by Dr. Anthony J. Hall
Associate Chair, Department of Native American Studies
University of Lethbridge
 

I
Connecting the Events, Ideas and Personalities

Sometimes seemingly unrelated events converge in your mind with powerful
synergy. That is what is happening to me. Week after week the reports
go from bad to worse on the haunted house of Balkan ethnic horrors. And
the reality of our involvement as North Americans in NATOís
fast-expanding war against the Milosevic regime in Serbia, gets closer
and closer to home. Meanwhile, we learn that the Law Society of Upper
Canada has disbarred Dr. Bruce Clark. For almost two decades this
controversial lawyer has staked his professional career and much, much
more on proving that what he calls he calls ìthe legal establishmentî is
guilty of ìtreason, fraud and complicity in genocideî in its treatment
of the First Nations of North America.

At first glance the connection between these stories may seem obscure.
The story of ethnic cleansing, refugees and war in the Balkans
rightfully dominates global news every day, while the ritual disrobbing
of Bruce Clark is presented like a small footnote to history-- a kind of
wierd curiosity of the modern-day Indian wars that puts the last nail in
the professional coffin of a colourful, but fatally misguided zealot. 
As Paul McKay wrote of Clark in The Ottawa Citizen (4 April, 1999) in
his gloating announcement of the outcome, ìan obsessive, in-your-face
messenger with a taste for martyrdom... has used up his ninth legal
life.... The ruling effectively kills the Canadian courtroom career of
the only lawyer on the planet to combine a bankerís suit, Ph.D.,
conehead haircut, Star Wars glasses, and self-penned writs to arrest
judges hearing his cases.î

Permission to ridicule Dr. Clarkís clothing, eye wear, shaved head and,
if any column space is left, his legal theories as well, came right from
the very top. ìYou are a disgrace to the bar,î Canadaís Chief Justice,
Antonio Lamar, told Clark in a heated courtroom exchange in 1995. Since
then the professional crucifixion has proceeded methodically, with minor
obstacles along the way such as when Law Society governor, Clayton Ruby,
dropped a little bomb shell. In a report emanating from the law bodyís
disciplinary proceedings, Mr. Ruby declared that ìthe genocide of which
Dr. Clark speaks is real.î

Apparently, however, Rubyís cautionary plea was not enough to sway the
Law Society. They gave their coneheaded, Ph.D. colleague with the Star
Wars glasses and a penchant for upsetting polite company too often with
the word ìgenocide,î the martyrdom he allegedly so lusts after. And now
that the Law Society inquisitors have exorcised their former colleague,
the Southam chain, by far the largest newspaper conglomerate in Canada,
seems to have taken the lead in continuing the ritual slaughtering of
the messenger of North Americaís most uncomfortable message. The
Citizen chose to run Mr. McKayís McCarthyesque professional obituary not
as an opinion piece, but rather as a news story that has been picked up
by many other information services, including Reuters.

On the face of it, words like genocide, treason and fraud do sound
excessive, to say the least, when referring to the joint role of police,
lawyers, judges and jail guards in applying the laws of Canada, as well
as those of the United States, to Indigenous peoples. After, all, if
thereís supposed to be genocide in North America, where are the ovens
and the concentration camps? Where are the CIA-backed, Guatemala-style,
para military death squads that killed and thus dispossessed tens of
thousands of Mayan Indians under the guise of anti-communism. Where are
the wave after wave of refugees fleeing from their homes in the fashion
of the terrible pictures we are witnessing nightly, as the regime of
Slobodan Misolevic ìcleansesî what his government calls the ìsoul of
Serbiaî of its Kosovar Albanian population.

But wait a minute. Pull the zoom lense of historical conceptualization
back further and there is no escaping the fact that Canada and
especially the United States could not exist in their present form if it
wasnít for the harshly successful application of some of the most
expansive, methodical and enduring operations of ethnic cleansing the
world has ever seen. All the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
countries in western Europe have participated actively in the formative
phases of ethnic cleansing in North America. This transformation of a
vast, pluralistic Indian Country into a Europeanized adjunct of
so-called western civilization, was realized not only through outright
killing or displacing Indigenous North American peoples, but also in
subjecting their Aboriginal territories to alien laws, alien economies,
and alien languages..

The transformation of Indigenous languages into alien languages in
Canada and the United States serves to illustrate the totalitaruian
intensity of the legacy of ethnic cleansing in North America. The
European languages so dominate, that only French and English have
official status in Canada whereas the languages and dialects of many
dozens of imperilled Indigenous groups have no official legal status
whatsoever. In the officially monocultural melting pot of the United
States, only English has official status. Until well into the 1970s,
the Canadian government paid the major Christian churches in Canada to
conspire actively in the coercive silencing of these Aboriginal
languages and preventing Indian children from honouring the Great Spirit
in the way of their ancestors.

The history of these Indian residential schools, which existed in the
United States but were forced on Indian Country with a singular
intensity in Canada, illustrate the very clear existence of government
laws, policies and institutions that generated outcomes which clearly
lie within the United Nations Convention on Genocide, which was first
ratified in 1948 but was not adopted by the USA until 40 years later. 
Article 2(e) of the Convention defines genocide to include ìforcibly
transferring children of the group to another group.î That is precisely
what the Indian residential schools did, the receiving group being the
Christian churches that ran these organizations.

Moreover, given the high rate of physical and sexual abuse which took
place in these institutions, and the fact that the whole purpose of
these Christian institutions was to teach Indian children to despise and
renounce their own Abriginal heritages of language and religion, they
easily meet definition 2(b). That provision refers to ìcausing serious
bodily or mental harm to members of the group.î Section 2(c) is also
applicable. It defines genocide as ìdeliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction
in whole or in part.î

The legal proceedings presently underway in Canada vividly illustrate
how the issue is being divorced from its true context as a crime that
easily fulfills the UNís definition of genocide. After denying for
decades that it had any responsibility whatsoever for what happened in
the Chritian residential schools it sponsored and oversaw, in 1997 the
Minister of Indian Affairs Jane Stewart finally apologized, but only to
those former students who have been raped or physically abused. To this
day the Canadian government has not addressed the issue of the
psychological abuse that was integral to a education system whose very
purpose was to alienate children from their own cultural background in
the name of what was called at the time, a ìcivilizingî policy.

The Genocide Convention also details that people are guilty of genocide
not only if they are directly involved in doing it themselves. The
Convention also makes it a crime for those people who know about
genocide, but who actively deny it exists, or merely keep silent and do
nothing about it. That crime is descibed in section 3(e) of the
Convention as ìcomplicity in genocide.î

>From Dr. Clarkís perspective there are many forces which perpetuate
genocide, the largest one being a persistent pattern of theft of
Aboriginal lands and resources that violates even the newcomersí own
laws. The record, he would argue, is quite clear that this theft and
extinguishment of Indian Country is never criminalized in the domestic
courts of Canada and the USA. Who has ever been charged, let alone
convicted, let alone incarcerated, for violating what is described in
the constitution of Canada as anîexisting Aboriginal and treaty right?

The contemporary modes of human destruction may be expressed among
Indigenous peoples in all sorts of internalized ways, including in high
rates of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, and domestic conflict, all
phenomena that can easily be connected, for instance, to the abuses that
characterized the operation of the Indian residential schools. And the
most culpable agency of all in maintaining the conditions of genocide
are, in Dr. Clarkís judgment and experience, the courts, which regularly
sanction continuing procedures to extinguish Aboriginal rights and
titles to the lands and resources of North America.

Thus Dr. Clarkís whole career, at least since he left in the early 1970s
his successful practice in general law in Haileybury Ontario, can be
interpreted as an effort not to be complicit in genocide, which in his
view is genuinely perpetuated by the legal establishment. For Dr. Clark
not to express to the judiciary his conviction that genocide permeates
the way the laws have been interpreted and enforced in North America,
would not only violate his personal conscience. It would also make him
complicit in the crime of genocide as defined by the United Nations
Convention.

