Ian Mulgrew: B.C. civil disobedience trumps law enforcement at Fairy Creek
Opinion: Injunctions have long and often turned the court into a tool for Big Business and Bad Government. This time it didn’t work.

Mohandas Gandhi would be proud — civil disobedience won another round in B.C. Supreme Court and the rule of law was defined as much more than simply law enforcement.

Justice Douglas Thompson’s refusal to extend a one-year injunction restricting protests against logging in the Fairy Creek watershed emphasized the impartial status of courts and civil rights are equally important societal values.

A top lawyer involved in the case, Steven Kelliher said the injunction raised serious concerns and should never have been issued:

“The courts get drawn into an enforcement role, stepping aside from their adjudicative role that we expect them to have, and they run the risk that they are going to be tainted both by the politics of the day — which is significant when there is large public disagreement and civil disobedience — and they are also going to be tainted by the manner in which the injunction was enforced.”

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Ian Mulgrew: Fixing structural racism with Indigenous justice
“What a lot of people are not aware of or don’t understand is that at the time of contact there was a vibrant, holistic approach to justice within First Nations communities.”

Chief of the Splatsin band and chair of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council, Wayne Christian, says that the federal commitment of $10 million to revitalize Indigenous law and traditions is an important step to erasing the historic racism of Canada’s legal system.

He said the money is being used by First Nations to move from research and reports to implementation of jurisdiction and control for children and families, welfare, land and resource management, and citizenship.

Indigenous people must practice and enforce their own traditional law in a modern context for it to survive, Christian maintains. It must be recognized that their legal traditions are braided together with language and cultural practices — ceremonies and dancing can be legal mechanisms.

“You need to be practicing law for it to be a living entity,” he said.

“Secwépemc legal traditions are part of and derived from the legal orders which are embedded within the social, political, economic, and spiritual institutions of our people. … The recognition and practicing of one’s traditional laws is an act of sovereignty and effectively serves as a process of decolonization through the assertion of the aboriginal right to govern oneself. We must be able to demonstrate the ways in which they have practicality in addressing today’s needs if we are to meaningfully breathe life into them once again.”

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Ian Mulgrew: Colonialism’s ‘success’ handcuffs courts
Although the incarceration rates for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous men have decreased, the Indigenous rate remains eight times higher.

Colonialism led to such alienation that Indigenous offenders can be unaware of or can’t document their ancestry and the effects of assimilation on their life in order to benefit from compensatory sentencing provisions, a B.C. Court of Appeal division says.

Judges do not function as “gatekeepers” of Indigenous identity, the three-justice panel noted in rejecting the appeal of a violent thug with more than eight assault convictions who argued his dangerous offender designation and indeterminate sentence should be overturned in part because he “recently learned” he was of Métis ancestry.

Justice Elizabeth Bennett explained the “methods of assimilation are often the very things that give rise to an Indigenous person’s alienation from their Indigenous community or culture.”

“Thus, not everyone with Indigenous roots can prove those roots,” she said. “The government’s system of assimilation was, in many ways, ‘successful.’ It resulted in many Indigenous people being partially or totally estranged from their Indigenous heritage and disconnected from their culture, their community, and their support. This disconnection is intergenerational and acts as a barrier to realizing the principles enunciated in (the Supreme Court of Canada decisions known as) Gladue (1999) and Ipeelee (2012).”

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Ian Mulgrew: First Nations find optimism in their kids
“Our children are very strong in their culture, they’re interested in their language, their family history, the cultural events.” — Peter Stone

Peter Stone and I huddled in a poorly constructed cabin in the tiny remote community of Lower Post on the Liard River just south of the Yukon border — it was well below -15 outside and although the stove was working ceaselessly the chinks in the logs quickly exhaled the warmth.

“My legs are dead,” Old Dan Lutz told us between plugs of chewing tobacco.

The federal government assigned him 1901 as the year of his birth, but he claimed to be older.

In a voice filtered through tobacco juice and laughter, Lutz recited his first encounter with a white man.

“I thought it was a ghost with whiskers riding a moose.”

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Ian Mulgrew: Want to start reconciling with First Nations? Expand the Senate
Opinion: It looks as if our Indigenous people’s long-deserved advancement is being put on hold for the greater good of multiculturalism.

The tragedy of hundreds of First Nations’ children dying in the care of government residential schools run by the Catholic Church has captured the world’s attention — colonialism’s shameful and bitter legacy.

But, together with the nomination of Mahmud Jamal to the Supreme Court of Canada, the scrutiny has highlighted the difficulties of addressing systemic racism and achieving reconciliation.

This country, in many ways, just can’t get it right.

After 154 years, Ottawa has yet to appoint a First Nations person to the nation’s highest court — worse, the Liberals erected another hurdle in 2016 by making bilingualism a requirement.

They didn’t mean Cree and English.

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