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Page 17

Review

Indian Fall: The Last Great Days of the Plains Cree and the Blackfoot Confederacy

By D'Arcy Jenish

341 pages, $32 (hc)

Viking/Penguin Canada

Cowboys and Indians: The Shooting of J.J. Harper

By Gordon Sinclair Jr.

400 pages, $34.99 (hc)

McClelland & Stewart

In 1882, after the buffalo had been slaughtered and the Blackfoot were starving, a man named Bull Elk bought a steer's head at the government rations house. The government employee then sold the same head to another customer. When Bull Elk tried to claim his purchase, he was accused of stealing and thrown out. So he went to his lodge, got a gun and fired shots above the employee's head. Although he knew Bull Elk was innocent, Blackfoot chief Crowfoot arranged for him to be turned over to the authorities at a later date, when everything would be sorted out. In spite of this agreement, government reinforcements arrived from Fort Macleod and arrested Bull Elk. Crowfoot - who had once admired the "redcoats" for driving unscrupulous whiskey traders out of Blackfoot territory - would never again trust the police or see them as protectors of his people.

In 1986, Garry Bunn and Gordon Ross, both Aboriginal, were put on trial for the murder of a Winnipeg taxi driver Gurnam Singh Dhaliwal. The police disregarded fingerprint and other evidence that pointed to a non-Native suspect, and instead pursued the Aboriginal men. Finally, the Crown's star witness, a former girlfriend of Ross', broke down on the stand. She said the police had frightened her - she said one cop kicked her door down - and pressured her to lie.

"I tried to tell the truth," she said. "But they wouldn't let me." Ross spent a year in custody before he and Bunn were proven innocent. The chief investigating officer in that case, the cop who kicked in the door, was Inspector Ken Dowson, later the lead investigator in the J.J. Harper shooting, another Aboriginal man.

You might think these events, separated by a century, have nothing in common. You'd be wrong. The miscarriages of justice D'Arcy Jenish describes in his book Indian Fall: The last Great Days of the Plains Cree and the Blackfoot Confederacy clearly set the stage for the police state Gordon Sinclair Jr. describes in his book, Cowboys and Indians: The Shooting of J.J. Harper.

Jenish, a senior writer for Maclean's magazine, revisits the settling of the Canadian West. Using trial transcripts, government records and early newspaper reports, the author documents the westward march of "civilization" and the myths that have sprung up around it. What was glorious nation-building for Canadians was the destruction of a way of life for Aboriginal societies from the western end of Lake Superior to the Rocky Mountains.

To illustrate what settlement meant for Aboriginal people on the Prairies, Jenish examines the lives of the 19th century Cree leaders Piapot, Big Bear and Poundmaker and Blackfoot leader Crowfoot. Using techniques of both biography and history, he traces their political rise, describes their spiritual and oratorical powers and details how each man reacted to the colonial regime. He also re-examines the coming of the white man, the extermination of the buffalo, the forcible relocation of Aboriginal people to reserves, the signing of the treaties and the 1885 Riel Rebellion with an eye to the role each leader played in these events.

Indian Fall suffers somewhat from the plodding 'just-the-facts-ma'am' journalistic style. There's no poetry here, and the book contains none of the righteous anger of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, the first and most famous Aboriginal history of the American West.

Gordon Sinclair Jr., on the other hand, writes with outrage and sadness throughout Cowboys and Indians. The Winnipeg Free Press columnist followed the Harper case from the beginning, and has devoted the last 10 years of his life to writing this book.

Sinclair is an accomplished writer, and, as a result, the book is a captivating read. Hs assured voice gives the book an immediacy that avoids the he-said, she-said reportage that deadens Jenish's book.

In a startling turn for a non-fiction writer, Sinclair also inserts himself into the narrative as a third-person character. This is an excellent way of declaring his connection to the case and inserting his own questions and theories into the text without giving himself or his opinions any more importance than the other people involved.

In the first half of the book, using testimony from two judicial inquiries as well as information gathered during his own investigation, Sinclair recounts the sad story of the Harper shooting. (In March 1988, Const. Robert Cross encountered John Joseph Harper near a Winnipeg park while chasing a suspect in a car theft. The men struggled, and Harper was shot in the chest and later died of his wounds.)

In the second half, he documents the disintegration of the official police account and the accompanying fallout, which included suicides, mental breakdowns, extramarital affairs and the deliberate harassment of anybody working to expose what Sinclair proved was a police cover-up. (His own investigation into the facts got him suspended from his column duties and made him the enemy of the Winnipeg police establishment.)

Sinclair exposes the irregularities of the hasty police investigation into the Harper matter using a step-by-step, in-depth analysis that allows the reader to accompany the author on his journey to uncover the truth. Sinclair is a first-class detective with a spot-on intuition, and he has a field day pointing out the impossibilities, inaccuracies and downright dirty lies. Mostly, though, he just lets the police hang themselves.

Cowboys and Indians isn't just about police corruption. It's about the pervasive racism of this country. After considering the public and media reaction to the Harper shooting and its aftermath, Sinclair thinks "he wouldn't have been the only Winnipeg journalist still investigating weks after the shooting if the victim had been a white business man shot walking his dog in River Heights, instead of an Indian on Logan."

Cecil Denny explains why. In Indian Fall, Jenish recounts the mounted policeman's 19th century opinion that "The white settler coming into the country ... cared little what became of the poor Indian. If a cow was killed or a horse was stolen, the Indians were to blame. Their land was looked upon with covetous eyes and they were regarded as a nuisance and expense. The right of the Native...was not for a moment considered or acknowledged."

Sinclair shadows Denny a century later when he says that the Harper shooting was "related to time, circumstances, and events...in a historic sense."

The racism that infects Canada's law-enforcement agencies and a justice system, which the late Anishnabe Elder Art Solomon once called the "just-us system," is a result of the decidedly unpeaceful and undemocratic foundations set in place in this country by the military and police forces that travelled west after the 1885 Indian resistence to introduce their own special version of law and order.

Read these books. Both of them illustrate what Aboriginal people have been saying all along; in the Wild West, the cowboys never went away. And the Indians are still losing.