tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/trc-28321/articles
TRC – The Conversation
2023-07-02T09:17:26Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/207769
2023-07-02T09:17:26Z
2023-07-02T09:17:26Z
Zondo at Your Fingertips: new book offers an accessible and condensed version of South Africa’s ambitious corruption inquiry
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534104/original/file-20230626-25-j2fluj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">President Ramaphosa, right, receives the final report of the State Capture Commission from Judge Zondo in 2020. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">GCIS</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Anti-corruption activist <a href="https://shadowworldinvestigations.org/team_member/paul-holden/">Paul Holden</a> has done South Africa a great favour by summarising the work of the judicial commission that probed massive corruption under former president Jacob Zuma. No one except academics will read the commission’s 4,750 page report, but many will read Holden’s book, <a href="https://jacana.co.za/product/zondo-at-your-fingertips/">Zondo at your Fingertips</a>.</p>
<p>Holden is a former director of investigations at <a href="https://www.corruptionwatch.org.za/">Corruption Watch</a>, the South African corruption watchdog. He has worked with the investigative organisations <a href="https://shadowworldinvestigations.org/">Shadow World</a> and <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org.za/">Open Secrets</a> for many years. He seeks to expose how corrupt individuals, aided by auditors and banks, not only looted the state but came to control it and pervert it into a kleptocracy.</p>
<p>The author, who has also lived in the UK, tells us that the Zondo commission was globally unique:</p>
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<p>There are only a handful of examples of any state or quasi-judicial inquiry being given the task and resources to delve so deeply into the corruption of the ruling party … something like the scale, importance and independence of the Zondo Commission could never happen in the United Kingdom. </p>
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<p>Holden has written a good and solid book, selecting and explaining the significant Zondo findings. It is useful for South Africans in getting a grasp of the commission’s report. Overall, this book is recommended for your bookshelf and every library.</p>
<p>If South Africans are lucky, the multi-volume report will be read through by prosecutors, who have the power to formulate charges and get the courts to issue warrants of arrest.</p>
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<img alt="Book cover with the words: Zondo at your fingertips" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532714/original/file-20230619-23-7kewfk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532714/original/file-20230619-23-7kewfk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532714/original/file-20230619-23-7kewfk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532714/original/file-20230619-23-7kewfk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532714/original/file-20230619-23-7kewfk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532714/original/file-20230619-23-7kewfk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532714/original/file-20230619-23-7kewfk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>But the historical odds are stacked against this. The country has had over a dozen big commissions of inquiry. Not many people landed up in jail as a consequence. </p>
<h2>How the story is told</h2>
<p>Holden starts by telling us that the commission, headed by then deputy chief justice <a href="https://www.concourt.org.za/index.php/13-current-judges/72-deputy-chief-justice-ray-zondo">Raymond Zondo</a>, heard 1,731,106 pages of documentary evidence, which it summarised in a transcript of 75,099 pages. The commission’s 19-volume report totals 4,750 pages. It heard 300 witnesses over 400 days of hearings, spread over four and a half years between 2018 and 2021. </p>
<p>Only the report of the <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/">Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a>, which probed human rights abuses by both the apartheid regime and the liberation movement during the struggle for freedom in South Africa, has been comparable in <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/">length and scope</a>. It sat from 1996 and submitted its <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Truth-and-Reconciliation-Commission-South-Africa">final report in October 2003</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-democracy-or-a-kleptocracy-how-south-africa-stacks-up-111101">A democracy or a kleptocracy? How South Africa stacks up</a>
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<p>The book is well structured in 10 parts. These include a chapter on the capture of state institutions such as the South African Revenue Service, the capture of state-owned enterprises such as South African Airways, the failures of the president, the African National Congress, and parliament, and a chapter on what money went where.</p>
<h2>Commissions of inquiry</h2>
<p>The most ambitious commission of inquiry set up in South Africa was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Set up in 1996 after the end of apartheid, it offered amnesty in exchange for information about atrocities.</p>
<p>No one who refused to apply for amnesty, or whose amnesty application was refused by the commission, was in fact prosecuted. A quarter of a century lapsed before the families of some detainees who’d been tortured to death found pro bono lawyers who <a href="https://www.newframe.com/long-read-the-unfinished-business-of-the-trc/">instituted the reopening of inquests and other litigation</a> – with zero support from the government.</p>
<p>The great majority of the recommendations of commissions of inquiry, such as the <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/comm-mrk/docs/20150710-gg38978_gen699_3_MarikanaReport.pdf">Farlam Commission</a> into the massacre of striking miners and other killings at Marikana, North West province in 2012, remain unimplemented and ignored by the government. Sceptics argue that commissions of inquiry merely provide governments with a pretext to <a href="https://www.enca.com/opinion/parking-hot-potato-are-commissions-inquiry-ineffective">stall any remedial actions for years</a>, until the politics of the front page has moved onto other issues.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-has-a-new-chief-justice-an-introduction-to-raymond-zondo-179315">South Africa has a new Chief Justice: an introduction to Raymond Zondo</a>
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<p>Holden notes that Judge Zondo ordered the government to lay charges with the police against Dudu Myeni, former chair of South African Airways, for revealing the identity of a witness. But no arrest or prosecution has yet occurred. Likewise, the commission’s recommendations to the <a href="https://lpc.org.za/">Legal Practice Council</a>, to explore whether certain lawyers who enabled corruption should be struck off the roll, and to the auditors’ regulatory entity, to do the same with some auditors, have not yet resulted in action.</p>
<p>However, the author concludes, on the positive side, the <a href="https://www.npa.gov.za/asset-forfeiture-unit#:%7E:text=Empowered%20by%20the%20Prevention%20of,the%20private%20and%20public%20sector.">Asset Forfeiture Unit</a>, which is empowered to seize assets which are the proceeds of crime, successfully froze the Optimum coal mine to prevent it being sold on to cronies of the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48980964">Guptas</a>, the Indian family accused of orchestrating mass corruption in South Africa. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.siu.org.za/">Special Investigating Unit</a> took up numerous cases against multinational companies to recoup state funds and got billions of rand refunded. The <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/news/investigative-directorate-move-npa-says-president">Investigative Directorate</a> of the <a href="https://www.npa.gov.za/">National Prosecuting Authority</a> made numerous arrests; prosecutions are pending.</p>
<h2>Recommendations</h2>
<p>Holden notes that the Zondo Commission made a number of recommendations. Key among these are to professionalise all appointments to the boards of state-owned enterprises, and prevent cabinet ministers from appointing political cronies and other unqualified or compromised persons. The same applies to <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-has-a-plan-to-make-its-public-service-professional-its-time-to-act-on-it-187706">professionalising civil service</a>, provincial, and municipal procurement officials.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/whistleblowers-are-key-to-fighting-corruption-in-south-africa-it-shouldnt-be-at-their-peril-168134">Whistleblowers are key to fighting corruption in South Africa. It shouldn't be at their peril</a>
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<p>Holden also summarises the commission’s enhanced proposed protection for whistle blowers, and to grant them compensation for losses they suffered. He notes that Zondo also flagged the deployment of party loyalists to key state positions as a violation of the constitution’s section 197 (3).</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207769/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keith Gottschalk is a member of the ANC, but writes this review in his professional capacity as a political scientist.</span></em></p>
The Zondo Commission was globally unique in scope and scale. The book selects and explains its key findings and recommendations.
Keith Gottschalk, Political Scientist, University of the Western Cape
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/196774
2023-01-11T20:27:11Z
2023-01-11T20:27:11Z
Residential school system recognized as genocide in Canada’s House of Commons: A harbinger of change
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503879/original/file-20230110-11-l4i24f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C10%2C538%2C390&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A rare photo from an Indian Residential School in Fort Resolution, N.W.T. These systems have been labeled a form of genocide by the Canadian House of Commons. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Department of Mines and Technical Surveys/Library and Archives Canada)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/residential-school-system-recognized-as-genocide-in-canada-s-house-of-commons--a-harbinger-of-change" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>In a historic move, Canada’s House of Commons <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/house-motion-recognize-genocide-1.6632450">unanimously recognized</a> the Indian Residential School System (IRS) as genocide on Oct. 27, 2022. </p>
<p>The resolution builds on the 2015 contribution of the <a href="https://nctr.ca/">Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada</a>. The commission was <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/five-reasons-the-trc-chose-cultural-genocide/article25311423/">barred</a> from using the term genocide for legal reasons and instead called the practice cultural genocide. </p>
<p>The recent motion was introduced by member of Parliament Leah Gazan. The move follows <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/pope-address-maskwacis-alberta-1.6531231">Pope Francis’s acknowledgement</a> during his visit to Canada of the ongoing trauma and damage done by residential schools to Indigenous communities. </p>
<p>It’s possible that <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/pope-francis-residential-schools-genocide-1.6537203">the Pope’s reference to the Indian Residential Schools as genocide</a> swayed some members of Parliament to agree to this new resolution because this was the second time the concept was introduced to the House. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/i-survived-the-60s-scoop-heres-why-the-popes-apology-isnt-an-apology-at-all-187681">I survived the ’60s Scoop. Here's why the Pope's apology isn't an apology at all</a>
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<img alt="Profile of MP Gazan in front of Canadian flag." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503317/original/file-20230105-14-hc5tkw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=289%2C22%2C4657%2C3255&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503317/original/file-20230105-14-hc5tkw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503317/original/file-20230105-14-hc5tkw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503317/original/file-20230105-14-hc5tkw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503317/original/file-20230105-14-hc5tkw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503317/original/file-20230105-14-hc5tkw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503317/original/file-20230105-14-hc5tkw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">MP Leah Gazan introduced the motion in the House of Commons.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Spencer Colby</span></span>
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<p>Gazan’s motion says that in the opinion of the House of Commons, Canada’s residential school system violated Article 2 of <a href="https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf">the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide</a>. Article 2 explains that for something to be considered genocide, an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…” must be evident.</p>
<p>Although Canada’s resolution is non-legally binding, the motion helps Canadians reconceptualize the Indian Residential School system. </p>
<p>Now, genocide can be used to describe the residential schools without the qualifying adjective or disclaimer that it is “only” cultural. This change is beyond a mere alteration of words. For both Canada and the world, it is a significant and consequential change. </p>
<h2>International debates: the Genocide Convention</h2>
<p>The scope of genocide is an <a href="https://doi.org/10.7202/1038713ar">ongoing debate</a> in international law. The current international definition has been reproduced in numerous international statutes, including the <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf">Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court</a>.</p>
<p>The word genocide was created following the Second World War by the legal scholar, <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/ceu/9486-lemkin-raphael.html">Raphael Lemkin</a>, to describe the destruction of a nation or ethnic group through various means. </p>
<p>The Convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group by five acts: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a) Killing members of the group,<br>
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,<br>
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,<br>
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and<br>
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. </p>
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<p>Typically, during debates on the Genocide Convention, items (a) to (c) of the definition are designated elements of physical genocide, while (d) and (e) are identified as biological genocide. This excludes cultural elements and restricts its scope to physical and biological genocide. </p>
<p>These debates on the scope of the Genocide Convention highlight differing views regarding <a href="https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/611058?ln=en">physical, biological and cultural actions</a> intended to terminate a group. Physical genocide is killing or serious injury to a targeted group. Biological genocide is destroying a group’s reproductive capacity. Cultural genocide is destroying a group’s specific characteristics. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503319/original/file-20230105-20-vwir44.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/503319/original/file-20230105-20-vwir44.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503319/original/file-20230105-20-vwir44.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503319/original/file-20230105-20-vwir44.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503319/original/file-20230105-20-vwir44.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503319/original/file-20230105-20-vwir44.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/503319/original/file-20230105-20-vwir44.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Pope Francis acknowledged the trauma of the IRS during his papal visit to Canada. Here, he watches a dance in Iqaluit.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette</span></span>
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<p>However, a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chy025">critical look</a> at the Genocide Convention reveals an element of cultural genocide. </p>
<p>Recognizing cultural genocide within the scope of the Genocide Convention acknowledges that cultural, physical and biological genocide all lead to groups’ <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3811037">social death</a> — what the Genocide Convention attempts to prevent. </p>
<h2>The Genocide Convention and Canada</h2>
<p>The House of Commons’ acceptance of the term genocide supports arguments that what is dominantly conceived as cultural genocide falls within the scope of the Genocide Convention. This now raises new questions about how that interpretation may be applied to Canadian cases. </p>
<p>The House of Commons resolution also indicates new perceptions of old colonial beliefs and emphasizes harms caused by residential schools. </p>
<p>In 1948, at the time of passing the Genocide Convention, the colonial practice to culturally destroy and “civilize natives” was not publicly discouraged. And <a href="https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-threatened-to-abandon-1948-accord-if-un-didnt-remove-cultural-genocide-ban-records-reveal">Canada successfully campaigned against the use of the term “cultural genocide”</a> during discussions on the Convention. </p>
<p>This type of challenge, led by MP Gazan, to these old colonial beliefs and systems is one of many steps that can help lead to massive changes. Old colonial practices and beliefs still abound in <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/book/26823">literature</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590600780011">international law</a>. There is much work to be done. For example, in Canada, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/what-is-a-hate-crime-1.1011612">section 318</a> of Canada’s <a href="https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/page-42.html#h-121176">Criminal Code</a> on hate crime restricts genocide to physical and biological destruction. </p>
<h2>Impact of resolution</h2>
<p>The House of Commons’ recognition of the residential school system as “genocide” within the scope of the Genocide Convention supports viewing cultural genocide as genocide. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/canadas-hypocrisy-recognizing-genocide-except-its-own-against-indigenous-peoples-162128">Canada's hypocrisy: Recognizing genocide except its own against Indigenous peoples</a>
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<p>By doing away with “culture” in describing the IRS, the Canadian House of Commons has now recognized cultural destruction as a possible means of genocide. </p>
<p>Following the path of the House of Commons, individuals may now legitimately refer to the residential school system as genocide. The resolution would also likely <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/boarding-homes-class-action-settlement-1.6702587">impact future negotiations and cases</a> to compensate victims of the IRS.</p>
<p>This resolution may not have any current implication legally in an international court of law. But it represents a shift in the way we think about our history and may affect future international jurisprudence.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504104/original/file-20230111-46330-9gl7i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/504104/original/file-20230111-46330-9gl7i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=200&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504104/original/file-20230111-46330-9gl7i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=200&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504104/original/file-20230111-46330-9gl7i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=200&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504104/original/file-20230111-46330-9gl7i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=251&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504104/original/file-20230111-46330-9gl7i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=251&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/504104/original/file-20230111-46330-9gl7i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=251&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.meetview.ca/sshrc20230120/">Click here to register for In Conversation With Cindy Blackstock</a></span>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Temitayo Olarewaju is a recipient of the Law Foundation of British Columbia Graduate Fellowship and a Graduate Fellow at the W Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics.
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Canada’s recent resolution to label the Indian Residential School system as genocide (and not cultural genocide) is not a mere alteration of words, it is a significant and consequential change.
Temitayo Olarewaju, PhD Candidate, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/181494
2022-05-05T16:42:00Z
2022-05-05T16:42:00Z
Antjie Krog and the role of the poet in South Africa’s public life
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461543/original/file-20220505-16-qp84fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Antjie Krog from a detail of the cover for the book 'n Vry vrou (a free woman).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Human & Rousseau</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When South African writer <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/antjie-krog">Antjie Krog</a> was just 17, she wrote a poem for her school magazine which was shocking enough to upset Kroonstad High’s parents. The furore caught the attention of the Sunday newspapers, who descended on the town in the Free State province. </p>
<p>The 17-year-old had expressed the desire to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>build myself a land/where skin colour doesn’t count/only the inner brand/of self; where no goat face in parliament/can keep things permanently verkrampt/where I can love you,/can lie beside you in the grass/without saying ‘I do’/where black and white hand in hand/can bring peace and love/to my beautiful land.“ (Translated from Afrikaans <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/book/change-tongue/9781770220751">by Krog</a>.) </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In South Africa in 1970, the minority white government’s apartheid policy spurned "racial” mixing and prohibited sexual relations between black and white. The poem attacked Afrikaner conservatives (verkrampt means cramped, but also a political designation). </p>
<p>Die Beeld newspaper repeated the entire poem and consulted <a href="http://www.stellenboschwriters.com/vheerdene.html">Dr Ernst van der Heerden</a>, poet and head of Afrikaans and Nederlands at Wits University, about whether it had value. His opinion was that Krog’s work was like that of famed poets <a href="http://www.stellenboschwriters.com/breyten.html">Breyten Breytenbach</a> and <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/opperman-diederik-johannes-1914-1985">DJ Opperman</a>. More press descended, the poem was published again (in English in the Rand Daily Mail). Her mother got involved in defending her writing. The poem appeared in the African National Congress (ANC) publication Sechaba (the ANC, now the country’s governing party, was then a liberation movement in exile). Her father was summonsed by the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Afrikaner-Broederbond">Broederbond</a> (a powerful and secretive patriarchal Afrikaans nationalist society), to explain how this could have happened. </p>
<p>This rapid set of events led to the publication of her first volume of poetry – <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Dogter_van_Jefta.html?id=We81kgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Dogter van Jefta</a> (Daughter of Jephthah) – but without the offending poem appearing in it.</p>
<p>That tale holds all the ingredients of Krog’s unfolding trajectory as a South African voice: an uncompromising stance about her own experiences and thoughts and a courage to say them out loud, the instant attention of the press and literary fraternity, and a curious and appreciative audience.</p>
<p>This year Antjie Krog turns 70 and her passions and commitments, forged in the 1970s, show no waning. For decades she has represented the important role that a poet can play in public life in a fractured country.</p>
<h2>Two audiences</h2>
<p>With Dogter van Jefta, Krog was immediately set on a path to become a serious poet, a writer mentored by Opperman and able to produce volume after volume with the assurance that thousands would buy them. But the appearance of the poem in Sechaba and the London Observer gave Krog another audience, invisible and silent for many years until the liberation movements were unbanned and the ANC returned to South Africa. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461557/original/file-20220505-11-tssf15.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An earnest woman looks over her shoulder, round glasses on." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461557/original/file-20220505-11-tssf15.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461557/original/file-20220505-11-tssf15.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461557/original/file-20220505-11-tssf15.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461557/original/file-20220505-11-tssf15.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461557/original/file-20220505-11-tssf15.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461557/original/file-20220505-11-tssf15.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461557/original/file-20220505-11-tssf15.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Krog in 2006.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MARK WESSELS/AFP via Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At a rally in Soweto in 1989 ANC cadre <a href="https://theconversation.com/ahmed-kathrada-a-simple-life-full-of-love-after-26-years-of-incarceration-75361">Ahmed Kathrada</a>, newly released from jail, quoted Krog’s poem written when she was 17. How had he got his hands on it in prison on Robben Island? He thought it might have been in a magazine. It had so touched him he’d written it out by hand and kept it.</p>
<p>So Krog had become a recognised poet within South Africa, but also a voice of dissent and hope for those in prison and in exile. The two hallmarks of the poem, aesthetic-poetic and personal-political, and their entanglement, have since marked all Krog’s work as she has moved beyond poetry into journalism, into nonfiction book writing in English, and as she has taken up an academic post at the University of the Western Cape.</p>
<h2>The truth commission</h2>
<p>Krog had written book reviews for the press for some years before she became editor of the left-leaning Afrikaans magazine Die Suid-Afrikaan in 1993. But it was in 1995 when the public broadcaster’s radio team was gearing up to cover the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/truth-and-reconciliation-commission-trc-0">Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a> (TRC) that Krog stepped properly into news journalism. She became leader of the Afrikaans reporting team at the SABC. The TRC was a court-like restorative justice body that sought to reveal human rights abuses under apartheid, which had formally ended in 1994.</p>
<p>Bringing a poet sensibility to journalism, Krog pushed the boundaries of radio reporting. She insisted that the voices and sounds of those affected be foregrounded in the listener’s ear. Journalist Hanlie Retief called her </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a disturbing conscience, an umbilical cord between the TRC and Afrikaans-speakers. She … let the often macabre testimonies sometimes wail, sometimes sing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The constraints of news journalism irked Krog. In a great outpouring of energy she produced a nonfiction book in English which described the experiences of reporting the TRC, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/95875/country-of-my-skull-by-antjie-krog-introduction-by-charlayne-hunter-gault/">Country of My Skull</a>. The book also told the powerful stories of victims and their families. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WNamu1Njkzc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>It was this book with its blend of reportage, memoir, poetry and fiction that propelled Krog onto an international stage. Hundreds of invitations were made to talk at conferences and the book became incorporated into university courses all over the world. The book’s power lies in the rawness of her experiences and unflinching descriptions, coupled with a worldwide attention to commissions of inquiry into past atrocities. </p>
<h2>How South Africans speak to each other</h2>
<p>Two more books followed as Krog took on creative nonfiction, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/book/change-tongue/9781770220751">A Change of Tongue</a> and <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/book/begging-be-black/9781770220706">Begging to be Black</a>. Working in both English and Afrikaans, she did her own translations and brought out more poetry, like <a href="http://penguin.bookslive.co.za/blog/2011/02/01/podcast-antjie-krogs-reads-body-bereft-verweefskrif/">Body Bereft/Verweeskrif</a> in 2006.</p>
<p>Using this facility in both languages, she also leaned on her experience during the 1980s, at anti-apartheid rallies with poets reading in other African languages. She ventured into writing that worked in the spaces between translation, into the somewhat untranslatable. The notable book, <a href="https://www.ukznpress.co.za/?class=bb_ukzn_books&method=view_books&global%5Bfields%5D%5B_id%5D=333">There was this Goat</a>, co-written with Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele, took on a TRC testimony that had elements of the fantastic and bizarre. </p>
<p>Krog was present during the testimony and had read the official translation but was dissatisfied with it. She, Mpolweni and Ratele worked on a retranslation. She had developed a preoccupation with how South Africans speak to each other, with how they listen and what they hear. As the authors write: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We became aware of the barriers we have to overcome, as well as the lengths we have to go to, in order to arrive at some understanding of our fellow human beings.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This project has become Krog’s university work. Although earlier she had embarked on translation and transcription projects, they were of her own writing or forays into older work in indigenous languages. Some were commissions, like the translation of former president <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/biography">Nelson Mandela</a>’s autobiography <a href="https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/nelson-mandela/long-walk-to-freedom/9780759521049/">Long Walk to Freedom</a> into Afrikaans. Now she works with a team selecting key historical texts, usually in a single African language, which are then translated into many South African tongues.</p>
<p>Krog has been busy with the same work since she was 17: using all her literary devices to get South Africans to see and listen to each other. In my <a href="https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10539/7957/Anthea%2520Garman%2520PhD%2520Thesis%25202009.pdf?sequence=1">doctoral thesis</a> and my <a href="https://www.ukznpress.co.za/?class=bb_ukzn_books&method=view_books&global%5Bfields%5D%5B_id%5D=464">book</a> on Krog, I summed up the role I see her playing in South African public life. It’s to affirm the literary as a resource for social and political life, bringing the personal into the political by asserting its messy, emotional and passionate dimensions, and by insisting on the very great value of open-hearted encounters with others.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181494/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anthea Garman receives funding from the National Research Foundation. She is affiliated with the South African National Editors' Forum.</span></em></p>
The famous writer turns 70 this year. She is driven by how South Africans see and hear one another.
