The unscrutinized legacy of Gustafsen Lake

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The old pie-in-the face gag has acquired heightened meaning in an era requiring engaging pictures to accompany the delivery of political messages. Last spring, Attorney General Ujjal Dosanjh became the target of a banana-cream protest for his role in overseeing the biggest police operation in his province's history. "That's for Gustafsen Lake," announced his critics, as the pie creamed across the ambitious politician's surprised face.

Dosanjh is now again in the public eye for his decision to seek the leadership of the provincial NDP and, along with it, the province's top political job. The common wisdom is that the attorney general's handling of the crisis, if anything, constitutes a political asset rather than a liability.

This orthodoxy was given renewed currency recently when columnist Paul Sullivan evoked popular wisdom in his laudatory commentary on Dosanjh's candidacy. Sullivan referred derisively to those "Aboriginal leaders" who he said "exhumed" the conflict pitting at least 400 RCMP together with federal army personnel against a small handful of so-called "rebel Indians."

Sullivan flicked aside the whole episode with the loaded remark that all reasonable British Columbians "probably applaud [Dosanjh's] denunciation of violence as a political tool."

Who could argue? But wait! The perception that what happened at Gustafsen Lake in 1995 is obvious and clear does not stand even the most rudimentary test of comparison with the facts currently available. For instance, reporters like the Vancouver Sun's Joey Thompson have commented on the huge gap between accounts given to the media by Dosanjh and the police during the standoff and subsequent accounts of what really happened.

"RCMP took reporters for a ride," wrote Thompson in September 1997. "Court transcripts tell the story we got had," she observed, referring to the RCMP's lies given as fact to badly spin-doctored reporters at the infamous briefing sessions at 100 Mile House. The "media should apologize for its gullibility" at Gustafsen Lake, she concludes.

In our estimation the basic aim of the RCMP's systematic disinformation campaign was ultimately to disarm the interpretation harbored by those in the camp that ultimately the Indian title question in the province is one involving international as well as domestic law. To discredit this position, one that still puts the whole domesticated structure of the tenuous B.C. treaty process at risk, a truly draconian campaign of dirty tricks was mounted. The original smear campaign was so successful that there are tremendous filters that to this day block any reckoning with the massive evidence that already exists of government wrongdoing. The fact that the mainstream media, especially in British Columbia, were so deeply implicated in the dissemination of the worst kind of propaganda helps perpetuate the thick stench of deceit that still permeates this sordid affair.

The case stands as a stark illustration of how easy it is to marshall the old racist stereotypes of wild Indian savagery to discredit serious legal and political arguments whose implications might have serious consequences for those who have benefited most from a long history of land theft from the First Nations.

The basic strategy was to kill the message by criminalizing the messengers, a very easy task when it comes to perpetuating the tactics of the old Indian wars on a continent where the real textbooks on ethnic cleansing were first written. To these larger objectives was soon added the aim of raising the NDP's political capital through the exploitation of a very public get-tough crusade directed at a group that had clearly been marked as prime material for opportunistic hate campaign.

A major piece of evidence exposing some of the misinformation disseminated in 1995 came up recently in an investigation conducted by David Bazay, the Ombudsman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In his report Bazay emphasizes an account that came to him fro the former head of CBC Radio News, Jeffrey Dvorkin, who now holds a similar post with Public Radio in the USA.

Dvorkin indicated to Bazay that Staff Sergeant Peter Montague, acting under the authority of Dosanjh, had lied about an alleged "hostage taking" during the standoff. The RCMP misled him in order to make an unmediated announcement on the airwaves of the public broadcaster.

Dvorkin complained officially to the RCMP commissioner "to protest the way the CBC had been manipulated."

If Crown authorities lied about that, what other misinformation was distributed as fact in 1995 under the higher authority of the province's attorney general?

A cynic might view the contrast between the determination to get to the bottom of what really happened at sprayPEC in 1997 with the lack of follow up into what happened at Gustafsen Lake in 1995. The different treatment displays the existence of a profound double standard. When middle-class Canadian university students are pepper sprayed it seems that there is more at stake than when so-called "renegade" Indians are made targets of thousands of police and army bullets. This same pattern of complacency resulted in a recent condemnation by the UN Human Rights Committee for Canada's failure to conduct a full public inquiry into the police killing at Ipperwash Ontario of Ojibway martyr Dudley George.

The incident was closely connected to the unfolding events at Gustafsen Lake, where a non-Native supporter of the Native protestors was shot in the arm and a Canadian soldier had his hand blown off as he was setting up explosive devices around the Gustafsen camp. On whose authority was he acting in setting up these stun grenades in this domestic conflict?

Demands for a full public inquiry into what happened at Gustafsen Lake and Ipperwash have come from the past and former leadership of the Assembly of First Nations, CUPE-Victoria, Council of Canadians (Victoria) Teaching Support Staff Union at Simon Fraser University, and the Federal reen Party.

Outside Canada similar demands have come from former United States attorney-general Ramsey Clark, The Green Group of the European Parliament, Defensoria Maya (Guatemala), For Mother Earth (Belgium), League of Indigenous Sovereign Nations, and the Tasmania Human Rights Group.

Ujjal Dosanjh has clearly succeeded in creating a rather appealing public image of himself as a sensitive, intellectually agile politician whose own Indo-Canadian identity has seemingly helped him to understand and identify with the plight of those who have yet to achieve full acceptance in the mainstream of Canada's economic and political life.

If he has nothing to hide, then Dosanjh has nothing to fear from some more rigorous investigation into what really happened at Gustafsen Lake under his watch.

To ignore his role in this episode, whose deeper character still has not been exposed to the scrutiny it deserves, would be to undermine the integrity of the political process aimed at choosing the next premier of British Columbia.