II
Ethnic Cleansing as a Persistent Theme
in North American History

The boarding schools were but one small part of the dehumanizing
indignities heaped upon the survivors of what David Stannard has called
in his book of the same name, The American Holocaust. In both Canada
and the USA the survivors were almost universally rendered as wards of
the state without the capacity to vote, to make contracts, or to
participate in the very limited and imperfect democracies beyond the
boundaries of their constrained ìreserves.î

In Canada, one of the British empireís so-called ìWhite Dominions,î
registered Indians often needed government passes to leave their home
communities, an innovation that authentically was replicated in South
Africa. In South Africa, which also identified itself as a White
Dominion, the countryís so-called Ministry of Native Affairs long
maintained a close and intimate bureaucratic collaboration with the
Department of Indian Affairs in our own country. What else is a
ìreserve,î which in the provinces of Canada cover less than one per cent
of the total land mass, than monuments to, and effective facilitators
of, the ethnic cleansing that constitutes the essential geopolitical
framework within which Canada and the USA have developed?

Now these little snippets of history only begin to paint the picture of
the origins and genesis of the society from which Bruce Clark, as well
as you and I, all emerge. This only begins to paint the picture of the
legal background that has created the basis for a large and thriving
ìIndian lawî industry among the practitioners of the self-regulated and
unaccountable Law Society of Upper Canada, as well as of all the other
law societies in Canada and the USA. And hey buddy, if you think these
guys break the law sometimes, take it to the judge.

Letís try to keep this as succinct as we can. Letís leave aside all
the horrors of New Spain-- genocidal horrors that became more gross and
pervasive once the Americans took over California, the site of some of
the most gruesome episodes of ethnic cleansing on the face of the earth.
Letís make short work of the fact that Spainís infamous conquistadorial
feats are being revisited, if in a more covert way, on Mayan peasants as
the Mexican government duplicates some of the right-wing, para-military
tactics of their Guatemalan neighbours. A principle objective of the
corrupt and notoriously murderous PRI regime in Mexico, is to enforce
the gringosí North American Free Trade Agreement on territory where an
active Canada and U.S.-backed killing war is being waged on Indian
resisters in Chiapas.

We need to devote more attention to The Trail of Tears, which helps to
put in perspective the tragedy in Kosovo. Moreover, this episode well
illustrates Bruce Clarkís allegations that North American legal
establishments often systematically violate their own laws in the
expropriation of Indian land, right up to this day. In the early
nineteenth century powerful Indian nations, including the Creeks, the
Cherokee and Chickasaw, dug in their heels and constructed elaborate
constitutions and successful agricultural economies to hold onto ground
against the notorious Indian fighters and their politician friends in
the slave-owning states of Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and
Kentucky.

The Cherokee won all their key cases in the Supreme Court of the United
States. But the Indian fighters who ran the federal government, from
the President, ìOld Hickoryî Andrew Jackson, on down, refused to respect
their countryís own laws, setting a precedent that Bruce Clark and many
other scholars of repute have demonstrated time and time again,
continues, right down to the present day. ìChief Justice John Marshall
made the law,î said Old Hickory referring to the famous federalist judge
who was his enemy. ìLet him enforce it.î

So the so-called Five Civilized Tribes--- they must be civilized, some
of them owned Black slaves--- were uprooted from their ancestral lands
and marched to the so-called ìIndian Territoryî west of the Mississippi
in an act of militarily-enforced ethnic cleansing easily as brutal, or
moreso, than anything being experienced by Kosovar Albanians. The Trail
of Tears in 1837 was just one part of a larger legislated regime of
ethnic cleansing in the USA that declared all registered Indians who
persisted in staying on lands east of east of the Mississippi, to be
illegal aliens-- aliens that frequently were killed by sports murderers
or lynch mobs with impunity.

Meanwhile grand promises were made and entrenched in international
treaties made by the USA that the territories west of the Mississippi
would be retained as a protected Indian Country forever. Without doubt
the Indian removal policy initiated by the regime of President Andrew
Jackson was the most ambitious project of apartheid ever tried on the
planet, before or since. And this apartheid scheme proved to be just a
ploy to purchase time. As soon as the American government had the
military, financial and technological power through their railways to
push their regime of ethnic cleansing outward to the Pacific, they did
so. As in most of their dealings with brown-skinned people in their own
country or elsewhere on the planet, the United States choses to
disregard the artifaces of international law in extending its vision of
democracy to the peoples of Europe at the genocidal cost of destroyed or
crippled First Nations.

This apartheid scheme is clearly marked on the map of modern North
Americ. There are almost no Indian reseves east of the Mississippi and
relatively large reserves, compared to Canada at least, west of the
Mississippi. All the reserves in Canada combined wouldnít fill half of
the territory encompassed by the Navajo reservation in the American
southwest, in the lands taken through war from Mexico and lands now
being reclaimed by the influx of migrants from Mexico. This influx,
legal and illegal, has raised almost hysterical reaction among many
Americans that their countryís Eurocentric orientation is at risk of
being overwhelmed by a largely Indian, Chicano population. This
hostility towards northward migration into the USA from Central America
can be seen as a fear that the results of the ethnic cleansing that made
the USA into what a Siouian delegation to Canada once called, ìthe new
White nation,î might be reversed.

The leading proponents of this expansionary movement of American
Manifest Destiny, also coveted the vast Indian Country of Canada. In
the drainage basin of the continentís northward-flowing rivers, the
Hudsonís Bay Company made profit by doing business with First Nations,
rather than by killing them and incarcerating the survivors on
reserves. How different was American Manifest Destiny than what the
Germans called Lebensraum in their eastern push to subjugate the slavs
and expropriate their lands-- a push leaving legacies and scars that
haunt the Balkans and feed their hatreds and resentments until this day?

How can we focus so-self-righteously on the hideous outcomes of the
injuries done to the psyches of some Slavic people from their past as
victims and perpetrators of racism, without confronting our own legacy
from the war crimes that shaped the countries in which we all live. 
What awesome hypocracy! When society become as plagued with amnesia as
this one-- when journalists like Paul McKay can dance so
self-confidently on what he sees as the professional corps of a man
whose major crime has been to implore us not to blind our eyes in our
own complicity in the crime of genocide-- then all the ingredients are
in place to repeat the mistakes of the past, perhaps on even a bigger,
more global scale.

Those who doubt the racial rationales of the USAís westward push-- the
position that ethnic cleansing was justified because the displaced or
murdered peoples were racially and culturally inferior and unworthy of
survival-- need only flip through the pages of the Historian-Presidentís
multi-volume The Winning of the West. The author, ìRough Riderî Teddy
Roosevelt, publicized himself in the first of many subsequent U.S.
invasions on Cuba. A student of social Darwinist and racist par
excellence Francis Parkman, Roosevelt was anything but an original
thinker. His glorification of the war on Indian Country as a kind of
testing ground for the global conquest of the ìGermanic race,î gave
clear articulation to what passed as the orthodox wisdom of his time,
group and place.

To try to pin the deeply racist cast of American Manifest Destiny, the
most potent ideological vehicle of one of the worldís pre-eminent
campaigns of ethnic cleansing, makes about as much sense as trying to
attribute all the war crimes of Naziism on one little mustached
vegetarian whose master-race fantasies were in no way unique to Germany
in the glory days of European imperialism. In the years leading up to
Naziismís rise to global prominence, let it be remembered that Rudyard
Kipling poetically implored the leaders of the dawning American empire,
to ìTake Up the White Manís Burdenî from the twilight power of the
British empire.

