Copyright © 1999 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

Sometimes seemingly unrelated events converge in your mind with powerful synergy. That is what is happening to me. Day after day the reports go from bad to worse on the haunted house of Balkan ethnic horrors. And the reality of our involvement as Canadians in NATO’’s 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 "the legal establishment" is guilty in its treatment of First Nations peoples of "treason, fraud and complicity in genocide."

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 disrobing of Bruce Clark is presented like a small footnote to history, a kind of weird curiosity of the modern-day Indian wars that puts the last nail in the professional coffin of a colorful, but fatally misguided zealot. As Paul McKay wrote of Clark in The Ottawa Citizen ( April 4, 1999) in his almost sadistically mean-spirited announcement of the outcome, "an 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 banker’’s suit, Ph.D., cone head haircut, Star Wars glasses, and self-penned writs to arrest judges hearing his cases."

Permission to ridicule Dr. Clark's clothing, eye wear, shaved head and, if any column space is left, his legal theories as well, came right from the very top. "You are a disgrace to the bar," Canada's Chief Justice, Antonio Lamar, told Clark in a 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 body’’s disciplinary proceedings, Mr. Ruby declared that ““the genocide of which Dr. Clark speaks is real."

Apparently, however, Ruby's cautionary plea was not enough to sway the Law Society. They gave their cone headed, PhD. colleague with the Star Wars glasses and a penchant for upsetting polite company too often with the word "genocide", the martyrdom he allegedly so lusts after. And now that the Law Society inquisitors have exorcised their colleague, the Southam chain seems to have taken the lead in demonizing the carrier of this country's most uncomfortable message. The Citizen chose to run Mr. McKay's McCarthyesque professional obituary not as an opinion piece, but rather as a news story that has been picked up by 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 Aboriginal peoples. After, all, if there's 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 sinister regime of Slobodan Misolevic "cleanses" what his government calls the "soul of Serbia" of its Kosovo Albanian population.

But wait a minute. Pull the zoom lens 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 wasn’t 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.

These European languages so dominate, that only French and English have official status in Canada whereas the languages and dialects of the dozens of imperilled Indigenous peoples have no official legal status whatsoever. Until well into the 1970s the Canadian government paid the major Christian churches in Canada to actively conspire in the coercive silencing of these Aboriginal languages with a zeal and "success" rate that could only make the Slobodan Milosevic regime green with envy. And it is presented to the Canadian people and the world that now this legacy of cultural genocide is going forward in Canada courts, not in any systematic way in front of some sort of war crimes tribunal, but rather with the assumption that whatever damage that was inflicted fell only on so many isolated, unrelated victims, as if the fact the abused children were subjected to predators precisely because they are Indian, has no part in the legal proceedings.

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 "reserves". In Canada, one of the British empire's so called "White Dominions", 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 country’’s 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 "reserve", which in the provinces of Canada cover less than one per cent of the land, 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 emerged. This only begins to paint the picture of the legal background that has created the basis for a large and thriving "Indian law" 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.

Let's try to keep this as succinct as we can. Let's 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. Let's make short work of the fact that Spain's 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 neighbors. A principle objective of the corrupt and notoriously murderous PRI regime in Mexico, is to enforce the "gringos" 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 Clark's 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 especially won all their key cases in the Supreme Court of the United States. But the Indian fighters who ran the federal government, from "Old Hickory" Andrew Jackson on down, refused to respect their country’’s 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. "Chief Justice John Marshall made the law", said Old Hickory referring to the famous federalist judge who was his enemy. "Let him enforce it."

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 "Indian Territory" west of the Mississippi in an act of militarily-enforced ethnic cleansing easily as brutal, or more so, than anything being experienced by Kosovo 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 chooses to disregard the artifices of international law in extending its vision of democracy to the peoples of Europe at the genocidal cost of destroyed First Nations.

