Human rights complaint filed against MP Pankiw

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John Melenchuk said his complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission about Saskatoon Member of Parliament Jim Pankiw is going to mediation.

Pankiw outraged many people-Native and non-Native alike-in December when he dipped into his MPs communication fund to produce and mail out a pamphlet to his constituents entitled Stop Indian Crime.

Melenchuk, a Metis man who resides in Saskatoon, believed the pamphlet disparaged all Aboriginal people. He complained to the major crimes unit at the RCMP Saskatoon detachment, saying the pamphlet amounted to a hate-crime.

On Jan. 9, Staff Sgt. F.R. Stevenson of the major crimes unit wrote to inform Melenchuk that Public Prosecutions Saskatchewan had determined that the pamphlet was not deemed to be an offense under Section 319 of the Criminal Code of Canada.

So the Metis man complained to the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) in Ottawa. On Feb. 26, Melenchuk told Windspeaker he had been offered an opportunity by Gary Watson, an intake services officer with the CHRC, to take advantage of a mediation process offered by the commission. He provided copies of correspondence from Watson to back up his claim.

Windspeaker asked Melenchuk what he would be seeking in mediation before he would drop his complaint against Pankiw.

"I want him to live on a reserve for a week and see what life's like for a minority on the street. I also want him to put the same amount of money and energy he put into that pamphlet into the Bridges Racism Group we have here in Saskatchewan," he said.

The offer for mediation, if it has been made, is not an indication that a ruling has been made in the matter, said Cathy Barratt, a media relations officer with the CHRC.

The commission employs staff mediators who attempt to resolve cases before any investigation begins. Mediation was offered to about half of the parties involved in human rights complaints during the 2001 reporting year. A resolution was reached in 72 per cent of those cases. Any settlement arrived at through the mediation process must "restore the rights of the individuals involved and must not be part of a larger systemic problem," Barratt said.

The media relations officer could not comment on specific cases. Cases that are not resolved through mediation are investigated by the commission members and, if not resolved, are referred to the human rights tribunal for adjudication. It is only at that point that it becomes public information.

If an offer to go to mediation has been made, that means a preliminary determination has been made that Melenchuk's complaint falls within the CHRC's jurisdiction and also falls within the grounds of the Canadian Human Rights Act. The act lists 11 prohibited grounds of discrimination, including discrimination based on race.

"Whether or not it's been substantiated is something that has not yet been determined because there has been no investigation," Barratt said.

A call toPankiw's Ottawa office for comment was not returned.

Pankiw sits as an independent MP. He was not welcomed back to the Canadian Alliance caucus when Stephen Harper took over as leader from Stockwell Day.

He stated in the pamphlet that more Native people are in jail because more Native people commit crimes. But information on a variety of social factors that might soften the impact of that statement is not included.

Native leaders say he is using poverty-induced statistics to make a misleading case that Native people are more prone to criminal behavior.

An American history professor and author says Pankiw's is not a new theory.

Michael Woodiwiss is a senior lecturer on American history at the University of the West of England in Bristol. His book, Organized Crime and American Power, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2001, offers a scathing analysis of the colonial period. He writes that organized crime goes far beyond the current narrow definition employed by police agencies and has infected and been empoyed by the ruling elite throughout the history of the United Kingdom. It was also exported to the New World during the colonialist expansion period, he wrote.

Woodiwiss' book was based on the idea that wealthy and powerful people are able to ignore the law and get away with it, that acts they commit which would be seen as crimes, are ignored by law enforcement officials.

During an interview conducted by e-mail, Woodiwiss expanded on his ideas for Windspeaker.

"British officials thought of Native peoples abroad as savages, just as they thought of poor people at home as 'the dangerous classes.' In both cases, the characterization suggested that Natives and poor people were responsible for most of the violent and criminal activity and this justified often-brutal repression. My own work has led me to the conclusion that the most serious 'organized' crime in the New World during the colonial period involved acts of land theft and fraud committed by settlers and traders against Native peoples," he said. "The authorities were either unable or unwilling to do anything about it until Natives reacted violently and then soldiers were sent in to restore some kind of order usually in the interests of the whites. Throughout the whole period, of course, there were serious acts of violence committed by both sides."

Crimes committed by colonizers have always been minimized while crimes committed by Indigenous peoples have been exaggerated, his research showed.

"I think that the essential difference between crimes committed by colonizers and Natives was that the formers' crimes were more likely to be successful, unpunished and mostly unrecorded. Among the historians I consulted in coming to these conclusions were Francis Jennings and Ronald Wright. Jennings, as you probably know, has published a lot and inspired a whole school of 'new Indian' history-his work was an attack on the generations of scholars who had internalized the racist language of the 17th century and overlooke the violence and brutality of the European settlers. Wright's book is called Stolen Continents: The Indian Story which, leaves little doubt as to his opinion."

In his book, it is revealed that a presidential commission during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant actually conducted a study and concluded that American Indian crimes were exaggerated unduly in order to justify much more serious crimes by colonists. The report was subsequently shelved and forgotten.

"The information was not new. It came from Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (1881). I'm not aware that her claim has been challenged. I believe that suppression was not necessary-the report was like many others-filed and forgotten-and therefore there was no need for cover-ups in most cases," he said.

The history professor said Pankiw's statistics do not deal with the most serious crimes, crimes that are almost never committed by "Indians."

"The most serious crimes are, as in the 17th to 19th centuries, successful and largely unpunished and therefore do not make it to the statistics quoted by Mr. Pankiw. In my book I have written about the deaths and injuries caused by corporate criminal activity, not to mention the massive amount of stolen money involved in business frauds. The Enron and WorldCom frauds are likely to affect the careers, pensions and quality of life of many more people than the relatively trivial crimes of the poor in general and Native Americans in particular," he said. "I'd agree with [criminologist] Edwin Sutherland's judgement that 'persons of the upper socio-economic class engage in much criminal behavior; that this criminal behavior differs from the criminal behavior of the lower socio-economic class principally in the administrative procedures which are used in dealing with the offenders; and that variations in administrative procedures are not significant from the point of view of causation of crime.' Natives are subject to more policing and therefore more lkely to be caught in relatively minor acts of wrongdoing and, yes, I do see this as part of the same scenario as that described by the Grant commission."

He said he hopes enlightened minds will take the discussion to a much higher level than Pankiw's in the future.

"I believe that historians of the future are likely to be aware of the continued injustice involved in the treatment of Indigenous peoples, but I hope they will be able to tell a story of survival against these odds rather than simple victimization. Native peoples have only usually achieved respect and justice through collective struggle-from Pontiac's 1763 to the Indian Rights struggles of the 1970s. I'd hope that there will be less need for violence to characterize the struggles of the future. I'd also hope that those scholars inspired by Francis Jennings can come to an understanding of the complex reality of Native-white relations and in some ways contribute to a lessening of the race hate exploited by some opportunistic politicians."