Anthea Garman, Professor of Journalism and Media Studies, Rhodes University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/170655
2021-11-03T14:46:25Z
2021-11-03T14:46:25Z
A hitman’s confessions expose brutality of white supremacists who served apartheid
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429698/original/file-20211102-25-1i1k8co.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Winnie Mandela was among key targets for disinformation by apartheid police</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mujahid Safodien/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A raft of confessions have been published in the past three decades chronicling the stories of white men in uniform who plied their trade as apartheid heavies and enforcers. The brutality they dispensed – killings, assassinations, torture, beatings – also came to light in two commissions: the <a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02039/04lv02046/05lv02047/06lv02049/07lv02062.htm">Goldstone Commission</a>, which exposed the a dirty tricks campaign of the apartheid-era South African Defence Force to forment violence in black townships in the 1990s; and the <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/">Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)</a>, which was established to help South Africa deal with its violent past.</p>
<p>A new book, <a href="https://jacana.co.za/product/confessions-of-a-stratcom-hitman/">Confessions of a StratCom Hitman</a>, has been written by Paul Erasmus who left the police in 1993. He served during the most brutal years of the apartheid regime, and prior to the book had already testified <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/1995-06-30-the-dirty-tricks-campaign-to-trash-winnie/">to the Goldstone Commission</a>, and the <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans/2000/201127jb.htm">Truth and Reconciliation Commission </a>.</p>
<p>His book is nevertheless a welcome addition because it covers a raft of new revelations. </p>
<p>These relate to both the <a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv03446/05lv03497.htm">Special Branch</a>, the notorious police unit that targeted anti-apartheid activists; and <a href="https://ewn.co.za/2020/04/27/stratcom-what-it-actually-was-and-means">Stratcom</a>, the strategic communications section of the <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/161023">National Security Management System</a>. This entity clustered various government departments under brigadiers or other military officers.</p>
<p>One theme of interest is the revelation that the rise of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/afrikaner-weerstandsbeweging-awb">Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging (AWB)</a>, a racist militia of far right-wing Afrikaner nationalists, from 1987 caused serious schisms in both the Special Branch – which led to factionalism and some police refusing orders to fire on AWB members attacking others – and in the uniform and detective (CID) branches of the police force.</p>
<p>The rise of the right-wing faction led to the police force being split into two camps – those with more extreme rightwing views and those with marginally less radical views who supported the ruling <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/national-party-np">National Party</a>.</p>
<p>This was significant because it led to some police refusing orders to fire on Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging members who were committing crimes.</p>
<p>Stratcom routinely fabricated smears against Winnie Mandela, for instance claiming that she smoked marijuana and was an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu1YXC2npdg">alcoholic</a>.</p>
<p>The book is also a useful reminder of how the Special Branch’s white racism was buttressed by anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism and homophobia. One Stratcom project – Project Epic. (p.192) – was devoted to indoctrination against Catholicism. Erasmus intriguingly names, without any details, a Project Drama, proposed to destabilise the government that would be elected when apartheid ended in 1994. (p.191)</p>
<p>This tells both about the failed ambitions of the state security apparatus under apartheid, and confirms what is known about the brutality of the period.</p>
<h2>Antagonism in the ranks</h2>
<p>Erasmus writes about how shabbily the apartheid regime treated its own staff. Salaries were appallingly low. And the police financiers often refused to refund him for overseas phone calls made on official duty. </p>
<p>This may be the first book to expose the extent of antagonism between the Special Branch and the uniformed and detectives branches of the apartheid-era South African Police, and antagonistic office politics within the Special Branch. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429352/original/file-20211029-27-1kf6dg3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429352/original/file-20211029-27-1kf6dg3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429352/original/file-20211029-27-1kf6dg3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429352/original/file-20211029-27-1kf6dg3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429352/original/file-20211029-27-1kf6dg3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1197&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429352/original/file-20211029-27-1kf6dg3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1197&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429352/original/file-20211029-27-1kf6dg3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1197&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>South African Police officers of the uniform branch regarded the Special Branch as either “glory-seekers” or “arse creepers” (p. 13). The unit’s members on the ninth and tenth floors of the notorious <a href="https://www.saha.org.za/publications/between_life_and_death.htm">John Vorster Square</a> police station nicknamed a Major Arthur Cronwright “little Hitler”. (p. 68). John Vorster Square was the biggest police headquarters in Johannesburg, then as now the largest South African city.</p>
<p>But I am sceptical of Erasmus’ claim that the Special Branch was shocked by the assassination of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/richard-albert-turner">Rick Turner</a>. The political philosopher and anti-apartheid activist was shot as he opened his front door in 1978. Erasmus argues that he didn’t believe that the security forces killed white people. </p>
<p>But he contradicts himself by writing how a superior ranking officer ordered him to murder a released white convict, (p.101) and a Special Branch major ordered him to shoot a police station commander because he was giving his son, a new constable, a hard time. (pp. 154,167)</p>
<h2>Murder, prejudice and unconscious ironies</h2>
<p>Confessions of a StratCom Hitman usefully also provides evidence of a Special Branch culture preferring casual lawlessness to prosecutions or legal repression. It is striking how a Special Branch major demanded his subordinates “fuck up” University of the Witwatersrand politics professor <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/tom-lodge-1256885">Tom Lodge</a>, (p. 99) when he never ordered Lodge’s deportation or banning. Lodge currently lives in the UK. </p>
<p>Erasmus also reveals the line of command on parcel bombs. These were used to assassinate leading South African activists who had fled abroad. He writes that every parcel bomb required individual permission from the Minister of Police. (p.18). These included those that killed <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/ruth-heloise-first">Ruth First</a>, a communist intellectual and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/jeanette-eva-schoon-nee-curtis">Jenny Curtis</a>, a former leader of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students. </p>
<p>His memories of a tour of duty in Ovamboland, Namibia, include discovering that a gay conscript complained to a policeman about repeated rapes by South African Defence Force officers, and South African Air Force helicopter gunships machine-gunning elephants to poach their ivory. (p.158)</p>
<p>Equally interesting is the author’s memories of an academic from the International Relations Department of the University of the Witwatersrand more than once lecturing Stratcom and the Special Branch members. The liberal open universities had a diversity of academics, and included some hard-line participants in both the censorship board, and the support to the police unit revealed here.</p>
<p>One interesting topic is apartheid South Africa’s foreign policy. The Special Branch vetted all personnel who applied for jobs in the civil service and parastatals. It also vetted all South African job applicants to the Israeli airline El Al. (p.34)</p>
<p>Erasmus is determined to expose the National Party’s abuse of the Special Branch and Stratcom for its party political purposes particularly between 1990-1993 when negotiations were underway to end apartheid. </p>
<p>Projects and operations included one to form a new political party, ideologically positioned between the National Party (NP) and the Democratic Party (today’s Democratic Alliance) with the aim of winning the first democratic elections in 1994. (p.103) Erasmus calls this abuse as it would be using taxpayers money to fund a political party, and the NP was simultaneously negotiating with the ANC over the transition to democracy.</p>
<p>During 1991, when the end of apartheid seemed imminent, the Special Branch shredded 185,000 files on people and organisations. (p.110) </p>
<p>Perhaps these dated all the way back to the founding of the notorious police unit by <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/general-jan-christiaan-smuts">Prime Minister Jan Smut</a>’s government in 1947?</p>
<p>Erasmus writes that his work and what he witnessed caused him depression, nightmares, heavy drinking, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the loss of 49 kgs in weight. He estimates he committed 500 crimes during 80 incidents. (p.221) </p>
<p>The author died earlier this year, aged 65: these revelations are among his legacy for South Africans to learn from.</p>
<p><em>Confessions of a StratCom Hitman is published by <a href="https://jacana.co.za/product/confessions-of-a-stratcom-hitman/">Jacana</a></em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/170655/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keith Gottschalk is a member of the ANC, but writes this review in his professional capacity as a political scientist.</span></em></p>
A secret plan to destabilise the new democratic government reveals the failed ambitions of the apartheid state security apparatus and confirms what is known about the brutality of the period.
Keith Gottschalk, Political Scientist, University of the Western Cape
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/163415
2021-08-19T13:55:12Z
2021-08-19T13:55:12Z
Indian Residential School findings: How diverse Indigenous communities deal with grief and healing
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414859/original/file-20210805-13-vamcse.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=78%2C17%2C5742%2C3918&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">People stand on Parliament Hill alongside a memorial for children who died at Indian Residential Schools. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The recent “discoveries” of <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/unmarked-graves-found-canadian-former-residential-school-sites-2021-07-06/">unmarked graves of children at the sites of former Indian Residential Schools (IRS)</a> is a stark reminder of an unspoken or ignored history between Indigenous Peoples and Canada.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/truth-before-reconciliation-8-ways-to-identify-and-confront-residential-school-denialism-164692">Truth before reconciliation: 8 ways to identify and confront Residential School denialism</a>
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<p>The reactions by many Canadians to these events is a strong indicator that despite all of the heightened awareness of the residential school system, there is little understanding how these institutions affected communities and families. </p>
<p>Often relying on assumptions and stereotypes, some Canadians show little effort to learn about the different perspectives and experiences held by Indigenous people. This encourages many non-Indigenous people to support measures they believe have the approval of all Indigenous people. But communities are not monolithic; different opinions and experiences exist. </p>
<h2>From the Bryce Report to RCAP</h2>
<p>The findings outlined in <a href="http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Honouring_the_Truth_Reconciling_for_the_Future_July_23_2015.pdf">the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) 2015 Final Report</a> <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/truth-and-reconciliation-canadians-see-value-in-report-skeptical-government-will-act-1.3144271">shocked Canada</a>. For many, this was the first time that they heard of this truth, despite previous reports that flagged the horrors of residential schools. </p>
<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/reportonindiansc00bryc">The Bryce Report from 1907</a> spoke about the harsh realities of IRS, and the <a href="https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/royal-commission-aboriginal-peoples/Pages/final-report.aspx">Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples</a> from 1996 called IRS: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“… an attempt by successive governments to determine the fate of Aboriginal people in Canada by appropriating and reshaping their future in the form of thousands of children who were removed from their homes and communities …” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 2015, TRC commissioner Marie Wilson declared that, “It is the survivors’ telling of their stolen childhoods that has shaken us all awake.” </p>
<h2>A different awakening</h2>
<p>Today, there is a different awakening and it’s happening in Indigenous circles. It is a realization of lives and futures lost. It is a resurgence of pain and grief experienced by families and communities that <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7996606/cranbrook-residential-school-graves-chief/">knew of these unmarked graves</a>. </p>
<p>It is a <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7910218/residential-schools-catholic-church-apology/">rekindling of anger toward religious entities</a>, specifically the Catholic Church, that had a role in running these schools. And it is an unveiling of the complicated dynamics within communities, especially those with members who are part of the church. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Ashes and debris are all that remains after a fire at a church in Saskatchewan. Debris with sunset in the background" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414863/original/file-20210805-27-fmae9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/414863/original/file-20210805-27-fmae9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414863/original/file-20210805-27-fmae9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414863/original/file-20210805-27-fmae9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414863/original/file-20210805-27-fmae9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414863/original/file-20210805-27-fmae9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/414863/original/file-20210805-27-fmae9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ashes and debris is all that remains after a fire at the former Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church near Orolow, Sask., in July 2021.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kayle Neis</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>As someone who grew up in the Catholic tradition in Kahnawake, Que., and now teaches in a theological school, there’s an inner conflict as I reflect on being part of a faith tradition that contributed to a process that caused such pain. </p>
<p>There are many Indigenous people who believe Indigenous people should not be Christians, furthering tensions. Instead of coming together, communities are becoming divided — some want to react and take action, while others want to deal and heal privately. </p>
<p>I recognize the anger toward the church, but struggle with some of the reactions, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8urq5GWvn1Q">such as the burning of buildings</a>. In response Indigenous leaders, such as former Assembly of First Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde, <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7996421/canada-church-burning-indigenous-leaders-reactions/">have called for communities to find a better way</a>. </p>
<h2>Lasting impacts and a path towards healing</h2>
<p>Although there has been a growing awareness and eagerness to learn, I believe that many non-Indigenous people don’t have the in-depth, community understanding to know that IRS legacy, findings and lasting colonialism can incite various impacts and reactions from Indigenous people.</p>
<p>Many institutions, such as schools and churches, have Indigenous people within them who are trying to address these impacts and make change. The work is slow and doesn’t always produce immediate transformation. So an action, such as <a href="https://www.cp24.com/news/egerton-ryerson-s-statue-brought-down-following-demonstration-1.5458599?cache=%2F7.304539">tearing down a statue</a> or <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/not-in-solidarity-with-us-indigenous-leaders-call-for-church-arsons-to-stop-1.5497911">setting a church on fire</a>, may provide some sense of satisfaction, however that doesn’t change the systems that contribute to the current problems in many communities. Problems like <a href="https://theconversation.com/tip-of-the-iceberg-the-true-state-of-drinking-water-advisories-in-first-nations-156190">a lack of clean drinking water</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/as-an-indigenous-doctor-i-see-the-legacy-of-residential-schools-and-ongoing-racism-in-todays-health-care-162048">inequities within health</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/racism-contributes-to-poor-attendance-of-indigenous-students-in-alberta-schools-new-study-141922">education systems</a> and <a href="https://www.povertyinstitute.ca/poverty-canada">higher levels of poverty</a>. </p>
<p>One may ask: How do we proceed? A fair question. I look to Chief Cadmus Delorme from Cowessess First Nation, who offers these words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We all must put down our ignorance and accidental racism of not addressing the truth that this country has with Indigenous people. We are not asking for pity, but we are asking for understanding. We need time to heal and this country must stand by us.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Impulsive reactions will not provide any long-term solutions. It is time to move away from this way of dealing with issues and start by becoming more reflective, acknowledge that Indigenous communities and people aren’t monolithic, that we all heal, grieve and deal with tragedy differently. And to stand with us, Canadians must listen and understand, give time and space.</p>
<p><em>If you are an Indian Residential School survivor, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163415/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jonathan Hamilton-Diabo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Indigenous people and communities are not monolithic. How they react to and deal with tragedy will be different. Acknowledging that will help us all heal.
Jonathan Hamilton-Diabo, Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream, Theology) and Special Advisor on Indigenous Initiatives, Victoria University, University of Toronto
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/164524
2021-07-21T14:53:50Z
2021-07-21T14:53:50Z
After findings at Indian Residential Schools, settler Canadians shouldn’t hide behind the ‘gothic narrative’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411305/original/file-20210714-13-1rw6iqp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C0%2C4726%2C3101&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Firefighters walk past the remains of a Catholic church that was on fire, in Morinville, Alta. in June 2021.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The idea of <a href="https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/AAAA-Hamilton-Report-Illustrations-final.pdf">Canada as an expansive crime scene</a> is <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/arts/the-rise-of-indigenous-horror-how-a-fiction-genre-is-confronting-a-monstrous-reality-1.5323428">neither unfamiliar nor disorienting to Indigenous people</a>.</p>
<p>The use of <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ground-radar-technology-residential-school-remains-1.6049776">ground-penetrating radar to reveal unmarked graves</a> at or near the sites of former residential schools does what personal narratives of physical, emotional and sexual abuse at residential schools and <a href="http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf">94 Calls to Action</a> were <a href="https://yellowheadinstitute.org/trc/">seemingly not enough to do</a>. They confront the mainstream discourse of reconciliation with some tougher questions about criminal accountability, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/critics-blast-catholic-church-1.6086030">unpaid debts</a>, <a href="https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/17858045/tdest_id/1618577">settler-state legitimacy</a> and the nature of the ground we stand on.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/amid-more-shocking-residential-schools-discoveries-non-indigenous-people-must-take-action-161965">Amid more shocking residential schools discoveries, non-Indigenous people must take action</a>
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</em>
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<p>If the <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ndp-mps-call-for-investigation-into-crimes-against-indigenous-children/">possibility of prosecution</a> on the horizon is something that, up to this point, Canada has managed to render unthinkable, or at most <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/father-johannes-rivoire-charges-stayed-1.5021869">not in the public interest</a>, then what does it mean for <a href="https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/thames-valley-board-lowers-all-flags-to-mourn-residential-school-genocide">flags to be lowered as a demonstration of shared grief</a>? Or for ministers to promise support for “<a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ndp-mps-call-for-investigation-into-crimes-against-indigenous-children/">affected communities</a>” to “<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/15846451-survivor-recalls-kamloops-b.c.-residential-school-remains-children">get on with the healing</a>?”</p>
<p>The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final report, released six years ago, <a href="https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Volume_1_History_Part_1_English_Web.pdf">established that Canada’s federal government designed and orchestrated the institutionalized genocidal violence of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system</a>.</p>
<p>The location of unmarked graves today highlights some of the limitations of a TRC that did not have the power to subpoena witnesses or documents.</p>
<p>While a TRC working group called the <a href="http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Volume_4_Missing_Children_English_Web.pdf">Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project</a> was formed to research death, disease and disappearances and to collaborate with communities in the identification and commemoration of gravesites, in <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7907424/trc-mass-graves-residential-school-federal-funding/">2009 they asked the federal government for additional funds to carry out this work</a>, but the request was denied.</p>
<h2>The figure of a perpetrator</h2>
<p>As this country processes the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/08/canada-indigenous-children-deaths-residential-schools">findings of unmarked graves</a>, public discussion has sketched the figure of a perpetrator around the Catholic Church. It is not hard to see why this figure is taking shape.</p>
<p>It was a specific Catholic order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, <a href="https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/discovery-of-kamloops-residential-school-gravesite-like-getting-stabbed-in-the-heart/">that ran the Kamloops</a>, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/cowessess-graves-unmarked-residential-school-marieval-1.6077797">Marieval</a> and <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/penelakut-kuper-residential-school-1.6100201">Kuper Island</a> residential schools, several associated with recently located unmarked graves. </p>
<p>The Catholic Church ran more schools than any other single church denomination.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A statue of the late Pope John Paul II, standing at the Holy Rosary Catholic Church, has been vandalized with red paint splatter and handprints" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411304/original/file-20210714-13-1xnmnlp.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=525&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The defacing of a statue of Pope John Paul follows several other actions taken against Catholic churches in the wake of thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children, which were found on the grounds of various residential schools run by the church.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Rob Drinkwater</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is the unfulfilled <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/national-indigenous-leaders-papal-visit-1.6084245">call for a papal apology</a>, and the failure of Canadian Catholics to raise more than a fifth of the $25 million that was the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/critics-blast-catholic-church-1.6086030">Catholic Church’s share of the compensation</a> to be paid to IRS survivors. This commitment seems to have been abandoned on the basis of <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-archbishop-wont-commit-to-asking-pope-for-residential-school-apology/">decentralized church structure and poverty</a>, even though Canadian Catholics have been <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/catholic-buildings-fundraising-residential-school-survivors-1.6090650">raising millions for new buildings</a>.</p>
<p>The loophole of “best efforts” was written into the language of the <a href="https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100015576/1571581687074">Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement</a> (IRSSA). A <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/church-residential-school-compensation-1.6082935">supplementary part of the IRSSA</a> allowed the Catholic Church to pay some of its compensation to survivors in the form of “in-kind services,” such as counselling.</p>
<p>So, it’s not surprising that <a href="https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/faith/fire-destroys-catholic-church-north-of-edmonton-rcmp-say-blaze-suspicious-574740042.html">burning Catholic churches</a> dot the landscape of Canada, as if we’ve reached the conclusion of <a href="https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/10/18/brief-history-gothic-horror">some classic gothic novel</a> in which the villain is swept away in a fury of wind and fire.</p>
<p>The inferno seems a <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-monk-by-matthew-lewis">fitting end</a> for the criminally hypocritical.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/honour-those-found-at-residential-schools-by-respecting-the-human-rights-of-first-nations-children-today-163643">Honour those found at residential schools by respecting the human rights of First Nations children today</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In Ottawa (unceded Algonquin territory), an imposing monastery constructed by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1885 is the centrepiece of a 26-acre <a href="https://greystonevillage.ca/community/">redevelopment project called Greystone Village</a>.</p>
<p>The “Oblates Land” was sold to a developer <a href="https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674fugitive_oblate_priest_joannis_rivoire_must_be_extradited_activists_sa/">in 2014 for $32 million</a>. In 2000, <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/priests-ask-taxpayers-to-cover-cost-of-abuses/article4165651/">the order proposed</a> to transfer assets to the federal government in exchange for the government’s assumption of its liability in lawsuits by residential school survivors. That proposal was later replaced by the IRSSA, the terms of which the Catholic Church has failed to fulfil. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Construction on the former 'Oblates Land'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411539/original/file-20210715-25-h9k97j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Construction is underway on former ‘Oblates Land,’ which was purchased for $32 million instead of being handed over to the federal government.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Jennifer Henderson)</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Elements of gothic fiction</h2>
<p>But the current focus in <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pope-no-apology-residential-school-1.4596439">public culture on the Catholic Church</a> is conveniently narrow and <a href="https://meridian.allenpress.com/aicrj/article-abstract/42/4/43/212111/Residential-School-Gothic-and-Red-Power-Genre">almost intuitively familiar</a> in its reference to <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs">gothic narrative conventions</a> — perverse actors, imprisoning structures, a distant time, a culturally distant and <a href="https://doi.org/10.7202/011133ar">religious otherness</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7228/manchester/9781784992699.001.0001/upso-9781784992699-chapter-002">Secret burials are the stuff of gothic fiction</a>, but these gothic events actually happened, and in great numbers. Indigenous children were moved to sites of abuse, sadistic discipline and neglect. When the conventions of the gothic genre are deployed to tell the story of residential schools, they produce an inappropriate sense of events being both distant and past. Images of robed priests and church ruins are just too comfortable for many settler Canadians.</p>
<p>For those of us (settlers) implicated in Indigenous displacement and containment through our privileges, the gothic is also a reassuring projection. It wasn’t us; it was the Catholic other.</p>
<p>The gothic narrative about <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-monk-by-matthew-lewis">the moral corruption of the Catholic other</a> has a deep-seated familiarity for much of settler Canada. It is generically familiar and intuitively just-seeming — especially for white, Protestant or secular Canadians, like myself — in its channelling toward the Catholic Church of the complex sensations of horror, disgust, shame and anxiety provoked by the unmarked graves of children. </p>
<p>Taking shelter in this narrative does not have to be deliberate; the genre is a habit of mind — and a self-serving one.</p>
<h2>White capital and its expansion</h2>
<p>The IRS system was made real through a <a href="http://rschools.nan.on.ca/article/the-davin-report-1879-1120.asp">contracting-out arrangement</a>. The churches provided efficiencies: cheap labour and what the <a href="https://dev.nctr.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Davin-Report.pdf">Davin Report</a> called the necessary moral and <a href="http://rschools.nan.on.ca/article/the-notion-of-removal-1131.asp">ideological <em>zeal</em></a>.</p>
<p>These capacities were resourced, deliberately, by a settler-state in the service of white capital and its expansion. <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/#Tole">The Enlightenment principle </a> of the separation of church and state is a flexible thing, especially in the federal government’s delegation of the day-to-day running of IRS’s to those with <em>zeal</em> for the work.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A woman sits with her legs crossed surrounded by hundreds of children's shoes" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/411307/original/file-20210714-13-1xbipe0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jane Kigutaq, a kindergarten teacher from Arctic Bay now living in Ottawa, protests on Parliament Hill at a ‘Cancel Canada Day’ in response to the discovery of unmarked Indigenous graves at residential schools.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Patrick Doyle</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For many settlers, the feelings of outrage at the vile crimes of villains — <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-most-canadians-say-church-to-blame-for-residential-school-tragedies/">ready-made by a familiar narrative genre</a> — may shield more complex emotional knots and investments. Investments both emotional and material, in the land and resources of what we now call Canada. </p>
<p>The argument I am making here is about non-Indigenous reckoning with the mundane and normalized, as well as the truly gothic violence of settler-state institutions and <a href="https://thenarwhal.ca/to-understand-b-c-s-push-for-the-coastal-gaslink-pipeline-think-fracking-lng-canada-and-the-site-c-dam/">ongoing public-private collaborations</a> in Indigenous displacement.</p>
<p>This is not a defence of the Catholic Church in Canada. The <a href="https://nctr.ca/joint-statement-nctr-to-work-with-the-oblates-to-access-residential-school-records/">shielding of individuals, records</a> and funds must stop. But it is incumbent upon settlers not to take cover under the genre of the gothic, which the current focus on the Catholic Church offers. Some of those still-to-be found residential school records are about contracting-out arrangements; they have the hands of the representative institutions of settler Canadians all over them.</p>
<p>As residential schools were just one tool for clearing the land and <a href="https://theconversation.com/indigenous-land-defenders-dont-call-me-resilient-ep-6-transcript-156633">building wealth from its commodification</a>, this isn’t just about the historical wrongs of the Catholic Church or Indigenous Affairs or the state; it’s about the foundations of Canadian capital.</p>
<p><em>If you are an Indian Residential School survivor, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164524/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Henderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Secret burials are the stuff of gothic fiction, but these gothic events actually happened to Indigenous children.
