Fear and loathing in Toon Town

Page 5

We'd been to Saskatoon before. We'd been in the over-crowded houses or apartments that First Nations' people try-and amazingly enough, often succeed-to make their homes. We'd seen the living rooms with no furniture, with just three or five or 10 (or more) mattresses leaning against the wall waiting to be spread out on the cold floors come bed time when too many people pack into these places to spend the night out of the cold.

It's bad enough living this way, feeding your kids low-cost food that fills their bellies but doesn't fulfill the requirements of good nutrition. It's bad enough just getting by. But to exist like this, trying to work your way towards a better life, and all the while waiting for that knock on the door. Well, it's almost too much, especially if the person knocking on that door is a police officer who's come to mess with your mind because you know something or saw something that might get one of the brothers in blue into trouble.

It's bad enough if that police officer has come to do his very difficult job to tell you to stand one of those mattresses back up against the wall, because its scheduled occupant won't be coming home that night-or ever.

Stabbings, shootings, overdoses, fatal beatings, bad booze, all the hazards of the hard life on the streets, that's Saskatoon-what Saskatoon has become for too many people.

Poor people die too soon and too often. Most of those poor people are our people-people who didn't have a place on the rez, who had to move to the city to find a place to live or a job or a shot at an education so they could do better for their children.

American humorist Kin Hubbard once said that it's not a crime to be poor, but it may as well be. He was talking about the U.S.A., about Indiana where he lived. He could have been talking about Saskatoon, about any urban ghetto where life is cheap and all too often brief.

So we sure don't need the cops helping to add to those numbers.

Mothers in the 'hood tell their kids to not go out alone. Guess why? No, it's not to protect them from the gangs that are springing up in alarming numbers in these unforgivable urban ghettos, unless you count that best-equipped gang in town, the Saskatoon Police Service.

Moms tell their children there's safety in numbers, because if the cops grab you and take you on a little starlight tour, you need a witness to call your mom and tell her to get on the phone and let them know they're being watched and they better make sure you make it home that night.

That's what it has come down to in this town. And there are other towns all over the country where things aren't much better.

In the soup kitchens that provide what they can for the poorest of the poor all along 20th Street are decent, gentle, generous souls who spend their time making sure there's always somewhere to go to get a boiled hotdog or some watery soup and a slice of hard bread. And they spend even more of their time knocking on doors, begging for money so they can keep their doors open yet another week or month or year.

People lined up in those soup kitchens when they heard Windspeaker was there. They've been crying out to be heard for so long, they could scarcely believe someone was there to listen to their stories.

We detected more than a trace of vindication now that the mainstream media in town has come to grips with the circumstances that have been around them for so long. We don't blame our media colleagues for being skeptical. Skepticism is the most powerful tool any reporter can bring to the job. And who wants to believe that cops do things like phony up breathalyzer results or drop people far from home in the dead of a Prairie winter just to avoid a little paper work?

Erica Stonechild is right. She's the sister of Neil Stonechild, a 17-year-old Native man who didn't make it home one night in 1990. Erica said we've got to get to the bottom of this and make it stop. She's right. Too many lives havalready been squandered.