’t even touch our best friends. I got into trouble when they asked me my name. I said I am so-and-so’s daughter, so-and-so’s granddaughter, but…” She contorts her body as if she’s grabbing a small cuff of neck, and channels the mad authority of a teacher into a suddenly enraged “I din ask you who your family was girl! I asked for your NAME!!” The charged air presses against my skin, and I wince a little at the violent re-enactment. This was Beverley at five. Mercifully, she doesn’t stay there, but invites us strangers into Blackfoot ways, one hand moving like a feather, her fingers tracing long ways home through the sunlit air. “Blackfoot girls stay close to their mothers. The English thought we were strange – oh we thought they were so strange! We never had aunts or uncles, only mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, grandparents. Everybody was your relative back then. I remember how we used to visit – go out for a month, put up our camp and visit!” Beverley, like most elders, is a mother, grandmother, burier of the dead “six in the past two weeks”, keeper of traditions and teller of stories. She is absolutely honest and sincere in what she tells us, even though so much of it can never be measured by the narrow barometer of fact. To be an elder is to tell the truth. But listeners have to, in turn, accept and honour those truths, or they are as worthless as X’s on the old treaty papers. This is not a passive relationship. Listening becomes a partnering in a dance, or an accompaniment along a path that would otherwise be overgrown, closed off. Although Beverley stands before us without wavering for almost two hours, these old people are no longer physically sturdy – most of what they teach, except the visiting, and the gentler protocols of ceremony, is for others to take up and practice. They realise that it’s no longer their job to sustain cultures, but rather inspire and guide the ones who will.
And somehow, even though most of us who listen are not Mohawk, or Blackfoot, or Indigenous in any direct sense, that gift and burden is being passed to us as well. I remember being struck by the truth of what a Dene friend told me years ago. “It’s not only us who have treaty rights – your people signed the treaties too. You’re our partners.” An easy thing to forget, when the land, the water, the type and style of government, all appear to be so obviously and uniformly ours, and it is only those few Native throwbacks who seem to be standing in the way of our democracy’s onward march, reminding us of what sounds like strange, ancient history. But we shed such wisdom, and forget foundational promises, at our collective moral, ecological, and spiritual peril. Those ragged holes that Sylvia drew for us don’t only manifest in wayward Mohawk youth.
Near the end of the conference, a delightful Six Nations’ elder leads us anew through the familiar seasons in this part of the world, from winter (“a time for white foods: white corn, white bean, ash, beavertail soup”), to spring (“we purify ourselves with the maple sap. Drink four gallons right from the tree!”), through summer (“we’re berry people. It acidifies the urine – fights off bacteria”), and on again (“burdock root, the first year it grows. That’s your fall medicine”). Is this knowledge, and the culture that knows it, useless, now that we can all drag our bodies eighty years with processed foods and pharmaceuticals? Now that we can all mumble or bellow in English, and program our time by TV schedules? Powerfully I feel, the answer remains no. No, even after years of erosion, co-optation, and neglect. No for all of us, Indigenous or not, who left that conference hall inspired by the gentle, crucial message of these elders to keep recognising one another in the sacred space that this country still blessedly cradles. As surely and enduringly as the land itself exists, it seems that land-based peoples will remain those most able to channel its mysteries, translate its stories, guard and be nurtured by its gifts. But how can I, stranger, settler, home-seeker, best accept and cherish these truths I’m told?
It seems clear, as I blink out into the re-interpreted southern Ontario sunlight and get into my car to drive back to the city, that we’re not all called to actually live these traditional indigenous ways. I hold no personal membership in the nations that patchwork this earth, though I – and all of us, from generous elders to eager urban youth – belong to the country that contains them, that might yet kill them off or help them thrive. As such, all the wisdom-strewn stories shared during this weekend hold transcendent relevance, even if we never drink spring sap or attend a sunrise ceremony.
One thing about wisdom: it ain’t exclusive. The universe is a circle, and, know it, like it or not, we must hold our differences within it.