Jennifer Henderson, Professor of Canadian Studies, Carleton University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/160663
2021-06-14T15:39:14Z
2021-06-14T15:39:14Z
Two years after the MMIWG report, targeted work must move urgently ahead
<p>It’s been two years since Canada released its years-in-the-making <a href="https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Executive_Summary.pdf">national inquiry and final report on the appalling reality of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG)</a>. </p>
<p>The report included background largely through voices of those affected, current status and recommendations — named as the <a href="https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Calls_for_Justice.pdf">231 Calls for Justice</a>. </p>
<p>Importantly, First Nations, Inuit and Métis women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people were included in the inquiry. </p>
<p>According to the report, there were close to 2,400 participants which included family members with direct impact, survivors, as well as expert witnesses, Elders and Knowledge Keepers. The input represented thousands of stories which pointed to, and was called out in the report through reference to international and Canadian law and expert scholarship, as undeniable acts of <a href="https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Supplementary-Report_Genocide.pdf">genocide against First Nations, Inuit and Métis women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people</a>. </p>
<p>Thousands have been lost in recent decades with an exact number escaping data as so many are left unreported, uninvestigated and unprosecuted. Although, the inquiry and report — and even setting out the Calls for Justice was a years-long endeavour — the MMIWG problem has been decades in the making and persistent, targeted work must move urgently ahead.</p>
<h2>Both sides of ‘the Medicine Line’</h2>
<p>Two years ago on June 10 2019, one week after the release of the report, a conference at the University of British Columbia’s First Nations Longhouse <a href="https://academic.ubc.ca/academic-community/news-announcements/news/event-murdered-and-missing-indigenous-women-and-girls">highlighted the MMIWG atrocities as occurring on both sides of “the Medicine Line,”</a> that is, in both the United States and Canada. </p>
<p>A distinguishing factor between the atrocities occurring in the two countries at the time report was released was that Canada played a role in commissioning the report, and had previously authorized the <a href="http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Honouring_the_Truth_Reconciling_for_the_Future_July_23_2015.pdf">Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and its resulting report</a>. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/reconciliation-requires-more-than-symbolic-gestures-101717">Reconciliation requires more than symbolic gestures</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<p>Both of these reports offered a national step towards naming the colonial harms to Indigenous people in what is now Canada, and outlining recommendations or calls for action and justice. </p>
<p>By contrast, in the U.S. there had been no successful federal legislation or national call for action in this area. </p>
<p>Now looking at what has changed in the two last years, there have been some interesting reversals.</p>
<h2>A national action plan announced</h2>
<p>In 2021 a national action plan, <a href="https://mmiwg2splus-nationalactionplan.ca/"><em>Ending Violence Against Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People</em></a> was released to help chart a path forward on the 231 Calls for Justice. </p>
<p>There is urgency as Indigenous females <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/07/canada-indigenous-women-and-girls-missing">are 12 times more likely to go missing or be murdered</a> than other groups with <a href="https://www.nwac.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Fact_Sheet_Missing_and_Murdered_Aboriginal_Women_and_Girls.pdf">even higher rates in the North</a>. </p>
<p>The national action plan involves, in part, immediate next steps which include: support services for survivors and family members; creating an oversight body; public awareness and training, all with continued involvement of families and survivors. It also outlines next steps around data and accountability.</p>
<h2>Calls need to be implemented</h2>
<p>However, the work is <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/7924432/mmiwg-action-plan-falls-short/">not moving forward fast enough</a> for some invested groups. The Native Women’s Association of Canada has put out its own plan — <a href="https://www.nwac.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NWAC-action-plan-FULL-ALL-EDITS.pdf"><em>Our Calls, Our Actions</em></a>. </p>
<p>They say, “It is time to wait no more. It is time to move away from state dependence to independence and self-determination. It is time.”</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-and-girls-an-epidemic-on-both-sides-of-the-medicine-line-118261">Missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls: An epidemic on both sides of the Medicine Line</a>
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<p>The final report calls on post-secondary institutions to educate the public about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and about the root causes of violence they experience. </p>
<p>At UBC, the MMIIWG report was incorporated along with the TRC and the <a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html">United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People</a> <a href="https://aboriginal-2018.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2020/09/UBC.ISP_C2V13.1_Spreads_Sept1.pdf">into the newly retooled Indigenous Strategic Plan</a>. </p>
<p>This is one example of a regional response to the national report.</p>
<h2>Not a new issue</h2>
<p>Recent news of the 215 children’s remains that were found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site ties in to the MMIWG inquiry. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/no-longer-the-disappeared-mourning-the-215-children-found-in-graves-at-kamloops-indian-residential-school-161782">No longer 'the disappeared': Mourning the 215 children found in graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School</a>
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<p>The inquiry noted that, “between 1883 and 1996, the Indian Residential School system enforced a patriarchal Christian dogma that devalued women, enforced homophobia and transphobia, and exposed them to abuse that made them easy targets for abuse from others.” </p>
<p>Presumably, many of the children’s remains found at the site would be girls who have been missing for decades. </p>
<p>It has to be recognized that there has been more than one path towards this form of Indigenous focused genocide, especially for women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA persons. </p>
<h2>In the United States</h2>
<p>In the U.S. there has been a shift where movement nationally has ramped up. In 2019 under former president Donald Trump, a task force to address the MMIWG crisis in American Indian and Alaska Native communities was announced. </p>
<p>This sparked new legislation named <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/227">Savanna’s Act</a>, named after 22-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, a citizen of Spirit Lake Nation, who was found deceased in the Red River.</p>
<p>In 2020 <a href="https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/u-s-house-passes-savanna-s-act-moves-to-be-signed-by-president">Savanna’s Act passed in the Senate, after a previous failure</a> in 2019. The Act will require that federal, state and tribal agencies have accurate and adequate training to handle and investigate the MMIWG epidemic urgently and effectively. </p>
<p>American Indians have maintained inherent jurisdictional power over what happens on their land. In a shift of power at both the federal and state levels, <a href="https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/2016-17-vol-42/vol-42-no-3/dis-respecting-the-role-of-tribal-courts/">tribal courts today, possess narrow legal authority</a>. </p>
<p>The National Congress of American Indians called for an <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/435/191/">Oliphant-fix</a> to combat domestic violence and sexual assault committed by non-Indians across Indian Country. As a result, the <a href="https://www.justice.gov/tribal/violence-against-women-act-vawa-reauthorization-2013-0">Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act</a> was enacted under former president Barack Obama, for the first time including those on reservations. </p>
<p>Tribes may now prosecute non-Indians who commit violence across Indian Country. </p>
<p>On the surface this appears to be a significant fix, however the legislation itself comes with its own unbending stipulations such as sentence limitation. Per the <a href="https://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/icra.htm">Indian Civil Rights Act</a> tribal courts cannot “impose for conviction of any one offense any penalty or punishment greater than imprisonment for a term of one year or a fine of $5,000 or both.” </p>
<p>It wasn’t until the <a href="https://www.justice.gov/tribal/tribal-law-and-order-act">Tribal Law and Order Act</a>, that allowed incarceration by tribal courts for up to three years and or a fine of up to $15,000 for each offense. Allowing tribes to increase their maximum sentencing would help tribes set precedence on the non-tolerance of crimes in tribal jurisdiction. </p>
<p>Next steps should include giving tribes more authority over harsher punishments in criminal matters which would be an amendment to the Indian Civil Rights Act. We need to bring our sisters, daughters and mothers home.</p>
<p>Both countries need more urgent and purposeful attention to the appalling and unacceptable MMIWG crimes. Both have huge needs in educating the public, law enforcement and legislative and executive bodies. These stolen and murdered First Nations, American Indian and Alaska Natives, Inuit and Métis women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people and their relatives must not spend another year in this ongoing epidemic without urgent action.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160663/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The MMIWG Inquiry two years later: What’s changed and what still needs to be done?
Margaret Moss, Associate Professor and Director of the First Nations House of Learning, University of British Columbia
Marique B. Moss, Director American Indian Education, Elk River District
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/139259
2020-06-04T16:40:04Z
2020-06-04T16:40:04Z
How the COVID-19 crisis calls us towards reconciliation
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338974/original/file-20200601-95036-k7dwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=93%2C46%2C3789%2C2533&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">We need more positive Indigenous-settler alliances like the one with Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, which created 24 km Freedom Road to provide access to the Trans-Canada Highway. Here a teepee frame sits beside Shoal Lake.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians have shown their support for front-line workers. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other political leaders have told Canadians “<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-pandemic-covid-coronavirus-media-1.5516383">we are all in this together</a>” and “<a href="https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/2020/03/23/ndp-leader-andrea-horwath-urges-premier-doug-ford-to-give-covid-19-impacted-households-2k-relief-cheques.html">no expense will be spared</a>” to ensure the health and safety of Canadians. </p>
<p>Yet, when it comes to the persistent and glaring inequities facing Indigenous communities in Canada, many of these same leaders, as well as Canadians, have fallen drastically short. The stubborn tendency of non-Indigenous Canadians to turn away from “Indigenous issues” and seek a return to “normalcy” remains an ongoing barrier to change.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338971/original/file-20200601-95049-5yds49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338971/original/file-20200601-95049-5yds49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338971/original/file-20200601-95049-5yds49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338971/original/file-20200601-95049-5yds49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338971/original/file-20200601-95049-5yds49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338971/original/file-20200601-95049-5yds49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338971/original/file-20200601-95049-5yds49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338971/original/file-20200601-95049-5yds49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Senator Lynn Beyak pictured here in Ottawa, Dec. 5, 2019, was suspended from the Senate.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick</span></span>
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<p>On April 27, 2020, for example, the Dryden town council in northwestern Ontario <a href="https://www.ckdr.net/2020/04/28/lynn-beyak-resignation-motion-voted-down/">voted 5-2 against a motion</a> calling for the resignation of Conservative Sen. Lynn Beyak. Beyak made national headlines last year when she refused to remove racist letters from her website and was subsequently <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/lynn-beyak-suspended-second-time-1.5478536">suspended from the Senate</a> for failing to take sensitivity training seriously.</p>
<p>Dryden Mayor Greg Wilson said some councillors felt it was beyond their jurisdiction to comment on federal matters. But as Fort Frances town councillor Douglas Judson pointed out: “Municipal resolutions comment or call for action by other levels of government all the time.”</p>
<p>Leaders from the Grand Council Treaty 3 (GCT3) and Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) publicly condemned Dryden council’s decision. <a href="https://theturtleislandnews.com/index.php/2020/05/07/dryden-refuses-to-call-for-senator-lynn-beyak-to-resign/">NAN Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler said</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“As leaders we must seize every opportunity to support reconciliation and speak out against racism … it is the duty of all Canadians to stand against racism and bigotry … hurtful comments that ignore our shared colonial history must be denounced.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>COVID-19 highlights Indigenous inequities</h2>
<p>COVID-19 has illuminated longstanding inequities in Indigenous communities, such as the lack of clean drinking water, overcrowded housing and inadequate health-care access in dozens of First Nations, as <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-history-will-repeat-itself-if-first-nations-remain-underfunded-in-the/">Cindy Blackstock and Isadore Day</a> recently explored in an op-ed for the <em>Globe and Mail</em> and <a href="https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/covid-19-first-nations-and-poor-housing">documented by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives</a>.</p>
<p>These conditions, created by decades of colonial policies and actions and inactions, make it much more challenging to follow basic public health guidelines, such as frequent hand washing and physical distancing.</p>
<p>Moreover, <a href="https://www.tvo.org/article/what-the-government-knows-and-doesnt-know-about-covid-19-in-indigenous-populations">the federal government recently acknowledged</a> that its funding for Indigenous organizations has “fallen short” and its COVID-19 data on Indigenous peoples is “limited.” </p>
<p>The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples is suing the federal government for “<a href="https://www.timescolonist.com/indigenous-group-files-legal-challenge-over-inadequate-covid-19-funding-1.24134269">inadequate and discriminatory funding</a>” to respond to COVID-19 among off-reserve and urban Indigenous people. </p>
<p>Some companies, meanwhile, seem to be exploiting the pandemic to <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/indigenous-fear-canada-work-camps-coronavirus-incubators-200406115720000.html">build pipelines or extract resources</a> on Indigenous territories that Indigenous people staunchly oppose. Alberta’s energy minister even said: “Now is a great time to be building a pipeline <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/canada-coronavirus-alberta-energy-minister-oil-pipeline">because you can’t have protests of more than 15 people</a>.”</p>
<h2>Widespread avoidance</h2>
<p>I conducted interviews and fieldwork over 18 months in the Rainy River District in northwestern Ontario to explore the attitudes of people like Beyak and her supporters. I found out they are not as rare as some would like to think. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338972/original/file-20200601-95059-qbrxi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338972/original/file-20200601-95059-qbrxi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338972/original/file-20200601-95059-qbrxi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338972/original/file-20200601-95059-qbrxi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338972/original/file-20200601-95059-qbrxi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338972/original/file-20200601-95059-qbrxi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338972/original/file-20200601-95059-qbrxi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Canada at a Crossroads: Boundaries, Bridges, and Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-Settler Relations.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(University of Toronto Press)</span></span>
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<p>In fact, in my book, <a href="https://utorontopress.com/us/canada-at-a-crossroads-4"><em>Canada at a Crossroads: Boundaries, Bridges, and Laissez-Faire Racism in Indigenous-Settler Relations</em></a>, I show that non-Indigenous Canadians, whatever their personal views, seek to avoid discussing racism and colonialism at all costs. </p>
<p>Part of the issue is about language and self-perception. Far too many Canadians do not see themselves as settlers when that is clearly the case.</p>
<p>Many settler Canadians routinely express a sense of group superiority and entitlement and feel threatened by Indigenous people who stand up for their rights, defend their lands and publicly assert their Indigenous identities and cultures. Perhaps even more common is the unwillingness of settlers to say or do anything about the racism in their midst.</p>
<p>Inter-group contact is not enough to overcome these racist and colonialist structures as these attitudes often coexist with a history of intermarriage and cross-group friendships. </p>
<p>Many settlers in northwestern Ontario refer to Indigenous friends or family members as “good Indians,” exceptions who prove the rule. Some even look to Indigenous people for validation of their racist views. Most commonly, racism and colonialism remain elephants in the room, and Indigenous-settler relations can be friendly so long as no one talks about “politics.”</p>
<h2>Reconciliation: A way forward</h2>
<p>The silver lining in my research is that many Indigenous and settler people are interested in finding new ways of relating to one another. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://theconversation.com/ca/topics/focus-truth-and-reconciliation-in-canada-77341">Click here for more articles in our ongoing series about the TRC Calls to Action.</a></span>
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<p>Positive Indigenous-settler alliances exist. In Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, the <a href="https://www.tvo.org/article/what-freedom-road-can-teach-ontario-about-partnering-with-indigenous-communities">Freedom Road</a> campaign brought together activists, evangelical Christians, business people and urban and rural Indigenous people to create a 24-kilometre route to link Shoal Lake 40 First Nation to the Trans-Canada Highway. In the Rainy River District, First Nations and municipalities worked together to protect their shorelines from flooding or pooled their resources to purchase medical equipment at the Fort Frances hospital.</p>
<p>Crises are often an opportunity for groups to develop new ways of working together to protect their mutual interests and to find a new footing on which to grapple with Canada’s past and move forward on a more equitable and sustainable path.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/john-a-macdonald-should-not-be-forgotten-nor-celebrated-101503">John A. Macdonald should not be forgotten, nor celebrated</a>
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<p>The COVID-19 pandemic represents one such crisis: for settlers and their governments, it could be an opportunity to live up to all the recent talk of reconciliation. This would mean respecting Indigenous nations’ political autonomy and jurisdiction, including the right to regulate who enters the community and on what terms. It would also mean providing the necessary funding and other supports to prevent and manage disease outbreaks.</p>
<p>Although there may be regions where this is happening locally in Canada, we continue to see instances like Dryden where settlers overlook or oppose the call to rectify these inequities. </p>
<p>It is imperative to speak out against racism — whether interpersonal or institutional. We must build new relationships based on respect for Indigenous sovereignty, fulfilment of treaty obligations, and a spirit of partnership.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139259/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeff Denis's book research was financially supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation, the Harvard University Native American Program, the University of Toronto/McMaster University Indigenous Health Research Development Program, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Canada Program.</span></em></p>
The COVID-19 pandemic crisis could represent an opportunity to live up to all the recent talk of reconciliation in Canada.
Jeff Denis, Associate Professor of Sociology, McMaster University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/132772
2020-03-10T13:35:38Z
2020-03-10T13:35:38Z
John Liebenberg: masterful photographer of life and war in southern Africa
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318440/original/file-20200303-66056-1vv9mae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Liebenberg in the ransacked hospital in Cubal, Angola, in 1993.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer unknown/Courtesy the Liebenberg family</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>South African photojournalist <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-02-20-john-arthur-liebenberg-1958-2020-a-man-who-photographed-war-and-suffering/">John Liebenberg</a> is best known for his remarkable body of work in Namibia, especially the period of the late 1980s when the country headed towards its United Nations-supervised transition to <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/namibian-struggle-independence-1966-1990-historical-background">independence</a>. </p>
<p>Born in 1958 in Johannesburg, his childhood was not an easy one, part of it spent in an orphanage. He finished school at a time when white South African men were expected to complete <a href="http://www.saha.org.za/youth/the_militarisation_of_the_south_african_state.htm">compulsory military service</a> and he was conscripted to Ondangwa in northern Namibia in 1976. It was illegal to take photographs in the army, but Liebenberg hid a small camera in the toilet block. </p>
<p>After national service Liebenberg returned to Namibia and worked in the Windhoek post office. He wanted to be a photographer. He also had a capacity to connect to people. He often spoke of the black migrant workers he came to know at the workplace, most of them from Namibia’s northern border area with Angola where the <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/12/annals-of-wars-we-dont-know-about-the-south-african-border-war-of-1966-1989/">war was intensifying</a>. Known as the ‘border war’ to South Africans and as the ‘war of liberation’ to Namibians, it drew Namibia, Angola and other countries into South Africa’s fight against armed liberation movements supported by socialist countries that <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/CWIHP_SouthAfrica_Final_Web.pdf">echoed wider Cold War politics</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318431/original/file-20200303-66112-12chn84.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318431/original/file-20200303-66112-12chn84.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318431/original/file-20200303-66112-12chn84.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318431/original/file-20200303-66112-12chn84.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318431/original/file-20200303-66112-12chn84.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318431/original/file-20200303-66112-12chn84.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318431/original/file-20200303-66112-12chn84.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318431/original/file-20200303-66112-12chn84.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Families of South African military conscripts picnic on the Cunene River near the border with Angola in 1987.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Liebenberg family</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“Endearment” was a term Liebenberg liked to use when talking about his relationship with people, getting to know their stories, and their harsh journeys of necessity to work in the south. One had the sense, many years later, that the stories still obsessed him. It was the same once he joined <a href="https://www.namibian.com.na/">The Namibian</a> newspaper and began covering the growing urban mobilisation of trade unions and students and, increasingly, the war zone on the border with Angola. </p>
<p>Fellow journalists and friends describe a man with the capacity to jump fences, break down boundaries and disarm people as he moved around like a whirlwind taking photographs, sometimes slyly, but often being touched by people and touching them in turn.</p>
<h2>Enemy of the state</h2>
<p>Namibia’s <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40175168?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">transition to independence</a> started on 1 April 1989 and initially foundered with the collapse of a ceasefire in the north. </p>
<p>Hours before the conflict resumed, Liebenberg’s car was riddled with bullets in an <a href="http://africanactivist.msu.edu/document_metadata.php?objectid=32-130-731">assassination attempt</a>. He learned years later from the amnesty hearings of South Africa’s <a href="https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/">Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a> how his would-be killers, the shadowy apartheid death squad the <a href="http://sabctrc.saha.org.za/reports/volume2/chapter2/subsection37.htm">Civil Cooperation Bureau</a>, had been commissioned to get rid of him. </p>
<p>It’s remarkable how he sustained the intensity of dense photographic coverage of ongoing protest and war in this period, including breaking the difficult story of the accounts of human rights abuses from detainees who belonged to the South West Africa People’s Organisation or <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/south-west-africa-peoples-organisation-swapo">SWAPO</a>. Their stories came to light after their release from the dungeons in southern Angola in 1989.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318432/original/file-20200303-66084-3gsjl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318432/original/file-20200303-66084-3gsjl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318432/original/file-20200303-66084-3gsjl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318432/original/file-20200303-66084-3gsjl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318432/original/file-20200303-66084-3gsjl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318432/original/file-20200303-66084-3gsjl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318432/original/file-20200303-66084-3gsjl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318432/original/file-20200303-66084-3gsjl8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dark days in Soyo. MPLA forces patrol oil installations in Soyo, Cabinda, after their recapture from UNITA in 1994.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Liebenberg family</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After Namibian independence, Liebenberg moved on to cover the civil war <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/angolan-civil-war-1975-2002-brief-history">in Angola</a>, which he called the “war of madness”. The stakes were very high, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/05/angola-brutal-history-mpla-leftwing-discipline-betrayal">politics muddied</a>, and human life frequently disrespected. </p>
<p>He photographed the conflict in Luanda after the collapse of the agreement between the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) following the elections in 1992. He accompanied the MPLA forces moving through central Angola to reconquer areas claimed by UNITA, including Huambo. Following his personal code of covering both sides of a struggle, he later photographed UNITA bases in southern Angola.</p>
<h2>Ghosts</h2>
<p>Liebenberg published his photographs of the Namibian war against South African colonial occupation in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bush-Ghosts-Life-Namibia-1986-90/dp/1415201005"><em>Bush of Ghosts</em></a> (2010). He invited me, as a historian of northern Namibia, to collaborate in the task. He was always very clear that the narrative must address all different parties in the struggle. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318677/original/file-20200304-66078-15xjy56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318677/original/file-20200304-66078-15xjy56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=441&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318677/original/file-20200304-66078-15xjy56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=441&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318677/original/file-20200304-66078-15xjy56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=441&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318677/original/file-20200304-66078-15xjy56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318677/original/file-20200304-66078-15xjy56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318677/original/file-20200304-66078-15xjy56.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Liebenberg’s book co-written with the author.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Umuzi</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The book has three chapters. The first follows young white conscripts who are pitched into the war zone of the Namibia-Angola border. It unfolds into scenes where white and black security forces confront local populations who face curfews and threats, who have their fields and homesteads destroyed by armoured vehicles and shellfire, but who often stand with unreadable stillness and dignity in the face of such impositions. This chapter acknowledges the vulnerability of young conscripts, but directly addresses them and the military apparatus of the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a> state. No other photographer in southern Africa has documented war in this way.</p>
<p>The second chapter in <em>Bush of Ghosts</em> is his homage to Namibians as they mobilised against South African rule. The third is more meditative, exploring the aftermath of war in portraits and landscapes. As Liebenberg’s co-author, I was astounded at the comprehensiveness of the subject matter and the lack of waste in this analogue archive.</p>
<h2>Chambers of the heart</h2>
<p>As we worked, Liebenberg pulled out another body of work he had never shown, the weekend studio portraits taken at the Ovambo Hostel for migrant men in Katutura township in Windhoek in 1986. These are astonishing for the way the men presented their sheer individuality to the camera. When some of these photos were exhibited in Windhoek in 2011, as <a href="https://www.artsy.net/artwork/john-liebenberg-weekends-at-the-okombone">Weekends at the Okombone</a>, there were dramatic moments of recognition by some of the descendants of the photographed men.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318435/original/file-20200303-66052-1ys7l8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318435/original/file-20200303-66052-1ys7l8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318435/original/file-20200303-66052-1ys7l8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318435/original/file-20200303-66052-1ys7l8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318435/original/file-20200303-66052-1ys7l8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318435/original/file-20200303-66052-1ys7l8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318435/original/file-20200303-66052-1ys7l8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Child with spent flare, northern Namibia, 1987.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Liebenberg family</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Liebenberg used to talk about the unpredictable way people could enter the “chambers of the heart”. This was not just about love. He was referring to the unexpected emotional consequences of his life work. </p>
<p>There are deep affective implications for a photographer coming close to people’s pain, death, mutilation, guilt, betrayal, mourning, rage or cruelty. Perhaps it made him determined and even reckless, throwing things to the wind and keeping the camera rolling as he famously did during the second plane crash he experienced in Huambo province in the 1990s.</p>
<p>And if you cannot reach or help the people who have come into the chambers of your heart, they can at least be brought into the chambers of your camera. That is, the subject enters John’s visual world, where unfathomable depths and surfaces cut many ways. That is why there is no single way to read any of his images, and probably why many remain so haunting.</p>
<p>And questions remain about the career and final predicament of a pre-eminent photographer who died in hospital after an operation at age 61 without healthcare benefits. Who often spoke of the exploitation of photographers by newspapers, agencies and networks. He said they were sometimes careless and often demanding about the copyright that would become the only means of survival for an ageing photographer and his family. A photographer whose surviving archive is unique, with the potential to open up the historical memory of nations. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318438/original/file-20200303-66064-1sn67cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/318438/original/file-20200303-66064-1sn67cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318438/original/file-20200303-66064-1sn67cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318438/original/file-20200303-66064-1sn67cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318438/original/file-20200303-66064-1sn67cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318438/original/file-20200303-66064-1sn67cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/318438/original/file-20200303-66064-1sn67cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Training parachute jump over Luiperdsvallei in Windhoek, 1987.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Liebenberg family</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/132772/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patricia Hayes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
No other photographer in southern Africa has documented war in the way that John Liebenberg did. He captured the life and the conflict of both sides in his body of work.