Let it be remembered that in Alberta and in other jurisdictions in the
USA, Native women and men were subjected to a disproportionately high
rate of involuntary sterilizations until into the 1970s. In Alberta
there has been no popular push for a thorough public investigation into
this provinceís undoubted crime against humanity as formalized by the
existence and application of a draconian Eugenics Act until 1971. That
was twenty-six years after the big Nazi eugenics program had
demonstrated the brutalities lurking behind legal terminology such as,
ìmental hygiene,î a close verbal and conceptual cousin of ethnic
cleansing. In the case of Alberta, the provincial government tried to
use the Canadian constitution to protect itself from being sued by the
its sterilized victims. As Angus McLaren details in Our Own Master
Race, in its final years Native people were put involuntary under the
surgeonís knife of ethnic cleansing at a rate ten times that of all
other groups in proportion to their overall numbers in the population.

This crime against humanity clearly fits section 2(d) of the Genocide
Convention. That provision stipulates that ìimposing measures intended
to prevent births within the groupî falls within the crime of genocide
as defined by international law.

No, we are not all Naziis. To our societyís credit, we eventually
opposed Naziism with the full energy of our military, industrial and
ideological energy. Moreover, with some few exceptions the leading
lights of the ethnocentrically misnamed ìWestî (whose dominance of
America is actually based on the invasion of Indian Country from the
east) tried to steal themselves against allowing any repeats of the
horrors visited on jews, on gypsies on communists and on homosexuals--
all condemned targets of the vast eugenics scheme that was the major
biotechnological pillar of the Third Reichís social policy.

As we leave the twentieth century, with the ghastly horrors of Rwanda,
East Timor, Tibet, Guatemala, Cambodia and now the Balkans to
demonstrate how unsuccessful we have been in suppressing genocide or in
holding those who commit genocide accountable, let us remember how we
entered the century. Let us remember World War I and the origins of
word, ìbalkanization.î The ethnic horrors of the unglued Yugoslavia puts
us face to face with the burdensome legacy of the White Manís propensity
for murderous ethnic hatreds This propensity is well understood by
Indigenous peoples around the world, peoples who have never had some
sort of equivalent of a war trial at Nurenburg to render a judgment of
history on the systematic murders of their children, of their parents
and of the the ecosystems that diminishes the future of all our babies,
born and unborn.

III
Holocaust Denial, North American-Style

When Columbus arrived in America, there were in the vacinity of 2,200
languages spoken on this hemisphere, by far the densest concentration of
linguistic diversity on the planet. The death of most of those
languages aids and facilitates the holocaust deniers that would say our 
home and Native land in North America is not a place of ethnic
cleansing. The reality of genocide in North America and the elaborate
subterfuges to hide it, downplay it, or rename it, is the subject of a
major book by the prolific Ward Churchill. The work was published in
1998. It is entitled is entitled, A Little Matter of Genocide:
Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to Present.

In 1997 a publication entitled Genocide in Canada, the Roseau River
Anishinabe First Nation Government in Manitoba Canada, published an
anthology of sources detailing allegations similar to those advanced by
Dr. Clark in his legal representations for his clients. A pioneering
work on the applicability of the UN Convention on Genocide to North
America is The Genocide Machine in Canada, by Mark Davis and Mark
Zannis. It was published in 1973 by Black Rose Books in Montreal.

These titles represent a small part of the huge mass of primary and
secondary sources that support the legal arguments aggressively brought
forward by Dr. Clark from the realm of the social sciences into the
adversarial forum of the courts. Given the extent of the extremely
elaborate and well-grounded nature of the documentary backing for his
positions, how is it that his former colleagues have succeeded in
depriving this legal advocate of his status as an officer and friend of
the domestic law courts of Canada?

One way to interpret the persecution of Dr. Clark by the Law Society of
Upper Canada particularly, and by the media and legal establishment more
generally, is to see the effort to discredit him as a small but
revealing part of a very concerted and co-ordinated plan of
psychological warfare in North America to deny that the crime of
genocide has been integral the way this continent has developed. It is
this dark prejudice against the truth that in my opinion makes Mr.
McKayís report of Clarkís disbarring, written on behalf of Canadaís most
powerful media monopoly, so illustrative of larger patterns.

At the very inception of the mobilization of the fighting forces of NATO
to make war, we were told, on the widening war crimes of ethnic
cleansing in the Balkans, the Southam chain subjects Clark to todayís
media equivalent of a public flogging. In my opinion, Clark rates this
treatment because of his untiring persistence, against all manner of
assaults to his person, his family, his colleagues and his reputation,
in raising the question of complicity in genocide as a genuine issue
that truly does cast a shadow over many legal establishments, even in
our own hemisphere, or, perhaps, more true to say, especially in our
own hemisphere.

In this fast stride through some of the more repressed episodes in our
own societyís unbroken heritage of ethnic cleansing, let us not forget
the year 1871. That was the date when the Congress of the United States
passed a law stating that no more treaties would be made with First
Nations-- that year even the fiction of obtaining some kind of official
consent for the appropriation of their ancestral lands would henceforth
be eschewed. From this date forward, Indian Country became a
thoroughgoing totalitarian regime under the power of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs, whose authority came from nowhere else other than the
end of the guns of the US cavalry. Will the Bureau of Indian Affairs in
the United States prove to be the proto type for the kind of governance
that NATO is developing for the Balkans?

In legislating their way out of their own constitutional principles as
articulated in the John Marshall decisions and in the Northwest
Ordinance of 1787, the USA clarified its rogue status outside the
rudimentary international laws of Aboriginal and treaty rights-- laws
which were adopted in the days when Indian peoples retained the power to
resist western expansionism, as they did especially in Canadaís war with
the United States from 1812 to 1814. In that conflict former U.S.
President Thomas Jefferson wrote that it had become necessary to hunt
the Indians down in Canada-- to ìexterminateî Indian people altogether
or to push them with ìthe beasts of the forests into the Stony [Rocky]
Mountains.î

The USAís original recognition of ìAboriginal rights to the soilî was
largely forced on Great Britainís republican offspring in the era when
the Long Knivesí American war on Indian Country was also a war on
Canada. While the USA made several hundred treaties with Indian nations
between 1778 and 1871, not one of these has even remotely been
respected, making the image of the USA as an enforcer of international
codes of conduct a sad farce. The history of Indian policy in the
United States demonstrates a consistent pattern of violation of
international law, even within its own borders.

Meanwhile, the Canada of John A. Macdonald, was less able to afford the
price of Indian wars without a transcontinental railway and without an
effective army. In 1871 the government of what was then frequently
referred to as British North America, began to seek a begrudging
acquiesence from First Nations for replacing the Crown authority of the
Hudsonís Bay Company with the Crown authority of the new Dominion. 
Although most of these treaties were in fact made with the sovereign of
Great Britain in her imperial capacity, the British government generally
and the British monarch specifically have also consistently operated
illegally in passing to the government of Canada, without international
sanctions or Aboriginal consent, domestic control of Indian policy.

This devolution was done in a way that passed all constitutional powers
to newcomer governments--i.e. the Canadian parliament and the provincial
legislatures-- and excluded First Nation altogether from any binding
power to a say in the future amendment of the Canadian constitution. 
Thus in handing over the authority for widened self-governing to Canada,
Great Britain commited a clear violation of international law that
subjects the Crownís Indian allies from the American Revolution, the War
of 1812, and two World Wars in the twentieth century, to a form of legal
authority that where First Nations have no formal vote in the process of
changing or amending the Canadian constitution.

The lack of consistency between Great Britainís position on the right to
self-determination of the Kosovar Albanians and Great Britainís own
violation of the rights of Indigenous peoples in the transformation of
the British empire to the British Commonwealth, needs to be better
understood and subjected to same sort of scrutiny and due process as the
prosecution of those who are to be commited war crimes trials in the
Balkans.

