And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 09:19:09 -0400
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Lynne Moss-Sharman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: NOAH AUGUSTINE trial Miramichi NB
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Monday, April 19, 1999
N.B. native activist goes on trial for murder
By CP
MIRAMICHI, N.B. -- A New Brunswick native leader who helped put the
province's forestry practices on trial will be in court today to face a
murder charge. Jury selection begins today for Noah Augustine, 28, a
prominent defender of aboriginal treaty rights
who came to provincial and national attention during a bitter dispute over
native logging in Crown forests. Augustine is charged with second-degree
murder in the shooting death last September of Bruce Barnaby, 41, a
resident of the Eel Ground First Nation, located near this eastern New
Brunswick city. Thomas Haddad, 39, a former police officer on the Red Bank
reserve, was originally charged with second-degree murder with Augustine.
But Haddad's charge was later reduced to being an accessory after the fact.
His trial is set to begin July 5.Augustine and Haddad have been free on
bail.Augustine has been attending the University of New Brunswick where
he's pursuing a political science degree. Eight hundred people have been
summoned for today's jury selection, which is expected to take all day. Two
weeks have been set aside for the trial.
A publication ban may be sought to prevent possibly prejudging the Haddad
trial.
Augustine, a Mi'kmaq activist, was seen as a rising star and a natural
leader in the province's small aboriginal community of about 10,000 people.
Even before the native logging issue propelled him into the spotlight,
Augustine had made a name for himself as a businessperson, a government
adviser, a suicide-prevention expert and an authority in the fight against
prescription drug abuse among aboriginals. There has been considerable
public interest in the case because of Augustine's high profile during the
protracted political and legal battle over aboriginal logging on provincial
Crown lands.
Augustine was front and centre during the debate, an attractive and
articulate spokesperson for the right of aboriginals to share in the forest
bounty on their ancestral grounds. "He was a strong voice," said Tim Paul
of the St. Mary's First Nation in Fredericton, who co-founded a native
loggers association with Augustine.
Although the issue resulted in conflicting court opinions and is still
being fought at various levels in the New Brunswick justice system,
Augustine won supporters on both sides with his reasoned arguments and
passionate belief in the right of the Maliseet and Mi'kmaq people to a fair
share of natural resources. Augustine argued the Crown lands of New
Brunswick are aboriginal lands. He said he believes 18th-century treaties
prove natives never relinquished their rights to what are now Crown lands
and forests.
There are a number of court battles pending on the issue, including one
involving Paul, who has been charged with illegal harvesting on Crown land.
His trial begins next month in Fredericton. The sad situation of Noah
Augustine Canadians know him as a talented young advocate of native rights.
Today he goes on trial for murder.
Monday, April 19, 1999
ERIN ANDERSSEN
The Globe and Mail
Miramichi, N.B. -- Noah Augustine sat in a room at the University of New
Brunswick three days ago, slouched over a desk, scribbling his many
thoughts on aboriginal self-government for the final exam in a third-year
political-science course. Finals don't start officially on campus until
today, but Mr. Augustine had to write his early. This morning, he goes on
trial for second-degree murder. As a moment in his bright, ambitious life,
it's not all that strange to find Mr. Augustine studying on the way into
court.
He has always worked to accomplish something, to claw himself out of the
poverty and alcoholism that taint his home, which is what makes his case,
with all its contradictions, so sad. There he was, last week, fussing over
a few half-year university courses for a degree he may never use, during
what could be his last days of freedom while he's still young. He has
another exam, a take-home, due
tomorrow, on the politics of French Canada; by then the jury should be
picked, perhaps even furnished with its first version of the night Bruce
Barnaby died, and the detail-by-detail slog toward
a verdict will have begun. Even so, according to his professor, Mr.
Augustine asked for no special consideration.
There is a huge part of this story that does not make sense, and probably
never will, although the people who know young Noah Augustine, the natives
who saw in him hope and a future, will
pack the Miramichi courthouse for the next two weeks looking, somehow, to
understand. It trips them up even now, months after his arrest: How could
one of their own, a rising star with such promise, who had been so
determined to make a leader of himself and fight the despair in his
community, find himself facing a life sentence for shooting a man on a
neighbouring reserve? The images clash. The Noah Augustine made famous in
the battle over provincial forests last
summer was clean-cut and charming, a skillful orator who favoured suits and
snappy ties. The 27-year-old man arrested in Florida in September had a
scruffy goatee and wore a bright orange prison suit.