Patricia Hayes, DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory, University of the Western Cape
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/131118
2020-02-07T20:59:19Z
2020-02-07T20:59:19Z
Raid of Wet’suwet’en part of Canada’s ongoing police violence against Indigenous Peoples
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314227/original/file-20200207-27533-1gl3mzd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=56%2C30%2C3364%2C2436&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Members of the RCMP look on as supporters of the Wet'suwet'en Nation block a road outside of RCMP headquarters in Surrey, B.C., on Jan. 16, 2020. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a pre-dawn raid on Feb. 6, <a href="https://www.straight.com/news/1356821/rcmp-begin-arrests-gidimten-spokesperson-molly-wickham-issues-declaration-wetsuweten">the RCMP arrested six land defenders</a> of the Gidimt'en clan of the Wet'suwet'en nation at a blockade protesting the Coastal GasLink pipeline project. They were released later the same day but <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/people-at-wet-suwet-en-checkpoint-await-next-wave-of-rcmp-injunction-enforcement-1.5455521">protestors at the Gidimt'en checkpoint await another raid by RCMP</a>. Enforcing an injunction, the RCMP have said that they will use “<a href="https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/rcmp-will-use-least-amount-of-force-necessary-to-enforce-coastal-gaslink-injunction">the least amount of force necessary</a>.” But protesters and observers believe any action will result in police violence.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://theconversation.com/ca/topics/focus-truth-and-reconciliation-in-canada-77341">Click here for more articles in our ongoing series about the TRC Calls to Action.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The RCMP has been called “an occupying foreign army” by Indigenous blogger M. Gouldhawke, who does so based on the fact that the RCMP still maintain their own camp in Wet’suwet’en territory and “<a href="https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2020/02/02/a-concise-chronology-of-canadas-colonial-cops/">continue to harass people at the long-running Unis’tot’en anti-pipeline camp</a>.” </p>
<p>As a young woman, 27 years ago, I stood on the line in Clayoquot Sound with land protectors trying to block logging trucks from taking down an old-growth forest. I witnessed the process of intimidation and <a href="https://thenarwhal.ca/25-years-after-clayoquot-sound-blockades-the-war-in-the-woods-never-ended-and-its-heating-back-up/">systematic arrests by police</a>. However, most of the people on the line were Euro-Canadian, middle class or relatively privileged folks in fleece and wool. </p>
<p>They were not hit with billy clubs, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/police-racial-bias-aboriginal-canada-1.3761884">or called derogatory names</a>, such as “squaw” or “chug.” To the state, Indigenous protesters represent a much greater threat than environmentalists demanding a park.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314088/original/file-20200206-43123-y7apzi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314088/original/file-20200206-43123-y7apzi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314088/original/file-20200206-43123-y7apzi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314088/original/file-20200206-43123-y7apzi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314088/original/file-20200206-43123-y7apzi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314088/original/file-20200206-43123-y7apzi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314088/original/file-20200206-43123-y7apzi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An anti-logging protestor is carried away by RCMP after being arrested for blocking Macmillan Bloedel logging trucks at the entrance to Clayoquot Valley in July 1993.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chuck Stoody</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Britain’s illegal rule</h2>
<p>Canada’s unlawful domination over Indigenous Peoples was articulated from the moment of the country’s inception. </p>
<p>Prior, imperial rule was enacted through imperial policies from Great Britain, <a href="https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_indian_act/">such as the Gradual Civilization Act</a>, the pre-cursor to the invasive and controlling Indian Act. </p>
<p>The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were established in 1873 as the North-West Mounted Police. They were the enforcers of the recently formed Anglo-settler state’s policies and to ensure that the Métis, Cree and Saulteaux did not take control in the northwest. </p>
<p>The Hudson’s Bay Company had recently closed shop and <a href="https://www.ubcpress.ca/trading-beyond-the-mountains">left behind a “European void”</a> in the former Rupert’s Land, an area <a href="https://www.ubcpress.ca/trading-beyond-the-mountains">soon reclaimed by the Métis</a>. Louis Riel was summoned to lead the Métis in their struggle to protect their community. He would later be hanged as a political prisoner, but he was not Canada’s first Indigenous political execution. </p>
<p>On Nov. 27, 1885, <a href="https://www.goodminds.com/loyal-till-death-indians-and-north-west-rebellion-paper-ed">eight Indigenous men were also hanged by the state</a> for their role in the Northwest Rebellion, <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=tcAikMMDA8sC&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=Cameron,+1926+resistance+blood+red+the+sun&source=bl&ots=OAEyxaKQpJ&sig=ACfU3U1dSZ2i-L4pnde0EyUhHeYTHayPBg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwis-9mp8L3nAhULH80KHYo2BKMQ6AEwBXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=Cameron%2C%201926%20resistance%20blood%20red%20the%20sun&f=false">also known as the North-West Resistance, as written about in William Cameron’s 1926 book <em>Blood Red the Sun</em></a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314087/original/file-20200206-43128-94m61y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314087/original/file-20200206-43128-94m61y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314087/original/file-20200206-43128-94m61y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314087/original/file-20200206-43128-94m61y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314087/original/file-20200206-43128-94m61y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314087/original/file-20200206-43128-94m61y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314087/original/file-20200206-43128-94m61y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The North-West Resistance in 1885 was a five-month insurgency against the Canadian government, fought mainly by the Métis and their First Nations allies. Here Poundmaker, Big Bear, Big Bear’s son, Father Andre, Father Conchin, Chief Stewart, Capt. Deane, Mr. Robertson and the court interpreter in Regina, Sask.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(O.B. Buell/Library and Archives Canada/C-001872)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Imperial domination can be seen as a matter of class, gender and “race” with white ruling-class supremacy. Prompted by upper-class advisers such as Donald Smith (a.k.a. Lord Strathcona), John Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, sent an army west to kill the Métis and <a href="https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/louis-riel">take their lands</a>, making way for the national railway project.</p>
<p>With the assistance of police, the state decimated the Métis at Red River in 1870, again in 1885 and then subsequently flooded the area with Anglo, Protestant, anti-French and anti-Native settlers. In 1961, the RCMP reprinted a <em>Prince Albert Daily Herald</em> article in their magazine, <em>Quarterly</em>, which claimed that Louis Riel was “<a href="https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2020/02/02/a-concise-chronology-of-canadas-colonial-cops/">mainly responsible for the unsettled conditions which led to the founding of the Force…</a>.” </p>
<p>According to a 2012 <em>Globe and Mail</em> article, strands of the rope used to hang Riel for treason were <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/material-history-the-rope-that-hanged-louis-riel/article4561006/">given to former Manitoba premier Duff Roblin</a> as well as to the RCMP who guarded Riel in his cell.</p>
<h2>Respecting sovereign Indigenous nations</h2>
<p>Many Indigenous Peoples seek the earlier nation-to-nation relationships spelled out in the <a href="https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1379594359150/1379594420080">Royal Proclamation of 1763</a> and the British North America Act of 1867. And some Indigenous activists look forward to <a href="https://redpaper.yellowheadinstitute.org/">restoring sovereign and self-governing lands</a> in a way prior to the imposition of empire in Turtle Island, imagining how this could look today. </p>
<p>Today, Indigenous people own less than one per cent of all lands in Canada. This process has clearly been both unlawful and unethical.</p>
<p>Later in life, when I worked in the Yukon co-facilitating a racism-reduction project, “Together for Justice,” I came to understand a few things about the RCMP. I learned that some individual RCMP members wanted to be seen as kind human beings, which is challenging given that they work for a gun-carrying, para-military force with a history of violence against Indigenous Peoples. At that point, the organization was contending with its role in a number of Indigenous prison deaths, including that of <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/we-failed-yukon-rcmp-says-of-in-custody-death-1.894466">Raymond Silverfox, who perished in his cell from pneumonia at the age of 43</a>. </p>
<p>The RCMP see themselves as having two roles: one of law enforcement and the other of community policing. It is through the second of these roles where their opportunity to be most helpful or humanitarian resides. If police were successful at addressing and stopping violence against women and keeping women and children safe, we would see a different kind of society. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314073/original/file-20200206-43128-1igz7t1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=132%2C60%2C3687%2C2740&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314073/original/file-20200206-43128-1igz7t1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314073/original/file-20200206-43128-1igz7t1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314073/original/file-20200206-43128-1igz7t1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314073/original/file-20200206-43128-1igz7t1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314073/original/file-20200206-43128-1igz7t1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314073/original/file-20200206-43128-1igz7t1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ta'Kaiya, front, and Sii-am Hamilton, holding a sign, are seen standing with Indigenous youth demonstrating support for the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs in northwest B.C. opposing the LNG pipeline project, in front of the B.C. legislature in Victoria on Jan. 24, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Dirk Meissner</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The RCMP have long had the disdainful role of enforcing the Indian Act, restricting the movement of on-reserve status Indians, arresting Indigenous people for using ceremony, and for the kidnapping of Indigenous children from their families to the internment camps known as “residential schools.”</p>
<p>Here in Tiohtià: ke/Montreal, on the territory of the Kanien’kehá: ka, police are remembered for their role in the Oka Crisis/Mohawk resistance. </p>
<p>Last month, Indigenous young people occupied the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum office in Victoria in solidarity with Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs who have opposed the Coastal GasLink pipeline in northern B.C. The occupation ended with arrests by Victoria police.</p>
<p>While we know that prejudice may be rooted in social attitudes, and can be transformed, those who work for the RCMP are required to perform social violence, maintain the status quo and do what folk-singer <a href="https://genius.com/Billy-bragg-the-marching-song-of-the-covert-battalions-lyrics">Billy Bragg</a> identified as “defend wealth.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/131118/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Richardson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The RCMP have long been responsible for violence against Indigenous people.
Catherine Richardson, Director, First Peoples Studies Program, Associate Professor, School of Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/126311
2019-11-13T23:27:45Z
2019-11-13T23:27:45Z
B.C. takes historic steps towards the rights of Indigenous Peoples, but the hard work is yet to come
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301428/original/file-20191113-77320-1ueom7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=26%2C4%2C3000%2C1980&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Regional Chief Terry Teegee speaks to the press n Victoria on Oct. 24, 2019 after Premier John Horgan announced Indigenous human rights will be recognized in B.C. with new legislation .</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolit</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>British Columbia recently introduced groundbreaking <a href="https://www.leg.bc.ca/parliamentary-business/legislation-debates-proceedings/41st-parliament/4th-session/bills/first-reading/gov41-1">provincial legislation</a> to implement global standards for upholding the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Those rights are set out in the <a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html">United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples</a>. </p>
<p>At the time, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=785727105193795">called it such a positive development</a> that he wondered if he might be asleep and dreaming it all up.</p>
<p>I had the honour of being in the legislature when the Bill 41 was introduced and fully share Grand Chief Phillip’s sense of elation, pride and, yes, a certain amount of disbelief. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this historic achievement – or the exhilaration over how far we’ve come.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://theconversation.com/ca/topics/focus-truth-and-reconciliation-in-canada-77341">Click here for more articles in our ongoing series about the TRC Calls to Action.</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>The UN Declaration is the most comprehensive international human rights instrument setting out the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples and the obligations of governments to honour, protect and fulfil those rights. Implementation of the UN Declaration is at the heart of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s <a href="http://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf">94 Calls to Action</a>. </p>
<p>With the introduction of Bill 41, B.C. is on track to become the first government in Canada – and indeed anywhere in the English common-law world – to establish a legislative framework for putting the declaration’s human rights standards into concrete practice. In doing so, B.C. is not only making an important step toward reconciliation, it is setting an example for the rest of Canada and the rest of the world to follow. </p>
<p>Now comes the hard part: maintaining the courage of its convictions and fulfilling the promise of implementation.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-road-to-reconciliation-starts-with-the-un-declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples-122305">The road to reconciliation starts with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Implementation of Bill 41</h2>
<p>In some quarters, any talk of actually upholding the UN Declaration will spur anxiety and opposition. Readers may be familiar with the fact that Bill 41 is based on proposed federal legislation. Romeo Saganash’s private members bill, <a href="https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/BillDetails.aspx?billId=8160636&Language=E">Bill C-262</a>, died in the Senate in June 2019 after the delaying tactics of a handful of Conservative senators prevented it coming to a final vote. </p>
<p>Concerns over the implications of the UN Declaration have also popped up from time to time in B.C. media.</p>
<p>Speaking to the legislature after the bill was introduced, <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/bc-undrip_ca_5db2290fe4b0a893740208b9">Cheryl Casimir, of the First Nations Summit, joked</a>: “Did you hear that? The sky didn’t fall.”</p>
<p>I agree wholeheartedly. As someone who has <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Global-Indigenous-Politics-A-Subtle-Revolution-1st-Edition/Lightfoot/p/book/9781138946682">intensively studied the UN Declaration, its content, its history and the work of Indigenous Peoples around the world to bring its provisions to life</a>, I can say without hesitation that the fears and anxiety that have been stirred up around implementation are overblown and unwarranted.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301425/original/file-20191113-77300-12tblfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=49%2C148%2C2946%2C1845&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301425/original/file-20191113-77300-12tblfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301425/original/file-20191113-77300-12tblfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301425/original/file-20191113-77300-12tblfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301425/original/file-20191113-77300-12tblfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301425/original/file-20191113-77300-12tblfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301425/original/file-20191113-77300-12tblfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">First Nations Speaker Cheryl Casimer speaks to the media after Premier John Horgan announced Indigenous human rights will be recognized in B.C. with new legislation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Implementation of the declaration is already well under way, albeit in a patchwork and uncertain way. Courts, human rights tribunals and environmental impact assessment panels have already referenced and applied its provisions. </p>
<p>The importance of Bill 41 is that it provides a framework for the province to now engage more proactively so that implementation can unfold in a more predictable and consistent way. Bill 41 requires the province to develop a co-ordinated action plan “to achieve the objectives of the Declaration” and to report regularly to the legislature on the progress being made.</p>
<h2>‘In consultation and co-operation with’</h2>
<p>I was heartened to see the measured and cautiously optimistic response to Bill 41 from the Mining Association of B.C. After the introduction of the legislation, Mining Association CEO Michael Goehring <a href="https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/b-c-makes-history-with-legislation-to-implement-un-declaration-on-indigenous-rights">told the <em>Vancouver Sun</em>:</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The truth is, the status quo has not engendered confidence in British Columbia’s economic future, nor has it served British Columbians or B.C.’s Indigenous communities.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In contrast, Goehring said, implementation of the declaration could “enable greater certainty and predictability on the land base.”</p>
<p>The bill also requires that the government implement it “in consultation and co-operation” with Indigenous Peoples. The phrase “in consultation and co-operation” is crucial. The words come directly from the UN Declaration itself and signal the imperative of going beyond mere consultation to instead work together in what the declaration calls “a spirit of partnership and mutual respect.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/documents/UNDRIP%20II%20Special%20Report%20lowres.pdf">Legislative pathways have always been considered essential for domestic implementation</a> of the UN Declaration. As the text of <a href="https://undocs.org/A/RES/61/295">Article 38</a> states: “States, in consultation and co-operation with Indigenous Peoples, shall take the appropriate measures, including legislative measures, to achieve the ends of this Declaration.” </p>
<p>Various <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IPeoples/EMRIP/Session10/A.HRC.EMRIP.2017.CRP.1.pdf">UN bodies</a> have called for legislative measures and public policies to implement the rights recognized in the declaration, yet they also recognize that <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IPeoples/UNDRIPManualForNHRIs.pdf">legislation alone is generally not sufficient</a>.</p>
<p>Without a doubt, there is significant work ahead to identify, prioritize and implement the reforms needed to bring B.C. in line with the requirements of international human rights law. Even with the framework provided by the UN Declaration, it will not be quick or easy work to uproot the legacies of colonialism present in provincial law and policy. </p>
<h2>Action plans</h2>
<p>While B.C. is about to become the first jurisdiction in the Commonwealth to adopt a legislative framework for implementation of the declaration, it will not be the first to develop an action plan for implementation. The collaborative development of a National Action Plan is already well under way in New Zealand. </p>
<p>The New Zealand government is working with the Maori people to identify key reforms necessary in their national laws and policies and <a href="https://www.tpk.govt.nz/en/whakamahia/un-declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples">co-develop their National Action Plan</a>. As part of its process, the Human Rights Commission of New Zealand and Maori groups <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24523&LangID=E">co-invited members of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples</a> to visit and provide advice. The government of British Columbia should follow suit. </p>
<p>While the action plan developed in B.C. must adapt to the specific needs of Indigenous Peoples in the province, it’s important to remain engaged with the ongoing processes of how the declaration is interpreted and applied globally. </p>
<p>Doing so is an opportunity to set positive examples for other countries, to learn from what others are doing and to ensure that domestic interpretation of the declaration not diverge from its international human rights foundations.</p>
<p>Terry Teegee, the Regional Chief of the B.C. Assembly of First Nations, remarked after the introduction of Bill 41 that making history “<a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/bc-undrip_ca_5db2290fe4b0a893740208b9">is not for the faint of heart</a>.” Further, Grand Chief Edward John of the First Nations Summit encouraged the Members B.C.’s Legislative Assembly to “be brave” as “<a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-bc-introduces-legislation-to-align-its-laws-policies-with-united/">change does require courage</a>.” </p>
<p>Without a doubt, there is hard work ahead, both for the Horgan government and the Indigenous leadership in B.C. </p>
<p>It’s worth noting another historical aspect of Bill 41: it was co-developed between the Horgan government and the B.C. Assembly of First Nations, the First Nations Summit and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs. </p>
<p>In other words, a foundation for collaborative development of an action plan has already been established. The very fact that their collaboration has already resulted in the tabling of Bill 41 holds out hope for the progress that can be made by working together.</p>
<p>[ <em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126311/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sheryl Lightfoot receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. </span></em></p>
British Columbia recently introduced groundbreaking legislation to implement the rights of Indigenous Peoples. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this historic achievement.
Sheryl Lightfoot, Canada Research Chair in Global Indigenous Rights and Politics and Associate Professor in Political Science, Public Policy and Indigenous Studies, University of British Columbia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/122305
2019-09-12T20:44:03Z
2019-09-12T20:44:03Z
The road to reconciliation starts with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291852/original/file-20190910-190044-1cgcu45.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=44%2C89%2C2950%2C1926&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Apologies without clear policy shift are typically rejected as 'empty gestures.' Here, more than 100 Indigenous people march on Parliament Hill in 1981 to protest the elimination of Aboriginal rights in the proposed Canadian Constitution.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Canadian Press/Carl Bigras</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When the <a href="http://www.trc.ca/about-us.html">Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada</a> concluded its work almost four years ago, it provided a road map for Canadians to follow. That road map, the <a href="http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf">94 Calls to Action</a>, aims to “revitalize the relationship between Aboriginal Peoples and Canadian society” after more than 100 years of the traumatic and systemic removal of Indigenous children from their families. </p>
<p>Call No. 43 underpinned all others, according to the commission. The commission urged federal, provincial and territorial governments to fully implement the <a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html">United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples</a>. They called it “the framework” for all reconciliation measures “<a href="http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Honouring_the_Truth_Reconciling_for_the_Future_July_23_2015.pdf">at all levels and across all sectors of society</a>.” </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296574/original/file-20191010-188819-17iz6s9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=580&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://theconversation.com/ca/topics/focus-truth-and-reconciliation-in-canada-77341">Click here for more articles in our ongoing series about the TRC Calls to Action.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s extremely rare for international human rights standards to even be mentioned in the Canadian policy debate. However, when <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-votes-no-as-un-native-rights-declaration-passes-1.632160">Canada voted against the declaration in 2007 at the United Nations</a>, it was the first time that Canada had ever stood in opposition to an international human rights standard.</p>
<p>It remains today the only international human rights standard in Canada up for debate. </p>
<p>Former prime minister Stephen Harper issued an official apology for residential schools in 2008. However, my ongoing study on <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/natiindistudj.2.1.0015?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">state apologies to Indigenous Peoples</a> demonstrates that apologies without clear policy shift are typically rejected as “empty gestures.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291850/original/file-20190910-190031-psmgdp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291850/original/file-20190910-190031-psmgdp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291850/original/file-20190910-190031-psmgdp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291850/original/file-20190910-190031-psmgdp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291850/original/file-20190910-190031-psmgdp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291850/original/file-20190910-190031-psmgdp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291850/original/file-20190910-190031-psmgdp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=615&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The closing ceremony of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Ottawa in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>International standards of justice require that those responsible for human rights violations must do more than acknowledge and apologize for the harm that has been done. They must go further. They must take every reasonable measure to set things right and to prevent any recurrence of harms. </p>
<p>A closer look at the history of the declaration and its unique framework for human rights protection underscores the TRC’s wisdom in highlighting its indispensable role in reconciliation. </p>
<h2>The birth of the declaration</h2>
<p>The idea for an international standard on Indigenous Peoples’ rights emerged out of several grassroots Indigenous movements in North America. Those movements were informed by their connections to traditional Indigenous forms of governance. They were also influenced by the U.S. civil rights movement, as well as decolonization movements across the Global South. </p>
<p>Fed up with government policies and frustrated by the lack of neutral avenues for dispute resolution, these Indigenous movements took their cause to the international level, hoping to appeal to wider global consciousness on human rights. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/292322/original/file-20190912-190016-11gxpqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/292322/original/file-20190912-190016-11gxpqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/292322/original/file-20190912-190016-11gxpqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/292322/original/file-20190912-190016-11gxpqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/292322/original/file-20190912-190016-11gxpqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/292322/original/file-20190912-190016-11gxpqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/292322/original/file-20190912-190016-11gxpqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/292322/original/file-20190912-190016-11gxpqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Winona LaDuke of Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) and Jewish heritage was 18 years old when she addressed the 1977 UN gathering in Geneva as part of the Indian Treaty Council.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Indigenous diplomacy at the UN in Geneva and New York carved out a unique space where Indigenous peoples could actually sit down with states and jointly create a mutually agreed framework for recognition, protection and fulfilment of our rights. The process of developing the text for declaration began with the creation of a special working group within the UN human rights system in August 1982. </p>
<p>This was the first time that the direct beneficiaries of a global human rights instrument standard were also its co-authors. On Sept. 13, 2007, a full 25 years after the writing process began, the UN General Assembly adopted the declaration as a body of “minimum standards” that all states are expected to uphold. </p>
<p>The very length of this process — a quarter-century! — tells us a lot about the depth of resistance that Indigenous peoples had to overcome to bring the declaration to life. It also speaks volumes about the dedication of all those Indigenous advocates from around the world who returned to the UN year after frustrating year until eventually, they prevailed. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://quno.org/sites/default/files/resources/ENGLISH_Advancing%20the%20Human%20Rights%20of%20Indigenous%20Peoples.pdf">Dalee Sambo Dorough</a>, now president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, said during the final years of the negotiation process:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I truly would love to just be at home enjoying my rights, and not having to pound the halls of the United Nations to gain a little respect, to gain some recognition of my inherent rights as an Indigenous woman, or the collective rights that I share with my people.” </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Refuting the doctrines of racial superiority</h2>
<p>Human rights lawyers and scholars often say <a href="https://www.indigenousbar.ca/pdf/undrip_handbook.pdf">the declaration creates no new rights</a>. They say they have been developed on the foundation of other international human rights standards with vast global experience in their interpretation and application.</p>
<p>But, as I have written in my book, <em><a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315670669">Global Indigenous Rights: A Subtle Revolution</a></em>, the specific way the declaration approaches these existing rights is subtly revolutionary. The declaration’s approach helps to transform the often Eurocentric discourse of human rights to more fully encompass Indigenous worldviews, histories and contemporary struggles. </p>
<p>With the adoption of the declaration, the famous words “We the peoples of the United Nations” at long last became inclusive of the realities of Indigenous Peoples. It made way for Indigenous Peoples who seek a multiplicity of new relationships with UN member states within whose boundaries our territories and nations have been divided and subsumed. </p>
<p>The declaration reinvigorates the themes of self-determination, decolonization and anti-discrimination that are the foundations of the United Nations. </p>
<p>In its preamble, the declaration refutes the doctrines of racial superiority that have been used to justify the dispossession of Indigenous peoples around the world. In its provisions, the declaration calls for concrete remedies for the harms that have resulted from this dispossession. </p>
<h2>Reconciliation: Much work needs to be done</h2>
<p>For more than 10 years, I have been attending various international meetings such as the <a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/">Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues</a> that support the ongoing work of implementing the declaration. I am also working with Indigenous academics and other partners around the world to share knowledge and experience about the growing body of implementation measures at the national and regional levels. </p>
<p>While the era of UN declaration implementation is well underway, enormous work remains to be done. This is as true of Canada as it is of the rest of the world.</p>
<p>The declaration calls for redress and rights protection through a wide range of specific provisions on matters such as Indigenous languages, cultural property, sacred sites, traditional medicines, environmental protection and the rights of children and families. More than anything, however, the declaration recognizes Indigenous Peoples’ continued authority, as self-determining peoples, over decisions affecting our lives and futures. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291632/original/file-20190909-109939-1a3naxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291632/original/file-20190909-109939-1a3naxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291632/original/file-20190909-109939-1a3naxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291632/original/file-20190909-109939-1a3naxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291632/original/file-20190909-109939-1a3naxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291632/original/file-20190909-109939-1a3naxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291632/original/file-20190909-109939-1a3naxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 2016, NDP MP Romeo Saganash introduced Bill-262 to create a legislative framework for federal implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>James Anaya, a former UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, has said the declaration’s foundation in established human rights obligations, the direct involvement of Indigenous peoples in its development and the exhaustive deliberations that led to its final adoption give the declaration a unique <a href="https://www.un.org/press/en/2010/gashc3982.doc.htm">“moral, political and, yes, legal”</a> weight that makes its implementation all the more imperative.</p>
<p>In 2018, the House of Commons passed <a href="https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/BillDetails.aspx?Language=E&billId=8160636">a private member’s bill, Bill C-262</a> —
put forth by NDP MP Romeo Saganash — meant to create a legislative framework for federal implementation of the declaration. Key provisions of the bill included review of federal laws and direct collaboration with First Nations, Inuit and Métis people in establishing policy priorities. These measures are key to meaningful implementation by the federal government.</p>
<p>The story of Bill C-262 is bittersweet, however. The House of Commons adopted the law, which was further supported by a unanimous motion in the House. These facts give some hope of seeing the legislative framework adopted in the future. </p>
<p>In the end, however, the opportunity to pass the legislation in the current session of Parliament was lost because the bill <a href="https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/dozens-of-bills-including-on-sexual-assault-and-undrip-die-in-senate-amid-conservative-filibuster">was stalled by Senate filibustering</a>. </p>
<p>This highlights the considerable remaining resistance, much of it partisan, to the concrete implementation of the declaration.</p>
<p>For this to change, more people must take the time to <a href="https://quakerservice.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Myths-and-misrepresentations-June-2018-Declaration-Coalition.pdf">learn about the declaration.</a> More people need to see their way past the myths and misrepresentations that confuse its actual content and implications. More people need to join the ranks of those who have already championed the UN declaration — an indispensable part of the national project of reconciliation.</p>
<p>[ <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=expertise">Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get a digest of academic takes on today’s news, every day.</a></em> ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/122305/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sheryl Lightfoot currently receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and has previously received funding from the Ford Foundation. </span></em></p>
It’s the 12th anniversary of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Canada has yet to implement this declaration even though the TRC says the road to reconciliation needs to start here.