Once some treaties were made-- once some of the key Indian leaders like
Big Bear and Poundmaker were incarcerated in Canada as political
prisoners-- the government of the Dominion enforced with increasing
agressiveness the Indian Act, which became for a time in the 1930s the
singularly most repressive statute in the world for the governance of
Indigenous peoples. Indian religious ceremonies were prohibited and it
was made illegal in 1927 even for registered Indian people even to raise
money to purchase stamps or to travel to meetings if the purpose was to
press some Indian title or claim.

While some of these provisions were removed after 1951, when Naziism did
force on Canadians some reckoning with their own heritage of White
supremacy, registered Indians continued to be constrained within the
paternalistic authority the federal state. Meanwhile, in much the same
way as the days when the violence on Indian Country was celebrated by
Frederick Jackson Turner and others as a dynamic factor in the genesis
of American democracy, major crimes against Indians frequently go
uninvestigated, let alone punished. On the other hand the Indigenous
peoples of North America are often provide a majority of the prison
inmates, especially in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Manitoba and
Saskatchewan.

As in the liberation struggles of many oppressed colonies of Europe,
the prisons of North America proved to be a kind of university for the
ìmilitantî American Indian Movenment. It first took shape in the late
1960s to react against the continuing genocidal conditions that feeds
institutionalized racism and keeps so many Native Americans poor,
unemployed, and subject to the internalized violence of suicide,
substance addiction and domestic violence.

This emergence of AIM in the United States climaxed with their second
major engagement with the American military at Wounded Knee in South
Dakato. Where in 1890 the Seventh Division of the American Cavalry
massacred several hundred defenceless Sioux elders and children as an
act of wanton revenge for armyís former defeat at the Battle of Little
Big Horn, in 1973 the AIM returned to Wounded Knee. Its objective was to
press their assertion about the continuation through new means of the
American governmentís genocidal policies aimed at the extinguishment and
absorption of what remained of Indian Country.

Their assertions were met by the outbreak of a virtual civil war at the
Pine Ridge Reservation in the United States, where almost 100 AIM
sympathers and members were assassinated by a Guatemalen-style death
squad known as the GOONs, a para-military group that had ample support
and sanction from the American federal police. To this day these
murders go mostly univestigated and unpunished. Meanwhile Leonard
Peltier, who was quickly extradicted from British Columbia Canada on
transparently falsified evidence, continues to languish in American
jails as a political prisoner and, in the style of Nelson Mandella and
the African National Congress, as the spiritual father of AIM.

This resort to history helps to put in perspective the symbolic
significance of the professional attacks on Bruce Clark. The efforts to
sideline his legal arguments and minimize his allegations fits a broad,
global pattern of repression against those seeking to take legal
procedures to prosecute the crimes against the humanity of Indigenous
peoples, beyond the framework of the domestic law of nation states; to
reframe the issues as ones which belong in international forums, the
only milieu where true third-party adjudication is possible given the
nature of the allegations. To leave to domestic institutions the
adjudication of the allegations coming forward from Indigenous peoples
that they have been subjected to genocide, would make as much sense as
leaving the prosecution of those charged with alleged war crimes in the
Balkans, to Balkan courts alone.

For seeking to return the issue of Indigenous peoples rights to the
forum of international law and third-party adjudication, both Clark and
his clients are frequently labelled as ìmilitants.î What they
attemptinh, however, is profoundly conservative in the authentic sense
of the word. In trying to divorce todayís Indian Country from what has
happened in the past, Southamís Mr. McKay would suggest that somehow
there is something illegitimate about going into history for directives
on what should take place in our own time. McKay comments derisively,
for instance, that Clark is ìthe renegade lawyer who spent two decades
cultivating militant native clients with arguments dating back to the
1700s.î

Perhaps if Clark was an economist or a sociologist more could be made
of his preoccupation with the past to understand the existence of legal
remedies for disputes in the present. But he is a first and foremost a
lawyer and the whole idea of the law is to figure out the limitations
put by past law makers on our various negotiations with the present, in
order to shape the future. It is bigotry, pure and simple, to suggest
that Indians are somehow less entitled than others to invoke the
authority of laws made in the past-- to invoke treaties, for instance,
as instruments which demonstrate and symbolize that First Nations have
been recognized as sovereign peoples in international law, peoples whose
relationships with the governments of countries who share their
ancestral lands, is best understood in the framework of
nation-to-nation; equal to equal.

Try driving up to a crossing point along the Canada-US border and
telling the officials there that this line on the land was put there in
1783 or 1818 or 1846, and that you werenít alive then and that the laws
made in those days thus arenít applicable to you. And yet at the same
time as those lines were being drawn on Indian Country, other laws were
being made that codified rules and regulations that became todayís the
constitutional basis for what we call in the language of Canadaís
supreme law, ìexisting Aboriginal and treaty rights.î This genre of
North American law, whose underlying principles emanate from the
imperial government in Europe, established quite rigorous rules and
regulations that had to be fulfilled by the colonial governments if
Indian territories were to be opened up to non-Indian settlement.

IV
The Recognition of Existing Aboriginal and Treaty Rights:
A Legal Shield for the Protection of First Nations from Crimes of
Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing?

And now, hereís the more heartening news that Bruce Clark brings. While
genocide is the overwhelming theme of Europeís colonization of the
continent, there were redeeming flickers of humanity here and there that
resulted in instruments like the creation in 1704 of Queen Anneís court
for resolving Indian land disputes. As there is the more well known
Royal Proclamation of 1763 which entrenched after the demise of New
France the constitutional foundation of British imperial Canada.

This Royal Proclamation, which codified the protocols for Crown
Aboriginal treaty making right up to the present day, provides the key
to understanding the laws beneath both the formal establishment of the
Inuit [Eskimo] territory of Nunavut only a short time ago and the
negotiation of the Nisgaía Treaty in British Columbia. The Nisgaía
Treaty, which its Aboriginal critics describe as the Nisgaía
Extinguishment Act, is a veritable test case to establish who is to give
and take what when it comes to the art of Canadian compromise on the
middle ground where Indian Country meets the land of the newcomers.

The many generations of delay between 1763 and 1999 might cause the
curious to wonder how it is that it took so long for the laws of Canada
to be enforced in British Columbia, if that is what the Nisgaía Treaty
indeed does. The curious might ask if the decision of the government of
BC to negotiate questions of land title with First Nations does not, in
itself, represent a tacit acknowledgment that Canadaís westernmost
province has for all of its history in Confederation existed outside
Canadaís rule of law.

In order to understand the constitutional depth and importance of
Aboriginal and treaty rights in the legal genesis of the northern
portion of North America, it needs to be remembered that for all of its
history leading up to the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway,
Canada was territory that, in the language of the Royal Proclamation,
was ìreserved to the Indians as their hunting groundsî-- reserved so
that they would not be ìmolested or disturbedî until such time as they
decided of their own free will to enter into a treaty with the imperial
sovereign. This legal regime was entirely consistent with the fur-trade
political economy of British imperial Canada, a regime that gave rise to
the commercial development of Montreal as Canadaís original metropolitan
centre.

The Royal Proclamation has never been repealed. In fact its legal
provisions were renewed and re-asserted in section 25 of the act which
patriated Canadaís constitution in 1982. This the terms of this
reservation of lands still applies over much of Canada. If the words of
the Royal Proclamation mean what they say, then most of BC like much of
Quebec, the Maritimes as well as some of Ontario north of Lake Superior,
are supposed to be under Crown protection to this day as an unceded
Indian Country. The Indian people there are not to be molested and
disturbed through being subjected to the powers of the local governments
not of their own making. Whether or not one believes that this is a
reasonable principle for governing these non-treatied areas, Clarkís
position is that this is what the constitutional law in fact says and
that the only way to change this reality is through a constitutional
amendment.