There was the activist who once had shared the stage with Robert Kennedy,
Jr., who had pressed his point at an Ottawa meeting with Indian Affairs
Minister Jane Stewart, whose potential resonated
with everyone he met. And then there was the accused killer, struggling not
to cry at his first court appearance, holding the
white eagle feather -- the highest symbol of native honour -- that would
have been fitting on another path, but now seemed doubtful in his hands. In
the story the newspapers told, Mr. Augustine kept the fight for the forests
going, leading native loggers into the woods to cut trees and claim the
land as their own. He was at the front of every protest; last spring, in
Fredericton, he stood in the back of a pick-up truck, shouting over the
buzz of chainsaws, inflaming the crowd with passionate words about native
rights. But always, he warned against violence -- it was not the way, he
said, to win.
If the murder accusation is true, that same Mr. Augustine shot 41-year-old
Bruce Barnaby on Sept. 19 in the man's home on a reserve not 15 minutes
from his own community. The house, a shabby, blue bungalow, is not there
any more; the band council had it torn down last Halloween at the request
of Mr. Barnaby's mother, a 72-year-old elder who lived next door. She could
not bear to look at it every day.
A couple of hundred years ago, before the reigning Micmac leader divided
the land between his two sons, Eel Ground and Red Bank were actually one
First Nation spread along the banks of the Miramichi River. The two
communities are still close; Red Bank men marry women from Eel Ground and
vice versa, the teenagers party together, everyone knows everyone else and
most of their business, too.
The shooting gave rise to the first murder charge anyone can remember in
Eel Ground. Red Bank's last killing happened about 25 years ago, when a
native man was tossed off a bridge into the icy
Miramichi by a visiting gang of white thugs.
Mr. Barnaby's death was a shock to both communities, but that was nothing
compared to the reaction a few days later when Mr. Augustine
and Thomas Haddad, a 38-year-old police constable from Red Bank, turned up
in Jacksonville, Fla., and were charged with the killing.
Most of the facts of the case -- including any possible motive -- are
subject to a sweeping publication ban until testimony starts, and some
details cannot be released until after Mr. Haddad's
trial in July. But by the time the two men returned to New Brunswick, and
were released on bail, Mr. Haddad's charge had been reduced to being an
accessory after the fact. The chiefs from both Red Bank and Eel Ground say
the case has been painful for both
communities, splitting families.
Mr. Augustine's father, a guard at the nearby Renous penitentiary,
is married to a woman from Eel Ground, and lives across the street from
some of Mr. Barnaby's relatives. Jimmy Ward, a long-time friend who started
a legal fund for the two accused, was born in the victim's community, and
used to work with his sister. "There's no doubt, there are bad feelings,"
said George Ginnish, Eel Ground's chief. "It kind of knocks the stuffing
out of a community."
When Mr. Augustine was 23, he made his one and only bid to be chief of Red
Bank. He lost by three votes, a great disappointment, although he must have
known, as the current chief points out, it's
often not your qualifications but the size of your family that gets you
elected in native communities. "He wanted to jump into the position pretty
quickly," said Michael Augustine, a distant relative
who, then a councillor, backed Noah during the election. "The timing wasn't
right. He was just too young. But he certainly caught people's eyes." Noah
Augustine was raised in Red Bank by his
mother -- his parents didn't stay together -- with his two sisters, and was
an average teenager, a runner with the school track team who spent summers
playing baseball with his white friends off the reserve. He is
light-skinned and green-eyed -- qualities that some observers suggest have
made him more palatable to New Brunswick's
non-native community.
By the time he ran for chief, he had already proved himself a confident,
outspoken native activist. A central character in his life was his
grandfather, Joe Augustine, a Red Bank elder who discovered an ancient
burial ground on the reserve before he died in 1995. Noah orchestrated a
video to promote and protect the site that was distributed to schools
across the province. He liked to write
poems, and he started a book about his grandfather; some of the working
chapters were included in a native anthology published in 1996. In the
stories, he talks about how his grandfather taught him the history of his
people and how to trap beaver, and he says that one of his favourite parts
of a moose was the foot, boiled with
potatoes.
When he was a teenager, he wrote a report about prescription-drug abuse on
reserves before it was a well-publicized problem, work that received
national attention and has led to a $160,000 government fund so Red Bank
can develop a native-based treatment program. It was one of the issues on
which he campaigned when he ran for
chief; some people believe it may have cost him votes.
After a series of suicides on a nearby reserve, he became one of the
leading suicide-prevention counsellors in the province; he gave training
seminars to the RCMP and community workers, and ran programs for native
inmates and victims of sexual abuse.
