And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Hi Ish,
some time ago you ran the Ottawa Citizen piece on Bruce Clark's
disbarment by the Ontario Law Society. Here's an interesting take on that
by Dr. Tony Hall. Long but an interesting read fyi. There is more
information on Clark on the SISIS site at
http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/gustmain.html This disbarrment is
simply a continuation of a campaign to prevent the truth about Gustafsen
Lake and the unextinguished sovereignty and jurisdiction of Indian
Nations, from being exposed. Please send the piece wherever you think it
might do the most good.
In resistance
JS
Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide in
North America and Kosovo:
The Disbarring of Dr. Bruce Clark by the
Law Society of Upper Canada in the Context of the
Evolving Jurisprudence of Crimes Against Humanity
by Dr. Anthony J. Hall
Associate Chair, Department of Native American Studies
University of Lethbridge
Sometimes seemingly unrelated events converge in your mind with powerful
synergy. That is what is happening to me. Day after day the reports go
from bad to worse on the haunted house of Balkan ethnic horrors. And
the reality of our involvement as Canadians in NATO��s fast expanding war
against the Milosevic regime in Serbia, gets closer and closer to home.
Meanwhile, we learn that the Law Society of Upper Canada has disbarred
Dr. Bruce Clark. For almost two decades this controversial lawyer has
staked his professional career and much, much more on proving that what
he calls he calls ��the legal establishment�� is guilty in its treatment
of First Nations peoples of ��treason, fraud and complicity in genocide.��
At first glance the connection between these stories may seem obscure.
The story of ethnic cleansing, refugees and war in the Balkans
rightfully dominates global news every day, while the ritual disrobing
of Bruce Clark is presented like a small footnote to history-- a kind of
weird curiosity of the modern-day Indian wars that puts the last nail in
the professional coffin of a colorful, but fatally misguided zealot.
As Paul McKay wrote of Clark in The Ottawa Citizen (4 April, 1999) in
his almost sadistically mean-spirited announcement of the outcome, ��an
obsessive, in-your-face messenger with a taste for martyrdom... has
used up his ninth legal life.... The ruling effectively kills the
Canadian courtroom career of the only lawyer on the planet to combine a
banker��s suit, Ph.D., conehead haircut, Star Wars glasses, and
self-penned writs to arrest judges hearing his cases.��
Permission to ridicule Dr. Clark��s clothing, eye wear, shaved head and,
if any column space is left, his legal theories as well, came right from
the very top. ��You are a disgrace to the bar,�� Canada��s Chief Justice,
Antonio Lamar, told Clark in a courtroom exchange in 1995. Since then
the professional crucifixion has proceeded methodically, with minor
obstacles along the way such as when Law Society governor, Clayton Ruby,
dropped a little bomb shell. In a report emanating from the law body��s
disciplinary proceedings, Mr. Ruby declared that ��the genocide of which
Dr. Clark speaks is real.��
Apparently, however, Ruby��s cautionary plea was not enough to sway the
Law Society. They gave their coneheaded, PhD. colleague with the Star
Wars glasses and a penchant for upsetting polite company too often with
the word ��genocide,�� the martyrdom he allegedly so lusts after. And now
that the Law Society inquisitors have exorcized their colleague, the
Southam chain seems to have taken the lead in demonizing the carrier of
this country��s most uncomfortable message. The Citizen chose to run Mr.
McKay��s McCarthyesque professional obituary not as an opinion piece, but
rather as a news story that has been picked up by other information
services, including Reuters.
On the face of it, words like genocide, treason and fraud do sound
excessive, to say the least, when referring to the joint role of police,
lawyers, judges and jail guards in applying the laws of Canada, as well
as those of the United States to Aboriginal peoples. After, all, if
there��s supposed to be genocide in North America, where are the ovens
and the concentration camps? Where are the CIA-backed, Guatemala-style,
para military death squads that killed and thus dispossessed tens of
thousands of Mayan Indians under the guise of anti-communism. Where are
the wave after wave of refugees fleeing from their homes in the fashion
of the terrible pictures we are witnessing nightly, as the sinister
regime of Slobodan Misolevic �cleanses� what his government calls the
�soul of Serbia� of its Kosovar Albanian population.