A basic element of this interpretation of the law is to remember that
the First Nations in Canada are not in any way a conquered people as,
for instance, is the case with the French Canadians who were abandoned
by the government of France after the British army defeated the French
army on the plains of Abraham. Indeed, First Nations fought as allies
of the British army in the War of 1812 to defend Canada from being
annexed by the rabid republican Indian fighters that are celebrated as
heroes by our neighbours to the south.

After studying for many years what he calls the imperial law of Canada
arising from this history, Bruce Clark gradually developed very grave
concerns that the rule of law was consistently being violated by ill
educated judges who responded to assertions of Indian title, not by
dealing with the imperial statutes such as the Royal Proclamation, but
rather by doing what seemed to them reasonable under the circumstances. 
These judges could base their findings on various lines of precedents
that cycled and recycled the most noxious racial theories. A huge legal
fiasco, for instance, has developed from the infamous St. Catherineís
Milling case, a legal dispute between Canada and Ontario in the late
1880s over the meaning of the constitutional phrase, ìlands reserved for
the Indians.î

A whole pattern of jurisprudence has arisen, for instance, from a lower
court judgeís ruling on the case, where he deemed that ìNow it is
evident from the history of [the reserves] that the Indians there are no
longer as in a wild and primitive state, but as in a condition of
transition from barbarism to civilization. The object of the system is
to segregate the red from the white population, in order that the former
may be trained up to a level with the later.î

This type of reasoning tended to prevail in the ruling on the Temagami
case, the land dispute that dominated Bruce Clarkís career for a
decade. During many of these years, Bruce Clark and his young family
lived on the Bear Island reserve, where he and Chief Gary Potts put
together one of the most comprehensive collections in that part of the
world of the imperial record of the colonization of Indians in Ontario.
As Paul McKay says of these years, Clark gave up his ìlucrative law
practice, huge home [in Haileybury Ontario] and private airplane.î He
lived ìin the very log cabin the Indian imposter Grey Owl used as part
of his own mythology.î

In thelatter stages those years that Bruce Clark and his family spent on
Bear Island, I was starting my own career as a Native Studies professor
at Laurentian University in nearby Sudbury Ontario. From this vantage
point my colleagues and I studied the Temagami case closely. I can
truly say that on reading the response of Mr. Justice Donald Steele to
the arguments brought forward by Chief Potts and Bruce Clark, I was
truly shocked that such abhorent words of blatent racism could be spoken
from the bench as the legal dictate of this country. I wrote an
article on the ruling that was published in 1990 in a book called,
Temagami: A Debate on Wilderness. So the reader is thus armed to check
for yourself to see if I can back up my assertion at length and with
rigour in a suitable scholarly fashion.

Let me quote but one passage of Judge Steeleís decision to give an idea
of its flavour. He ruled that the expert witnesses for the Temagami
First Nations ìwere typical of persons who have worked among Indians for
so many years that they have lost their objectivity when giving opinion
evidence.î So there it is. That comment, made in 1984, signals the
beginnings of the growing sense in some circles, especially in the
higher echelons of the legal establishment, that Bruce Clark does not
play by the rules and is too close to Indian Country to be afforded
professional respect. What is to be made of the idea that non-Indians
who live and work among Indians cannot be seen as objective? Doesnít
this beg the question of how Indians themselves could ever be taken
seriously by an interpreter of the law like Mr. Justice Donald Steele.

To now read all these years later Mr. McKayís dismissive comments about
Bruce Clark as the infamous loser in Temagami and countless and other
cases, raises the question of strange argumentative concoctions youíd
need to win before a judge with the deep prejudices and sparce
historical knowledge of a Mr. Justice Steele. While I thought he was
the last word in judicial ethnocentrism, Mr. Justice Allan McEachern
managed to outdo his Ontario counterpart in the ruling of the lower
court on the Delgamuukw case. Mr. McEachern, who doubles as chair of
the judgeís own self regulating body, pronounced that Indians have
almost nothing of worth to retain for either themselves or the world
from their own Indigenous cultures. To make this point, the BC jurist
actually quoted Thomas Hobbes, who used imaginary North American Indians
in 1651, to argue that life without a dictatorial ruler is ìnasty,
brutish and short.î

Accordingly, to properly understand the genesis of Dr. Clarkís legal
interpretation, you need to know someting of the nature of his formative
experiences with judges that, in my view, were unusually extreme in
their ethnocentric hostility to Indian peoples and Indian cultures. What
emerged for him from this experience, was a dawning recognition that the
stakes of the contentions over Aboriginal and treaty rights are so big,
and the legacy of legal impropriety so old and so well protected by
layer upon layer of dubious and overtly racist legal precedent, that it
is almost unimaginable that any judge would take the responsibility of
overturning this status quo-- of overturning this institutionalized
complicity in genocide that is so deeply ingrained in the framework of
North American experience that it is made to seem normal and natural and
simply a fact of life.

No judge could realistically be expected to expose his or her colleagues
to the brand of serious criminal charge that the now disbarred lawyer
regularly characterizes in the language of the old imperial statutes.
>From these statutes he extracts the words treason, fraud and sometimes
chicanery as well, to describe the crimes that the imperial sovereign
was seeking to criminalize with imperial statutes including the Royal
Proclamation of 1763 and the instruments which created in 1704 the
imperial instrument to provide for genuine third-party adjudication on
land disputes involving Indigenous peoples.

A major point to consider in evaluating this startling and inescapably
troubling proposition, is to question who has ever been charged or
crimalized for the offence of violating an ìexisting Aboriginal and
treaty right?î In 1982 this phrase became part of the supreme
constitutional law of Canada. And yet what evidence can be shown that
any corporation, any individual or any government has ever faced
criminal proceedings for infringing on whatever constitutes an
Aboriginal and treaty right? And what else is a violation of this genre
of human rights, other than a crime that contributes to the process of
genocide and ethnic cleansing?

This process of ethnic cleansing has been so thoroughly ingrained into
the character of North America since 1492, that it has come to be seen
as perfectly natural to treat Indigenous peoples, Indigenous languages
and Indigenous laws as alien. Moreover, in virtually every case where
Indigenous individuals attempt to defend on behalf of their peoples
their lands and resources-- territories that the Crown or the federal
authority in the USA actually has a fiduciary reponsibility to protect--
the result is always the same. Invariably the Indigenous patriots are
treated as criminals for defending their lands and resources, no matter
how transparently defensive their posture.

The history of North America thus demonstrates time and time again that
the law of self-defence never is respected when it comes to Indigenous
peoples. They have been defined again and again, through all sorts of
legal and sociological theories, as primitives who must be eliminated
either through outright murder, or through cultural genocide, in the
name of the expansion and progress of western civilization. Or they are
defined as children who must be maintained under the guardianship of the
churches and federal authorities until such time as they can be elevated
to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and municipal
self-governance. The other side of this extension to Indians of
citizenship in the polities of their colonizers, is that they are
expected to subordinate their citizenship in their own Aboriginal
nationalities to the sovereign authority of the very governments which
have dispossessed their peoples.

Clarkís basic proposition, therefore, is that that the legal
establishment, from top to bottom, is so deeply guilty of systematic
violations of the law of existing Aboriginal and treaty rights-- of the
laws put in place in the very constitutional foundations of British
North America, that there is a huge pressure on every player in the
system not to allow any case to proceed forward that might give an
opening to the argument that ethnic cleansing in North America carries
consequences that could go as far as criminal charges against the
perpetrators.

