And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: For instance, Mr. McKay paraphrases Stuart Rush as arguing ��the Canadian courts at all levels properly dismissed Mr. Clark��s 1704 legal argument.�� Then Mr. McKay cites Rush directly, writing, ��His [Clark��s] whole argument is misplaced and wrong in law. Canada is the only place where this can be settled.�� What Southam��s point man fails to observe, however, is that as lead lawyer on the Delgamuukw case, Mr. Rush and others like him have made barrels of money, with much more to come, by working within the framework that avoids the question of who really should be deciding the scope and content of existing Aboriginal and treaty rights. Bruce Clark and his colleagues often refer to this central issue of who decides, as ��the jurisdiction question.�� Indeed, virtually all the persons that Mr. McKay named and interviewed have a large vested interest in working within the framework of domestic law and the infrastructure of Indian Act agencies, including the Assembly of First Nations, that form the basis of most federally-funded and federal-sanctioned negotiation procedures. In my view this system of so called self-government is based, whatever the rhetoric, on municipal models of delegated authority and on principles of governance of Indigenous peoples that draw on the same legal theories as what Lord Lugard used to refer to as �indirect rule.� Lord Lugard was an influential imperial official based largely in Nigeria in the 1920s. This system of indirect rule offends some First Nations peoples as too severe a check on the self-determination of their Aboriginal nationhoods. Those rooted in more sovereigntist perspectives�in perspectives totally unreflected in Mr. McKay��s piece for Southam� tend to look with favor at some sort of continuing protective role for the British monarchy in the affairs of First Nations. Such an involvement, one with a very deep and elaborate constitutional and cultural heritage both in the Indian Country and the imperial law of Canada, would signal to Indigenous peoples that they retain a recognized standing in international law and that have not been entirely subordinated to the domestic courts or the domestic laws of their local colonizers. This position is surely equally as worthy of respect and protection as, for instance, the stance of most Albanian Kosovars, or of any other colonized group rendered vulnerable to arbitrary actions when a hostile, or potentially-hostile government is in control and ownership of all, or most, of their ancestral lands. Mr. McKay does not fail to point to the historic Delgamuukw ruling by the Supreme Court in 1997 as proof that the system does work-- that all the talk of treason and fraud and complicity in genocide has now been rendered obsolete. The Southam journalist writes, �the Supreme Court�s landmark Delgamuukw decision has affirmed aboriginal rights to self government and land use across Canada�and effectively achieved much of what Mr. Clark�s native apostles could have hoped to attain from a favourable ruling on the 1704 Connecticut case.� The more I look closely at the genesis of the Delgamuukw ruling, the more I suspect its author, Antonio Lamer, wrote it very much with the arguments in mind brought forward by Dr. Clark in 1995 in the exchange where the Chief Justice referred to his peskey nemisis as �a disgrace to the bar.� I make this observation after viewing Chief Justice Lamar go from interview to interview as he spins the media to fend off or mitigate growing unease with the judicialization of politics and the politicization of the judiciary. This speculation fits well within Dr. Clark�s argument that the history of Aboriginal rights jurisprudence in Canada reveals this country as a politically correct society rather than a rule of law society. It is with this in mind that I have come to see our top jurist in the land as a consummate example of a judicial politician. In writing the Delgamuukw case, its chief author may very well have moved towards the ground of acknowleging the country�s underlying imperial law as a way of pre-empting the more sweeping historical reckoning with the arguments of Dr. Clark. Of course I would not go as far to say that this was the only factor but I would say in is a very plausible explanation for a ruling that does, on the surface at least, strengthen the hand especially like those First Nations in BC and Long Lake 58 who have never been extended to legal protocols demanded by the Royal Proclamation of 1763. But the jurisdictional question has still not been addressed and there is nothing to say that future courts won��t roll back whatever gains have in theory been made. And then there is the question of the enforcement of law. I myself have stood before the judiciary of the National Energy Board in Canada on behalf of Indigenous Ecology Alliance and quoted the words of the Delgamuukw ruling only to have the jurists turn 2+2 into three and deny that the Crown has any real duty to consult Indian nations on a little matter of the Alliance transcontinental pipeline that runs from northern BC to Chicago. From my perspective the