I
arrived in the pre-Christmas waiting season of
Advent depressed. It was difficult writing about
some books during 2018 because the subject added
more depression. It has been a year of gun
shootings. Terrible
wars raged largely hidden from media attention.
There were extreme fires and excessive rains. The
UN committee on climate change called for greater
cuts in greenhouse gasses going into the global
atmosphere. Without that come greater risks of
uncertain extreme weather. There were reports on
species dying. Fewer birds seemed to come in our
2018 spring bird watching at Prince Edward Point.
Perhaps worse have been the wild reality shows:
President Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK to
which has been added the depressing Ford
Conservative government show in Ontario. As I
write Ford has just closed the legislature until
February after criticism that a family friend was
to be made head of Ontario’s police following an
adjustment in the requirements for applicants for
the job. All these add a level of fear about
future security in the western world and in
Ontario.
Some
happenings in December changed my depression a
bit.
First,
the old stories in church for the Advent season
somehow spoke to me. Those early Christians - the
Jews practicing “the new way” - were to be ready
for the world to change. They were to care for
each other - and everyone. They were to do
justice, grant mercy and walk humbly with the
winds of change blowing through the human
community. “Be strong” said the reflection. “Fear
not” said the angels. Those ancients had some
pretty miserable times: mass killings; jailing and
some mad emperors. There was slavery. There were
plagues.
Recalling
ancient words can have a similar effect to looking
at a cold clear sky of stars – something our choir
sang about in the carol service on the second
Advent Sunday. It brings a calming perspective on
time and space. “Times have been bad before” say
the stars. There have been high moments before
too, I thought. And I recalled some giants of
humanity in my lifetime - Gandhi and Mandela and
Gorbechev.
The second thing that happened was
that I saw the published form of a Project
Ploughshares Working Paper I helped with on and
off during the year. It was about the war in
Yemen. My co-author and the Project Ploughshares
staff were responsible for the coloured pictures
and the text boxes and a lot of the writing on the
effects of this war and the writing about the arms
trade. Yet in there was my little component about
what was going on at the UN, from the UN
documents, and what should be tried in order to
move this war towards an end. It felt good to see
it out there in writing being seen and used. Also
in December there were new UN moves to try to stop
this terrible war in Yemen. In this messy complex
world of Trump and Brexit and Ford we can make
contributions – tiny but real.
After
these two bits of comforting news, I was able to
begin to reflect again on some books I had pushed
aside as depressing. In the middle of that came
the third set of Advent good news.
Near
the beginning of the year I had read Tanya
Talaga’s Seven
Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths
in a Northern City, Anansi, 2017. Talaga
gives an intimate account of the deaths of
adolescent boys who had to go to Thunder Bay from
their reservation if they were to attend a high
school. Near the beginning we are told how Talaga
came to learn from the grand chief that telling
these stories mattered greatly to him and to the
aboriginal community. One side of Talaga’s family
is tied to one of those tribes. She wanted to
honour the need of the aboriginal community to
have the stories told – rather than to worry about
the interest of the wider Canadian community in
these stories. She also wanted to honour the dead
young men themselves. And she did all of that.
Talaga
lets us meet each of those boys, their families,
their reserve, their background as well as their
relatives or lodging providers and friends on the
indigenous side of Thunder Bay. They become human
to the reader. Several of these young men had
considerable potential. One was related to a
family of well-known artists. Another was a
promising hockey player. Talaga tells us things as
they are – calmly, clearly and with some detail.
Youths have parties. Youths get drunk. She
describes in detail how each went missing and how
they were found - dead. Police, sometimes without
any coroner examination, just recorded the deaths
as accidental. She is clear about racism between
communities in Thunder Bay. But she is measured
when it comes to indications of violence that were
not always pursued by the police when some young
men were found drowned in the waters of the river.
Those lives deserved to have been valued and the
losses deserved to have been thoroughly
investigated.
I found
this book hard to take when I first read it even
though I understood that the stories needed to be
told. Now, in Advent, I could better see that
Talaga was being bold and not fearing and
promoting justice in troubling times. I don’t
think she expected big things. Happily, she was
wrong. Earlier in 2018 others felt that her
boldness of choice and her writing were worthy of
recognition. Her book won a prize. More than that,
she was named to give the 2018 Massey Lectures on
CBC - that adds another book. But things grew
bigger still in the third surprise of advent.
I knew
that the facts in Thunder Bay behind her book were
stark. As Thunder Bay resident and reviewer Ben
Babcock surmised about Talaga’s book: “Seven students attending Dennis Franklin
Cromarty High School died between 2000 and 2011
and the police and city did the utter minimum that
they could do to investigate or prevent further
tragedies.”