On face of it, this allegation may initially seem preposterous to the
point of absurdity, a position well reflected in Southamís attack piece
on Dr. Clark as authored by Mr. McKay. But think about it further and
it becomes equally as absurd to imagine that a land theft of the scope
which has clearly taken place in North America, could possibly have
happened without some criminal transgressions, even of the newcomersí
own legal codes. Moreover, the group with the most to lose if these
arguments were to be truly pressed, as Dr. Clark has attempted in many
ways against great resistance from above, are judges,
judges-in-training (i.e. lawyers) and the faceless defenders of ìthe
legal establishmentî in unaccountable and self-regulating agencies like
the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Canadian Judicial Council.

V
The Absence of Genuine Third-Party Adjudication in Arbitrating Disputed
Claims between First Nations and Non-Aboriginals

The heart of Dr. Clarkís legal theory concerns the lack of genuine third
party adjudication when it comes to the domestic courtís handling of
those issues involving conflict between the legal assertions of First
Nations and the people, governments or corporations whose legal
identities are rooted in the newcomersí colonization of North America. 
There is no mystery here. Third-party adjudication is the basis of
every respectable legal system. Can we expect, for instance, Serbian
judges in Yugoslavian courts to be objective and impartial in deciding
the identity and the extent of the crimes of alleged Serbian war
criminals?

Canadaís own Louise Arbour is busy in Europe setting herself up as
something between a judge and a prosecutor with the aim of bringing the
war criminals of the Balkans to justice. You can be very sure that if
any such proceedings do take place, the NATO countriesí own legacy of
genocide and ethnic cleansing will be very interesting to the accused
persons and their lawyers. And I can almost guarantee you that the
background of the Upper Canada Law Societyís disbarring of Dr. Clark
will also come up.

Very legitimate questions about ethnic cleansing in North America may
arise, indeed should arise in this forum for the consideration of war
crimes. Only if there is some authentic display of consistency can there
be any real integrity in courts set up to the enforce international laws
of war crimes against humanity. What legitimacy will a prosecutor like
Louise Arbour have, if it can be shown that she is part of a legal
establishment in Canada that has actively covered up the crimes against
humanity in North America. One very illustrative example of the
extremes that this legal establishment will apparently go to in
preventing its own complicity in genocide from coming to trial, is, it
could be argued, the disbarring of Bruce Clark as a particularly
heavy-handed means to discredit the arguments he has attempted to
advance?

So the heart and soul of the Clark thesis, is that judges in Canada and
the United States are in no position to deal objectively with deciding
among themselves if some, or all of them are guilty of treason or fraud
or complicity in genocide. Moreover, the circumstances of their own home
life, presumably as land owners with title that could be affected by the
competing assertions of Indigenous peoples, add to the built-in conflict
of interest when they are asked to decide matters pertaining to existing
Aboriginal and treaty rights. So what is needed to properly adjudicate
land disputes between Indian and newcomer contestants, is a court
composed of jurists without a vested interst in either camp--
third-party adjudication.

Enter the matter of the Mohegans versus Connecticut. I have seen a
number of literary references to the Mohegan case long before Bruce
Clark grasped on its significance as a legal basis for asserting that
the remedy for true third-party adjudication, entered the mainstream of
constitutional law in English North America in 1704. For instance in
1985, five years before Clarkís revised Ph.D. thesis was published as a
book by McGill-Queenís Press, my own department here in Lethbridge
published a book entitled Quest for Justice. It includes an article by
James Youngblood Henderson entitled, ìThe Doctrine of Aboriginal Rights
in Western Legal Tradition.î

Youngblood Henderson is currently director of the Native Law Centre at
the University of Saskatchewan. In the article he comments expansively
on the broad constitutional significance of the Mohegan case, a legal
proceeding that essentially marked a recognition by the English
sovereign that the Aboriginal and treaty rights of Connecticutís Mohegan
neighbours could not properly be adjudicated in a normal colonial
court. So the imperial government went to great lengths to create a
Royal Commision on Aboriginal land rights, although local land
speculators kept trying to buy off and co-opt the judges chosen by the
Privy Council of the Mother Country.

Obviously it strikes Mr. McKay as totally ridiculous that what happened
in Connecticut in 1704 could somehow have any bearing on whatís
happening now in British Columbia, or, with Bruce Clarkís expert legal
advice, at Long Lake reserve 58 in northern Ontario. Mr. McKay quotes
at length various ìrespectedî and ìAboriginalî sources to prove his
case that all sensible experts in Canada agree that Queen Anneís Mohegan
precedent should be left alone and that all systems are go and A-OK in
Canada for a happy outcome to Aboriginal land disputes within existing
institutions.

For instance, Mr. McKay paraphrases Stuart Rush as arguing ìthe Canadian
courts at all levels properly dismissed Mr. Clarkís 1704 legal
argument.î Then Mr. McKay cites Rush directly, writing, ìHis [Clarkís]
whole argument is misplaced and wrong in law. Canada is the only place
where this can be settled.î What Southamís point man fails to observe,
however, is that as lead lawyer on the Delgamuukw case, Mr. Rush and
others like him have made barrels of money, with much more to come, by
working within the framework that avoids the question of who really
should be deciding the scope and content of existing Aboriginal and
treaty rights. Bruce Clark and his colleagues often refer to this
central issue of who decides, as ìthe jurisdiction question.î

Indeed, virtually all the persons that Mr. McKay named and interviewed
have a large vested interest in working within the framework of domestic
law and the infrastructure of Indian Act agencies, including the
Assembly of First Nations, that form the basis of most federally-funded
and federal-sanctioned negotiation procedures. In my view this system
of so called self-government is based, whatever the rhetoric, on
municipal models of delegated autority and on principles of governance
of Indigenous peoples that draw on the same legal theories as what Lord
Lugard used to refer to as ìindirect rule.î Lord Lugard was an
influential imperial official based largely in Nigeria in the 1920s.

This system of indirect rule offends some First Nations people as too
severe a check on the self-determination of their Aboriginal
nationalities. Those rooted in more sovereigntist perspectives-- in
perspectives totally unreflected in Mr. McKayís piece for Southam-- tend
to look with favour at some sort of continuing protective role for the
British monarchy in the affairs of First Nations. Such an involvement,
one with a very deep and elaborate constitutional and cultural heritage
both in the Indian Country and the imperial law of Canada, would signal
to Indigenous peoples that they retain a recognized standing in
international law and that they have not been entirely subordinated to
the domestic courts or the domestic laws of their local colonizers. 
This position is surely equally as worthy of respect and international
protection as that of any other colonized people, including the Kosovar
Albanians, when they are dehumanized and dispossessed by a hostile, or
potentially-hostile government, in control and ownership of all, or
most, of their ancestral lands.

Mr. McKay does not fail to point to the historic Delgamuukw ruling by
the Supreme Court in 1997 as proof that the system does work-- that all
the talk of treason and fraud and complicity in genocide has now been
rendered obsolete. The Southam journalist writes, ìthe Supreme Courtís
landmark Delgamuukw decision has affirmed aboriginal rights to self
government and land use across Canada-- and effectively achieved much of
what Mr. Clarkís native apostles could have hoped to attain from a
favourable ruling on the 1704 Connecticut case.î

The more I look at the genesis of the Delgamuukw ruling, the more I
suspect its author, Antonio Lamer, wrote it very much with the arguments
in mind brought forward by Dr. Clark in 1995. The background of Dr.
Clarkís rendez-vous with the Chief Justice was the dramatic
confrontation at Gustafsen Lake, which underlined for the attentive the
possible consequences of not coming to some sort of compromise on the BC
land issue. Recall that in the exchange, where the Chief Justice
effectively denied Dr. Clark the opportunity to put forward the
jurisdiction issue, the countryís highest jurist referred to his peskey
nemisis as ìa disgrace to the bar.î

This attack on Dr. Clark seems to me an essential part of the genesis of
the Delgamuukw ruling, whose main author is in the habit of moving from
interview to interview, spinning the media as he goes to fend off or
mitigate growing unease with the judicialization of politics and the
politicization of the judiciary. It is by observing this phenomenon
that I have come to view the Delgamuukw ruling as being informed not so
much by the Chief Justiceís deep and genuine reading of the existing
constitutional law; it appears to me rather as a sort of pre-emptive
strike whose inspiration is essentially political rather than
scholarly. Its intent is to steer the BC land issue away from the
deeper jurisdictional questions by giving just enough ground to the
constitutional force of the imperial law to pre-empt a real reckoning
with the criminal dimension arising from a long history of violations of
Crownís very clear and explicit recognitions of existing Aboriginal and
treaty rights.