Queen��s men at the Energy Board, a regulatory body notoriously captive to the direction of Big Oil in the USA, answered as Andrew Jackson did when the Supreme Court told him the Cherokee have rights. Let Antonio Lamer enforce the law, these Crown regulators might as well have said. The �negotiations� leading up to the Delgamuukw ruling didn�t take place on paper alone. The demonization of Bruce Clark in the media really started in earnest when he turned up at the standoff at Gustafsen Lake in the summer of 1995 to represent his clients including William Jones Ignace, the 63 year-old Shuswap elder who also proclaimed himself to the world by the ecological name of Wolverine. The language of Mr. McKay�s article, full of terms like �renegade,� �militant faction,� and �dissident native faction,� was largely invented by the media in their coverage of that stand off. I wasn�t there. So I have heard different stories and read different accounts of what really happened, including from Ovide Mercredi who characterized himself somewhat as a peace keeper in the style of Ghandi to help prevent a tragedy. Others have different views of his role. In any case what I could clearly see from the electronic and print press reports is that Canada��s federal police were firmly in control of the information coming out of the confrontation. The journalists were kept far away from what really was happening and the RCMP��s information officers presented a steady stream of commentary that I know for sure effectively demeaned and dehumanized the odds and sods of people inside the camp. The daily briefings conducted by Peter Montague, of the closed and tightly controlled coverage of the USA��s invasion of Iraq. More and more the people inside were dismissed as crazies, lunatics, fanatics, rebels-- as all manner of monster-like radicals. Their asserted claims to a few acres of Sun Dance land in the great Canadian wilderness for some reason required hundreds of police officers, and tens of thousands of rounds of fired ammunition, the commitment of Canadian soldiers and of Canadian army armored vehicles, and even land mines for heavens sake, to counter and keep in check. And all this was simply reported, day after day, as established fact, without hardly any journalists seeing for themselves what was really going on or thinking to question seriously the process that sent Dr. Clark away to a hospital for the criminally insane, put him in leg irons and caused he and his wife, justifiably I think, to flee from the vigilante excesses of the media, the public, and the same legal establishment he totally freaked out by trying to introduce them to the T, F and C in G�to the treason, fraud and complicity in genocide that are the rhetorical pillars of his undeniably provocative legal interpretation. One thing for sure is that in my view all the stuff that Mr. McKay and so many other media burgher servers have to say, in such vivid, technicolour verbiage about Clark��s alleged temper tantrums, his alleged paper throwing incidents and what he calls, �resisting assault,� I take with a grain of salt. I have no doubt that the man has his fair share of human eccentricities and that human nature, when subjected to inhumane threats and pressures, sometimes breaks out in erratic and even frightening ways. I also know that a common tactic of police in the days when civil rights workers were challenging the Jim Crow laws of the American Deep South in the era of totally overt apartheid, was to jump the activists and then charge them with assault. Anyway, I wasn�t there to see it for myself. And as far as I know, Mr. McKay wasn�t either. Now things become yet more complex. In the later trial of the Gustafsen sun dancers, RCMP video tape was aired, producing transcripts of police officials bragging that �smear campaign are our specialty.� More troubling yet is the piece of tape producing a transcript, �kill this prick Clark and smear everyone with him.� A few months later the same cast of Mounties are taped pepper sraying university students for protesting Canada��s hosting in Vancouver of the Asian Pacific Economic Co-Operation nations, including Indonesia�s ruthless dictator, the infamous Mr. Suharto. The episode eventually led to media reports that the Prime Minister himself and his office were in charge of police operations whose ultimate purpose was not to maintain law and order, but to prevent Suharto and others from being embarrased by direct exposure to dissidents acting well within what is supposed to be allowed for within the Charter rights of Canadian citizens. Subsequent events have exposed the Mounties to growing criticism. The RCMP, for instance, planted and exploded a bomb in northern Alberta to generate public outrage against two suspected sabotagers of the health Destroying gas extraction infrastructure in the northern part of the province. On a reserve near Calgary a Mounty shot and killed an Indian woman and her Son in a child apprehension operation for an Indian social service agency. This episode drew attention to the fact that of all the people killed by the RCMP since its inception over half are Aboriginal. The mounting