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.

Crime and the Closing of the Canadian Mind

One of the great perils of Canadian politics – for legislators no less than electors – lies in the necessity of making decisions that impact people we will likely never meet, in situations we will likely never know. Such blindfolded influence is present in all policy areas, but perhaps no more profoundly so than that of criminal justice.

In the construction of criminal prohibitions, we tell each other unambiguous stories: if X is wrong, then it is wrong regardless of place and irrespective of person. In an odd way, this may be a strand of our national cohesiveness, our democratic promise. Redrawing the boundaries of what counts as a crime, of course, is not a major topic of this year’s federal election (the Green Party’s call to legalize marijuana notwithstanding). What is at issue is how we – in each province, every region, from coast to coast to coast – are being asked to change they way we to respond to crimes when they occur.

Our choice in this regard is being couched in clear, alluring terms. Do we want to send a strong message to criminals? (of course). Do we want to stand up for victims? (you bet). Do we want a safer Canada? (Alleluia!). The answers are offered as inexorable: more people must be locked up for more crimes, and for longer. Simple.

Reforms to sentencing legislation, however, affect some Canadians much more than others. And it is not urban gangsters who come to mind, although these are the bogeymen we are being asked to imagine. In the Aboriginal communities where I work, the incidence of violence and substance abuse can be shockingly high, and persists as a grim symptom of cyclical trauma. In these places, victims and offenders are closely related, with sources of suffering and solace that are deeply enmeshed. Here, the cleaving punishment of long imprisonment is often not seen as an appropriate or effective response to wrongdoing, being not resonant with traditions that value relational healing over individual blame. This remains true even as Aboriginal communities have long been subject to the dictates and ideologies of a Canadian justice system that does not much share or seemingly understand such restorative approaches.

To the extent that any meaningful justice gets done in this intercultural environment, it is due largely to the ability of sentencing courts to moderate the law’s retributive ethic with an allowance to local wisdom. This can come by way of the advice of elders and community circles, in-depth investigations into an offender’s life circumstances, or appeals, direct or indirect, from the person(s) harmed by a criminal act. The end result, of course, is most clearly measured in sentences that are somewhat lower than the national ‘average’. But the importance of attempts to narrow the gaps between different traditions, while also attending to the immense needs that crime uncovers, is poorly reflected in mere numbers. The true effectiveness of any system of justice depends, not on its coercive power, but its moral authority. And in many Aboriginal communities, Canada’s legal apparatus has an unenviable record to work against. This is why the Supreme Court of Canada has strongly endorsed alternative responses to the travesty of high crime and incarceration rates in Aboriginal communities.

A roll-out of mandatory sentences would threaten the (small) gains that have been made in making criminal courts more alive to these realities, and may perversely make communities less safe for actual victims. Faced with the certainty of having family members jailed in far-away institutions, and returned, if at all, bearing the burdens of further embitterment, victims and witnesses of violent crimes and drug trafficking will be less inclined to make reports, seek support, and take the stand. At a time when the criminal justice system desperately needs to build confidence among vulnerable persons and communities, who equally need the security of reflective, responsive justice structures, these initiatives will push such possibilities further away.

The architects of this law-and-order agenda were quite obviously not thinking of the small minority of Canadians who live, and have always lived, in the vast majority of this country’s land. When you cast your ballot in this election, perhaps you could spare them a moment’s consideration. Your choice could tip a very important balance.

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?