Babcock notes: “Dennis
Franklin Cromarty [school], albeit run by an
Indigenous education authority, is a response to
and inheritor of the colonial system of
residential schools that broke apart so many
families over the past century. These students
were only attending high school in Thunder Bay
because their own communities don’t have high
schools, for various reasons, all of which are
ultimately attributable to the provincial and
federal governments refusing to do anything about
it. The governments have, through decades of
inaction, proved that Indigenous lives (by which I
mean their livelihoods, lands, education, culture,
language, as well as their bodies) matter less
than settler lives. … We did this. We meaning
not just settlers but entire generations of anyone
who calls themselves Canadians. And we are
still doing it. When we ignore
Indigenous people who are telling us about
communities with unsafe drinking water, without
proper housing or flushing toilets, when we don’t
care about the state of education in these
communities—we are complicit.”
Amazingly, two highly
critical reports on the police treatment of
aboriginal youth deaths in Thunder Bay came out in
the second week of December – in the Advent time.
And they made national news. The 13 December Globe
& Mail reported Ontario’s independent police
watchdog urging Thunder Bay’s police force to
reopen nine sudden-death cases involving
Indigenous victims over concerns the
investigations were tainted by systemic racism and
neglect. The call was one of many recommendations
from the report by the Office of the Independent
Police Review Director (OIPRD), an independent
civilian oversight agency that handles public
complaints of police conduct in the province of
Ontario. The agency oversees all police forces.
Then
the 15 December Globe reported on Senator Murray
Sinclair’s report for the Ontario Civilian Police
Commission, OCPC. The Globe reported Senator
Sinclair saying the Thunder Bay Police Service
Board has, for years, “failed to provide the
leadership and direction essential to ensure the
success of the service they oversee.”
Senator Sinclair’s report
had recommended board members take cultural
sensitivity training, develop a training package
for new members, establish closer ties with the
Indigenous community and clarify the police
chief’s responsibilities to the board. He also
wanted a plan for diversifying the police service.
“The board has failed to recognize and address the
clear and indisputable pattern of violence and
systemic racism against Indigenous people in
Thunder Bay,” his report states. “Moreover, the
board’s failure to act on these issues in the face
of overwhelming documentary and media exposure is
indicative of wilful blindness.”
In response, the OCPC
then declared the situation in Thunder Bay an
emergency and appointed lawyer Thomas Lockwood as
administrator for the police for a year. The
police Board was dissolved.
There is now a glimmer of
hope since I first read Talaga’s book about a
terrible situation of mysteriously dying
aboriginal youth.
The
last book I was reading in December added a
different twist to concerns about treatment of
aboriginal peoples. Adam Shoalts in A History of
Canada in Ten Maps Penguin
2018 does not aim to say anything about relations
with aboriginal peoples, yet he does.
Shoalts
writes adventure stories about people who paddled
and trudged through dangers and wilderness,
mapping Canada. His writing is particularly
gripping about those explorers in the 17th, 18th
and 19th centuries. These stories draw from the
explorers’ own accounts. The book underscored the
harsh climate, the vastness and the isolation.
Like Talaga, Shoalts tends to understate. Some
aspects of the exploration of Canada are left
unsaid in his enthusiasm for a gripping tale of
survival in the wilderness.
What
struck me throughout all the later chapters of
this book was the teamwork with aboriginal peoples
that was crucial to the early explorations and the
resulting maps of Canada. In all these stories,
there are accounts of the generosity and concern
shown to the European and by the Europeans in the
exploration teams. There is frequent reference in
the accounts of these explorers to the
geographical awareness and ability of the
aboriginal peoples. They can map by telling, or
sketching. The early maps of Canada depended
heavily on the insights of the aboriginal tribes.
And along with the gripping tales of survival come
accounts of caring and working together among all
those on an exploration.
Today may be
dominated by stories of racism, but there have
been examples of cooperation. Some Europeans and
some tribes explored and mapped “Canada” together.
The relationships on explorations between
aboriginal people and Europeans and settlers like
Champlain, MacKenzie and even Franklin seem
respectful.
And so
I came back to where I began. The year has been
dominated by depressing news: wars; shootings; the
Trump reality show; the Brexit tragic show and the
Ford farce. Yet as Advent creeps among the few in
the pews still following the Christian tradition,
and among those who look up at the stars on a cold
clear night, there is something reassuring. Things
are bigger and older than 2018. And there have
also been an odd few small positive signs. So …
Be bold. Hang
tight. This is just 2018. It too will pass in the
end. A new world is waiting to dawn somehow …