number of unanswered questions about what the modern-day RCMP in Canada is really all about, takes us back to what really happened at Gustafsen Lake in 1995. There the journalistic smearing of Bruce Clark and his clients, apparently under police guidance and oversight-- the finessing of the instrments of popular opinion that constitutes the real weaponry of the dangerous 1990s became hard to ignore for those with alert eyes to see. To my way of thinking the most plausible scenario is that a decision was made at the highest political level that the BC land issue was not to be permitted to spill out into the international community, especially by allowing Bruce Clark, the Wolverine, or �Doc� Hill (aka Splitting The Sky) to reach an audience with a coherent, consistent, well-articulated message. Splitting The Sky is a veteran of the Attica prison riot who brought his old lawyer, Ramsay Clark, a former Attorney General of the United States, into the Gustafsen confrontation. Ramsay Clark becam a powerful voice of sanity in an escalating atmosphere of ghoulish spectacle, that was stripped by a compliant media, under tight police controls, of its serious intellectual content. Doc Hill is hard at work on his memoires of what happened, an account that should increase the pressure for a full public inquiry into an episode that in my opinion makes the RCMP�s pepper spraying of the Canadian university students in 1995, look like a veritable boy scout jamboree by way of comparison to what happened under cover of a media blackout at Gustafsen Lake. The pepper sraying incident was rightfully showered with sceptical scutiny by the Canadian journalists such as the CBC�s Terry Melewski. Many of them were definitely not willing to take the RCMP�s version of events at face value. Thus when it came to defending the constitutional rights of middle class university students� folks as polished and polite as law student Craig Jones�the media was ready, willing and able to fight the good fight as a friend of the legitimate democratic right of Canadian to air their legitimate dissent. Unfortunately, the same kind of journalistic independence has, with some small but noble exceptions, tended to protect the aggressors and victimize the innocent of those who left Gustafsen Lake. The Wolverine served four years in jail. When he came out, the silence of the Canadian media on the condition of the 67 old defender of Indian Country was deafening. On a similar score, the press have been thoroughly scared off from looking into the role of the Mike Harris government in the police killing of Dudley George at Ipperwash Ontario. What began as a peaceful protest related to the stand at Gustafsen Lake� a protest that like Oka started as a defence of a burial ground� ended in tragedy that four years later still lacks proper explanation. So derelict are our own people when it comes even to the state�s violent removal of an Indian, that the United Nations Human Rights Commission has felt compelled four years after the episode to press Canada for what it can report on the involvement of officialdom in giving the orders which resulted in the death with a government bullet of yet another martyr for the trampled rights of indigenous peoples all over this planet. The perpetuation of this web of cover-up, half truths, and media attack jobs to disguise the true issues, proceeds in a way that has long characterized the perpetuation of a quiet, but insidious variant of ethnic cleansing that is being perpetuated in North America into the new millenium. Why is it that Native people in Canada, but especially in northern Canada, consistently kill themselves at a rate higher than any other recorded population in the world? When will the killing stop? What is to be the monument we will put up for those tens of thousands-- those tens of millions over the centuries� who had to die, premature, gruesome, senseless, horrible deaths so that the Americas could be remade in the image of Europe. The extent of this makeover though ethnic cleansing is reflected in the reality of a European defensive coalition, NATO, that throws in Canada and the United States as if North Atlantic had everything to do with the European heritage and nothing at all to do with the tens of thousands of years of history of the Aboriginal civilization of the Americas. A big part of the ethnic cleansing has taken place by writting out the Indigenous peoples from history and from the big times of contemporary geopolitics, almost as if First Nations never existed; almost as if so-called western civilization was the original civilization of the hemisphere rather than an overlay brutally imposed by continuing forms of genocide that have not really been dealt with; as instead of looking truth in the face we put band aids and linguistics ornaments to sanitize the outward appearance of our own Kosovos and our own dirty little tactics for manufacturing contempt. The experience of Bruce Clark demonstrates what happens when a dutiful Canadian functionary leaves the well-funded, lawyer gravy train devoted to, as Mr. McKay writes, �affirmed Aboriginal rights to self-government and land use rights across Canada.