The Inconvenient Indian (23 page)

Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not.

Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one.

The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they
are
driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others.

More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

Racism is endemic in North America. And it’s also systemic. While it affects the general population at large, it’s also buried in the institutions that are supposed to protect us from such abuses.

On a November evening in 1971, in The Pas, Manitoba, a nineteen-year-old Cree woman, Helen Betty Osborne, was walking home. She was approached by four White men, who threw her into their car and took her to a cabin near Clearwater Lake where she was beaten, raped, and stabbed over fifty times. To call Osborne’s death a murder is to ignore the mindless savagery of the crime. It was more a slaughter.

The initial investigation focused on Osborne’s Aboriginal friends, but in May of 1972, police received a letter naming three White men, Lee Colgan, James Houghton, and Norman Manger, as Osborne’s killers. Later, a fourth name was added to this list, Dwayne Johnston.

Police seized Colgan’s car and found trace evidence to indicate that this was the vehicle that had been used to kidnap Osborne.

Osborne was killed before my 1985 cutoff date, so you might feel that I’m cheating, but I’ve included this crime because the real investigation didn’t start
until
1985 when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who had sat on their hands for fourteen years, finally got serious about the murder.

In 1983, Constable Robert Urbanoski of the Thompson detachment opened up the cold case and began a new review of the murder. Two years later, in June of 1985, the RCMP placed an article in the local newspaper asking the people of The Pas for their assistance. Amazingly, after all this time, several individuals came forward. Colgan and Johnston had talked openly about the murder and shared details with friends, and in October of 1986,
the police, armed with the old and new evidence, charged Colgan and Johnston with murder. Colgan immediately asked for immunity and got it in exchange for his testimony against Johnston and Houghton. In 1987, Johnston was convicted of murder, Houghton was acquitted, and Colgan walked away without a scratch. Norman Manger was never charged.

Perhaps I was unfair when I said that the police “sat on their hands.” The official reason for the years of delay was that the police, while they knew who killed Osborne, didn’t feel they had enough evidence to take the case to trial. Perhaps they hadn’t thought of asking for the public’s help in 1971. Or perhaps back then, they hadn’t been all that concerned with solving the murder of an Aboriginal woman. Perhaps it was partly Osborne’s fault. Perhaps she should have been White.

In 1999, the Manitoba Aboriginal Justice Inquiry concluded that the murder of Betty Osborne was motivated by racism. “It is clear,” the report said, “that Betty Osborne would not have been killed if she had not been Aboriginal.” However, the inquiry did not take the RCMP to task for their lack of interest all those years, choosing instead to focus on the special effort that Constable Robert Urbanoski made in bringing Osborne’s killer to justice.

Fair enough. In March of 2012, the Aboriginal Commission on Human Rights and Justice and the Institute for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women presented Urbanoski with their Social Justice Award for his efforts in the Osborne case. Well deserved.

But sixteen years? With everything in plain view? With the murderers talking freely about their crime? Even the most generous observer would have to wonder about the police force and its attitude towards Aboriginal people.

Or maybe not.

On another November evening, this time in 1990, a seventeen-year-old Cree man, Neil Stonechild, disappeared just blocks from his mother’s home. The next day, he was found frozen to death in a field on the northern outskirts of Saskatoon. A friend, Jason Roy, had seen Stonechild the night before, handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser driven by Saskatoon Police officers Larry Hartwig and Brad Senger. The police department did a cursory and sloppy investigation, concluded that Stonechild had died of exposure, and closed the case.

For the next ten years, the Stonechild case stayed closed. Then, in January of 2000, another Native man, Darrell Night, was picked up by Saskatoon police officers Dan Hatchen and Ken Munson, driven out of town, and dropped off by the side of the road. He almost froze to death, but was able to walk to a power plant where a shift worker, Mark Evoy, let Night in out of the cold.

Night was lucky. He lived. The next day the body of Rodney Naistus, a twenty-five-year-old man from the Onion Lake reserve, was found frozen to death about a kilometre south of where Night had been dropped off. Then days later, in early February, Lawrence Wegner from Saulteaux First Nation was discovered frozen to death in the same area.

The three deaths—Wenger, Naistus, and Stonechild ten years earlier—were remarkably similar. All three were young Native men who had been found frozen to death in the same area just outside Saskatoon. Besides being Native, the other common element that three of the four men shared was that they had last been seen in the back of a Saskatoon Police cruiser.

With three similar, suspicious fatalities and one near-fatality, the Saskatoon public might have suspected that the deaths were racially motivated. And they would have been correct. The police even knew where to look to find the perpetrators. As far back as 1976, Saskatoon police officers had been driving young Native men to the outskirts of town and dropping them off. Within the urban mythology of Saskatoon, these rides were known as Starlight Tours. You could argue that this activity was no more than simple harassment, the kind of harassment that police forces around North America have engaged in for centuries, the kind that usually results in inconvenience and bad feelings rather than death.

But on the prairies, in the dead of winter, these Starlight Tours were executions.

This is what happened to Neil Stonechild, Rodney Naistus, and Lawrence Wegner. Darrell Night would have died as well, had he not found shelter in time.

The police.

There was a public inquiry. A number of high-ranking and retired police officials had their feelings hurt and their reputations impugned. The two officers responsible for Darrell Night’s ordeal were convicted and sentenced to eight months in jail, then released early. The two officers who had been seen with Lawrence Wegner in their squad car were fired.