But wait a minute. Pull the zoom lense of historical conceptualization
back further and there is no escaping the fact that Canada and
especially the United States could not exist in their present form if it
wasn�t for the harshly successful application of some of the most
expansive, methodical and enduring operations of ethnic cleansing the
world has ever seen. All the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
countries in western Europe have participated actively in the formative
phases of ethnic cleansing in North America. This transformation of a
vast, pluralistic Indian Country into a Europeanized adjunct of
so-called western civilization, was realized not only through outright
killing or displacing Indigenous North American peoples, but also in
subjecting their Aboriginal territories to alien laws, alien economies,
and alien languages..
These European languages so dominate, that only French and English have
official status in Canada whereas the languages and dialects of the
dozens of imperilled Indigenous peoples have no official legal status
whatsoever. Until well into the 1970s the Canadian government paid the
major Christian churches in Canada to actively conspire in the coercive
silencing of these Aboriginal languages with a zeal and ��success�� rate
that could only make the Slobodon Milosevic regime green with envy. And
it is presented to the Canadian people and the world that now this
legacy of cultural genocide is going forward in Canada courts, not in
any systematic way in front of some sort of war crimes tribunal, but
rather with the assumption that whatever damage that was inflicted fell
only on so many isolated, unrelated victims, as if the fact the abused
children were subjected to predators precisely because they are Indian,
has no part in the legal proceedings.
The boarding schools were but one small part of the dehumanizing
indignities heaped upon the survivors of what David Stannard has called
in his book of the same name, The American Holocaust. In both Canada
and the USA the survivors were almost universally rendered as wards of
the state without the capacity to vote, to make contracts, or to
participate in the very limited and imperfect democracies beyond the
boundaries of their constrained ��reserves.�� In Canada, one of the
British empire��s so called ��White Dominions,�� registered Indians often
needed government passes to leave their home communities, an innovation
that authentically was replicated in South Africa. In South Africa,
which also identified itself as a White Dominion, the country��s
so-called Ministry of Native Affairs long maintained a close and
intimate bureaucratic collaboration with the Department of Indian
Affairs in our own country. What else is a ��reserve,�� which in the
provinces of Canada cover less than one per cent of the land, than
monuments to, and effective facilitators of, the ethnic cleansing that
constitutes the essential geopolitical framework within which Canada and
the USA have developed?
Now these little snippets of history only begin to paint the picture of
the origins and genesis of the society from which Bruce Clark, as well
as you and I, all emerged. This only begins to paint the picture of the
legal background that has created the basis for a large and thriving
��Indian law�� industry among the practitioners of the self-regulated and
unaccountable Law Society of Upper Canada, as well as of all the other
law societies in Canada and the USA. And hey buddy, if you think these
guys break the law sometimes, take it to the judge.
Let��s try to keep this as succinct as we can. Let��s leave aside all
the horrors of New Spain-- genocidal horrors that became more gross and
pervasive once the Americans took over California, the site of some of
the most gruesome episodes of ethnic cleansing on the face of the earth.
Let��s make short work of the fact that Spain��s infamous conquistadorial
feats are being revisited, if in a more covert way, on Mayan peasants
as the Mexican government duplicates some of the right-wing,
para-military tactics of their Guatemalan neighbors. A principle
objective of the corrupt and notoriously murderous PRI regime
in Mexico, is to enforce the gringos�� North American Free Trade
Agreement on territory where an active Canada and U.S.-backed killing
war is being waged on Indian resisters in Chiapas.
We need to devote more attention to The Trail of Tears, which helps to
put in perspective the tragedy in Kosovo. Moreover, this episode well
illustrates Bruce Clark��s allegations that North American legal
establishments often systematically violate their own laws in the
expropriation of Indian land, right up to this day. In the early
nineteenth century powerful Indian nations, including the Creeks, the
Cherokee and Chickasaw dug in their heels and constructed elaborate
constitutions and successful agricultural economies to hold onto ground
against the notorious Indian fighters and their politician friends in
the slave-owning states of Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and
Kentucky.