Caledonia: The Weight of this Land
Hazel’s greying, elbow-length hair embraces the huge red ‘MOHAWK’ sloganed on her sweatshirt. Her blue eyes strongly hold my own, and her voice is mostly measured, but passion trembles some of the more important, battleground words, words like ‘sovereignty’, ‘colonialism’, and ‘hate’. Words like ‘ours’. Hazel is one of the leaders and spokespeople of the Six Nations’ reclamation of an ugly patch of scrubland and half-finished houses, a contended acreage that’s become synonymous with Caledonia, and representative of one of the most urgent challenges this country might not realise it faces.
A big guy who calls himself Whoodat steps in front of my car as I turn off from the highway to where a tarp-and-plywood shack and a maze of concrete blocks sits between the skeletal gates of the Douglas Creek Estates residences. He and a couple of others are taking their turn patrolling the entrance and stopping every new arrival, while a couple of OPP officers silently watch from a car parked across from the ‘Welcome to Caledonia’ sign. They haven’t heard I was coming, but after a few minutes of discussion on his walkie-talkie, Whoodat comes back to give me the go-ahead. “Anyone with an open mind and peace in their heart is welcome here,” he says in the same serious voice he had used to question my purpose.
“I own nothing.” One elder bluntly answers when I thank him for the wisdom he’s just finished imparting to a group of us newcomers who are here to experience first-hand what this controversy’s all about. “It ain’t mine – all things belong to the Creator, y’know?”
I think I do know, but I hold that understanding with a mind that’s also babbling with contradictory truths, facts, ways of the world. The principles at stake dwarf the few acres of would-be development that compose the occupation site. People here are struggling for a fundamentally new relationship between themselves and the Canada they feel has long oppressed them. They are also articulating a profoundly different vision of how land ought to be used by the humans who live on it. It’s attracted a curious blend of sympathisers. Sitting around a fire listening to a well-spoken white man explain, with intricate reference to centuries-old treaties and constitutional documents, how he and his friends are extricating themselves from the Canadian corporation, I have the distinct feeling that I’m perched on an outer ring of reason. So what if that ‘Name’ on that ‘Driver’s Licence’ isn’t the ‘living, flesh and blood’ person who’s standing in front of me, he’s still gonna be in a heap of trouble if he gets caught driving around without it. But the others near the fire- two black women, a converted Sundancer from Virginia, and a handful of Six Nations’ folk, seem able to accept the man’s version of reality with much more equanimity than I can muster. “It’s all assumptions and presumptions”, one of his friends says for the second time in five minutes, speaking of the ‘country’ called ‘Canada’ where I was born and raised and locate a great deal of my belonging. It’s not that they have anything wrong with people who identify themselves as proud Canadians, of course, it’s just that they reserve, and are in the midst of trying to claim, their right to be sovereign of its cloying possessiveness. A hard thing to do from the inside, to be sure.
These men are a few of the supporters who’ve come to feel the air of righteous struggle that stiffens the flags on the reclamation site, from the Mohawk banner fluttering from would-be suburban lampposts to Six Nations’ insignia crowning transplanted trees, to solidarity flags from Palestine and Lebanon. For me it’s an exhilarating, even intoxicating atmosphere, but one that many others have been breathing for a lot longer than one day, or 897 (that’s how many days the occupation has been going on as of August 11, 2008). I imagine, from the matter-of-fact way in which our hosts explain their position and schlep sacks of potatoes into the makeshift cookhouse, that any rush that comes from confronting Goliath has long since dissipated. If anything, though, this plodding tenacity seems a sign of their resolve to remain, both on this site and as a self-evident nation. For many I meet on this Sunday in Caledonia, there’s simply no other approach to take.
A sweet elder starts speaking in a gentle, tremulous voice about some of the opposition they’ve encountered from people living in the town. “They ask why can’t we just be like other normal people. Why can’t we pay taxes and live like all the rest?” “Well,” she answers herself, “that’s spoken like a person who’s never lost anything.”
There’s a consensus among those gathered here that they have lost a great deal, more than they can ever get back. “It’s not about kicking people out of their houses” Hazel tells us, “we just want to live in peace and give our grandkids a chance to claim their heritage”. Asserting this claim, in large part, is a symbolic way of saying “No more” to the continued indifference or ignorance on the part of Canadian governments and the public who elects them.