Sheryl Lightfoot, Canada Research Chair in Global Indigenous Rights and Politics and Associate Professor in Political Science, Public Policy and Indigenous Studies, University of British Columbia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/119060
2019-08-29T22:06:38Z
2019-08-29T22:06:38Z
What does ‘We are all treaty people’ mean, and who speaks for Indigenous students on campus?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290159/original/file-20190829-106530-1f1mnih.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=58%2C143%2C2833%2C1818&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Students stage a walkout to raise awareness about systemic discrimination in the Canadian justice system during a protest at the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C., on March 14, 2018. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>While there has been a recent growing awareness of Indigenous cultures at Canadian universities, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenization-university-students-1.4841965">racism, violence and dismissal still dominate conversations on campus.</a></p>
<p>In December 2015, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) issued its Calls to Action, education was at the centre. Many Canadian universities have been working to incorporate the recommendations. </p>
<p>But universities <a href="https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/indigenization-efforts-vary-widely-on-canadian-campuses-study-finds/">have mostly adopted a top-down approach to Indigenization.</a> In many cases, the Indigenization process lacks <a href="https://indigenousnationhood.blogspot.com/2019/05/reconciliation-with-indigenous-peoples.html">substance</a>. The process often comes with a slogan: “<a href="https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/abed101/we-are-all-treaty-people/">We are all treaty people</a>.” </p>
<p>“We are all treaty people” is intended to emphasize that all people have treaty rights and responsibilities. But I believe that it conveys instead a false sense of equally shared benefits between Indigenous Peoples and settlers. </p>
<p>The phrase ignores the social, economic and political devastation of Indigenous communities through federal betrayal and mismanagement of Canada’s treaty obligations. Sociologists Eve Tuck (Unangax, Aleut Community of St. Paul Island) and K. Wayne Yang have discussed false senses of equality as a “<a href="https://www.latrobe.edu.au/staff-profiles/data/docs/fjcollins.pdf">move to innocence</a>” by settlers.</p>
<p>Often, the university is positioned as the institutional saviour, as being uniquely able to help Indigenous students succeed. A recognition of the university’s complicity in past inequities is not usually the starting point but may come after public pressure from Indigenous activists.</p>
<p>Indigenous voices that denounce the continued marginalization of Indigenous
Peoples within these projects are viewed as radicals by university administrators. This institutional distrust long predates the TRC.</p>
<h2>Much stays the same</h2>
<p>In June 1966, when the refrain was the <a href="https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1969/12/1/what-the-canadian-indian-wants-from-you">“Canadian Mosaic,”</a> members of the Canadian Indian Youth Council (CIYC) disagreed about how students on campus should learn about Indigenous issues. The CIYC, initially housed at the University of Manitoba, was a student-led activist group that advocated for Indigenous rights and self-determination across Canada. </p>
<p>The disagreement strained the relationship between the CIYC and the <a href="https://archives.mcmaster.ca/index.php/national-federation-of-canadian-university-students-2">Canadian Union of Students (CUS)</a>. The CUS was a national coalition of Canadian university students councils, including the CIYC. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/harold-cardinal">Harold Cardinal</a> (Sucker Creek Cree), who <a href="https://btlbooks.com/book/unsettling-canada">vocally opposed the White Paper</a> and later wrote <em><a href="http://www.douglas-mcintyre.com/book/unjust-society">The Unjust Society</a></em>, was a founding member of the CIYC. Cardinal praised campus awareness programs run through the Canadian Union of Students. The teach-in style programs had been set up “in an attempt to dispel the ignorance of the non-informed and, at times, apathetic public.”</p>
<p>But rather than leave the programs under the control of the CUS, Cardinal wanted to encourage Indigenous students’ involvement as partners. He believed these programs were a perfect opportunity for Indigenous students to voice “<a href="https://archives.mcmaster.ca/index.php/national-federation-of-canadian-university-students-2">great disapproval</a> for the shameful, ironical, and disgusting breach of Treaty Rights which have been perpetuated on us for many years.” </p>
<p>Two months later, fellow CIYC member <a href="https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1964/5/16/how-kahn-tineta-horn-became-an-indian">Kahn-Tineta Horn</a> (Kahnawá:ke), argued against Cardinal’s idea. Not against Indigenous students speaking out, but against collaboration with the CUS. Her preference was for the CIYC to work alone. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"885320919643594752"}"></div></p>
<p>Horn wrote that “it has been my privilege to make clear that the <a href="https://archives.mcmaster.ca/index.php/national-federation-of-canadian-university-students-2">Canadian Union of Students</a>, and all students, in fact, should mind their business and keep their nose out of the affairs of Indians.” </p>
<p>She continued that “all you can do is confuse the issues, block reality and develop a situation which will, in the end, damage the interests of Indians.” </p>
<p>Despite their conflicting opinions, both shared a vision of Indigenous students telling their own stories on college campuses. At a time when there were almost no Indigenous faculty in Canada, student voices were essential in raising awareness of the disparities Indigenous Peoples faced.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-from-history-indigenous-womens-activism-in-saskatchewan-103279">Hidden from history: Indigenous women's activism in Saskatchewan</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Cardinal, Kahn and their CIYC cohort were, however, considered radical by most fellow students and news media. This was primarily because they vocally rejected societal, institutional and state interpretations about Indigenous pasts, presents and futures. </p>
<p>Fifty plus years later, contemporary Indigenous students express similar concerns about how they are represented, and by whom, on campus.</p>
<h2>Pressure on Indigenous faculty</h2>
<p>Indigenous faculty represent <a href="https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/with-a-shared-commitment-canadas-universities-take-steps-toward-reconciliation/">1.4 per cent</a> of Canadian professors. </p>
<p>This low percentage <a href="https://www.ubyssey.ca/news/the-gold-rush-canadian-academia-rush-indigenous-faculty/">places excessive pressure</a> on Indigenous faculty, staff and students. Most are expected to be the voices of Indigenous Peoples on their campuses; few are part of the executive decision-making process. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/law-professor-put-on-trial-for-trespassing-on-familys-ancestral-lands-114065">Law professor put on trial for 'trespassing' on family's ancestral lands</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This paradox means Indigenous faculty are <a href="http://cfr.info.yorku.ca/2019/05/7806/">placed in a spotlight and marginalized at the same time</a>. This dynamic puts faculty, staff and students at risk of reprisal if they speak out against policies they see as detrimental to Indigenous students. </p>
<p>Those who speak out can find themselves, in much the way that Cardinal, Horn and the CIYC were, classified as radicals. This leaves little space for them institutionally. </p>
<p>This situation can be rectified: Indigenous faculty, staff and students should lead Indigenization projects rather than just being consulted on them. How can this happen, when such faculty are already over-committed on campus?</p>
<p>As a settler scholar, I believe it is vital to relieve this pressure on Indigenous colleagues. We must push our institutions to allow Indigenous faculty, staff and students to lead the decision making processes. We can relieve service expectations elsewhere. </p>
<p>We must help change institutional perceptions. Universities need to accept the legitimacy of Indigenous legal and cultural systems. </p>
<p>There are too few institutional attempts to dismantle or restructure the current system to properly decolonize. Exceptions include The <a href="https://yellowheadinstitute.org">Yellowhead Institute</a> at Ryerson University, the <a href="https://nctr.ca/map.php">National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation</a> at the University of Manitoba, and the <a href="https://aboriginal.ubc.ca/indian-residential-school-centre/">Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre</a> at the University of British Columbia. </p>
<h2>Corporate motivations</h2>
<p>Campus-corporate <a href="https://www.ualberta.ca/vice-president-research/internal-honours-prizes/petro-canada-recipients">partnerships are a reality</a> in Canada. How might these partnerships influence the kinds of programs that are developed or lauded? How do such partnerships impact what’s valued in Indigenization?</p>
<p>For example, Thompson Rivers University has <a href="https://www.transmountain.com/news/2015/thompson-rivers-university-and-trans-mountain-sign-a-500-000-community-benefit-agreement">a “community benefit agreement” with Trans Mountain Pipeline</a>. </p>
<p>According to Trans Mountain, the company has signed <a href="https://www.transmountain.com/news/2017/trans-mountain-named-thompson-rivers-university-largest-donor-of-the-year">15 such agreements</a> to benefit communities along the proposed pipeline route. The TRU agreement includes funding towards bursary programs for students in fields <a href="https://tru.ca/__shared/assets/Trans_Mountain_201742020.pdf">related to the energy industry</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290198/original/file-20190829-106524-1w3inz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290198/original/file-20190829-106524-1w3inz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290198/original/file-20190829-106524-1w3inz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290198/original/file-20190829-106524-1w3inz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290198/original/file-20190829-106524-1w3inz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290198/original/file-20190829-106524-1w3inz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290198/original/file-20190829-106524-1w3inz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hereditary Chief Ronnie West, centre, from the Lake Babine First Nation, sings and beats a drum during a solidarity march after Indigenous nations and supporters gathered for a meeting to show support for the Wet'suwet'en Nation, in Smithers, B.C., on January 16, 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The TRU agreement contains a clause that says the university <a href="https://tru.ca/__shared/assets/Trans_Mountain_201742020.pdf">would provide a copy of any public announcements</a> regarding the program to Trans Mountain for approval. Would research or scholarship opposed to the pipeline be approved under such circumstances?</p>
<h2>Elevating voices of protest</h2>
<p>The majority of contemporary Indigenous students yearn to see their communities reflected and represented on campus. </p>
<p>Students want this representation to include those community members and activists fighting against pipelines, <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/telescopes-hawaii-reopen-after-deal-protesters">telescopes</a> and other forms of settler intrusion on Indigenous territories. Usually, the public is informed by media agencies <a href="https://uofmpress.ca/books/detail/seeing-red">reporting these issues from the settler perspective</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290155/original/file-20190829-106504-1wa7rjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290155/original/file-20190829-106504-1wa7rjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/290155/original/file-20190829-106504-1wa7rjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290155/original/file-20190829-106504-1wa7rjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290155/original/file-20190829-106504-1wa7rjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=999&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290155/original/file-20190829-106504-1wa7rjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1255&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290155/original/file-20190829-106504-1wa7rjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1255&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/290155/original/file-20190829-106504-1wa7rjk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1255&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many students want to hear Indigenous voices of protest on campus. Women’s March, 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dulcey Lima / Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We must be as informed by Indigenous Peoples who want to fight the settler system as we are by those who want to work within it. This includes faculty working to change the system from within and community members who reject the system outright.</p>
<p>Universities cannot proclaim reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples while silencing Indigenous voices of dissent. As in the 1960s, Indigenous students need spaces to speak to power. Indigenous students need platforms where they can speak for themselves, on their terms. They need to know that they will be heard, listened to and that their concerns will be acted upon. </p>
<p>Indigenization cannot take place without radical change. Radical change cannot take place until institutions actively listen to the “radical” Indigenous voices they currently exclude. </p>
<p>[ <em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119060/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul McKenzie-Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
As students and faculty start a new academic year, it’s a good time to highlight the barriers to Indigenizing the campus and the importance of Indigenous voices on campus.
Paul McKenzie-Jones, Assistant Professor, Indigenous Studies, University of Lethbridge
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/118948
2019-06-19T22:54:47Z
2019-06-19T22:54:47Z
Genocide is foundational to Canada: What are we going to do about it?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/279857/original/file-20190617-118505-1tipcr9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=120%2C40%2C4316%2C2495&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It is entirely unprecedented to have a sitting head of government admitting to ongoing genocide. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during ceremonies at the release of the MMIWG report in Gatineau, on June 3. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Three weeks ago, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights acknowledged the existence of genocide in Canada. In a tweet, they called the Indian Residential Schools system a <a href="https://aptnnews.ca/2019/06/06/national-museum-changes-stance-on-genocide-sides-with-inquiry-findings/">violation of the United Nations Genocide Convention</a>. </p>
<p>The final report on the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls took that acknowledgement several steps further. The report documents how Canada has committed and <a href="https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Supplementary-Report_Genocide.pdf">continues to commit colonial genocide through a range of composite acts.</a></p>
<p>In 2015, the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission brought attention to “cultural genocide.” I recently published <a href="https://utorontopress.com/ca/the-sleeping-giant-awakens-4"><em>The Sleeping Giant Awakens</em></a>, a book on the Indian Residential system and genocide. In my book, I outline how it was outside the TRC’s limited post-judicial mandate to conclude with a finding of genocide. Although TRC Chair Murray Sinclair approached his legal team to see if genocide could be inserted in the final report, his lawyers advised against it. However, survivors have made widespread use of the term to help to translate their devastating experiences.</p>
<p>The MMIWG report was not bound by a restrictive mandate and has gone much further in articulating a case for the entire history and present of Canada constituting genocide. The report cites the Second World War human rights lawyer Raphael Lemkin’s view that genocide consists of a “co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, <a href="https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/final-report/">with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”</a> </p>
<p>The MMIWG inquiry effectively used their political space to make calls to justice, not only for Indigenous women and girls but also larger calls to prevent the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. Rather than genocide as a series of historical events, the inquiry appeals to the present. </p>
<p>With the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/oas-offers-canada-a-panel-of-experts-to-probe-genocide/2019/06/04/a2602f78-8706-11e9-9d73-e2ba6bbf1b9b_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4538ffe22c84">Organization of American States</a> involved in an investigation, there is now international focus on this issue. </p>
<p>Up until recently, my field of political science has paid little attention to these issues. Political scientists have generally not engaged with the dispossession and subjugation of Indigenous peoples and how that dispossession was foundational to Canada’s current political order. </p>
<p>Once we take in the MMIWG report, our discipline cannot ignore genocide because genocide is foundational to Canada.</p>
<h2>Investigating genocide and the state</h2>
<p>Only one other inquiry in a western settler state found that the state committed genocide against Indigenous peoples. The first was 22 years ago in Australia when the Australian Human Rights Commission argued that genocide had been committed in the forcible transfer of Aboriginal children from their families and communities, what became known as the <a href="https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/bringing-them-home-report-1997">“stolen generations.”</a> </p>
<p>What is entirely unprecedented is a sitting head of government admitting to the ongoing genocide. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pursued a strategy markedly different from that of former Australian prime minister John Howard. <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-trudeau-accepts-indigenous-inquirys-finding-of-genocide/">Now that Trudeau has accepted the findings of the inquiry, we will wait to see how this will play out.</a></p>
<p>Although some political scientists may disagree with the inquiry’s conclusion, they should not ignore the conclusion of genocide because it is easier to do so. If some political scientists don’t agree with the label of genocide, then what sort of terms might we use to advance the conversation? And what are the political implications of those other terms, such as crime against humanity?</p>
<p>The American political scientist <a href="https://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2011.532607?src=recsys&journalCode=fdem20">Robert Dahl described how “stateness” is necessary for the pillars of democracy: electoral rights, political liberties, the rule of law and social rights.</a> Stateness includes basic agreements about the legitimacy of state borders, institutions, rules of government, and the use of force.</p>
<p>For many Indigenous peoples, Canada has severe stateness problems. The state asserts sovereignty and territorial control when it does not have the law on its side, while continuing to <a href="https://btlbooks.com/book/unsettling-canada">break treaties on treaty lands and exercising power on unceded lands.</a></p>
<p>But most political scientists do not see stateness issues as central to Canadian politics. Instead they often to look at Canadian institutions as natural constructions and neutral arenas for competition between legitimate actors. </p>
<h2>Understanding historic violence</h2>
<p>To study settler colonial systems, political scientists need to recognize their historical context and the violence involved in their maintenance and perpetuation. These colonial systems replaced Indigenous governance systems which were often ideally suited to the <a href="https://www.ubcpress.ca/sylvia-mcadam-saysewahum">peoples and territories on which they developed over millennia.</a> </p>
<p>Once genocide against Indigenous peoples is factored into the analysis, how do we understand electoral and political institutional reform? What does reconciliation after or during genocide mean? What does this mean for how we study territory, political institutions, the courts, elite decision-making, foreign policy, economic policy, national identity, regional identity, biculturalism? </p>
<p>What does it mean to welcome refugees and new immigrants to “integrate” into a state which has been committing genocide since the 19th century? </p>
<p>These systems were not designed to provide fairness or justice to Indigenous nations; they were instead designed to destroy the political agency of Indigenous peoples while also destroying them as peoples, communities and families. </p>
<p>For too long we political scientists in Canada have been bystanders to discussions about cultural genocide and genocide. The excuse previously is that we didn’t know and we didn’t have the means to fully comprehend what this means. Now that we know, what will we do? </p>
<p>In 2016, the Canadian Political Science Association put together a reconciliation committee to address the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/truth-and-reconciliation-94-calls-to-action-1.3362258">TRC’s 94 Calls to Action</a>. They will now have even more to consider. I look forward to seeing how these conversations evolve.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/118948/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David MacDonald receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Guelph. </span></em></p>
Political scientists concern themselves with ideas of democracy. Now that Canada’s PM has accepted the finding of genocide, this changes how and what political scientists need to discuss.
David MacDonald, Professor of Political Science and Research Leadership Chair for the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences, University of Guelph
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/118276
2019-06-04T13:34:21Z
2019-06-04T13:34:21Z
What the Timol judgment means for ending South Africa’s culture of impunity
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277910/original/file-20190604-69095-tl27kh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ahmed Timol, pictured in the centre of the 2nd row, was a teacher when he was killed by South African police.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">ahmedtimol.co.za</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A South African court <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2019-06-03-timol-murder-accused-rodrigues-trial-to-go-ahead">has ruled</a> that a security policeman has to stand trial for his role in the killing of an anti-apartheid activist nearly 48 years ago. It’s a judgment that will have far-reaching implications for unresolved cases of human rights abuses under apartheid. The case also draws attention to the enduring effects of apartheid-era policing practices and the prevalence of torture in South Africa today, 25 years after the transition to democracy in 1994.</p>
<p>In 1971 the Security Police claimed that <a href="https://theconversation.com/ahmed-timol-the-quest-for-justice-for-people-murdered-in-apartheids-jails-116843">Ahmed Timol</a> had committed suicide by throwing himself out of the window of room 1026 of John Vorster Square, the notorious police headquarters in central Johannesburg. In 2017, more than 40 years after his death, the case was re-opened. The court established that Timol had been tortured and murdered. Former security branch sergeant <a href="https://mg.co.za/tag/joao-rodrigues">Joao “Jan” Rodrigues</a>, allegedly the last person to have seen Timol before his death, sought a permanent stay of prosecution for his part in the murder. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.ahmedtimol.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SKMBT_42190603121900.pdf">judgment</a> states that,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the interests of justice and the societal need to ensure accountability for the commission of serious offences and the nature of the crime located in its historical context all militate against the granting of a permanent stay of prosecution.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The judges argued that, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This, in many respects, is a difficult case. Not necessarily on account of the legal issues it raises, but rather to the extent that it compels us to revisit our troubled past; examine what occurred there, recognise the need for reconciliation; and the consequences that invariably went with it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The judges added:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Importantly, this case reaffirms that justice and the truth were never meant to be compromised during all that our young society sought to do in dealing with its troubled, turbulent and shameful past.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Pursuing justice</h2>
<p>The verdict is a hard-won victory for the Timol family. They have been pursuing justice for over four decades, including at the <a href="http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/">Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a>’s (TRC) <a href="http://sabctrc.saha.org.za/hearing.php?id=55646&t=timol&tab=hearings">hearings</a> in 1996. The TRC was set up in 1995 and made it possible for victims to publicly recount their experiences. Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from prosecution.</p>
<p>The Security Police officers involved in Timol’s arrest and interrogation did not testify at the TRC, nor did they apply for amnesty for their part in his murder.</p>
<p>The court ruling offers hope for those – like the Timols – who continue to seek the truth about what happened to their loved ones at the hands of the apartheid-era Security Police. It re-opens questions about impunity and accountability that apartheid-era perpetrators hoped would never resurface after the TRC published its <a href="http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/">final report</a> in 2003. </p>
<p>The TRC handed over 300 cases involving gross violations of human rights to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). This was done on the understanding that they would be investigated and that those responsible would be prosecuted.</p>
<h2>Policing practices</h2>
<p>The return to the unresolved TRC cases is significant not only for how South Africa deals with impunity relating to human rights violations committed under apartheid, but for addressing impunity in the police and justice system today.</p>
<p>The NPA’s failure to pursue the 300-plus cases is a sign of how the impunity that characterised the apartheid state has not yet been expunged. The officers, appointed in 2018 to investigate 20 cases of human rights violations that took place under apartheid, were themselves former members of the Security Branch. This is according to a February 2019 <a href="https://www.ijr.org.za/2019/02/08/ijr-endorses-letter-by-former-trc-commissioners/">letter</a> written to President Cyril Ramaphosa by 10 former TRC commissioners.</p>
<p>They divulged that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The most senior investigator had been implicated in the torture of a political detainee in the 1980s. This detainee, together with his wife, were subsequently shot dead by the Security Branch, after he sued the South African Police for damages. Although the two officers have since been removed from these investigations following complaints, it is hardly surprising that no progress has been made in any of these 20 cases. As recent as 2018 it is still business as usual with the TRC cases ultimately controlled by forces from the past.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Torture after apartheid</h2>
<p>The continuing prevalence of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment within the South African Police Service (SAPS) indicates both how thoroughly contaminated the organs of the state were under apartheid and how inadequate attempts to transform the police have been.</p>
<p>In spite of the constitutional reforms introduced in 1994, torture has not been eradicated. It continues to characterise policing practices. In 2017/2018, South Africa’s <a href="https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201810/ipidannual-report-20172018.pdf">Independent Police Investigative Directorate</a>, an official organisation that is tasked with investigating police abuse, received reports of 3 661 assault cases, 436 cases of death as a result of police action, and 271 cases of torture. The Directorate’s report indicates that there were 98 more incidents of torture in 2017/2018 than in the previous year. Of the 62 cases of torture investigated during 2017, there was only one conviction.</p>
<p>Torture, like corruption, is a practice generally committed by groups, rather than by individuals. Torture is not an aberration. It is systemic, and it persists where civil society, the justice system and the state have failed to expose and punish those who practice it. Torture is an open secret made possible by impunity.</p>
<p>The re-opening of the Timol case and the court’s decision to prevent apartheid-era perpetrators from permanently evading justice is an important sign that the long reign of impunity might at last be coming to an end.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/118276/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kylie Thomas receives funding from the National Research Foundation, South Africa.</span></em></p>
The Timol ruling will not only have implications for crimes under apartheid, but also put the focus on torture within the South African Police Service.