My speculation fits well within Dr. Clarkís argument, developed at great
length in his forthcoming book, that the recent history of Aboriginal
rights jurisprudence in Canada reveals this country as a politically
correct society rather than a rule of law society. Dr. Clark is far
from alone in his thesis that the court has become so overwhelmingly
politicized that it lacks real credibility as a dispassionate dispenser
of judicial objectivity. On March 30th The Ottawa Citizen published an
opinion piece by Ian Hunter, Professor Emeritus in th Faculty of Law at
the University of Western Ontario. He commented with alarm at the Chief
Justiceís wierd characterization of the role of the judiciary as
ìactorsî in ìa psycho-dramaî who must ìcommand a certain degree of
repect or itís chaos, and the whole system falls apart.î

According to Professor Hunter, Chief Justice Lamar has no inherent right
to ìcommandî repect, which, in the authorís opinion, the Chief Justice
has not earned. Says Hunter of the courts under the guidance of the
Chief Justice, ìtoday its three parts ideology... to one part law.î
Moreover, with the Supreme Courtís chief judicial politician as their
model, ìour judges swan around the country, speaking to credulous and
sycophantic faculty and students at the law schools, boring on about how
progressive and with-it they have become.î

It is with such observations in mind that I have come to see our current
Chief Justice as a consummate example of a judicial politician. In
writing the Delgamuukw case, its chief author may very well have moved
towards the ground of acknowleging the countryís underlying imperial
law, precisely as a way of pre-empting a more sweeping historical
reckoning with the arguments of Dr. Clark. Of course I would not go as
far as to say that this was the only factor in the Chief Justiceís mind
in formulating the ruling. But I would go as far as saying it is a very
plausible explanation for a ruling that does, on the surface at least,
strengthen the hand especially of Aboriginal peoples like those in BC
and Long Lake 58, who have never been extended the legal recognitions
and respect demanded by the Royal Procalamation of 1763.

In the end, the authors of the Delgamuukw ruling did not find guilt or
innocence; instead they simply ordered a new trial. Thus the issue of
how it was that the constitutional law of Canada could be violated for
generations without anyone being held accountable, was neatly
sidestepped. Moreover, the jurisdictional question has still not been
addressed and there is nothing to say that future courts wonít roll back
whatever gains have, in theory, been made with the Delgamuukw case.

And then there is the question of the enforcement of law. On behalf of
Indigenous Ecology Alliance, I have stood before the judges of the
National Energy Board in Canada where I have quoted the words of the
Delgamuukw ruling. In response, they have denied that what is written
in black and white means what it says. What they told me is the
equivalent of saying 2+2=3; they denied that the Crown has any real duty
to consult Indian nations on the building of the Alliance
transcontinental pipeline, which is being built from northern BC to
Chicago.

>From my perspective the Queenís men at the Energy Board, a regulatory
body notoriously captive to the direction of Big Oil in the USA,
answered as Andrew Jackson did when the Supreme Court told him the
Cherokee have rights. . Let Antonio Lamer enforce the law, these Crown regulators might as well have said.

The "negotiations" leading up to the Delgamuukw ruling didn’t take place on paper alone. The demonization of Bruce Clark in the media really started in earnest when he turned up at the standoff at Gustafsen Lake in the summer of 1995 to represent his clients including William Jones Ignace, the 63 year-old Shuswap elder who also proclaimed himself to the world by the ecological name of Wolverine. The language of Mr. McKay's article, full of terms like "renegade", "militant faction", and "dissident native faction", was largely invented by the media in their coverage of that stand off.

I wasn't there. So I have heard different stories and read different accounts of what really happened, including from Ovide Mercredi who characterized himself somewhat as a peace keeper in the style of Ghandi to help prevent a tragedy. Others have different views of his role. In any case what I could clearly see from the electronic and print press reports is that Canada's federal police were firmly in control of the information coming out of the confrontation. The journalists were kept far away from what really was happening and the RCMP's information officers presented a steady stream of commentary that I know for sure effectively demeaned and dehumanized the odds and sods of people inside the camp.

The daily briefings conducted by Peter Montague, of the closed and tightly controlled coverage of the USA's invasion of Iraq. More and more the people inside were dismissed as crazies, lunatics, fanatics, rebels, as all manner of monster-like radicals. Their asserted claims to a few acres of Sun Dance land in the great Canadian wilderness for some reason required hundreds of police officers, and tens of thousands of rounds of fired ammunition, the commitment of Canadian soldiers and of Canadian army armored vehicles, and even land mines for heavens sake, to counter and keep in check. And all this was simply reported, day after day, as established fact, without hardly any journalists seeing for themselves what was really going on or thinking to question seriously the process that sent Dr. Clark away to a hospital for the criminally insane, put him in leg irons and caused he and his wife, justifiably I think, to flee from the vigilante excesses of the media, the public, and the same legal establishment he totally freaked out by trying to introduce them to the T, F and C in G, to the treason, fraud and complicity in genocide that are the rhetorical pillars of his undeniably provocative legal interpretation.

One thing for sure is that in my view all the stuff that Mr. McKay and so many other media burgher servers have to say, in such vivid, technicolor verbiage about Clark's alleged temper tantrums, his alleged paper throwing incidents and what he calls, "resisting assault", I take with a grain of salt. I have no doubt that the man has his fair share of human eccentricities and that human nature, when subjected to inhumane threats and pressures, sometimes breaks out in erratic and even frightening ways. I also know that a common tactic of police in the days when civil rights workers were challenging the Jim Crow laws of the American Deep South in the era of totally overt apartheid, was to jump the activists and then charge them with assault. Anyway, I wasn't there to see it for myself. And as far as I know, Mr. McKay wasn't either.

Now things become yet more complex. In the later trial of the Gustafsen sun dancers, RCMP video tape was aired, producing transcripts of police officials bragging that "smear campaign are our specialty". More troubling yet is the piece of tape producing a transcript, "kill this prick Clark and smear everyone with him."

A few months later the same cast of Mounties are taped pepper spraying university students for protesting Canada's hosting in Vancouver of the Asian Pacific Economic Co-Operation nations, including Indonesia's ruthless dictator, the infamous Mr. Suharto. The episode eventually led to media reports that the Prime Minister himself and his office were in charge of police operations whose ultimate purpose was not to maintain law and order, but to prevent Suharto and others from being embarrassed by direct exposure to dissidents acting well within what is supposed to be allowed for within the Charter rights of Canadian citizens.

Subsequent events have exposed the Mounties to growing criticism. The RCMP, for instance, planted and exploded a bomb in northern Alberta to generate public outrage against two suspected saboteurs of the health Destroying gas extraction infrastructure in the northern part of the province. On a reserve near Calgary a Mounty shot and killed an Indian woman and her Son in a child apprehension operation for an Indian social service agency. This episode drew attention to the fact that of all the people killed by the RCMP since its inception over half are Aboriginal.