And for that afternoon, around the fire, I felt the soundness of the argument, the fundamental claim to renewed inter-national respect, even though it’s voiced across a wide and often confusing spectrum of particular perspectives. Some I spoke with didn’t consider themselves Canadian at all, while others proudly sported maple leaf tattoos alongside those of the Eagle Clan. Some want to throw down the shackles of an illegitimate state, some want to see this materialist ego-zone turned back to the nature that once stretched across traditional Aboriginal lands. Everyone understands they can’t go backwards, but all are fed up by a forward march they feel both demands what they value and excludes their belonging.
I ask Hazel why those on the site don’t leave, now that the government has committed to negotiating a resolution to the dispute. “We remember Oka,” she says, “we remember Ipperwash. Those lands were put in trust, and what happened? Still, no progress has been made. So we need to stay here until we can be sure.” Looking around the desolate acreage, Hazel turns to something that has especially troubled her and the other Six Nations’ elders. “They came in here, they bulldozed all of the topsoil, maybe three, four feet deep across all of this land. And then they took it away. When we buried our ancestors here, we didn’t dig them six-foot graves. We just covered them up. But now all that soil’s gone, and they won’t tell us where they’ve taken it.”
Who owns these treasures, who controls this mud? If the answers come back as nothing else than ‘individuals’ and ‘the democratic state’, if indeed these words translate to nothing else but ‘money’ and ‘numbers’, then there is no room here for small nations, and no ear for that which does not speak.
This is not the constitutional promise of the Canada I was born into, nor the humble trail towards its realisation that I ache for us to walk. Somewhere missed within the marching orders, the official narratives that suggest settlements are just a matter of time, the low rumble coming from south of Caledonia seems to voice a more enduring, widespread dissatisfaction with what has happened in this country, and what its path will likely be. And though I still believe in promises, it seems we face a contradictory choice of which to keep.
A big guy who calls himself Whoodat steps in front of my car as I turn off from the highway to where a tarp-and-plywood shack and a maze of concrete blocks sits between the skeletal gates of the Douglas Creek Estates residences. He and a couple of others are taking their turn patrolling the entrance and stopping every new arrival, while a couple of OPP officers silently watch from a car parked across from the ‘Welcome to Caledonia’ sign. They haven’t heard I was coming, but after a few minutes of discussion on his walkie-talkie, Whoodat comes back to give me the go-ahead. “Anyone with an open mind and peace in their heart is welcome here,” he says in the same serious voice he had used to question my purpose.
“I own nothing.” One elder bluntly answers when I thank him for the wisdom he’s just finished imparting to a group of us newcomers who are here to experience first-hand what this controversy’s all about. “It ain’t mine – all things belong to the Creator, y’know?”
I think I do know, but I hold that understanding with a mind that’s also babbling with contradictory truths, facts, ways of the world. The principles at stake dwarf the few acres of would-be development that compose the occupation site. People here are struggling for a fundamentally new relationship between themselves and the Canada they feel has long oppressed them. They are also articulating a profoundly different vision of how land ought to be used by the humans who live on it. It’s attracted a curious blend of sympathisers. Sitting around a fire listening to a well-spoken white man explain, with intricate reference to centuries-old treaties and constitutional documents, how he and his friends are extricating themselves from the Canadian corporation, I have the distinct feeling that I’m perched on an outer ring of reason. So what if that ‘Name’ on that ‘Driver’s Licence’ isn’t the ‘living, flesh and blood’ person who’s standing in front of me, he’s still gonna be in a heap of trouble if he gets caught driving around without it. But the others near the fire- two black women, a converted Sundancer from Virginia, and a handful of Six Nations’ folk, seem able to accept the man’s version of reality with much more equanimity than I can muster. “It’s all assumptions and presumptions”, one of his friends says for the second time in five minutes, speaking of the ‘country’ called ‘Canada’ where I was born and raised and locate a great deal of my belonging. It’s not that they have anything wrong with people who identify themselves as proud Canadians, of course, it’s just that they reserve, and are in the midst of trying to claim, their right to be sovereign of its cloying possessiveness. A hard thing to do from the inside, to be sure.