The Cherokee especially won all their key cases in the Supreme Court of
the United States. But the Indian fighters who ran the federal
government, from ��Old Hickory�� Andrew Jackson on down, refused to
respect their country��s own laws, setting a precedent that Bruce Clark
and many other scholars of repute have demonstrated time and time again,
continues, right down to the present day. ��Chief Justice John Marshall
made the law,�� said Old Hickory referring to the famous federalist judge
who was his enemy. ��Let him enforce it.��
So the so-called Five Civilized Tribes--- they must be civilized, some
of them owned Black slaves--- were uprooted from their ancestral lands
and marched to the so-called ��Indian Territory�� west of the Mississippi
in an act of militarily-enforced ethnic cleansing easily as brutal, or
more so, than anything being experienced by Kosovar Albanians. The Trail
of Tears in 1837 was just one part of a larger legislated regime of
ethnic cleansing in the USA that declared all registered Indians who
persisted in staying on lands east of east of the Mississippi, to be
illegal aliens-- aliens that frequently were killed by sports murderers
or lynch mobs with impunity.
Meanwhile grand promises were made and entrenched in international
treaties made by the USA that the territories west of the Mississippi
would be retained as a protected Indian Country forever. Without doubt
the Indian removal policy initiated by the regime of President Andrew
Jackson was the most ambitious project of apartheid ever tried on the
planet, before or since. And this apartheid scheme proved to be just a
ploy to purchase time. As soon as the American government had the
military, financial and technological power through their railways to
push their regime of ethnic cleansing outward to the Pacific, they did
so. As in most of their dealings with brown-skinned people in their own
country or elsewhere on the planet, the United States chooses to
disregard the artifices of international law in extending its vision of
democracy to the peoples of Europe at the genocidal cost of destroyed
First Nations.
This apartheid scheme shows up on the map, with almost no Indian reserves
east of the Mississippi and relatively large reserves, compared to
Canada at least, west of the Mississippi. All the reserves in Canada
combined wouldn�t fill half of the territory encompassed by the Navajo
reservation in the American southwest, in the lands taken through war
from Mexico and lands now being reclaimed by the influx of migrants from
Mexico.
Leading proponents of this expansionary movement of American Manifest
Destiny, also coveted the vast Indian Country of Canada. In the
drainage basin of the continent��s northward-flowing rivers, the Hudson��s
Bay Company made profit by doing business with First Nations, rather
than by killing them and incarcerating the survivors on reserves. How
different was American Manifest Destiny than what the Germans called
Lebensraum in their eastern push to subjugate the Slavs and expropriate
their lands-- a push leaving legacies and scars that haunt the Balkans
and feed their hatreds and resentments until this day?
How can we focus so-self-righteously on the hideous outcomes of the
injuries done to the psyches of some Slavic people from their past as
victims and perpetrators of racism, without confronting our own legacy
from the war crimes which shaped the countries in which we all live.
What awesome hypocrisy! When society become as plagued with amnesia as
this one-- when journalists like Paul McKay can dance so self
confidently on what he sees as the professional corpse of a man whose
major crime has been to implore us not to blind our eyes in our own
complicity in the crime of genocide-- then all the ingredients are in
place to repeat the mistakes of the past, perhaps on an even bigger,
more global scale.
Those who doubt the racial rationales of the USA��s westward push-- the
position that ethnic cleansing was justified because the displaced or
murdered peoples were racially and culturally inferior and unworthy of
survival-- need only flip through the pages of the Historian-President��s
multi-volume The Winning of the West. The author, ��Rough Rider�� Teddy
Roosevelt, publicized himself in the first of many subsequent U.S.
invasions on Cuba. A student of social Darwinist and racist par
excellence Francis Parkman, Roosevelt was anything but an original
thinker. His glorification of the war on Indian Country as a kind of
testing ground for the global conquest of the ��Germanic race,�� gave
clear articulation to what passed as the orthodox wisdom of his time,
group and place.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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