� Nice word but really short on substance to the poorest and the most marginalized of those First Nation citizens outside of the comfortable patronage network that is the infrastructure of the Indian business in see-no-evil-hear no-evil-do-no evil Canada. Enough of this complacency! If we in Canada and the United States are going to commit our young men, including many Indian men, to serve and die in an honourable crusade to prevent the commission and spreading of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, we had better confront honestly the home version of the same process in our own back yard. We are all Kosovo. One of the great tragedies of the media/police head games played at Gustafsen Lake is that the whole conflict was simplified and misrepresented as a simple conflict between criminals and law enforcement agencies. As far as most of mainstream reportage of what the event meant for the internal dynamics of Indian Country, all we got was moralistic dribble about the law abidding Indians and the lawless Indians, the elected Indians and the self-appointed freedom fighters, the fanatics and the pragmatists, our Indians and the wild, savage Indians. Right there, in those essentialized polarities of Hollywood trash, the violence on Indian Country is perpetuated. It was a if the Mounties were there� no North of 60 good guys this time� to hold up a cape of obfuscation and prevent the widening of an honest and much-needed dialogue among First Nations peoples and the rest of the population throughout the country and the continent. In the distance between what Wolverine and Ovide Mercredi, Splitting The Sky and Orvil Looking Horse, Peter Montague and Bruce Clark, there was the makings of a broad discussion on what needs to be done to assure the survival of the Aboriginal civilization of the Americas for the next 500 years; to assure the survival of us all as well as our plant and animal relatives in the great web of life. Paul McKay�s brand of reporting on the disbarring of Bruce Clark illustrates well the kind of false, contrived misrepresentation of reality that does such an injustice to his all. When I first read his report on my computer screen two nights ago, my eyes popped from my head as I saw the words �disident native faction associated with my family, friends and acquaintances at Long Lake 58 reserve in northern Ontario. I read the words, attributed to a colleague who I have known in passing for about 20 years, suggesting that Bruce Clark has shown up on the reserve, split the community, and then taken the �militant minority� with him towards his Star Wars, conehjeaded PhD. fantasies about the continuing relevance of the need for genuine third-party adjudication of land disputes involving First Nations in Canada. �He��s a dangerous item... He�s bad for public optics,� says Trent Native Studies graduate Peter Di Gangi. Then the author cites one of his many unattributed sources, detailing perhaps the most serious allegation of them all in Mr. Mckay�s eyes. Clark has �helped to escalate land-claim legal costs in Canada.� Since these alleged added costs are quite clearly not going to him, why aren�t the sharks at the Law Societies urging him on? Or maybe there�s more to this plot that Mr. McKay has either been able to ascertain or realize in his own grasp of how his reportage serves the interests of the Indian business stalwarts he has chosen to interview. Who didn�t Mr. McKay interview? Well as far as I can tell he spoken to no one at Long lake 58, although he��s already re-cycled for the whole world the old Gustafsen Lake copy as if one bunch of Clark clients must all be pretty much the same�you know... dissident, militant, minority, Star Wars glasses, conehead.... Taste for martyrdom.... You know.. fringy. Not repectable. Gullible. What nonsense! These people� janitors, aunties, but mostly real bush people, mostly very old but still hopeful, mostly pushed aside but still trusting... they are the ones behind what you call Mr. Clark�s �surprise case on behalf of a dissident native faction in northern Ontario.� And perhaps chief and council, who are after all mostly the children of the affadavit signers, will come around. Maybe the elected young ones will adhere more to the hereditary systems still in tact... In spite of the clear cutting. In spite of the cancers growing in more and more of the animals as a result of the herbicide spraying to tansform Indian hunting grounds into tree plantations... Monocultures... Plundered habitat. Maybe the whole community will pull together pull together once they see that chicanery that the Law Society and Southam seems to be attempting, to cut off the jurisdiction question, to prevent the internationalization of Aboriginal land disputes not only in Canada put in many other countries as well, including Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Nigeria, and the United States. We are all Kosovo. ________________________________ There is more information on Clark on the SISIS site at http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/gustmain.html &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