These men are a few of the supporters who’ve come to feel the air of righteous struggle that stiffens the flags on the reclamation site, from the Mohawk banner fluttering from would-be suburban lampposts to Six Nations’ insignia crowning transplanted trees, to solidarity flags from Palestine and Lebanon. For me it’s an exhilarating, even intoxicating atmosphere, but one that many others have been breathing for a lot longer than one day, or 897 (that’s how many days the occupation has been going on as of August 11, 2008). I imagine, from the matter-of-fact way in which our hosts explain their position and schlep sacks of potatoes into the makeshift cookhouse, that any rush that comes from confronting Goliath has long since dissipated. If anything, though, this plodding tenacity seems a sign of their resolve to remain, both on this site and as a self-evident nation. For many I meet on this Sunday in Caledonia, there’s simply no other approach to take.
A sweet elder starts speaking in a gentle, tremulous voice about some of the opposition they’ve encountered from people living in the town. “They ask why can’t we just be like other normal people. Why can’t we pay taxes and live like all the rest?” “Well,” she answers herself, “that’s spoken like a person who’s never lost anything.”
There’s a consensus among those gathered here that they have lost a great deal, more than they can ever get back. “It’s not about kicking people out of their houses” Hazel tells us, “we just want to live in peace and give our grandkids a chance to claim their heritage”. Asserting this claim, in large part, is a symbolic way of saying “No more” to the continued indifference or ignorance on the part of Canadian governments and the public who elects them.
And for that afternoon, around the fire, I felt the soundness of the argument, the fundamental claim to renewed inter-national respect, even though it’s voiced across a wide and often confusing spectrum of particular perspectives. Some I spoke with didn’t consider themselves Canadian at all, while others proudly sported maple leaf tattoos alongside those of the Eagle Clan. Some want to throw down the shackles of an illegitimate state, some want to see this materialist ego-zone turned back to the nature that once stretched across traditional Aboriginal lands. Everyone understands they can’t go backwards, but all are fed up by a forward march they feel both demands what they value and excludes their belonging.
I ask Hazel why those on the site don’t leave, now that the government has committed to negotiating a resolution to the dispute. “We remember Oka,” she says, “we remember Ipperwash. Those lands were put in trust, and what happened? Still, no progress has been made. So we need to stay here until we can be sure.” Looking around the desolate acreage, Hazel turns to something that has especially troubled her and the other Six Nations’ elders. “They came in here, they bulldozed all of the topsoil, maybe three, four feet deep across all of this land. And then they took it away. When we buried our ancestors here, we didn’t dig them six-foot graves. We just covered them up. But now all that soil’s gone, and they won’t tell us where they’ve taken it.”
Who owns these treasures, who controls this mud? If the answers come back as nothing else than ‘individuals’ and ‘the democratic state’, if indeed these words translate to nothing else but ‘money’ and ‘numbers’, then there is no room here for small nations, and no ear for that which does not speak.
This is not the constitutional promise of the Canada I was born into, nor the humble trail towards its realisation that I ache for us to walk. Somewhere missed within the marching orders, the official narratives that suggest settlements are just a matter of time, the low rumble coming from south of Caledonia seems to voice a more enduring, widespread dissatisfaction with what has happened in this country, and what its path will likely be. And though I still believe in promises, it seems we face a contradictory choice of which to keep.
Jacks in the Box
A colourful, cartoonish eagle is painted on an otherwise barren cinder wall in the worship centre at the Barton Street Jail. Underneath its outstretched, soaring body is a string of initials, presumably those of the inmates who carried out the bold notion of putting one of the world’s most symbolically liberated creatures on the blocks at the bottom of their prison. It’s not a fantastic work of art, but whenever I see it I’m reminded of the powerful human urge for freedom, which seems to abide through even the most frustrating of circumstances. Though coming here week after week, doing the same things and seeing the same faces, can easily sink into mindless routine, it’s crucial for me to remember that prison’s no place to belong in. In many ways, in moods washing from angry to patient, hopeful to terrified, everyone here is trying to break out. And it’s a need – essential, elemental, universal – that seems to operate independently of whatever just or absurd reason for why a person might be locked up to begin with. This dissociation – between why a person may be in jail, and the prevailing motivation to get out – causes one of the many tensions that sprout out of the stacked rocks of the incarceration matrix. Because it is the collective who, officially in the service of public and individual good, sees fit to box up ‘bad’ people, we bear a large amount of the responsibility for the consequences of our doing so. This is where our civilisation rubs rawest, and untended wounds fester unseen.