This apartheid scheme shows up on the map, with almost no Indian reserves east of the Mississippi and relatively large reserves, compared to Canada at least, west of the Mississippi. All the reserves in Canada combined wouldn’t 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.

Leading proponents of this expansionary movement of American Manifest Destiny, also coveted the vast Indian Country of Canada. In the drainage basin of the continent’’s northward-flowing rivers, the Hudson's 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 which shaped the countries in which we all live. What awesome hypocrisy! 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 corpse 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 an even bigger, more global scale.

Those who doubt the racial rationales of the USA’’s 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, President's multi-volume The Winning of the West. The author, "Rough Rider" 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 "Germanic race", 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 world’’s pre-eminent campaigns of ethnic cleansing, makes about as much sense 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 Naziism’’s rise to global prominence, let it be remembered that Rudyard Kipling poetically implored the leaders of the dawning American empire, to "Take Up the White Man’’s Burden" 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 province's 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, "mental hygiene", 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, the survivors of a program that in its final years put Native people under the surgeon's knife at a rate ten times that of all other groups in proportion to their overall numbers in the population.

No, we are not all Nazis. To our society's 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 “West” (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 Reich's 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 entrenched genocide has become in the contemporary human condition, let us remember how we entered the century. Let us remember World War I and the origins of word, "balkanization". The ethnic horrors of the unglued Yugoslavia puts us face to face with the burdensome legacy of the White Man's 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 Nuremberg to render a judgment of history on the systematic murders of their children, of their parents and of the ecosystems that diminishes the future of all our babies, born and unborn.

When Columbus arrived in America, there were in the vicinity 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 is not a place of ethnic cleansing. And with this denial, Bruce Clark is mocked and demeaned by Mr. McKay on behalf of Canada's most powerful media monopoly. The lawyer is disbarred and subjected by the Southam chain to today's media equivalent of a public flogging for the crime of 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 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 society's 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 thorough going 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.

In legislating their way out of their own constitutional principles as articulated in the John Marshall decisions and 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 our war with the United States in 1812. In that conflict former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson wrote that it had become necessary to hunt the Indian down in Canada-- to "exterminate" Indian people altogether or to push them with "the beasts of the forests into the Stony [Rocky] Mountains".

The USA's original recognition of "Aboriginal rights to the soil" was largely forced on Great Britain's republican offspring in the era when the Long Knives' 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.

Meanwhile, the of Canada John A. MacDonald, was less able to afford the price of Indian wars without a transcontinental railway and without an effective army, began in 1871 to seek a begrudging acquiescence from First Nations for replacing the Crown authority of the Hudson's Bay Company with the Crown of the new Dominion. Once some treaties were made, once some of the key Indian leaders like Big Bear and Poundmaker were incarcerated as political prisoners, the government of Canada enforced with increasing aggressiveness the Indian Act, which became for a time in the 1930s the most singularly repressive statute in the world for the governance of Indigenous peoples. Indian religious ceremonies were prohibited and it was made illegal 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 there 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 a majority of the prison inmates especially in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. As in many oppressed colonies, prison proved to be a kind of university for the "militant" American Indian Movement, which first took shape in the late 1960s to react against the continuing genocidal conditions that kept so many Native Americans poor, unemployed, and subject to the internalized violence of substance addiction, domestic violence.

So what has this all got to do with today? After all, isn’t part of the frustration with the so-called "militants" of Indian Country they seem so obsessed with conjuring up the past and making light of the opportunities and positive changes in the present? Paul McKay’’s Southam article reflects well this sense, suggesting that somehow there is something illegitimate about going into the distant past for directives on what should take place in our own time. McKay characterizes Bruce Clark as "the renegade lawyer who spent two decades cultivating militant native clients with arguments dating back to the 1700s."

Perhaps if Clark was an economist or a sociologist rather than a lawyer, more could be made of this. But that is not how the law works. 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 weren’t alive then and that the laws made in those days thus aren’t applicable. And yet at the same time as those lines were being drawn on Indian Country, other laws were being made that expressed rules and regulations about how what we call in today’s language, existing Aboriginal and treaty rights were henceforth to be dealt with.

