Judge hopes to open eyes to reserve living

A book by an Alberta judge chronicling his time behind the bench and his experience with First Nations people has been met with criticism by the current administration of the Stoney Nakoda First Nation.

In Bad Medicine: A Judge’s Struggle for Justice in a First Nation’s Community, Judge John Reilly claims that mismanagement of funds by the Stoney Nakoda First Nation chief and council and lack of services on the reserve resulted in extreme poverty and an inability for many band members to lead productive lives.

The band’s lawyer has filed a complaint with judicial council about the content of the book.

“I don’t expect it to go anywhere,” said Reilly, who is 64 and semi-retired. “I believe that they are afraid to actually sue me. If they in fact took action against me for defamation then they would be subject to disclose all documentation that’s relevant to the claim. They would have to prove that my allegations are untrue and I can’t see them doing that.”

Reilly said many of the cases he presided over as circuit judge in the Cochrane area included people from the Stoney Nakoda First Nation.

 “The people of that community only made up 10 per cent of the population, yet they represented 75 per cent of the charges that showed up in court,” he said. “So many people coming before my court were obvious alcoholics.”

Wanting to understand the circumstances he was working in, Reilly began volunteering on the First Nation and found that not only were people living in poverty, but that the community’s alcohol treatment centre was closed down in 1996. He was told lack of funding was the reason, but heard “conflicting stories.” He also heard about racism and the difficult upbringing many people had.

Reilly said he didn’t fully understand the scale of the community’s issues until he visited the grave yard.
“I was just overcome. This was 1997 and there must have been half a dozen fresh grave markers of people born after 1970. People dying in their teens and early twenties. Their names had come up one way or another through the courts, and here were their graves. I was overcome with grief at seeing it.”

Reilly alleged financial mismanagement by chief and council, including unfair processes, firings, and accounts not made public. In 1997 he called on the Crown to do an official investigation into why so many band members were living in poverty.

Many of the solutions Reilly noted in his book, including the need for greater transparency and less bureaucracy, are drawn from the Royal Commission of Aboriginal People which he said the government has failed to implement.

“If I were the government I would get rid of the department of Indian and Northern Affairs immediately,” he said.

Reilly said his book is about more than outing mismanagement.

“I hope that people will read it and be a little more understanding of the dysfunctional Aboriginal people they see. The Aboriginal people who are living in poverty and suffering from addictions and that are involved in crime and violence, my feeling is if I grew up in the circumstances that so many people grow up, I would be no different than them,” he said.

“Why are we not changing the circumstances that are producing people that are suffering like that?”