I deal with the overwhelming need for freedom in two rather contradictory ways. As a lawyer, I come to Barton Street to see clients who (as I mentioned in a previous column) are considered ‘unacceptable risks’ to be allowed to remain in the community while their cases are before the court. I meet with them across scarred tables in small glassed-in rooms, one breath removed from the noisy pods of their spare, highly-surveilled lodgings. Not surprisingly, getting free is a major preoccupation, so we discuss the legal strategies and options best designed to reach this narrowly-defined goal. The antagonist, of course, is almost always the “other side” that put them in there, usually vaguely symbolised by the court, the system, or else some wretch who lied or snitched to the cops. At least partially because of the setting, it’s a struggle to handle anything more during these hurried encounters than the barest bones of a particular charge, which is circumscribed and set apart from the much deeper who’s and why’s of where they are. I feel like each of us is programmed, in this place, to approach problems (“hey, you’re in jail”) and solutions (“get me out of jail”) in the crudest, most impoverished sense. Creativity and self-empowerment, for men most desperately in need of them, seem muted, far away.
But blessedly, I have another job in prison, a volunteer gig on Monday nights leading small groups of so-called Y.O.’s (young offenders) in yoga and meditation. There’s lots of giggles and grunts, but never any talk about why these earnest boys are in the bowels of an adult institution. Instead we start by acknowledging the mental barriers to being free (whether we’re in jail or on the streets), then learn, along the ancient paths of movement and stillness, the possibilities of spiritual escape. All done in a dimly lit, locked room, the eagle watching from its frozen flight upon the wall.
I’m not alone in this effort to provide tools and guidance to inmates, to engage in some helpful way with the undeniable yearning for liberation. Chess, church ministries, smudging ceremonies, A.A., all sorts of healing arts are brought through the heavy doors by well-meaning folks propelled by various ideas about how to make the broken whole. Through this lens, it doesn’t so much matter exactly what it is that someone did to land them in the slammer, it’s enough to know that somehow something hopeful led this ragged man or cocky kid to your particular prescription for getting free. The law, in its wisdom, will nourish or at least not trample on the good seeds planted in these quiet evening freedom sessions, will bring its power to bear in ways that do justice to both past wrongs and future chances.
Or at least, I could be forgiven for thinking so if I were not also a servant of the system that so often maintains and widens the divide between freedom and responsibility. With both perspectives – that of the lawyer encouraged to maximise the quantitative aspects of my clients’ freedom via legal combat and message massaging, and that of the volunteer who is involved in enhancing these same persons’ qualitative experience of what real freedom feels like – I’m beginning to understand the depth of confusion inherent in a restrictive, impersonal prison/justice model. How can I expect to introduce a prisoner to the practice of Zen or Christianity, which, if taken seriously, arguably leads directly to courageous engagement with the source of one’s imprisonment, and then turn around and counsel an incarcerated client on the importance of not opening up in court, if a risk of longer imprisonment would result? Yet that’s precisely what I find myself doing, week after fractured week.
Imprisoning people, if it’s not eminently necessary to protect someone’s safety, makes the difficult job of responding holistically to criminal allegations and conduct that much harder to accomplish. More than the elephant in the room, prison is the room itself, the walls that shut out much of the breadth of freedom-seeking, narrowing it all down to the sparest basics. Understandably, when you’re in, all you really want is to get out. But without the integration of tools and values necessary to get at the roots of criminal behaviour – a process that implicates the public system as much as it does the individuals whose lives are caught up in such suffering – the outside becomes little more than an interlude between recreated reasons for being thrown back in again. Until we learn (and truly teach) how to take up problems with the heart as well as the mind, none of us – not least those behind our bricked-up walls – will really get free.
