Summer of discontent revisited

Page 9

With the incidents at Ipperwash and Gustafsen Lake fresh in the minds of everyone, it seems that particular opinions about the treatment of these, all to frequent, Native crises are being voiced more openly; or perhaps more accurately, there is a belief that there is a double standard in relation to these blockades in that Natives get preferential treatment or handled with kid gloves.

Tell that to Dudley George, the Ojibway man killed at Ipperwash.

Many critics outside and within the government have commented that there seems to be two sets of law in Canada; one for the Native people and one for the whites.

As I've often heard said "You get white people blockading a road or doing what the Indians are doing and the police would be in there breaking things up faster then Mike Harris can hit a golf ball. They should treat them Indians like they would white people."

Equal rights ? what a concept. That would be nice. Very nice, in fact, but in reality, unlikely. For it does seem there is truly a double standard. Most Native leaders would agree. Chief Tom Bressette of the Stony Kettle Reserve agrees with these irate voices, basically saying there are "two separate laws" for Indians and whites and that Indians "get the lower end of the stick."

Anybody who is even slightly familiar with the Native community is well aware of the incredibly high levels of Aboriginal people incarcerated in the provincial and federal jails. While Native people make up less then five per cent of the general population. Aboriginal people sometimes exceed 40 per cent of those in jail.

You don't have to work for Revenue Canada to know something is wrong with these numbers, especially when you take into consideration that Native culture as a whole never had jails nor a need for them. There was no institutionalized punishment, no witness relocation, no prison riots.

Now, to go from a culture with no need for jails to an obscenely high incarceration rate should tell these politicians and nay-sayers that something is dreadfully wrong.

Either, in a scant few years, we as a people have become an anarchic gang of hoodlums with no appreciation and bent on overcrowding prisons for the hell of it, or there is a double standard.

The justice system's famous for its inflexibility to take into account different perceptions of what is right and what is wrong. For instance, white society reveres the nuclear family principle, while the Native community is structured around the extended family concept. This is one of the reasons why many Native kids were taken away for adoption or put into residential schools.

Centuries of alienation, dispossession, and insensitivity have also had their effect. When you take away the culture for Native people, their language, their land, it creates a vacuum. A very powerful and hungry vacuum. And as white scientists love to quote "Nature hates a vacuum."

It stands to reason that something has to fill this gaping black hole. Anger and frustration at what has been lost, or taken, rushes in to fill that vacuum. Simple physics.

And while I and the vast majority of Native people across this country do not condone violence, I challenge any people with this history not to be overcome by emotions such as these.

Personally, I think the bottom line is that Hugh MacLennan was incredibly naive when he wrote his book TwoSolitudes. He couldn't even begin to understand how many solitudes there really are.