Kylie Thomas, Associate Researcher at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State, University of the Free State
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/109925
2019-01-23T20:44:02Z
2019-01-23T20:44:02Z
Do truth and reconciliation commissions heal divided nations?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254630/original/file-20190120-100295-1mvujy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In this October 1998 photo, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu dance after Tutu handed over the final report of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Pretoria. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Zoe Selsky)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As long as unresolved historic injustices continue to fester in the world, there will be a demand for truth commissions.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there is no end to the need.</p>
<p>The goal of a truth commission — in some forms also called a truth and reconciliation commission, as it is in Canada — is to hold public hearings to establish the scale and impact of a past injustice, typically involving wide-scale human rights abuses, and make it part of the permanent, unassailable public record. Truth commissions also officially recognize victims and perpetrators in an effort to move beyond the painful past.</p>
<p>Over the past three decades, more than 40 countries have, <a href="http://www.trc.ca/">like Canada,</a> established truth commissions, including Chile, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, <a href="http://www.justice.gov.za/trc">South Africa</a> and South Korea. The hope has been that restorative justice would provide greater healing than the retributive justice modelled most memorably by the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials">Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War.</a></p>
<p>There has been a range in the effectiveness of commissions designed to resolve injustices in African and Latin American countries, typically held as those countries made transitions from civil war, colonialism or authoritarian rule.</p>
<p>Most recently, <a href="http://www.trc.ca/">Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a> addressed historic injustices perpetrated against Canada’s Indigenous peoples through forced assimilation and other abuses.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254631/original/file-20190120-100261-l171he.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254631/original/file-20190120-100261-l171he.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254631/original/file-20190120-100261-l171he.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254631/original/file-20190120-100261-l171he.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254631/original/file-20190120-100261-l171he.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254631/original/file-20190120-100261-l171he.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254631/original/file-20190120-100261-l171he.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair embraces residential school survivor Madeleine Basile after she spoke at the release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation commission in December 2015 in Ottawa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Its effectiveness is still being measured, with a list of <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/truth-and-reconciliation-94-calls-to-action-1.3362258">94 calls to action</a> waiting to be fully implemented. But Canada’s experience appears to have been at least productive enough to inspire <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/how-other-countries-have-tried-to-reconcile-with-native-peoples/article24826144/">Australia and New Zealand </a> to come to terms with their own treatment of Indigenous peoples by exploring similar processes.</p>
<p>Although both countries have a long history to trying to reconcile with native peoples, <a href="https://www.hrc.co.nz/news/truth-and-reconciliation-state-abuse-survivors-right-thing-do/=">recent discussions</a> have leaned toward a Canadian-style TRC model.</p>
<h2>South Africa set the standard</h2>
<p>There had been other truth commissions in the 1980s and early 1990s, <a href="https://www.beyondintractability.org/casestudy/brahm-chilean">including Chilé’s post-Pinochet reckoning</a>. </p>
<p>But the most recognizable standard became South Africa’s, when President Nelson Mandela mandated a painful and necessary Truth and Reconciliation Commission to resolve the scornful legacy of apartheid, the racist and repressive policy that had driven the African National Congress, including Mandela, to fight for reform. Their efforts resulted in widespread violence and Mandela’s own 27-year imprisonment.</p>
<p>Through South Africa’s publicly televised TRC proceedings, white perpetrators were required to come face-to-face with the Black families they had victimized physically, socially and economically.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Tw5aTObdO5Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Source: Facing History and Ourselves.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There were critics, to be sure, on both sides. <a href="https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-09-08-1997251022-story.html">Some called it the “Kleenex Commission”</a> for the emotional hearings they saw as going easy on some perpetrators who were granted amnesty after demonstrating public contrition.</p>
<p>Others felt it fell short of its promise — benefiting the new government by legitimizing Mandela’s ANC and letting perpetrators off the hook by allowing so many go without punishment, and failing victims who never saw adequate compensation or true justice.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-memories-of-the-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-still-ache-107721">Why memories of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission still ache</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>These criticisms were valid, yet the process did succeed in its most fundamental responsibility — it pulled the country safely into a modern, democratic era.</p>
<h2>Saving humanity from ‘hell’</h2>
<p>Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary general of the United Nations through most of the 1950s who faced criticism about the limitations of the UN, once said the UN was <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34310354">“not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”</a></p>
<p>Similarly, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not designed to take South Africa to some idyllic utopia. After a century of colonialism and apartheid, that would not have been realistic. It was designed to save South Africa, then a nuclear power, from an implosion — one that many feared would trigger a wider international war.</p>
<p>To the extent that the commission saved South Africa from hell, I think it was successful. Is it a low benchmark? Perhaps, but it did its work.</p>
<p>Since then, other truth commissions, whether they have included reconciliation or reparation mandates, have generated varying results.</p>
<p>Some have been used cynically as tools for governments to legitimize themselves by pretending they have dealt with painful history when they have only kicked the can down the road.</p>
<p>In Liberia, where I worked with a team of researchers last summer, the records of <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/2006/02/truth-commission-liberia">that country’s truth and reconciliation commission</a> are not even readily available to the public. That secrecy robs Liberia of what should be the most essential benefit of confronting past injustices: permanent, public memorialization that inoculates the future against the mistakes of the past.</p>
<h2>U.S. needs truth commission</h2>
<p>On balance, the truth commission stands as an important tool that can and should be used around the world.</p>
<p>It’s painfully apparent that the United States needs a national truth commission of some kind to address hundreds of years of injustice suffered by Black Americans. There, centuries of enslavement, state-sponsored racism, denial of civil rights and ongoing economic and social disparity have yet to be addressed.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dealing-with-hate-can-americas-truth-and-reconciliation-commissions-help-73170">Dealing with hate: Can America's truth and reconciliation commissions help?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Like many, I don’t hold out hope that a U.S. commission will be established any time soon – especially not under the current administration. But I do think one is inevitable at some point, better sooner than later.</p>
<p>Wherever there is an ugly, unresolved injustice pulling at the fabric of a society, there is an opportunity to haul it out in public and deal with it through a truth commission.</p>
<p>Still, there is not yet any central body or facility that researchers, political leaders or other advocates can turn to for guidance, information and evidence. Such an entity would help them understand and compare how past commissions have worked — or failed to work — and create better outcomes for future commissions.</p>
<p>As the movement to expose, understand and resolve historical injustices grows, it would seem that Canada, a stable democracy with its own sorrowed history and its interest in global human rights, would make an excellent place to establish such a centre.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/109925/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bonny Ibhawoh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Wherever there is an ugly, unresolved injustice pulling at the fabric of a society, there is an opportunity to haul it out in public and deal with it through a truth commission.
Bonny Ibhawoh, Professor of History and Global Human Rights, McMaster University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/107721
2018-11-29T12:44:16Z
2018-11-29T12:44:16Z
Why memories of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission still ache
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/247497/original/file-20181127-76770-1co1oq6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The TRC's first hearings in 1996. Left to right: Nomonde Calata, a TRC counsellor, and Nyameka Goniwe.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jon Hrusa/Sunday Times</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s 20 years since the submission of the report of South Africa’s <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/truth-and-reconciliation-commission-trc-0">Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a> (TRC), which was a court-like restorative justice body that sought to reveal human rights abuses under apartheid. When <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/archbishop-emeritus-desmond-mpilo-tutu">Archbishop Desmond Tutu</a>, who chaired the TRC process, handed over the <a href="http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/">report</a> to then President Nelson Mandela in October 1998, he was handing over more than a physical archive of memory of the past. </p>
<p>Tutu aptly called the TRC <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/723953?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">“the third way”</a>. It lifted the veil of lies perpetuated under apartheid, offering victims, perpetrators and “implicated others”. To borrow American academic <a href="https://complit.ucla.edu/person/michael-rothberg/">Michael Rothberg</a>’s term, it was a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23133895?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">horizon</a> moment pregnant with possibility that oriented the country toward a hopeful (if unpredictable) future. </p>
<p>Here was a chance for South Africans to begin anew. But, two decades later and after almost 25 years of post-apartheid democracy, the hope that was envisioned then – and the racial reconciliation these historical moments of 1994 and 1998 promised – are only barely visible.</p>
<p>What remains are the memories of the stories told at the TRC and their history-making impetus. All that remains, as Chief Justice Ismail Mohamed then <a href="https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/25596/Complete.pdf?sequence=7">said</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>is the truth of wounded memories of loved ones. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s a deep and traumatic memory that could be shared, but is impossible to translate, into objective and corroborative evidence which could survive the rigours of the law. </p>
<h2>“No one to blame”</h2>
<p>Some of the cases that came before the TRC had already been tried and tested in a case of law and the courts had found “no one to blame”. It’s a refrain at the end of many inquests, which became the title of a book by <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/george-bizos">George Bizos</a>, the South African human rights lawyer who represented anti-apartheid activists, including Mandela and Walter Sisulu. </p>
<p>Bizos served as the lawyer at the TRC for the families of those who suffered gross human rights violations. Among them were the widows of the <a href="http://www.thecradockfour.co.za/Home.html">Cradock Four</a> whose husbands were brutally killed by apartheid security forces. During her testimony one of the widows, <a href="http://nomondecalata.com/">Nomonde Calata</a>, let out a scream that still haunts many of us who were present at that first TRC hearing in East London. </p>
<p>She was bearing witness to the shards of her brokenness after the murder of her husband, Fort Calata. She recalled the painful details of the day she received the news that his charred remains had been found with the burnt-out wreck of the car in which he was travelling with his comrades. At the time she was a 26-year-old mother of two, and expecting her third child. </p>
<p>Even the memory of this moment was too much to bear. Mrs Calata’s “iconic” scream didn’t just mark the opening of the TRC. Hers was the voice of a “second wounding”; an expression of anger and pain, screamed at a past that goes back several generations, calling up deeply buried emotions that reverberated over several generations. </p>
<p>There was a sense that Mrs Calata was at last reclaiming her agency, with the violent movement of her body thrown back as she let out her wailing cry. She was confronting this violent history told on the stage of the TRC, exposing those responsible for her irreparable loss. </p>
<p>American social activist bell hooks <a href="http://infed.org/mobi/bell-hooks-on-education/">writes</a> that black subjectivity is not a standpoint that exists only to oppose dehumanisation,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>but as that movement which enables… self-actualisation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Objectified in so many ways as the racial and sexual “other” to legitimise the colonial and apartheid order, Calata’s TRC testimony shifted the gaze from the object of oppression to shine the light on the perpetrators’ depravity. This powerful stance unsettles the view of a world that associates goodness with all things white and savagery with black people. </p>
<p>The TRC laid bare the savagery of apartheid. No longer would it be possible to deny the barbarism of the apartheid state and the men and women who were its executioners. </p>
<h2>White spectators</h2>
<p>A similar move is reflected in the exposure of white America’s vicious terrorism of the lynching of black people in the artist Ken Gonzales Day’s project <a href="http://kengonzalesday.com/erased-lynchings/">“Erased Lynchings”</a>. </p>
<p>In a series of photographs, Gonzales Day shows lynchings of black bodies with the images of the ropes and bodies removed from the scene of the crime, leaving the white spectators in the photographs. The series invites the viewer to cast the gaze not on the victims of the lynchings, but rather on the spectators to this crime, gleefully standing by to witness this atrocity to its conclusion. </p>
<p>This forces us to reflect on the extreme depravity of these spectators, and to ponder about the conditions of a society that perpetuates such acts of dehumanisation. Far from denial of history, inviting the imaginary at these sites of the crime presents the viewer with potent evidence of who the doer of the evil deed is. </p>
<p>Who are these people, and what stories did or do they tell their children about this shameful history? How are the memories of this shame passed down? Through its silencing and denial? Most importantly, how does it play out in societies where perpetrators and victims live in the same country in the aftermath of violent pasts? </p>
<p>These are some of the most urgent questions of our time. Few topics stake a more compelling claim on humanities research than the legacies of historical trauma. Apartheid, colonialism, slavery and other watershed moments of crimes against humanity in the 20th century are not events in “the past”. They are a history whose traumatic repercussions reverberates across multiple generations. </p>
<p>We should receive the cry of Nomonde Calata as a call to arms; to rethink our notions of “reconciliation”, “forgiveness” and other concepts that imply a goal, an accomplishment. Dealing with the past will always remain “unfinished business”, because I think that much of what happens in the afterlife of historical trauma is enigmatic, muddy, elusive, and unpredictable. The words “forgiveness” or “reconciliation” fall short of adequately capturing this complexity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107721/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Twenty years after the final report of South Africa’s Truth Commission, dealing with the past will always remain “unfinished business”.
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Research Chair in Studies in Historical Trauma and Transformation, Stellenbosch University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/105417
2018-10-23T09:15:58Z
2018-10-23T09:15:58Z
Pik Botha: sympathetic obits fail to recognise that he protected apartheid
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241793/original/file-20181023-169801-bheksr.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Pik Botha's life’s work was dedicated to the protection and entrenchment of apartheid.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Media 24/Alet Pretorius</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/2021882/apartheid-era-foreign-minister-pik-botha-dies/">death of Roelof Frederik “Pik” Botha</a>, South Africa’s apartheid era foreign minister from 1977 to 1994, has produced a range of appraisals of his life. </p>
<p>The general tone of the commentaries – including the governing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/obituaries/pik-botha-dead.html">African National Congress (ANC’s)</a> - has been sympathetic. Many have been prepared to give Botha the benefit of the doubt, viewing him as an essentially reasonable man whose decent political instincts were consistently frustrated at home and abroad by forces beyond his control. An old quote from a Western diplomat was excavated <a href="https://m.news24.com/Obituaries/pik-botha-a-good-man-working-for-a-bad-government-20181012">claiming that Botha</a> was</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a good man working for a bad government, one of the first National Party leaders who saw that democracy was inevitable. South Africa could have avoided years of bloodshed and turmoil if the NP had taken his advice. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This take on Botha as a man of peace and a frustrated democrat is a travesty. It displays a cavalier attitude towards recent southern African history. True, he will never rank among the most brutish defenders of apartheid: he lacked the crude racism of erstwhile apartheid prime minister <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/johannes-gerhardus-strijdom">Johannes G. Strijdom</a>, and the ideological fanaticism of apartheid architect <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/hendrik-frensch-verwoerd">Hendrik Verwoerd</a>. He also didn’t have the thuggery of John Vorster, and authoritarianism of a PW Botha, their respective successors.</p>
<p>But Pik Botha certainly helped enable apartheid. </p>
<p>At the heart of the system</p>
<p>Botha defended apartheid internationally and was firmly committed to the system – however “reformist” his version of it. He served successive apartheid regimes that ultimately rested on violence and hugely disproportionate levels of white privilege and power. </p>
<p>Botha also endorsed the policy of aggression towards neighbouring states in the 1980s. Known as <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00358538708453820">“destabilisation”</a>, the policy caused catastrophic damage to their economies and societies. </p>
<p>He also served on the State Security Council during the turmoil of the middle to late 1980s, when it was issuing orders for activists to be “permanently removed from society” and “eliminated”. He would subsequently argue before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996 that they had not meant kill. This allowed security force operatives to twist in the wind while the political leadership <a href="https://www.economist.com/international/1997/10/16/ambiguitys-path-to-murder">abdicated responsibility</a>. </p>
<p>It’s a measure of the horrors and of the malign individuals spawned by apartheid that Botha emerges as relatively liberal or, in the jargon of the era, “enlightened” by comparison. But, the key word, is “relatively”. Being an improvement on grotesque figures like Strijdom, Verwoerd and Vorster is hardly enough to be considered a democrat.</p>
<p>An impediment to change</p>
<p>In fact, Botha helped delay the process to democratise South Africa, not facilitate it. </p>
<p>He was a passionate opponent of the economic sanctions that ultimately helped bring down apartheid, and worked closely with foreign leaders against them. Fortunately for him, the governments of then US President Ronald Reagan, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were extremely sympathetic to the white South African cause.</p>
<p>Botha was also an architect of illicit trade deals and military sanctions-busting arrangements designed to protect the apartheid regime. This enabled it to resist change or strengthen its capacity to change only on <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/news/opinion/the-real-face-of-pik-botha-17469472">its own terms</a>. The constructive engagement approach favoured by Thatcher and Reagan emboldened apartheid South Africa and encouraged its excesses at home and abroad.</p>
<p>Yet fundamental change finally did come to southern Africa: the destabilisation of neighbouring states stopped, Namibia got its independence in 1990, and FW de Klerk made his historic speech of <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/fw-de-klerk-announces-release-nelson-mandela-and-unbans-political-organisations">February 2, 1990</a> announcing the unbanning of liberation movements and release of political prisoners. </p>
<p>Botha’s liberalism amounted, first, to a defence of apartheid. Then, as the cracks in that system began to open in the period following the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">1976 Soweto Uprising</a>, he embraced “reform”. This was an ultimately disastrous attempt to secure the modernisation of white domination which, in triggering a range of unintended consequences, hastened the demise of the system.</p>
<p>Even in the period following the unbanning of the ANC in 1990 and the beginning of negotiations to end apartheid, Botha, like his party leader De Klerk, supported a convoluted system of power-sharing with a built-in minority veto. This was designed to emasculate an incoming majority-based government and prevent it from tackling the awesome socioeconomic legacies of apartheid.</p>
<p>Finally, Botha’s role in the carnage wrought by apartheid South Africa’s regional destabilisation policy belies the image of the peacemaking diplomat seeking to rein in more hawkish and militaristic elements. A narrative emerged claiming that destabilisation was a South African Defence Force project imposed against the wishes of a Department of Foreign Affairs, led by Botha, which was more interested in diplomatic dialogue and peace deals with neighbouring states. </p>
<p>This was a false dichotomy. </p>
<p>Degrees of hawkishness</p>
<p>As Foreign Minister, Botha appreciated the benefits of a policy of military coercion. This softened up neighbouring states and made them more inclined to sign peace deals and non-aggression pacts on South African terms. Any differences that emerged were over tactics rather than strategy. This included how much military pressure should be applied and at what point it should be reduced. </p>
<p>At no point did Botha oppose military pressure. In fact, he was quite explicit on this point in the South African parliament in May 1984 when discussing the process by which the country had secured the March 1984 <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/south-africa-and-mozambique-sign-non-aggression-pact">Nkomati Accord</a> with Mozambique. Then Marxist Mozambique, humiliated and its economy broken by South African attacks, was compelled to sign a non-aggression treaty with the apartheid regime. Botha rejected any idea this was a source of bureaucratic conflict with the military, stating that he was in “absolute agreement with the decisions taken”. He added that the Nkomati Accord was achieved “by way of the military action we took, as well as by way of <a href="https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy4.lib.le.ac.uk/stable/2636749?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">diplomatic action”</a>.</p>
<p>Legacy</p>
<p>He may be remembered as a man who operated at the more liberal end of a thoroughly illiberal regime, and one who came to <a href="https://www.economist.com/obituary/2018/10/20/obituary-pik-botha">read the writing on the wall</a>. This is an achievement of sorts, but he should not be remembered as making a decisive – or even significant - contribution to the demise of apartheid. The credit for that lies elsewhere. </p>
<p>Most of his life’s work was dedicated to the protection and entrenchment of that system, which the United Nations declared a crime against humanity, not its dismantling. And, in the 1980s he was an important cog at the heart of the machinery of repression, the State Security Council. That is a more accurate if unpleasant epitaph for Roelof Frederik Botha.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105417/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Hamill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The sympathetic take on Pik Botha as a man of peace and a frustrated democrat is a travesty.
James Hamill, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/94008
2018-04-15T19:58:09Z
2018-04-15T19:58:09Z
Can we really teach ‘Indigenizing’ courses online?
<p>On April 16, Canadians — and internet users around the world — have the opportunity to participate in “<a href="https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada">Indigenous Canada</a>,” a <a href="http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/MOOC_Final.pdf">Massive Open Online Course</a> (MOOC) offered through the University of Alberta and the Coursera consortium of online learning providers.</p>
<p>Similar courses — for instance on “<a href="https://www.edx.org/course/reconciliation-through-indigenous-education">Reconciliation through Indigenous education</a>” and
“<a href="https://www.coursera.org/learn/aboriginal-education">Aboriginal worldviews and education</a>” — are offered by the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto respectively.</p>
<p>“Indigenization” of the curriculum is an urgent issue in Canadian higher education.</p>
<p>As a non-Indigenous faculty member at Thompson Rivers University, I make no claims to speak for, or about, Indigenous communities. I specialize in learning technologies, have a strong interest in instructional design and e-learning and my doctoral thesis was on <a href="https://prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/handle/11023/4150/ucalgary_2017_stranach_matthew.pdf;jsessionid=FABF6690A74C76E867DF323CDF3949EF?sequence=3">social presence in MOOCs</a>. </p>
<p>My university has <a href="https://towards-indigenizing.trubox.ca/">made a priority of “Indigenizing” curricula</a> and expressed the desire to be a “university of choice” both for Indigenous students and for open, distance and online education. Given my role as a faculty member is to support learning technologies and instructional design initiatives, I have taken a strong interest in Indigenization programs across Canada.</p>
<h2>Indigenous ways of knowing</h2>
<p>So what are we talking about when we discuss Indigenization? Camosun College, in their “<a href="http://camosun.ca/learn/school/indigenous-education-community-connections/about/publications/indigenization-plan13.pdf">Inspiring relationships</a>” strategic document provides a useful starting point in this discussion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Indigenization is the process by which Indigenous ways of knowing, being, doing and relating are incorporated into educational, organizational, cultural and social structures.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of the <a href="http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf">94 Calls to Action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada</a>, seven deal specifically with education while another while another four deal with “education for reconciliation.” </p>
<p>Higher education clearly has a role to play in helping to implement these calls to action — through teacher education programs, and across the entire curriculum.</p>
<p>Within the context of MOOCs — and e-learning generally — there is much potential to align with Indigenization curricular goals. MOOCS, for example, could amplify and extend place-based, problem-based and project-based learning of Indigenous content as well as language revitalization and storytelling.</p>
<p>There could also be great value in bringing Indigenous content to a potentially “massive” audience. In the past, some MOOCs <a href="http://www.karsenti.ca/archives/RITPU_VOL10_NO2_MOOC_ENvf.pdf">have seen enrollments in the hundreds of thousands</a>. </p>
<h2>Didactic teaching methods</h2>
<p>The concern is that there is, as yet, little evidence which speaks to good practices for Indigenizing these types of massive online courses.</p>
<p>The question arises of how to incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing, being, doing and relating into the way these courses are designed, delivered and facilitated.</p>
<p>As an instructional designer I am constantly going back to the question: Who are the intended learners? And what are their needs in relation to the content, subject matter and program of study? </p>
<p>While there is still much to learn about who participates in MOOCs and for what purpose, <a href="http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2448/3655">some studies on this topic</a> have shown that MOOC participants tend to be university - or college - educated males in their 20s to 40s. Results from my own doctoral research study are consistent with this profile. </p>
<p>It will be interesting to see what outreach the providers of these Indigenizing courses and their institutional partners will engage in — to reach as diverse a range of learners as possible.</p>
<p>Another concern is that MOOCs offered through Coursera, EdX and other similar providers use relatively didactic, one-way teaching methods. The learning management software, course design and learning outcomes have tended to favour a homogeneous, <a href="http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/890/1663">cognitive-behaviourist approach to teaching and learning</a> — with little interaction between instructor and students, and evaluation and assessment frequently automated.</p>
<p>I am curious to see what variations of the typical <a href="https://www.tonybates.ca/2014/10/13/comparing-xmoocs-and-cmoocs-philosophy-and-practice/">“xMOOC” pedagogy</a> and curricular approach may be employed when speaking to and about Indigenous knowledge and world views.</p>
<h2>Diluting and distorting complex content</h2>
<p>It is also worth mentioning that <a href="http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1651/2774">MOOCs have notoriously low completion rates</a>.</p>
<p>It has been argued that this is not necessarily a bad thing — rather, that <a href="http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/882/1689">participants choose their own learning outcomes and pathways through the courses</a>. Again, my doctoral work is consistent with these findings. </p>
<p>The point is that addressing important content using a format which has a low participation and completion rate runs the risk of diluting and diminishing the content within academic and public discourse.</p>
<p>There is also a risk of speaking so broadly of Indigenous issues that these courses distort the complex diversity of Indigenous experiences in Canada. I will be interested to see how the University of Alberta and University of Toronto speak to the complex plurality of First Nations relationships within their home regions of Ontario and Alberta and across Canada generally.</p>
<h2>A surfeit of data</h2>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764213498851">There is also the question of learner analytics</a>. Coursera, Ed.X and their institutional partners collect vast quantities of data on platform users and their pathways through course content. This information can be aggregated and used for a wide range of purposes. </p>
<p>It would be interesting to hear from learning software providers and their institutional partners how their analytics are used, and — from a practical standpoint — how this usage will enhance teaching and learning on the topics addressed.</p>
<p>We are still in the very early days of assessing good practice in Indigenization curricular initiatives vis-à-vis e-learning, distance education and instructional design. </p>
<p>Three of the country’s most respected and high-profile universities are to be commended for bringing Indigenous content to a potentially “massive” audience of learners from around the world. </p>
<p>These efforts, should in turn, lead to valuable lessons in how institutions of higher learning can leverage online learning to improve access to, and quality of, their offerings on Indigenous topics.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94008/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Stranach does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
University “Indigenization” efforts using Massive Open Online Courses promise to reach wide audiences. They also raise critical questions about how to embody Indigenous ways of knowing and relating.