I deal with the overwhelming need for freedom in two rather contradictory ways. As a lawyer, I come to Barton Street to see clients who (as I mentioned in a previous column) are considered ‘unacceptable risks’ to be allowed to remain in the community while their cases are before the court. I meet with them across scarred tables in small glassed-in rooms, one breath removed from the noisy pods of their spare, highly-surveilled lodgings. Not surprisingly, getting free is a major preoccupation, so we discuss the legal strategies and options best designed to reach this narrowly-defined goal. The antagonist, of course, is almost always the “other side” that put them in there, usually vaguely symbolised by the court, the system, or else some wretch who lied or snitched to the cops. At least partially because of the setting, it’s a struggle to handle anything more during these hurried encounters than the barest bones of a particular charge, which is circumscribed and set apart from the much deeper who’s and why’s of where they are. I feel like each of us is programmed, in this place, to approach problems (“hey, you’re in jail”) and solutions (“get me out of jail”) in the crudest, most impoverished sense. Creativity and self-empowerment, for men most desperately in need of them, seem muted, far away.
But blessedly, I have another job in prison, a volunteer gig on Monday nights leading small groups of so-called Y.O.’s (young offenders) in yoga and meditation. There’s lots of giggles and grunts, but never any talk about why these earnest boys are in the bowels of an adult institution. Instead we start by acknowledging the mental barriers to being free (whether we’re in jail or on the streets), then learn, along the ancient paths of movement and stillness, the possibilities of spiritual escape. All done in a dimly lit, locked room, the eagle watching from its frozen flight upon the wall.
I’m not alone in this effort to provide tools and guidance to inmates, to engage in some helpful way with the undeniable yearning for liberation. Chess, church ministries, smudging ceremonies, A.A., all sorts of healing arts are brought through the heavy doors by well-meaning folks propelled by various ideas about how to make the broken whole. Through this lens, it doesn’t so much matter exactly what it is that someone did to land them in the slammer, it’s enough to know that somehow something hopeful led this ragged man or cocky kid to your particular prescription for getting free. The law, in its wisdom, will nourish or at least not trample on the good seeds planted in these quiet evening freedom sessions, will bring its power to bear in ways that do justice to both past wrongs and future chances.
Or at least, I could be forgiven for thinking so if I were not also a servant of the system that so often maintains and widens the divide between freedom and responsibility. With both perspectives – that of the lawyer encouraged to maximise the quantitative aspects of my clients’ freedom via legal combat and message massaging, and that of the volunteer who is involved in enhancing these same persons’ qualitative experience of what real freedom feels like – I’m beginning to understand the depth of confusion inherent in a restrictive, impersonal prison/justice model. How can I expect to introduce a prisoner to the practice of Zen or Christianity, which, if taken seriously, arguably leads directly to courageous engagement with the source of one’s imprisonment, and then turn around and counsel an incarcerated client on the importance of not opening up in court, if a risk of longer imprisonment would result? Yet that’s precisely what I find myself doing, week after fractured week.
Imprisoning people, if it’s not eminently necessary to protect someone’s safety, makes the difficult job of responding holistically to criminal allegations and conduct that much harder to accomplish. More than the elephant in the room, prison is the room itself, the walls that shut out much of the breadth of freedom-seeking, narrowing it all down to the sparest basics. Understandably, when you’re in, all you really want is to get out. But without the integration of tools and values necessary to get at the roots of criminal behaviour – a process that implicates the public system as much as it does the individuals whose lives are caught up in such suffering – the outside becomes little more than an interlude between recreated reasons for being thrown back in again. Until we learn (and truly teach) how to take up problems with the heart as well as the mind, none of us – not least those behind our bricked-up walls – will really get free.
The Banality of Oppression
Honesty, strangely enough, is not something that is very welcome in the justice system – at least not the deep variety, those revelations that lead to more questions, reflections, connections. Lawyers don’t like it; successes slip away, sophisticated lines of defence are severed, and we start to uncomfortably understand (and worse, contemplate responding to) how tangled the roots of wrongdoing really are. Police and prosecutors prey upon it; hearing, instead of the complex subtext of shame and hopefulness that may justifiably lead someone to admit a wrong action, simply the “aha, gotcha!” moment that secures a conviction. Judges, well, judges tend to be so chronically undernourished on their diets of partial truths and platitudes that real honesties likely taste strange, insubstantial. Besides, what court has time to sink its teeth into the messy realities of lives, especially when dryly recited by parroting counsel who have fifty other files and their own interests to think about?
