Native candidates looking forward to next time

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The shutout of Aboriginal people from Vancouver politics continues, but Aboriginal trans-sexual Jamie Lee Hamilton says she would have won a council seat in Vancouver's Nov. 20 civic election if a ward system was in place.

"I believe when our people take their power and exercise it, I'm going to be elected. Poring over the results, I'd have been elected in a ward system."

Hamilton, 44, headed a field of five Native candidates, and joined with three of them to form the CIVIC (Citizens in Vancouver in Coalition) slate or what she calls a social movement for Aboriginal candidates. The other CIVIC candidates were Laurie McDonald, originally from Enoch Cree First Nation, west of Edmonton; Irene Louise Schmidt; Tyler G. Ducharme; and Metis Greg Reid, an engineer, who ran as an independent.

Hamilton with 10,895 votes received the most of any of the Aboriginal council candidates, but they were all well back of the winners. Vancouver has a well-established pattern of voting for the NPA or COPE slates making it difficult for newcomers to break in. Aboriginals Kelly Elizabeth White (Green Party) and Robert Kiyoshk (COPE) sought election as school trustees. White received 36,344 votes while Kiyoshk received 31,843.

It's been a long time since declared Aboriginal candidates ran for municipal office in Vancouver, according to Hamilton, noting the last time was when Angie Dennis ran for mayor in 1972. To have five running is a real breakthrough and is in large part due to the efforts of Hamilton and Viola Thomas, president of the United Native Nations, both sparkplugs in their own right.

"We'll probably grow from there," said Hamilton.

Her resolve is shared by Thomas.

"I'm not going to give up because we didn't get people elected," she told Raven's Eye.

Thomas' organization put out a sobering news release during the election campaign, advertising a civic election forum. It noted Aboriginal and Asian people had been denied the right to vote until 1947.

"Since the right has been given, there has never been an Aboriginal person elected either to the Vancouver School Board or the Vancouver Municipal Council."

The forum was held at the Vancouver Friendship Centre. Jamie Lee's deceased mother, Alice Hamilton, who was born at Lac Ste. Anne, Alta. during an annual pilgrimage, went on to become a founding member of the Vancouver fellowship society, which predates today's friendship centre.

During the election campaign, Hamilton and the other Native candidates helped focus attention on Aboriginal issues ignored by other council hopefuls. They pushed for the city to hire a social planner at city hall dedicated to looking after Native issues and to set up a standing committee on Aboriginal issues as ways of bettering the lives of Vancouver's 43,000 Natives. A total of 60,000 Aboriginals live in the Lower Mainland, according to Thomas.

"We can no longer stand on the sidelines and watch our young people grow up in a life of hopelessness, poverty and lack of pride. We must have voices that are sensitive to the legacy of neglect by all levels of governments for urban Aboriginal peoples," said Thomas.

She said many people were deceived into believing Aboriginal people don't pay taxes, but in 1991, for example, Aboriginal people living in Vancouver contributed more than $36 million in provincial and federal income taxes alone. Yet "many urban Aboriginal people are ghettoized due to poverty, despair and lack of culturally appropriate services" in Vancouver, which some Aboriginal people call "the biggest reserve in British Columbia," Thomas said.

Off-reserve Native people are bounced between the federal and provincial governments, she added.

"Vancouver's role is to imprison or keep Aboriginal people on the street and provide lawyers, judges, police and social workers with jobs. One of the biggest challenges for urban Aboriginal initiatives is to recover from decades of fiscal neglect by all governments," Thomas said. "Urban Aboriginal peopl should have equality of access to financial resources and if governments gave a true political commitment to the concept of self government, perhaps our people wouldn't be filling the jails or the state welfare system."

Hamilton, who ran for the first time in 1996, was born a male, had a sex change operation and now lives as a woman. Sexual bias may originally have hurt her political hopes, she conceded, but now "I'm recognized for the work I do rather than who I am. I have done very well on the Eastside, where our population is based."

In some areas she beat three or four candidates of the reigning Non-Partisan Association slate, which had a lock on Vancouver until this election, holding all seats on council, school board and park board.

A prostitute rights activist, Hamilton is the director and 1997 founder of Grandma's House, a safe house for those in the sex trade. Her activism had its roots in 1994 when she opened a business, which attracted many prostitutes.

"My clothing store became a de facto drop-in centre for women in the sex trade," she said.

Hamilton has been one of the leaders in the charge to demand answers to the unsolved disappearances, mostly over the last four years, of 31 Vancouver women who worked in the Downtown Eastside sex trade. They were all drug addicts and most were almost certainly murdered. The number of disappearances, which was steadily rising, ended after the media turned the spotlight on the case last summer. Hamilton, a prostitute herself many years ago, said "60 per cent plus of the missing women are Aboriginal. The Aboriginal women are being targeted."

The Downtown Eastside is home to many Aboriginal people, which writer Daniel Wood describes as "the place people end up when they have no further to fall." It has the highest percentage of drug addicts, drug dealers, HIV cases, poverty, petty crime and street prostitution in Canada. It is, says one addicted street prostitute, "a place of the dead and the walking dead."

Angered by he prostitute killings and at the inaction of Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen, who ignored all letters on the issue, Hamilton, Thomas and others decided to take dramatic action months ago. They went to a city council meeting, seized the lectern and demanded the issue of the missing women be item Number 1 on the agenda. Although councillors voted to hear them, the mayor ruled the delegation out of order and shut down the meeting, but they refused to leave. Two hours later, the council gave them a hearing, although it was not public. The rest is history. A $100,000 reward is now offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of individuals responsible for the deaths of any of the 31 Eastside women. The money was put up about the time the TV show America's Most Wanted showed interest in the case.

With transsexual Georgina Beyer having been elected as an MP recently in New Zealand, Hamilton has set her sights on breaking ground in Canada, noting no transsexuals have been elected to public office in Canada or the U.S. She believes she'd also be breaking ground since she's unaware of any Aboriginal candidates having been elected in an urban centre in Canada.