Matthew Stranach, Coordinator, Educational Technologies, Thompson Rivers University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/90808
2018-01-31T23:29:54Z
2018-01-31T23:29:54Z
Canada guilty of forging crisis in Indigenous foster care
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204274/original/file-20180131-157455-14mhqh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dr. Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, has called on the federal government to stop its chronic underfunding of services for Indigenous children.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Politics is about power – who has it, who doesn’t, and what it enables people to do. Canada as a settler colonial state has had too much power for too long over Indigenous peoples and their lands and institutions. </p>
<p>No genuinely positive change, however defined, can succeed unless the federal and provincial governments roll back power to give the Indigenous control over their own self-determining futures and lands. </p>
<p>After almost two and a half years, it seems like Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is going to do something positive to address what is recognized as a “humanitarian crisis.” The <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/crisis-philpott-child-welfare-1.4385136">identification of a crisis by Minister of Indigenous Services Jane Philpott</a> may be news, but the crisis is hardly that. </p>
<p>Way back in 1984, the Manitoba-based Kimelman Committee investigating the forced removal of Indigenous children from their homes and into the child welfare system concluded: “Cultural genocide has been taking place in a systematic, routine manner.” </p>
<p>In 2013, United Nations Special Rapporteur <a href="http://www.amnesty.ca/blog/new-un-report-highlights-crisis-for-the-human-rights-of-indigenous-peoples-in-canada">James Anaya described Indigenous peoples as being in “crisis” in Canada</a>. </p>
<p>And two years ago, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal sided with the Assembly of First Nations and Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the <a href="https://fncaringsociety.com/">First Nations Child and Family Caring Society</a>, and called for the <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/blackstock-philpott-children-welfare-1.4420658">federal government to stop its chronic underfunding of services for Indigenous children</a> living on reserves. </p>
<p>When announcing six steps to improve the status of Indigenous children in “care,” Philpott argued that “assigning blame” was not the goal. Rather, she said, it was to acknowledge “the severity and importance of the crisis and determining how each of us can be part of the solution.”</p>
<p>However, assigning blame is important, because Canada is responsible. It created the crisis in the first place and has been avoiding it ever since. Successive federal and provincial governments since the 1880s, if not before, have been blameworthy in their actions. </p>
<p>They have acted in the name of settlers like me, settlers who voted for elected representatives and parties and endorsed the policies of their governments.</p>
<h2>A violation of the UN Genocide Convention</h2>
<p>In much of my published work, I have consistently argued that <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623528.2015.1096583">the Indian Residential Schools violated the UN Genocide Convention of 1948</a>, with a particular focus on <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CrimeOfGenocide.aspx">Article IIe</a>, which prohibits forcibly transferring children from one group to another group.</p>
<p>The residential school system operated for more than seven generations, and the federal government created legislation in the form of the <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/background-the-indian-act-1.1056988">Indian Act</a>. The government worked with the Christian churches and other authorities to remove Indigenous children from their families and communities. </p>
<p>Most of us know something of the struggles many children encountered, including extremely high rates of abuse and the loss of languages, cultures and crucial ties with their families. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) officially names this cultural genocide. But individual TRC commissioners and a large number of survivors see no need to use “cultural” as a descriptor.</p>
<p>The argument can also be made that the so-called <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-sixties-scoop-explained">Sixties Scoop</a> — the mass removal of Indigenous children from their families into the child welfare system — also violated the UN Genocide Convention, since here too, tens of thousands of children were removed from their families and communities.</p>
<p>Many were virtually sold to white families in the United States, and were stripped of their languages, spiritual beliefs and cultures. Some did not even know they were Indigenous, just that they often looked and thought differently from their white families. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204162/original/file-20180131-38216-18g3gwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204162/original/file-20180131-38216-18g3gwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204162/original/file-20180131-38216-18g3gwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204162/original/file-20180131-38216-18g3gwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204162/original/file-20180131-38216-18g3gwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204162/original/file-20180131-38216-18g3gwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204162/original/file-20180131-38216-18g3gwx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Beaverhouse First Nation Chief Marcia Brown Martel was taken from her home near North Bay, Ont., in 1967 when she was four years old. She spent years in foster care. Last February, a judge ruled in favour of 16,000 Indigenous Ontarians removed from their homes in the Sixties Scoop.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nineteenth-century politicians and bureaucrats at the federal level were overt about their racism and their intent to end the separate existence of Indigenous peoples using residential schools. When it comes to the Sixties Scoop, provincial leaders were more cryptic — policy outcomes were assumed rather than explicitly stated. Policies implemented against Indigenous peoples were based on bias and structural racism embedded within child welfare systems. </p>
<h2>Why the delay in responding to a crisis?</h2>
<p>When it comes to political action in favour of Indigenous peoples, things move slowly even when court decisions call for immediate action. <a href="https://www.liberal.ca/realchange/a-new-nation-to-nation-process/">The Liberal government has made a commitment to making changes</a>. Why is it taking so long to see some actual action? Delays in responding to this crisis have a profound impact on the lives of Indigenous children, parents and extended families. </p>
<p>Does the Liberal government only care when confronted with media spotlights and when meeting with Indigenous leaders? If they do have a sense of responsibility, why are things moving so slowly? </p>
<p>The government needs to be more transparent about what they are doing and when. They need to consult with their treaty partners, not make decisions on their behalf. They need to communicate the obstacles they are facing. Good intentions are not enough. Their intentions need to be translated into concrete policies and then implemented. </p>
<h2>Goodwill needs to translate into action</h2>
<p>Philpott announced a six-point plan to address the crisis in foster care. The plan overlaps with — but is far less comprehensive than — a proposal known as <a href="https://fncaringsociety.com/spirit-bear-plan">The Spirit Bear Plan</a> put forward by the <a href="https://fncaringsociety.com/">First Nations Child and Family Caring Society.</a></p>
<p>The minister’s plan includes a vow to “implement all orders” from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. It focuses on “prevention and early intervention;” support of Indigenous community-led programs; support for “Inuit and Métis leadership to advance culturally appropriate reform; and better "data and reporting” strategies. </p>
<p>But the Spirit Bear plan tackles a problem Philpott does not address — government accountability to Indigenous peoples. The Spirit Bear Plan also calls for a large infusion of much needed funding into communities. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204275/original/file-20180131-157455-qyew8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204275/original/file-20180131-157455-qyew8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204275/original/file-20180131-157455-qyew8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204275/original/file-20180131-157455-qyew8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204275/original/file-20180131-157455-qyew8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204275/original/file-20180131-157455-qyew8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204275/original/file-20180131-157455-qyew8g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cindy Blackstock, Executive Director of First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, middle, attends the National Day of Action on First Nations Child Welfare on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in November 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A central request of the Spirit Bear plan is identifying need and targeting funding to address the massive inequalities between Indigenous peoples and settlers. The plan asks the parliamentary budget officer to “publicly cost out the shortfalls in all federally funded public services provided to First Nations children, youth and families (education, health, water, child welfare, etc.) and propose solutions to fix it.” </p>
<p>In consultation with First Nations, the government would “co-create a holistic Spirit Bear Plan to end all of the inequalities … in a short period of time sensitive to children’s best interests, development and distinct community needs.” </p>
<p>As well, the plan calls for oversight and a “thorough and independent 360° evaluation to identify any ongoing discriminatory ideologies, policies or practices and address them” for any government department providing services to Indigenous peoples. </p>
<p>The Spirit Bear Plan concludes with a call to all public servants to “receive mandatory training to identify and address government ideology, policies and practices that fetter the implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.” </p>
<p>If any form of nation-to-nation relationship is to work, government activities must be transparent and accountable. That transparency and accountability must be able to be measured from outside, and corrected when it is insufficient. There needs to be a rollback of settler government control over Indigenous issues. The current system continues to reflect the power imbalance that developed from the onset of settler colonization – settler governments want to keep the power to enact policies towards Indigenous peoples. </p>
<p>Indigenous power and land were taken by the settler state. The building of constructive and positive relations is not about being “nice.” It is about ensuring that settler governments cede enough political power so that they are no longer in a position to make the same policies again that have led to crises.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90808/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David MacDonald receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Guelph. </span></em></p>
No project for reconciliation can succeed unless the federal and provincial governments roll back their power and create space for Indigenous control over their own self-determining futures.
David MacDonald, Professor of Political Science and Research Leadership Chair for the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences, University of Guelph
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/87609
2017-12-17T21:58:37Z
2017-12-17T21:58:37Z
Threats to Bears Ears and other Indigenous sacred sites are a violation of human rights
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198926/original/file-20171213-31716-1kwngoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Comb Ridge near Bluff Utah.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For many archaeologists, one of the darkest moments in memory was the destruction of the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1214384.stm">fourth and fifth-century Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001</a>. That tragedy was later eclipsed by <a href="https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150901-isis-destruction-looting-ancient-sites-iraq-syria-archaeology/">ISIS’s destruction of Baghdad museum artifacts, Palmyra temples and other structures elsewhere.</a> </p>
<p>Such wanton erasure of culture diminishes our collective history. As an archaeologist who has spent much of my career protecting heritage, I see these as instances of violence against history. </p>
<p>The loss of less prominent ancestral sites here in North America may not seem as dramatic yet the effects are of even greater consequence to First Nations and Native Americans. No matter how unassuming they may be to outsiders, the ancient campsites, scatters of broken pottery and other tangible signs of their ancestors’ lives are places imbued with spiritual qualities. </p>
<p>All are considered vital to the identities, histories, religious practices and well-being of Indigenous North Americans. </p>
<p>Recently, two places of great cultural and spiritual importance — one in Canada, the other in the United States — have been threatened. In the first, legal efforts have failed; in the second, existing protections have been severely weakened:</p>
<h2><em>Ktunaxa Nation: Grizzly Bear Spirit</em></h2>
<p>On Nov. 2, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against the <a href="http://www.ktunaxa.org/">Ktunaxa Nation’s</a> efforts to prevent a ski resort from being developed in British Columbia in an area of spiritual importance known as Qat’muk, where the Ktunaxa believe the Grizzly Bear Spirit resides. </p>
<p>The court concluded Canada’s Charter of Rights “<a href="https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/16816/index.do">protects the freedom to worship, but does not protect the spiritual focal point of worship</a>.” </p>
<p>Yet the Ktunaxa had asked the court to validate not their right to worship but their right to continue essential traditional practices. They fear the Grizzly Bear Spirit will be be driven away, further debilitating their connection to a living landscape.</p>
<h2><em>Bears Ears and Grand Staircase: Escalante National Parks in Utah</em></h2>
<p>On Dec. 4, Donald Trump signed two proclamations that greatly reduced the size of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/us/trump-bears-ears.html">Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Parks in Utah</a>. With that pen stroke, two million acres of land may soon be open to mining, logging and other uses. </p>
<p>This move is seen by the Hopi, Navajo, Ute and Zuni as an endangerment of their heritage sites, burials and sacred spaces. </p>
<p>All U.S. federal lands require compliance with the <a href="http://www.achp.gov/nhpa.pdf">National Historic Preservation Act</a> and the <a href="https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/summary-national-environmental-policy-act">National Environmental Policy Act</a>, but the oversight of these acts is not as stringent as the overarching cultural and environmental protection afforded national monuments. For Bear Ears, <a href="http://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/12/04/five-american-indian-tribes-furious-over-trump-shrinking-bears-ears-sue-the-president/">affected tribes and their allies are currently mounting legal challenges to the president’s authority</a>.</p>
<p>Cultural harm will likely result. This may include threats to the archaeological record of ancient habitation areas and activities across the landscape — what the Hopi refer to as the footprints of their ancestors. </p>
<p>Even more disturbing will be the weakening of protection of places of great historical or spiritual importance that are fundamental to the beliefs and worldview of the Hopi, Navajo, Ute and Zuni peoples. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199494/original/file-20171215-17851-3u23wk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199494/original/file-20171215-17851-3u23wk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199494/original/file-20171215-17851-3u23wk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199494/original/file-20171215-17851-3u23wk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=340&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199494/original/file-20171215-17851-3u23wk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199494/original/file-20171215-17851-3u23wk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199494/original/file-20171215-17851-3u23wk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Ktunaxa Nation has tried to prevent a ski resort from being developed in British Columbia in an area of spiritual importance known as Qat’muk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Heritage loss: A violation of human rights</h2>
<p>“Violence” is seldom used by archaeologists to describe the harms resulting from disturbing heritage sites. But by looking at this through the lens of indigeneity, we must acknowledge the real harm that is done to people in these situations. </p>
<p>When Indigenous heritage sites, burial grounds and sacred places, or other types of Indigenous heritage are intentionally denigrated, destroyed or appropriated, it is both a form of violence and a human rights violation. </p>
<p>The United Nations defines human rights as the “rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status.” <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/WhatareHumanRights.aspx">We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination.</a>“ But conspicuously missing from the UN’s definition is "heritage,” which is no less important as a standard of well-being for many peoples.</p>
<p>Being denied the right to heritage, along with the denigration or destruction of heritage sites, is not only harmful, it also constitutes a type of violence that exacerbates existing social, economic, spiritual and health challenges faced by contemporary Indigenous peoples. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199361/original/file-20171215-26014-7krga3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199361/original/file-20171215-26014-7krga3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=332&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199361/original/file-20171215-26014-7krga3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=332&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199361/original/file-20171215-26014-7krga3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=332&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199361/original/file-20171215-26014-7krga3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199361/original/file-20171215-26014-7krga3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199361/original/file-20171215-26014-7krga3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Members of the Musqueam First Nation block traffic as they march on the Arthur Laing Bridge in a 2012 protest of a nearby condo development on an ancient Musqueam burial site in Vancouver, B.C.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="http://www.who.int/violenceprevention/approach/definition/en/">The World Health Organization defines violence</a> as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.” </p>
<p>Without wanting to detract attention from more explicit forms of harm, the destruction of heritage sites has significant adverse effects upon Indigenous peoples in North America and elsewhere. </p>
<p>This is articulated by <a href="http://www.hulquminum.bc.ca/pubs/McLay_etal_2004_respecting-the-ancestors.pdf?lbisphpreq=1">Hul’qumi’num (B.C.) elder Ruby Peters</a> who held that the disturbance of one ancient burial ground not only offended and disrupted relations with the deceased but also resulted in physical danger for the living. </p>
<h2>Contrasting world views: Heritage is alive</h2>
<p>To understand why the destruction of seemingly “unremarkable” sites is equivalent to violence requires an understanding of how Indigenous conceptions of heritage and place may be fundamentally different from that found in Western society.</p>
<p>When Indigenous heritage is viewed and evaluated through only a Western lens, it ignores the fact that Indigenous values, beliefs and knowledge systems are fundamentally different.</p>
<p>Western knowledge of the world is based on description and classification, a Cartesian sense of order, and a search for universalist explanation. These ideas emerged during the Enlightenment’s notion of Reason and a belief that the world can be neatly divided up and studied.</p>
<p>In contrast, Indigenous perspectives are particularistic and situational, composed of different bodies of knowledge. Heather Harris (Cree-Métis) notes in her essay, “<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/div-classtitlesmith-claire-andamp-wobst-h-martin-ed-indigenous-archaeologies-decolonizing-theory-and-practice-one-world-archaeology-47-xxiv-408-pages-84-illustrations-6-tables-2005-abingdon-andamp-new-york-routledge-0-415-30965-4-hardback-85div/9BC0B324574330D77F48DD607A02ACDE">Indigenous Worldviews and Ways of Knowing</a>” that “the universe [and everything in it] is alive, has power, will and intelligence.” </p>
<p>Absent then may be the familiar divisions between the natural and supernatural realms, the sacred and the secular, or even past and present. </p>
<p>For the Ktunaxa, Qat’muk is thus not a “place” or “spiritual focal point” but a living presence; for the peoples of the Big Ears National Park, that landscape is literally alive with their history.</p>
<p>Evident here is that most of what constitutes heritage is intangible, lacking physical form, yet vital to one’s existence. In this sense, heritage is not just about “things” (such as artifacts) but about relationships and what these things mean. </p>
<p>In the words of one Yukon elder, when asked to define “heritage,” he said, “<a href="https://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/sites/default/files/resources/reports/yfn_ipinch_report_2016.pdf">It is everything that makes us who we are.</a>” </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HbPLXTJwVMY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">In this video, the author, George Nicholas, speaks about heritage — not as things but as relationships — at TEDx Yellowknife, in conjunction with Itaa Yati Traditional Knowledge Symposium, in 2014.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Resistance and reconciliation</h2>
<p>Yet the privileging of land development projects and commercial interests over the protection of Aboriginal rights and interests is all too common. </p>
<p>In 2014, protests erupted over the desecration of an ancestral burial ground on Grace Islet, B.C. <a href="https://qmackie.com/2014/11/16/grace-islet-and-the-equifinality-of-bad-process/">Despite being a recorded archaeological site, a house was literally being built on and around 16 burial cairns</a>.</p>
<p>A settlement was reached early in 2016 when the province, bowing to pressure from First Nations and their allies, agreed to purchase the one-hectare islet. The landowner received $5.45 million — of which $840,000 was for the property itself — and $4.6 million for “losses suffered.” The First Nation received no recompense for the far more serious harms it endured.</p>
<p>Qat'muck, Bear Ears and Grace Islet are not isolated instances. Heritage values and human rights remain at peril due to economic interests, political pressures and incomplete or inaccurate understandings of what heritage means.</p>
<p>There have been victories: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/dakota-access-standing-rock-sioux-victory-court/530427/">The federal ruling against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in South Dakota earlier this year</a> is one recent example. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe legal case was about both the lack of adequate consultation, and the failure to recognize the impact of the pipeline on the cultural, spiritual and environmental dimensions of the land and water. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199495/original/file-20171215-17848-1t764px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199495/original/file-20171215-17848-1t764px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199495/original/file-20171215-17848-1t764px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199495/original/file-20171215-17848-1t764px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199495/original/file-20171215-17848-1t764px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199495/original/file-20171215-17848-1t764px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/199495/original/file-20171215-17848-1t764px.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline highlighted the spiritual and environmental aspects of land and water. Here, a solidarity rally with the DAPL protesters on November 5, 2016 in Toronto, Canada.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Too often, these victories are short-lived. The fate of DAPL remains uncertain. As the actions underway to gut U.S. National Parks show, Native American heritage is threatened and endangered by political and economic interests.</p>
<p>Current local and national legal and policy frameworks for heritage in both the U.S. and Canada fail to reflect emerging national and international norms related to Indigenous legal and cultural traditions and human rights. </p>
<p>Yet there is now increasing acknowledgement in Canada — and globally — that Indigenous Peoples’ heritage must be protected more fully and effectively and that the protection of one’s heritage needs to be considered as a basic human right. </p>
<p>Some of these new policy frameworks include the recommendations of <a href="http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=905">Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission</a> and the <a href="http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf">UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples</a>, to which both the U.S. and Canada are signatories. </p>
<p>Yet, there is currently too little sense of direction, or too little incentive by all levels of government that have a major role to play in this arena. </p>
<p>There can be no argument that colonialism robbed Indigenous North Americans of much of their heritage; we today subsequently must support restoration and protection of their cultural patrimony. This requires action, not lip service. </p>
<p>Reconciliation needs to be be more than saying “sorry.” It should mean both understanding these issues as human rights violations and fundamentally changing how heritage is protected.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87609/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>George Nicholas has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to support the research conducted by the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH) project (2008-2016).</span></em></p>
The Trump administration recently reduced the size of Bears Ears in Utah, opening millions of acres to mining and other uses. This threatens Indigenous heritage and can be seen as a form of violence.