After losing the election, he turned to business and was put in charge of
economic development for the reserve. In 1997, he was hired by the province
to develop tourism plans for native communities. But he quit after several
months because, his friends say, he felt he wasn't
helping his people. The next year, running a fledgling consulting firm, he
took on a native logger named Tim Paul as a client. When a controversial
ruling from a New
Brunswick judge opened the forests to the province's natives, he stepped in
with his rousing speeches and pithy media quotes, to fight what he has
called a "modern-day war." "He saw an opportunity and he capitalized on
it," said Roger Augustine, a land-claims commissioner and prominent former
chief who considers Noah a friend but also happens
to be Mr. Barnaby's half-brother. "The logging incident, any protest, makes
stars overnight -- people that happen to be there when the cameras hit."
Timing was part of Noah Augustine's rise, to be sure, but that did not
explain his appeal to native people -- who saw him as an alternative to the
chiefs they did not trust -- and to reporters who put his name in the news.
He worked tirelessly at the cause -- plotting strategy many nights until 3
a.m. At one point, friends say, it almost cost him his girl friend, who
gave birth to a daughter last year. (The couple,
who have been together off and on for years, also have a son in elementary
school; they have been living together in a Fredericton apartment since he
was released on bail.) In the end, the court decision was reversed and the
province started making deals with individual reserves, an approach Mr.
Augustine had opposed.
With the chiefs back in charge, he largely fell out of sight for the rest
of the summer -- until his name appeared in the news again, linked to a
murder. Now, whether he is found guilty or not, many in
the community believe the trial will tarnish his reputation permanently.
"Anybody that's accused of a crime this serious,
it's not something you walk away from," Chief Ginnish said. "A lot of
people aren't going to forget."
CRY OF PAIN
"Give me strength or give me death," she screams into the sky.
"Help me take this pain away or leave me here to die.
"Life is cruel -- can't stand no more,
"There's only grief ahead.
"I wish, my lord, you were my friend
"But perhaps that dream is dead."
From The Pain She Feels, a poem by Noah
Augustine about a victim of sexual abuse.
**************************************************************
Monday, April 19, 1999
Jury selection begins in N.B.
murder trial of native activist
Graeme Hamilton
National Post
Seven months ago today, the body of Bruce Barnaby was discovered
in his home on the Eel Ground reserve in New Brunswick and the
world of native politics in the province turned upside down.
Mr. Barnaby, 41, was unknown outside his community. But Noah
Augustine, the man charged with second-degree murder in the Sept.
19 shooting death, was a national figure in the fight for native rights. As
jurors are chosen today in Miramichi, N.B., for Mr. Augustine's trial,
their task will be to deliver a verdict of guilty or not-guilty. But for
other New Brunswickers, whose attention has been riveted by the case, the
question is more complex: Who is the real Noah Augustine? In the year
leading up to his arrest last September, Mr. Augustine, 28,had become the
main spokesman for New Brunswick natives demanding the right to log on
Crown lands. Articulate, cool-headed, and comfortable in a suit and tie, he
was the subject of glowing profiles in the press and a source of annoyance
to the provincial government.
It was the latest turn in a career that seemed headed for big things
for the Mi'kmaq from Red Bank, a reserve just outside Miramichi.
As a teenager, he gained attention with a study he wrote on
prescription drug abuse among natives. At 21, after nine people killed
themselves on another reserve, he trained as a suicide intervention
counsellor and helped focus attention on the issue of native suicide. Two
years later, he became the youngest person ever to run for chief of his
reserve, losing by just three votes. When his grandfather led
archaeologists to a spot on the reserve that ended up being one of the
oldest native burial sites in North America, Noah orchestrated the
production of a video on the discovery. But in the image now fixed in the
public's mind, Mr. Augustine wears no tie. His hands are manacled and he is
wearing orange prison garb after he and a friend were arrested in
Jacksonville, Fla., six days after the discovery of Mr. Barnaby's body. The
friend, Thomas Haddad, a First Nations police officer, is charged with
being an accessory after the fact of murder and is scheduled to go on trial
July 5.
Mr. Augustine still has his supporters. Miramichi's aging courthouse is
expected to be packed for the trial, scheduled to last two weeks.
Friends launched a legal-defence fund last fall, and, since December, Mr.
Augustine has been out on $15,000 bail raised by supporters and his lawyer.
At one point, Mr. Barnaby's sister complained there was more public
sympathy for the man accused of killing her brother than for the victim of
the crime. Recognizing the strong feelings the case has generated, court
officials
in Miramichi expanded the pool of potential jurors, mailing notices to 800
people. To accommodate the throng, jury selection has been
moved from the courthouse to a community centre.
"Let Us Consider The Human Brain As
A Very Complex Photographic Plate"
1957 G.H. Estabrooks, Creator
of the Manchurian Candidate
born New Brunswick
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.aches-mc.org
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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