Opportunities for honest engagement, like many other of the most important insignia of healthy relations, are rarely found in our criminal courtrooms. And so, even as the system digs its claws and keeps its tabs upon the humans it commands, most are paradoxically hard-pressed to be seen as full humans, to assert and nurture, as one frustrated client put it, their “dignity and integrity”. It might seem an odd attribute to recognise in those accused, perhaps, of violating the dignity and integrity of others (or their property), but it’s a fundamental attribute of liberal humanism. Anything less leads to oppression.
So that’s what I’m going to call it, even though ours is the sort that leaves no whip scars or wire burns, that doesn’t disappear people in the night or actively shackle basic entitlements, as in certain other power-addled states. Rather, our oppressions are cloaked in the strict, confounding logic that imprisons addicts for the effects of their addictions, that denies the homeless bail because they don’t have stable homes. They are deepened by the measured condescension of professionals, when respect means little more than checking off the right boxes. And they are underlined by the centrality of poverty among the reasons why some folks are pegged as “rounders”, returned with sad regularity to the system’s small square holes. Oppression flourishes when those who wield power cease caring about how it diminishes the dignity and integrity of those without.
People with the least power in our society – those enduring mangled families, self-medicating wounds, wandering between temporary refuges – are disproportionately represented in our pre-trial prisons. Many are legally guilty of at least some of what they’ve been charged with; some are not. This is not surprising: private sufferings have public consequences. Oppressed people, perhaps in more achingly evident ways than the rest of us, commit crimes: they lie, they lash out, they try to get ahead by doing underhanded things, and thus, they come into contact with our official structures of rules, punishments, and accountability. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this state of affairs – societies have long reserved the right to draw and enforce moral boundaries around the lives of their members – but it seems reasonable to assume that any institution that dignifies itself with the word ‘justice’ ought to remember that any exercise of its substantial influence should be accompanied by significant responsibilities, including a sensitive awareness of the brokenness that characterises many of its subjects’ existences. By and large, those invested with the tasks of policing, prosecuting, defending and judging persons accused of crimes do not share much in common with them. Most don’t have any idea what it’s like to live with a mental illness or the memory of abuse, most, if they’re addicted to anything, don’t have to huddle in alleys or hustle their own bodies to get a fix, and most are more likely to own their homes rather than face the hassles of bad landlords or the revolving-door welcome of charity shelters. Again, not surprising, and not a feature of our slanted society that’s about to change. But once we accept the burden of adjudicating conflicts, can we justly refuse to recognise our role in making matters better or worse?
While ‘better’ is maybe too much to expect of a system primarily designed to determine who should be marked with the stigma of “criminal”, it’s more culpably complicit in making people’s lives worse. The blinkered roll-out of equal treatment is one of the worse culprits in this regard. Although its façade is fraying somewhat thin these days, the presumption of innocence remains a cornerstone of our legal process. Unless pre-trial detention is necessary in the interests of public safety or to make sure someone returns to court, that presumption demands that they should be allowed every freedom in the interim, to either address the underlying difficulties that led to the charge or, if they prefer, go about as if nothing had happened. Instead, most people accused of committing a crime are made to agree to a string of conditions before they’ll be released. These may include demands that they keep a curfew, or stay at a certain residence, or steer clear of drugs, alcohol, or anyone with a criminal record. Most insidiously, bail is rarely granted to those who can’t produce a whack of assets, a whistle-clean relative, or, more commonly, both. Some programs, like that offered by the John Howard Society, attempt to level the field a bit by supervising the release of those who are otherwise bereft of alternatives, but the ostensibly equal, manifestly discriminatory rule remains the same: if you take one step out of line, any faltering that may be entirely understandable in your difficult circumstances, your next residence will be that big house on Barton Street. Told you so. This is the banality of oppression in our time, our community: processes whose impervious, impersonal demands box in complete people with complex stories, who make it ever harder for those without power to reclaim the dignity and integrity that should never be lost.
