Ignored plea for help one story in justice inquiry

Part one in a two-part series

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Jimmy Stillas experienced a death not unfamiliar to those who use a snowmobile on a regular basis.

Let me explain:

Stillas was a trapper in the Cariboo-Chilcotin area of British Columbia. He was also chief of the Ulkatcho band of the Carrier Indians.

He and a couple of friends had left their village at Anahim Lake, 3,000 kilometres west of Williams Lake, one day in December of 1990. They were heading up to his trapping cabin near Tweedsmuir Provincial Park.

Stillas was going to check his trapline and maybe do some moose hunting. He said he would be back nightfall.

David Friesen, a young archaeologist and one of Stillas's companions, left Stillas's cabin that same morning to visit another cabin four hours hike away. He left behind Wilfred Cassam, a Carrier Elder who had been crippled a stroke.

When Stillas did not return that night. Cassam became worried. So worried, that despite his handicapped condition, he hiked to the cabin Friesen had gone. A hike that takes a healthy person four hours stretched in to 24 for Cassam.

Friesen, who had experienced difficulties getting to the cabin himself, sent a friend off on horseback to raise the alarm in Anahim Lake.

Normally, the RCMP would organize a search-party but the local detachment decided Stillas's disappearance was outside their territorial jurisdiction and they alerted the detachment in Bella Coola, 600 kilometres away.

Horrified, Anahim Lake residents quickly organized a search party themselves.

A plane hired the concerned friends found Stillas's trail on a frozen riverbed. At the end of his trail they spotted the hole where he had plunged to his death.

Inquiry

This was the first story to come out of testimony given at British Columbia's Cariboo-Chilcotin Justice Inquiry. The inquiry is looking into the poor state of relations between Natives of the Cariboo-Chilcotin region in central B.C. and all levels of the justice system there.

The story of Jimmy Stillas's death is neither representative of testimony given at the inquiry nor is it the catalyst that prompted the call for an inquiry.

It is typical in one respect, though. It is "saying that the police, the sheriffs, the court reporters, the legal aid society have treated Chilcotin-Cariboo natives in an inferior way to other people."

That, says Bryan Williams, the lawyer representing 15 bands at the inquiry, is what it is all about.

"When a Native goes missing the police rather yawn and don't get very excited

about it, when he is found dead they are rather apologetic but they didn't really believe the Native people," says Williams.

"The examples that are being brought forth in the inquiry are designed to demonstrate that Native people are being treated in a very, very unjust manner," adds Williams.

One must remember, though, that Bryan Williams is representing the bands in this inquiry and there are other parties represented in the inquiry as well. Among them are the RCMP and the Legal Services Society against whom most of the allegations are being made.

There are also individual officers of the RCMP, private security firms, the commissioner and his counsel and, to top it all off, the government of B.C. is there, too.

As Marion Buller, the Commission Counsel, put it: "What went from a humble little road show has become a big show."

And they all have interests at stake.

But before getting into that, perhaps a little background information is in order.

History

The Cariboo-Chilcotin region is located in central B.C. It is a plateau wedged between the Coast Mountain range to the west and the Rocky Mountains to the East.

The Fraser River splits the plateau in two, carving a narrow valley down its middle.

Williams Lake, the principal town in the region, is located right in the center of the plateau on the banks of the Fraser.

There are three Aboriginal nations who lived there prior to the arrival of the white man in the mid-nineteenth century and who till live there today: The Carrier Nation in the north, the Chilcotin Nation in the southwest and the Snuswap in the southeast.

These three nations, divided into 15 bands, are the main plaintiffs in the inquiry.

According to Joan Gentles, a Chilcotin Native testimony, her people's complaints go all the way back to the 1870's and what is referred to in historical circles as the Chilcotin War.

It began when road-building crews disrupted native hunting grounds. When confronted Natives, the crews threatened to reintroduce small pox, which had devastated bands in the area.

Understandably upset, they began attacking the crews. The end result was 21 white men dead; countless Natives as well. To teach them a lesson, five Chilcotin leaders were hung. The Chilcotin people have yet to forgive the white justice system for this episode in their history.

Although it provides a comprehensive backdrop for relations between Natives and the justice system today, the Chilcotin War does not have as much of an effect on the inquiry as certain events in the modern era.

In fact, the single most important event in the recent history of Cariboo-Chilcotin seems to be the effect of residential schools that children were forced to attend in the 1960s.

"What we are finding time and time again is a real problem created the residential school system," says Buller.

In the 1960s, children were forcibly removed from their parents and sent to

these schools in a vain attempt to rid them of their culture and assimilate them into

white culture.

Instead, "they learnt to hate themselves and hate each other," insists Buller.