No one was ever formally accused or convicted of any of the deaths.

1985.

In terms of attitudes, in terms of dispossession and intolerance, nothing much has changed; 2012 feels remarkably similar to 1961. That was the year I graduated from high school, and the
year that four hundred delegates from sixty-seven tribes met in Chicago to draw up a Declaration of Indian Purpose, which emphasized the preservation of culture and freedom for Native people to choose their own way. And 2012 also feels similar to 1911, when the Lakota writer Charles Eastman published
The Soul of the Indian
and when Ishi walked out of the Butte County wilderness in northern California and into the modern world. Or 1864, when Kit Carson and the U.S. Army rounded up the Navajo and marched them at gunpoint for eighteen days to Bosque Redondo. Or 1812, when the British cut and ran and left Tecumseh to face the Americans alone at the Battle of the Thames. Or 1763, when Pontiac led a loose confederation of Great Lake tribes against the British in an effort to drive them out of the area.

One story from this period has the British army contemplating using blankets infected with smallpox in an attempt to break the back of Indian resistance, but whether or not that plan was ever carried out, or carried out successfully, has never been proven, so I’m not going to repeat it.

1985.

You see my problem. The history I offered to forget, the past I offered to burn, turns out to be our present. It may well be our future.

A FUTURE
.

What a good idea. But there’s a problem. If Native people are to have a future that is of our own making, such a future will be predicated, in large part, on sovereignty.

Sovereignty is one of those topics about which everyone has an opinion, and each time the subject is brought up at a gathering or at a conference, a hockey game breaks out. To be honest, I’m reluctant to mention it. But if you’re going to talk about Indians in contemporary North America, you’re going to have to discuss sovereignty. No way around it.

Sovereignty, by definition, is supreme and unrestricted
authority. However, sovereignty in practice, as a functional form of governance, is never an absolute condition. Rather, it is a collection of practical powers that include, among others, the authority to levy taxes, set the criteria for citizenship, control trade, and negotiate agreements and treaties.

Aboriginal sovereignty, by the way, is a given. It is recognized in treaties, in the Canadian and American constitutions, and in the Indian Act. It has been confirmed any number of times by Supreme Court decisions in both countries. Just in case you didn’t know.

In 2007, the United Nations passed its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in which it recognized that indigenous people had the right “to self-determination” and that they could “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” The declaration doesn’t use the word “sovereignty” but the forty-six articles that set out the rights and freedoms and responsibilities of indigenous people are close enough to sovereignty. At least, close enough for government work.

The Canadian columnist Jeffrey Simpson, in a
Globe and Mail
article in August of 2009, offered a more pragmatic approach to the subject of Native sovereignty. “We have been living a myth in aboriginal policy,” said Simpson, “that ‘nations,’ in the sociological sense of the word, can be effective ‘sovereign’ entities, in the sense of doing what sovereign governments are expected to do. When the population of a ‘nation’ is a few hundred people, or even a few thousand, we are kidding ourselves, aboriginal or non-aboriginal, if we think that sovereignty can be anything more than partial.”

The Cherokee-Creek scholar Craig Womak is less dismissive and more practical. “Sovereignty, for all its problems and
contradictions,” says Womak, “is a reality in Indian country, embedded in the U.S. Constitution and two centuries of federal Indian law. In short, it is what Native people have to work with, the hand that has been dealt us. This, of course, does not mean Native people should not dream of more, or even advocate for more, but present realities must also be acknowledged.”

One of the realities that Simpson may have missed is that the Navajo in the Southwest, the Blackfoot in Alberta, and the Mohawk on both sides of the border have been looking after their own affairs for some time now. All three tribes have taken control of on-reserve services for health, education, and housing. Meanwhile, the Iroquois have been practising sovereignty by issuing and using their own Haudenosaunee Confederacy passports.

In 2009, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) finished work on the Embassy of Tribal Nations in Washington, D.C. At the opening ceremony, President Jefferson Keel said he expected that the embassy would allow Native people to “more effectively assert their sovereign status and facilitate a much stronger nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government.”

Even American President Barack Obama has spoken publicly about the “nation-to-nation relationship” that North America has with Indian tribes.

It all
sounds
good. Of course, government has been only too happy to download services onto reservations and reserves. Ottawa and Washington still control the budgets and set the regulations, while avoiding most of the liabilities. The issuing of passports is a legitimate exercise of sovereignty, but in 2010, when the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team tried to travel to Manchester for the International Lacrosse Championships on those documents,
they were refused entry into England. They had been able to cross from Canada to the United States on their passports, but that was only because Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had interceded in the matter and arranged for a one-time waiver. In the end, however, instead of playing in the tournament, the team wound up watching television at a Comfort Inn in New York.

The Embassy of Tribal Nations is a fine idea, and to hear President Obama speak the word “sovereignty” in the same breath as the word “Indian” is certainly encouraging, even though we all know that political rhetoric has little to do with political action. But more telling, to my way of thinking, is the 2010 radio show during which New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg called on New York governor David Paterson to take a more proactive approach to the state’s dispute with the Seneca tribe over the collection of sales tax on cigarettes. “I’ve said this to David Paterson,” said Bloomberg. “Get yourself a cowboy hat and a shotgun. If there’s ever a great video, it’s you standing in the middle of the New York State Thruway saying, ‘Read my lips—the law of the land is this, and we’re going to enforce the law.’ ”