Opportunities for honest engagement, like many other of the most important insignia of healthy relations, are rarely found in our criminal courtrooms. And so, even as the system digs its claws and keeps its tabs upon the humans it commands, most are paradoxically hard-pressed to be seen as full humans, to assert and nurture, as one frustrated client put it, their “dignity and integrity”. It might seem an odd attribute to recognise in those accused, perhaps, of violating the dignity and integrity of others (or their property), but it’s a fundamental attribute of liberal humanism. Anything less leads to oppression.
So that’s what I’m going to call it, even though ours is the sort that leaves no whip scars or wire burns, that doesn’t disappear people in the night or actively shackle basic entitlements, as in certain other power-addled states. Rather, our oppressions are cloaked in the strict, confounding logic that imprisons addicts for the effects of their addictions, that denies the homeless bail because they don’t have stable homes. They are deepened by the measured condescension of professionals, when respect means little more than checking off the right boxes. And they are underlined by the centrality of poverty among the reasons why some folks are pegged as “rounders”, returned with sad regularity to the system’s small square holes. Oppression flourishes when those who wield power cease caring about how it diminishes the dignity and integrity of those without.
People with the least power in our society – those enduring mangled families, self-medicating wounds, wandering between temporary refuges – are disproportionately represented in our pre-trial prisons. Many are legally guilty of at least some of what they’ve been charged with; some are not. This is not surprising: private sufferings have public consequences. Oppressed people, perhaps in more achingly evident ways than the rest of us, commit crimes: they lie, they lash out, they try to get ahead by doing underhanded things, and thus, they come into contact with our official structures of rules, punishments, and accountability. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this state of affairs – societies have long reserved the right to draw and enforce moral boundaries around the lives of their members – but it seems reasonable to assume that any institution that dignifies itself with the word ‘justice’ ought to remember that any exercise of its substantial influence should be accompanied by significant responsibilities, including a sensitive awareness of the brokenness that characterises many of its subjects’ existences. By and large, those invested with the tasks of policing, prosecuting, defending and judging persons accused of crimes do not share much in common with them. Most don’t have any idea what it’s like to live with a mental illness or the memory of abuse, most, if they’re addicted to anything, don’t have to huddle in alleys or hustle their own bodies to get a fix, and most are more likely to own their homes rather than face the hassles of bad landlords or the revolving-door welcome of charity shelters. Again, not surprising, and not a feature of our slanted society that’s about to change. But once we accept the burden of adjudicating conflicts, can we justly refuse to recognise our role in making matters better or worse?
While ‘better’ is maybe too much to expect of a system primarily designed to determine who should be marked with the stigma of “criminal”, it’s more culpably complicit in making people’s lives worse. The blinkered roll-out of equal treatment is one of the worse culprits in this regard. Although its façade is fraying somewhat thin these days, the presumption of innocence remains a cornerstone of our legal process. Unless pre-trial detention is necessary in the interests of public safety or to make sure someone returns to court, that presumption demands that they should be allowed every freedom in the interim, to either address the underlying difficulties that led to the charge or, if they prefer, go about as if nothing had happened. Instead, most people accused of committing a crime are made to agree to a string of conditions before they’ll be released. These may include demands that they keep a curfew, or stay at a certain residence, or steer clear of drugs, alcohol, or anyone with a criminal record. Most insidiously, bail is rarely granted to those who can’t produce a whack of assets, a whistle-clean relative, or, more commonly, both. Some programs, like that offered by the John Howard Society, attempt to level the field a bit by supervising the release of those who are otherwise bereft of alternatives, but the ostensibly equal, manifestly discriminatory rule remains the same: if you take one step out of line, any faltering that may be entirely understandable in your difficult circumstances, your next residence will be that big house on Barton Street. Told you so. This is the banality of oppression in our time, our community: processes whose impervious, impersonal demands box in complete people with complex stories, who make it ever harder for those without power to reclaim the dignity and integrity that should never be lost.
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