The mounting number of unanswered questions about what the modern-day RCMP in Canada is really all about, takes us back to what really happened at Gustafsen Lake in 1995. There the journalistic smearing of Bruce Clark and his clients, apparently under police guidance and oversight, the finessing of the instruments of popular opinion that constitutes the real weaponry of the dangerous 1990s became hard to ignore for those with alert eyes to see. To my way of thinking the most plausible scenario is that a decision was made at the highest political level that the BC land issue was not to be permitted to spill out into the international community, especially by allowing Bruce Clark, the Wolverine, or "Doc" Hill (aka Splitting The Sky) to reach an audience with a coherent, consistent, well-articulated message. Splitting The Sky is a veteran of the Attica prison riot who brought his old lawyer, Ramsay Clark, a former Attorney General of the United States, into the Gustafsen confrontation. Ramsey Clark became a powerful voice of sanity in an escalating atmosphere of ghoulish spectacle, that was stripped by a compliant media, under tight police controls, of its serious intellectual content.

Doc Hill is hard at work on his memories of what happened, an account that should increase the pressure for a full public inquiry into an episode that in my opinion makes the RCMP’s pepper spraying of the Canadian university students in 1995, look like a veritable boy scout jamboree by way of comparison to what happened under cover of a media blackout at Gustafsen Lake. The pepper spraying incident was rightfully showered with skeptical scrutiny by the Canadian journalists such as the CBC’s Terry Melewski. Many of them were definitely not willing to take the RCMP’s version of events at face value.

Thus when it came to defending the constitutional rights of middle class university students— folks as polished and polite as law student Craig Jones—the media was ready, willing and able to fight the good fight as a friend of the legitimate democratic right of Canadian to air their legitimate dissent. Unfortunately, the same kind of journalistic independence has, with some small but noble exceptions, tended to protect the aggressors and victimize the innocent of those who left Gustafsen Lake.

The Wolverine served four years in jail. When he came out, the silence of the Canadian media on the condition of the 67 old defender of Indian Country was deafening. On a similar score, the press have been thoroughly scared off from looking into the role of the Mike Harris government in the police killing of Dudley George at Ipperwash Ontario. What began as a peaceful protest related to the stand at Gustafsen Lake, a protest that like Oka started as a defence of a burial ground, ended in tragedy that four years later still lacks proper explanation. So derelict are our own people when it comes even to the state's violent removal of an Indian, that the United Nations Human Rights Commission has felt compelled four years after the episode to press Canada for what it can report on the involvement of officialdom in giving the orders which resulted in the death with a government bullet of yet another martyr for the trampled rights of indigenous peoples all over this planet.

The perpetuation of this web of cover-up, half truths, and media attack jobs to disguise the true issues, proceeds in a way that has long characterized the perpetuation of a quiet, but insidious variant of ethnic cleansing that is being perpetuated in North America into the new millennium. Why is it that Native people in Canada, but especially in northern Canada, consistently kill themselves at a rate higher than any other recorded population in the world? When will the killing stop? What is to be the monument we will put up for those tens of thousands, those tens of millions over the centuries— who had to die, premature, gruesome, senseless, horrible deaths so that the Americas could be remade in the image of Europe.

The extent of this make over though ethnic cleansing is reflected in the reality of a European defensive coalition, NATO, that throws in Canada and the United States as if North Atlantic had everything to do with the European heritage and nothing at all to do with the tens of thousands of years of history of the Aboriginal civilization of the Americas. A big part of the ethnic cleansing has taken place by writing out the Indigenous peoples from history and from the big times of contemporary geopolitics, almost as if First Nations never existed; almost as if so-called western civilization was the original civilization of the hemisphere rather than an overlay brutally imposed by continuing forms of genocide that have not really been dealt with; as instead of looking truth in the face we put band aids and linguistics ornaments to sanitize the outward appearance of our own Kosovos and our own dirty little tactics for manufacturing contempt.

The experience of Bruce Clark demonstrates what happens when a dutiful Canadian functionary leaves the well-funded, lawyer gravy train devoted to, as Mr. McKay writes, "affirmed Aboriginal rights to self-government and land use rights across Canada." Nice word but really short on substance to the poorest and the most marginalized of those First Nation citizens outside of the comfortable patronage network that is the infrastructure of the Indian business in see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, do-no-evil, Canada. Enough of this complacency! If we in Canada and the United States are going to commit our young men, including many Indian men, to serve and die in an honorable crusade to prevent the commission and spreading of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, we had better confront honestly the home version of the same process in our own back yard. We are all Kosovo.

One of the great tragedies of the media/police head games played at Gustafsen Lake is that the whole conflict was simplified and misrepresented as a simple conflict between criminals and law enforcement agencies. As far as most of mainstream reportage of what the event meant for the internal dynamics of Indian Country, all we got was moralistic dribble about the law abiding Indians and the lawless Indians, the elected Indians and the self-appointed freedom fighters, the fanatics and the pragmatists, our Indians and the wild, savage Indians. Right there, in those essentialized polarities of Hollywood trash, the violence on Indian Country is perpetuated.

It was a if the Mounties were there, no North of 60 good guys this time, to hold up a cape of obfuscation and prevent the widening of an honest and much-needed dialogue among First Nations peoples and the rest of the population throughout the country and the continent. In the distance between what Wolverine and Ovide Mercredi, Splitting The Sky and Arvil Looking Horse, Peter Montague and Bruce Clark, there was the makings of a broad discussion on what needs to be done to assure the survival of the Aboriginal civilization of the Americas for the next 500 years; to assure the survival of us all as well as our plant and animal relatives in the great web of life.

Paul McKay’s brand of reporting on the disbarring of Bruce Clark illustrates well the kind of false, contrived misrepresentation of reality that does such an injustice to his all. When I first read his report on my computer screen two nights ago, my eyes popped from my head as I saw the words “dissident native faction associated with my family, friends and acquaintances at Long Lake 58 reserve in northern Ontario. I read the words, attributed to a colleague who I have known in passing for about 20 years, suggesting that Bruce Clark has shown up on the reserve, split the community, and then taken the “militant minority” with him towards his Star Wars, cone headed PhD. fantasies about the continuing relevance of the need for genuine third-party adjudication of land disputes involving First Nations in Canada. “He’’s a dangerous item... He's bad for public optics, says Trent Native Studies graduate Peter Di Gangi. Then the author cites one of his many unattributed sources, detailing perhaps the most serious allegation of them all in Mr. Mckay’s eyes. Clark has "helped to escalate land-claim legal costs in Canada." Since these alleged added costs are quite clearly not going to him, why aren't the sharks at the Law Societies urging him on? Or maybe there's more to this plot that Mr. McKay has either been able to ascertain or realize in his own grasp of how his reportage serves the interests of the Indian business stalwarts he has chosen to interview.

Who didn't Mr. McKay interview? Well as far as I can tell he spoken to no one at Long lake 58, although he’’s already re-cycled for the whole world the old Gustafsen Lake copy as if one bunch of Clark clients must all be pretty much the same—you know... dissident, militant, minority, Star Wars glasses, cone head.... Taste for martyrdom.... You know.. fringy. Not respectable. Gullible.

What nonsense! These people janitors, aunties, but mostly real bush people, mostly very old but still hopeful, mostly pushed aside but still trusting... they are the ones behind what you call Mr. Clark’s "surprise case on behalf of a dissident native faction in northern Ontario." And perhaps chief and council, who are after all mostly the children of the affadavit signers, will come around. Maybe the elected young ones will adhere more to the hereditary systems still in tact... In spite of the clear cutting. In spite of the cancers growing in more and more of the animals as a result of the herbicide spraying to transform Indian hunting grounds into tree plantations... Mono-cultures... Plundered habitat. Maybe the whole community will pull together pull together once they see that chicanery that the Law Society and Southam seems to be attempting, to cut off the jurisdiction question, to prevent the internationalization of Aboriginal land disputes not only in Canada put in many other countries as well, including Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Nigeria, and the United States. We are all Kosovo.