And now, here's the good news that Bruce Clark brings. While genocide is the overwhelming theme of Europe’’s colonization of the continent, there were redeeming flickers of humanity here and there that resulted in instruments like Queen Anne's court for Indian land disputes being established in 1704, or the more well known Royal Proclamation of 1763 being entrenched in the constitutional foundation of British imperial Canada. This Royal Proclamation provides the key to understanding the laws beneath both the formal establishment of Nunavut only days ago and the negotiation of the Nisga's Treaty in British Columbia. The Nisga's Treaty in particular 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.

Now 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 Nisga's 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 Canada's westernmost province has for all of its history in Confederation existed outside Canada's rule of law.

In order to understand the importance of Aboriginal treaty rights 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 "reserved to the Indians as their hunting grounds", reserved where they would not be "molested or disturbed" until such time as they decided of their own free will to enter into a treaty with the imperial sovereign. This reservation of lands, if the words of the Royal Proclamation mean what they say, indicate that most of BC like much of Quebec, the Maritimes as well as some of Ontario north of Lake Superior, remains an unceded Indian Country until this day.

Moreover, the First Nations in Canada are not 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 neighbors 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, 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. Catherine's Milling case, a legal dispute between Canada and Ontario in the late 1880s over the meaning of the constitutional phrase, "land reserved for the Indians".

A whole pattern of jurisprudence has arisen, for instance, from a lower court judge's ruling on the case, where he deemed that "Now 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."

This type of reasoning tended to prevail in the ruling on the Temagami case, the land dispute that dominated Bruce Clark's 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 "lucrative law practice, huge home [in Haileybury Ontario] and private airplane." He lived "in the very log cabin the Indian imposter Grey Owl used as part of his own mythology."

In the latter part of those years 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 lower court's ruling by Mr. Justice Donald Steele, a law school friend of my father as a matter of fact, I was truly shocked that such abhorrent words of blatant racism could be spoken from the bench as 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 rigor in a suitable scholarly fashion.

Let me quote but one passage of Judge Steele's decision to give an idea of its flavor. He ruled that the expert witnesses for the Temagami First Nations "were typical of persons who have worked among Indians for so many years that they have lost their objectivity when giving opinion evidence." 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? Doesn't 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. McKay's dismissive comments about Bruce Clark as the infamous loser in Temagami and countless and other cases, raises the question of strange argumentative concoctions you'd need to win before a judge with the deep prejudices and sparse historical knowledge of a Mr. Justice Steele. While I thought he was the last word in judicial ethnocentricism, 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 judge's own self regulating body, pronounced that Indians have almost nothing of worth to retain for either themselves or the world from their 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 "nasty, brutish and short."

To properly understand the genesis of Dr. Clark's legal interpretation, you need to know something of the radical nature of his formative experiences with the so-called legal establishment. What emerged for him 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 what the now disbarred lawyer regularly characterizes in the language of the old imperial statutes as treason and fraud and sometimes chicanery as well.

A major point to consider in evaluating this startling and inescapably troubling proposition is to question who has ever been charged or criminalized for the offense of violating an "existing Aboriginal and treaty right?" 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?

Clark's basic proposition, therefore, is that the legal establishment, from top to bottom, is so deeply guilty of systematic violations of this certain variety of constitutional law, of this law put in place at the very beginning of British imperial Canada, 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 my initially seem preposterous to the point of absurdity, a position well reflected in Mr. McKay's Southam attack piece. 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 "newcomers" 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 the legal establishment in unaccountable and self-regulating agencies like the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Canadian Judicial Council.

This analysis forms the basis of what Dr. Clark refers to as third-party adjudication. There is no mystery here. Third party adjudication is the basis of every decent legal system. We cannot expect Serbian judges, for instance, to be objective and impartial in deciding the identity and the extent of the crimes of Serbian war criminals. Canada's own Louise Arbor is busy in Europe setting herself up as a 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 countries' 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 Law Society's disbarring of Dr. Clark will come up, as well as the role of a corporation like the Southam chain as a key part of the alleged professional hit squad and of the alleged psychological warfare.

So the heart and soul of the Clark thesis, is that judges in Canada are in no position to deal objectively with deciding among themselves if some or all of them are themselves 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 a 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 interest 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 grounds for assertion 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 Clark's revised Ph.D. thesis was published as a book by McGill-Queen's Press, my own department here in Lethbridge published a book entitled Quest for Justice. In it is included an article by James Youngblood Henderson entitled, "The Doctrine of Aboriginal Rights in Western Legal Tradition." It makes extensive comment 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 Connecticut's Mohegan neighbors could not properly be adjudicated in a normal colonial court. So the imperial government went to great lengths to create a Royal Commission 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 what's happening in now in British Columbia, or, with Bruce Clark's important legal advice at Long Lake reserve 58 in northern Ontario. He quotes at length various "respected" and "Aboriginal" sources to prove his case that all sensible experts in Canada agree that Queen Anne's Mohegan precedent should be left alone and that all systems are go and A-OK in Canada for a happy outcome within the existing institutions.

For instance, Mr. McKay paraphrases Stuart Rush as arguing "the Canadian courts at all levels properly dismissed Mr. Clark's 1704 legal argument." Then Mr. McKay cites Rush directly, writing, "His [Clark's] whole argument is misplaced and wrong in law. Canada is the only place where this can be settled." What Southam's 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 "the jurisdiction question."

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 authority and on principles of governance of Indigenous peoples that draw on the same legal theories as what Lord Lugard used to refer to as "indirect rule." Lord Lugard was an influential imperial official based largely in Nigeria in the 1920s.

This system of indirect rule offends some First Nations peoples as too severe a check on the self-determination of their Aboriginal nationhoods. Those rooted in more sovereigntist perspectives—in perspectives totally unreflected in Mr. McKay's piece for Southam tends to look with favor 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 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 protection as, for instance, the stance of most Albanian Kosovors, or of any other colonized group rendered vulnerable to arbitrary actions when a hostile, or potentially-hostile government is 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, "the Supreme Court's landmark Delgamuukw decision has affirmed aboriginal rights to self government and land use across Canada—and effectively achieved much of what Mr. Clark’s native apostles could have hoped to attain from a favorable ruling on the 1704 Connecticut case."

The more I look closely 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 in the exchange where the Chief Justice referred to his pesky nemesis as "a disgrace to the bar." I make this observation after viewing Chief Justice Lamar go from interview to interview as he spins the media to fend off or mitigate growing unease with the judicialization of politics and the politicization of the judiciary.

This speculation fits well within Dr. Clark's argument that the history of Aboriginal rights jurisprudence in Canada reveals this country as a politically correct society rather than a rule of law society. It is with this in mind that I have come to see our top jurist in the land 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 acknowledging the country’s underlying imperial law as a way of pre-empting the more sweeping historical reckoning with the arguments of Dr. Clark. Of course I would not go as far to say that this was the only factor but I would say in is a very plausible explanation for a ruling that does, on the surface at least, strengthen the hand especially like those First Nations in BC and Long Lake 58 who have never been extended to legal protocols demanded by the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

But the jurisdictional question has still not been addressed and there is nothing to say that future courts won’’t roll back whatever gains have in theory been made. And then there is the question of the enforcement of law. I myself have stood before the judiciary of the National Energy Board in Canada on behalf of Indigenous Ecology Alliance and quoted the words of the Delgamuukw ruling only to have the jurists turn 2+2 into three and deny that the Crown has any real duty to consult Indian nations on a little matter of the Alliance transcontinental pipeline that runs from northern BC to Chicago. From my perspective the Queen's 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.