George Nicholas, Professor of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/76030
2017-04-12T16:58:42Z
2017-04-12T16:58:42Z
Craig Williamson: the spy who came in for apartheid
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164796/original/image-20170411-31873-1vvexmb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Apartheid spy Craig Williamson (far right).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>-<em><strong>Book Review:</strong> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Spy-Uncovering-Williamson-Jonathan-Ancer-ebook/dp/B06Y1MXD33">Spy - Uncovering Craig Williamson</a> by Jonathan Ancer; Jacana Media, Johannesburg, March 2017</em></p>
<p>One can judge a book’s bleakness by the photograph on its cover. The Mephistophelian figure holding a tea cup is Craig Williamson: police informant, Cold War spy and apartheid assassin.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164702/original/image-20170410-8846-1sx9ii5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164702/original/image-20170410-8846-1sx9ii5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164702/original/image-20170410-8846-1sx9ii5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164702/original/image-20170410-8846-1sx9ii5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164702/original/image-20170410-8846-1sx9ii5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164702/original/image-20170410-8846-1sx9ii5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164702/original/image-20170410-8846-1sx9ii5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Prizewinning journalist <a href="https://jancerjancer.wordpress.com/author/jancerjancer/">Jonathan Ancer’s</a> goal is clear from the get-go. He wants to expose the man on the cover in all his infamy in order to set himself free.</p>
<p>It’s no surprise, then, that there’s no place in these pages for the political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s idea of the <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/07/hannah-arendt-the-banality-of-evil/">“banality of evil”</a> – those who perpetuate terrible deeds are mostly thoughtless functionaries. </p>
<p>For Ancer the man on the cover of the book – not apartheid, nor his handlers – was responsible for a two-decade career of falsehood, cover-up, betrayal, and murder. These were Williamson’s choice, and his alone.</p>
<h2>Class, rather than race at the core</h2>
<p>So who is (or was) Williamson? </p>
<p>Born into an English-speaking Johannesburg family, Williamson was schooled at one of the city’s great institutions, St John’s College. Gently, Ancer opens to the idea that class, rather than race, may have been at the core of Williamson’s inability to tell right from wrong.</p>
<p>Awkward and always overweight, the boy was bullied and in turn learned to bully. Other writers might have been tempted to position a propensity for violence at the centre of their narrative. Ancer is near playful when discussing Williamson’s school days.</p>
<p>But trawling through old copies of the school magazine, Ancer discovers that when they emerged, Williamson’s politics were of a raw racist strain which was integral to the search for a white South African patriotism after the Second World War. </p>
<p>In 1966, Williamson won a school debating-cum-mock election by drawing on the racial ideology espoused by the (now long-forgotten) Republican Party, a right wing splinter group of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/national-party-np">National Party</a>.</p>
<p>If this was the direction of his politics, his “gap year” confirmed it: his national served was not with apartheid’s South African Defence Force (SADF), as was the case for most young white men, but with the South African Police (SAP). </p>
<p>It was 1968. Maintaining domestic order and the travails of white-ruled Rhodesia, were uppermost in the thinking of prime minister <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/balthazar-johannes-vorster">John Vorster</a>, apartheid architect <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/hendrik-frensch-verwoerd">Hendrik Verwoerd’s</a> successor. Their National Party embarked on a charm offensive towards English-speakers: an approach that drew on the pervasive anti-Communism of the time.</p>
<p>So, young Williamson’s choice of national service in the SAP – which was then at the sharp end of racial repression – didn’t seemed untoward, even in Johannesburg’s supposed more liberal white English-speaking northern suburbs. </p>
<h2>Student politics</h2>
<p>After his year in the SAP, he enrolled to read Politics and Law at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Here Williamson began his decade-long career of subterfuge. He immersed himself in student politics: first, through the Wits Students’ Representative Council (SRC) and, later, the leftist National Union of South African Students (Nusas).</p>
<p>During these years, Williamson interacted with (and reported on) several generations of student leaders from almost every English-speaking university. Interviewed by Ancer, several of them report that suspicions about Williamson abounded, but the liberal impulse to believe, to forgive, to understand, stayed any serious investigations of a double life.</p>
<p>After Nusas, and purportedly without a passport, Williamson was catapulted (accompanied by his medical student wife, Ingrid) into the Geneva-based <a href="http://www.aluka.org/stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.nuun1974_30">International University Exchange Fund</a> (IUEF). This Nordic-funded body fronted for liberation movements across the world, but particularly in southern Africa. </p>
<p>This was when the police informant turned to espionage by passing information to apartheid’s notorious Special Branch (SB). Despite Williamson’s hints to the contrary, there’s no hard evidence that he passed on deep Cold War secrets to western intelligence agencies.</p>
<p>But, here, regretfully, Ancer leaves an intriguing question hanging. Might Williamson not have been working for the British, too? </p>
<p>This question isn’t asked out of mischief or malice. It simply connects the dots. Williamson’s Scottish-born father, Herbert, had a claim on British citizenship. If these were exercised the son might have travelled under the cover of British papers; and maybe he even worked as a double agent.</p>
<h2>Imperfect infiltrator</h2>
<p>In Geneva the ever-dutiful, ever-practical Williamson was drawn into the
IUEF, eventually becoming deputy to its Swedish Director, <a href="http://www.liberationafrica.se/intervstories/interviews/shubin/shubin.pdf">Lars-Gunner Erikson</a>. </p>
<p>But efforts to infiltrate (and divide) the ANC and the PAC in London were imperfect; indeed, these may well have been the moment every spy fears, overreach. His undoing came in an <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/it-revealed-switzerland-international-university-exchange-funds-deputy-director-craig-wi">exposé</a> in the British press after the defection of a South African agent.</p>
<p>He immediately absented himself from the IUEF and called his SB handler, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/25/world/man-in-the-news-apartheid-s-policeman-johann-coetzee.html">General Johann Coetzee</a>, who flew to Europe to accompany Williamson (and Ingrid) back to South Africa. </p>
<p>On landing, he was lauded by the local press – especially the then odious <em>Sunday Times</em> – who played off the metaphors of the Cold War spy-writer, John le Carré. It’s not surprising that in apartheid circles he became something of a hero. But an exaggerated James Bond-like characterisation of himself rendered him a figure of fun, even within the Security Branch. </p>
<p>Williamson continued to work in apartheid’s cause: building its international work, serving on various security bodies, and participating in South Africa’s wicked policy of regional destabilisation. It was in servicing the latter that the Cold War spy turned into an apartheid assassin.</p>
<h2>Personal anguish</h2>
<p>If Ancer is measured in the early part of the narrative, he draws from the depth of his craft – and his personal anguish - to describe Williamson’s role in the assassinations of three people. Journalist, academic and political activist, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/ruth-heloise-first">Ruth First</a>, was killed by a parcel bomb in her office in Maputo, Mozambique. Fellow anti-apartheid activist, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/jeanette-eva-curtis-0">Jeanette Schoon</a>, and her six-year old daughter, Katryn, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/jeannette-schoon-and-her-daughter-are-killed-letter-bomb">suffered</a> the same fate in Lubango in Angola.</p>
<p>For these killings and the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/bomb-blast-rocks-anc-london-office">bombing</a> of the ANC Office in London, Williamson <a href="http://sabctrc.saha.org.za/reports/volume2/chapter2/subsection43.htm">appeared</a> before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Amnesty Committee in September 1998. He was, according to an eyewitness, “not even remotely apologetic” for his role in these atrocities. But within the legal technology of the TRC process, Williamson’s 21-day performance was sufficient enough to be <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/13/victoriabrittain">granted</a> the amnesty he sought. </p>
<p>But what incenses Ancer – and should incense us all – is that the man on the cover’s sole interest was in reproducing what he regarded as his birthright: wealth and racial privilege. This is a beautifully written and meticulously researched book; it’s story told with disarming intellectual honesty and great passion. It’s destined become a minor classic about apartheid’s ruinous path.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76030/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Vale receives funding from the University of Johannesburg, the National Research Foundation and the Nanyang Technological University. </span></em></p>
Notorious apartheid spy Craig Williamson’s sole interest was in reproducing what he regarded as his birthright – wealth and racial privilege.
Peter Vale, Professor of Humanities and the Director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), University of Johannesburg
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/67258
2016-11-14T19:09:30Z
2016-11-14T19:09:30Z
Why a narrow view of restorative justice blunts its impact
<p>We have all at one time or another applied the principles and practices that restorative justice is based on. These are intuitively drawn on to resolve conflicts between couples, parents and children, extended families, friends, neighbours and colleagues.</p>
<p>South Africa’s Department of Justice <a href="http://www.justice.gov.za/rj/2011rj-booklet-a5-eng.pdf">states</a> that the “resurfacing of Restorative Justice Philosophy may be foreign to Roman Dutch Law but it has been part of the African indigenous justice system”. In “Restorative Justice: a road to healing” it says that, instead of viewing crime as an act against the state, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>restorative justice sees crime as an act against the victim and shifts the focus to repairing the harm that has been committed against the victim and community. It believes that the offender also needs assistance and seeks to identify what needs to change to prevent future re-offending. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mediation between victims and offenders is conducted by trained lay and professional people within and beyond the criminal justice system. </p>
<p>The principles and practices on which modern forms of restorative justice are based have deep roots in <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5033029a84ae7fae2e6a0a98/t/50efa90ae4b02cdfa2b2cfa6/1357883658343/Conflicts-as-Property-by-Nils-Christie.full.pdf">indigenous</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Future-Without-Forgiveness-Desmond-Tutu/dp/0385496907">religious</a> approaches to social harm. </p>
<p>South Africa’s Emeritus Archbishop Tutu says that, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>restorative justice is characteristic of traditional African jurisprudence that is infused with ‘the spirit of ubuntu’, which seeks to restore, heal or mend breaches, imbalances and broken relationships. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Restorative justice <a href="http://restorativejustice.org/restorative-justice/about-restorative-justice/around-the-world/">is used across the world</a>. This includes countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, North America, the Caribbean and the Pacific.</p>
<p>It has produced uneven results. In South Africa, the best-known example of restorative justice was the country’s qausi-judicial Truth and Reconciliation Commission <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/truth-and-reconciliation-commission-trc">(TRC)</a>. This has been criticised for placing racial reconciliation before economic reconciliation.</p>
<p>As a society South Africa has allowed the focus on relationships to obscure the role that historical and growing inequality plays in sabotaging these relationships.</p>
<p>Some researchers who focus on <a href="http://www.iirp.edu/pdf/RJ_full_report.pdf">the intra- and interpersonal levels</a> of restorative justice see it as effective. But “unorthodox” researchers and scholars (including my own trans-disciplinary work) make the case for <a href="http://www.prisonexp.org/book/">a more expansive approach</a>. This goes beyond an individual-level criminal justice lens to include social and economic structures that co-produce harms in society.</p>
<h2>Limits to restorative justice</h2>
<p>Theoretically, restorative justice is understood to be part of social justice and peacebuilding <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/104708186/Strategic-Peacebuilding-State-of-the-Field">at the societal level</a>. But practical application of the approach is often limited to the micro, individual level. </p>
<p>For example, current restorative justice processes are limited to individual wrongdoing. They focus on the restoration of relationships between victims and offenders. </p>
<p>The problem with this approach is that it does not focus on the causes and consequences of wrongdoing. These are rooted in inequality, particularly in societies where this has been embedded over generations. This leaves structural causes of harm and injustice intact. </p>
<p>For example, the <a href="http://www.khulumani.net/">Khulumani support group</a> was initiated by victims who testified at the TRC. The support group has a growing membership in excess of 100,000. The limitations of individual-level responses are illustrated on a T-shirt worn by a survivor on their website, which reads:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No reconciliation without truth, reparation and redress.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Modern forms of restorative justice attempt to “rehabilitate” offenders and “reintegrate” them into a broken social system. Alternatively, attempts are made to “fix” the individual to make him or her more resilient, sober or responsible.</p>
<p>This leaves the cumulative psychological and material impact of injustices such as colonialism and apartheid untouched.</p>
<p>Modest applications of restorative justice are therefore inadequate. They do not challenge persistent structural inequality. They also obscure society’s role in perpetuating violence by relying on the criminal law definition of crime. This holds individuals solely responsible. </p>
<p>On the other hand, expansive applications of restorative justice have the flexibility to take into account the interaction of individual and societal factors that co-produce violence. </p>
<p>This is why unorthodox restorative justice scholars like Gregg Barak <a href="http://restorativejustice.org/rj-library/repressive-versus-restorative-and-social-justice-a-case-for-integrative-praxis/1446/">argue</a> for a more expansive approach in which both society and individuals are healed. </p>
<h2>A broader definition</h2>
<p>Recent <a href="http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10413/11840/Henkeman_Sarah_Rosaline_2012.pdf?sequence=1">research</a> shows that mediation practitioners need special training. This is to ensure that they sharpen their ability to identify patterns in their knowledge about the society they live in. They also learn to recognise new instances of these patterns in the narratives of others. </p>
<p>If practitioners are trained to “see”, “hear” and “articulate” deeper and broader patterns in the cases they mediate, they can help make different forms of violence “visible”. In turn this can raise the awareness and consciousness of society, add to the body of academic knowledge and inform policy. </p>
<p>Adopting this approach would also produce knowledge that could inform education literature for <a href="http://www.justiciarestaurativa.org/www.restorativejustice.org/articlesdb/articles/7223">“structurally responsive”</a> restorative justice training. This would be based on information sharing and awareness-raising as well as education and action to build <a href="https://www.academia.edu/29008051/Do_we_as_conflict_resolution_practitioners_really_know_what_we_are_getting_in_the_middle_of_p._10-11">critical consciousness</a>.</p>
<p>As psychologist Helena Neves Almeida suggests, practitioners can extend and deepen the effect of their work when they identify “recurring conflict between similar types of social actors”. They can then approach these conflicts</p>
<blockquote>
<p>in their structure and not just in their <a href="https://issuu.com/helena23/docs/community_mediation_as_social_inter">individuality</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If violent contexts are not taken into account, restorative justice does not serve broader society. Instead it serves as a peacemaking process within a paradigm stacked against the poor and vulnerable. They feel emotionally lighter, but remain structurally trapped after the process is completed.</p>
<p>A move to more social justice-driven peacebuilding practice will yield more data for analysis, and more accurate policies, strategies, techniques and tactics. They will also resonate at every level of society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67258/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Malotane Henkeman is affiliated with the Social Law Project, UWC; Zakheni Arts Therapy Foundation and the Centre of Criminology, UCT. </span></em></p>
If violent contexts aren’t taken into account, restorative justice does not serve broader society. Instead it serves as a peacemaking process within a paradigm stacked against the poor and vulnerable.
Sarah Malotane Henkeman, Independent conflict and social justice practitioner/researcher. Currently Senior Staff Associate in the Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/60658
2016-06-13T09:17:14Z
2016-06-13T09:17:14Z
Soweto uprising: four decades on, South Africa still struggles with violent policing
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126261/original/image-20160613-29216-e0c2pf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A recent protest by South African schoolchildren which had to be quelled by an under-resourced police force</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>June days in South Africa can be dark, cold and short. The sun rises late and sets early. Highland frosts feel their way through blades of blemished veld; mists mask roads ahead and behind. The month brings with it the year’s mid-point and shortest day; a chance to reflect on what has been, and what may lie ahead.</p>
<p>Five days before the equinox South Africa celebrates <a href="http://www.gov.za/youth-day-2015">Youth Day</a>. Forty years ago on 16 June 1976, thousands of school children in Soweto, Johannesburg, braved the Highveld cold to protest the apartheid government’s decision that they be educated in a strange tongue: <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">Afrikaans</a>. Out on the street the students were confronted by the South African Police force (SAP). Teargas was followed by gunfire. Young bodies fell; cameras <a href="https://www.google.co.za/search?q=photograph+of+hector+pieterson&rlz=1C1CHMO_en-GBZA648ZA648&tbm=isch&imgil=-nSZWu7xmToV5M%253A%253BZcLIipsW1ZziwM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.fimomitchell.com%25252Fblog%25252Fsoweto-apartheid%25252F&source=iu&pf=m&fir=-nSZWu7xmToV5M%253A%252CZcLIipsW1ZziwM%252C_&usg=__2QMDkEQA2eQXBvR0tY9wnnDW7a0%3D&biw=1920&bih=911&dpr=1&ved=0ahUKEwiv4_fj6fTMAhVJL8AKHVIvBzMQyjcINg&ei=vmRFV6-MJ8negAbS3pyYAw#imgrc=3dkBnajiT0w66M%3A">clicked</a>. The apartheid system was shaken irrevocably.</p>
<p>Youth Day takes its name from the energy and courage of those young learners. But had the police not responded as they did, 16 June might simply be another winter’s day. Police work is practical and symbolic. Through interactions with police, the state communicates with its public. In 1976, police actions embodied the unjust, indefensible and violent state attitude towards black citizens.</p>
<p>It exposed, in ways not seen since the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/sharpeville-massacre-21-march-1960">Sharpeville</a> massacre on March 21, 1960 the violence through which apartheid was upheld. South Africans remember June 16, 1976 because youth took to the streets, but also because police looked them in the eye and pulled their triggers. The ripples set in motion by the youth of ‘76 had by the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/youth-politics-south-africa-1980s">mid-80s</a> crippled the economy, led to <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/state-emergency-south-africa-1960-and-1980s">states of emergency</a>, public “unrest”, and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/south-africas-foreign-relations-during-apartheid-1948">international sanctions</a> against the apartheid regime.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126138/original/image-20160610-29209-i2z0d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126138/original/image-20160610-29209-i2z0d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126138/original/image-20160610-29209-i2z0d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126138/original/image-20160610-29209-i2z0d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126138/original/image-20160610-29209-i2z0d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126138/original/image-20160610-29209-i2z0d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126138/original/image-20160610-29209-i2z0d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">South African children visit the Hector Pieterson memorial in Soweto outside Johannesburg.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Lerato Maduna</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Nelson Mandela freed</h2>
<p>The early '90s saw <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/nelson-mandela-freed">Nelson Mandela</a> freed from prison and liberation movements <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/fw-de-klerk-announces-release-nelson-mandela-and-unbans-political-organisations">unbanned</a>. The South African Police <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02167/04lv02264/05lv02335/06lv02357/07lv02372/08lv02379.htm">re-positioned</a> itself as an objective arbiter of political tension while being accused of using undercover agents to stoke ethnic violence, at a time when the country recorded its highest ever murder rate. </p>
<p>In 1995, a year before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (<a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/truth-and-reconciliation-commission-trc">TRC</a>), the police service <a href="http://www.saps.gov.za/resource_centre/publications/police_mag/police_magazine_feb_2015.pdf">merged</a> with the 10 <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/homelands">Bantustan</a> police agencies to form a single South African Police Service (SAPS). <a href="https://www.issafrica.org/uploads/2016-05-19-SAPS-Shake-Up-Presentation.pdf">Civilian ranks</a> replaced military, and mustard-coloured vehicles were painted cloud-white.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.csvr.org.za/wits/papers/papsapjr.htm">Training curricula</a> were revised to embrace human rights, and “<a href="http://www.csvr.org.za/index.php/publications/1462-a-review-of-community-policing.html">community policing</a>” was imported from the wealthy West. <a href="http://www.csvr.org.za/wits/papers/papbruc6.htm">Transformation policies</a> saw black members and women rising through the ranks rapidly. All the while, the TRC shone a light on the SAP’s <a href="https://www.enca.com/look-vlakplaas-apartheids-death-squad-hq">torture farms</a>, as well as on the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/umkhonto-wesizwe-mk-exile">detention camps</a> of the liberation movements. It exposed habits of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/09/world/apartheid-torturer-testifies-as-evil-shows-its-banal-face.html?pagewanted=all">torture</a> and <a href="http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/columnists/2013/10/29/remember-the-past-and-question-the-present">murder</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126136/original/image-20160610-29238-n7o1o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126136/original/image-20160610-29238-n7o1o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126136/original/image-20160610-29238-n7o1o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126136/original/image-20160610-29238-n7o1o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126136/original/image-20160610-29238-n7o1o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126136/original/image-20160610-29238-n7o1o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126136/original/image-20160610-29238-n7o1o4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nelson Mandela and his wife Graca Machel attend a ceremony to receive the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report on October 29, 1998.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the run-up to the '94 elections, the African National Congress (ANC) believed, perhaps not unexpectedly, that once police were under an elected-ANC’s control, South Africans would accept their authority. They expected that citizens would accept the criminal law as legitimate and cease the daily violence. This violence had evolved as a product of oppression and as a tool of political resistance, security and punishment in <a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2015-10-02-south-africas-mysterious-murder-rate/#.V1q4r7t97IV">preceding decades</a>.</p>
<h2>“Dog deals with a bone”</h2>
<p>Instead crime and violence spread, sending politicians scrambling. In 1999 then Minister of Safety and Security <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp?relid=2932">Steve Tshwete</a> <a href="http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/2012/12/20/police-public-order-expert-proves-a-recalcitrant-witness-at-marikana-inquiry">declared</a> that government would “deal with criminals in the same way a dog deals with a bone”. With this posturing the ANC <a href="https://www.issafrica.org/uploads/CW41Dixon.pdf">stripped law-breaking</a> of the historical, socioeconomic and political overtones through which it had <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Governing-through-Crime-in-South-Africa-The-Politics-of-Race-and-Class/Super/p/book/9781409444749">explained violence under apartheid</a>, framing “criminals” instead as bad people who threatened democracy.</p>
<p>In 2000 South Africans were shown precisely how a police dog “deals with a bone” when video emerged of four white officers and their dogs <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/30/chrismcgreal">mauling</a> three Mozambican men. It was a reminder that, like its violent crime, the horrors of apartheid policing were not snuffed out by elections.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/onmq-g2kx-o?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Four white South African policemen set their dogs on three Mozambicans as a ‘training exercise’ and videotaped it. PLEASE NOTE: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS GRAPHIC VIOLENCE.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In response to public anger over crime, the 2000s saw government increase police budgets at rates above inflation. Police ranks swelled to 200 000 and the rhetoric of police “service” was abandoned in favour of “force”. <a href="http://fromtheold.com/news/new-police-ranks-south-africa-welcome-sapf-2010040117527.html">Military ranks</a> were reintroduced in 2010 amid calls by leaders for police to “<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1584641/Kill-the-bastards-South-African-police-advised.html">kill the [criminal] bastards</a>” and “<a href="http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/police-must-shoot-to-kill-worry-later---cele-453587">shoot to kill</a>”. Some officers have been so emboldened that they have filmed and shared their shootings.</p>
<p>Even the 2012 horrors that happened at the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/marikana-massacre-16-august-2012">Marikana</a> mine, where police shot and killed 34 striking mineworkers, were <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbAlgo_pzVg">captured</a> on police cell phones. Scenes from that day have become as iconic as those of a dying <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/hector-pieterson">Hector Pieterson</a>, photographed in Soweto 40 years ago this week. Has anything changed?</p>
<p>The SAPS is far from a perfect organisation, but it is not dysfunctional. Many SAPS officers face extreme challenges, like policing a claimed average of <a href="http://www.saps.gov.za/about/stratframework/annual_report/2014_2015/SAPS_AR_2014-15_for_viewing.pdf">40 protests a day.</a> </p>
<p>A further challenge is <a href="http://www.khayelitshacommission.org.za/images/towards_khaye_docs/3_Part_Three.pdf">patrolling</a> informal settlements without lighting or roads where murders can exceed 100 per 100 000 residents (the <a href="https://www.unodc.org/gsh/en/big-picture.html">global average</a> was 6.2 in 2012) and where residents <a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/sinoxolos-boyfriend-allegedly-stabs-state-witness-20160509">fear attack from neighbours</a> if they speak to detectives.</p>
<h2>Police salary a dream</h2>
<p>In a country with a <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=7281">27% unemployment rate</a> and where 60% of workers <a href="https://africacheck.org/reports/do-60-of-south-african-workers-earn-less-than-r5000-a-month/">earn less</a> than R5 000 a month, a police starting salary of R13 000 is the kind of thing dreams are made of. Of the nearly <a href="http://www.saps.gov.za/about/stratframework/annual_report/2014_2015/SAPS_AR_2014-15_for_viewing.pdf">200 000 job applications</a> received by the SAPS in 2014/15, just 1.4% (2 827) were successful.</p>
<p>It is in this context that the job is something to be coveted. But this doesn’t necessarily produce professional, integrity-based policing. Rather, many officers –- including the <a href="http://city-press.news24.com/News/Farlams-Marikana-findings-Leading-role-players-slammed-20150628">most senior</a> –- do what they must to please their managers and present a public image of competence.</p>
<p>For some this means doing the best job they can do, <a href="https://www.enca.com/south-africa/policeman-shares-lunch-homeless-woman-photo-goes-viral">responding</a> to people’s needs compassionately and efficiently. But for others it means <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFiCiJeQMo8">abusing sex workers</a>; shooting <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2016/03/14/CT-filling-station-robbery-ends-in-shooting-four-killed">without fair warning</a>; <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2009-10-17-top-cops-knew-stats-were-cooked">manipulating</a> crime data; <a href="http://www.icd.gov.za/sites/default/files/documents/IPID_Annual_Report%20_2014-15.pdf">torturing</a> criminal suspects; (allegedly) <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime-courts/pics-cops-terrorise-vyeboom-residents-2026300">assaulting</a> vulnerable villagers; even <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2015/08/25/Mido-Macia-all-eight-accused-found-guilty-of-murder">beating a man to death</a> for publicly questioning police authority – when they believe nobody is watching.</p>
<p>It’s an <a href="http://www.elections.org.za/content/Elections/2016-Municipal-Elections/Home/">election year</a> in South Africa. The opposition Economic Freedom Fighters’ <a href="http://www.economicfreedomfighters.org/full-document-2014-eff-elections-manifesto/">manifesto claims</a> that “20 years [into democracy], the police still kill people!” It promises the party will protect street vendors from “police harassment” and communities from “intimidation from the police”. That the party believes these promises will win it votes reflects very poorly on the SAPS.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126135/original/image-20160610-29222-82412e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126135/original/image-20160610-29222-82412e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126135/original/image-20160610-29222-82412e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126135/original/image-20160610-29222-82412e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126135/original/image-20160610-29222-82412e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=648&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126135/original/image-20160610-29222-82412e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=648&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126135/original/image-20160610-29222-82412e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=648&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Policemen stand in front of the Hector Pieterson memorial during the 30th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nevertheless, more South Africans are <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0341/P03412013.pdf">satisfied</a> with police than not, even though only <a href="http://afrobarometer.org/sites/default/files/publications/Dispatches/ab_r6_dispatchno56_police_corruption_in_africa.pdf">49% trust</a> them. Ultimately, <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0341/P03412013.pdf">South Africans agree</a> that to address crime, government should spend money on socioeconomic interventions rather than police. Indeed, what democracy has not yet delivered is an equal country or economy, in the absence of which policing will always likely defend the status quo established by extreme concentrations of power and wealth.</p>
<h2>Volunteer for the police</h2>
<p>In my many years of working with the SAPS as a volunteer and researcher, most police action I have observed has targeted poor, black men. But one needn’t be a researcher or reservist to know this: <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/death-andries-tatane-service-delivery-protest-free-state-sparks-national-outrage">Andries Tatane</a>, who was killed by police during a service delivery protest, was black and poor, the Marikana workers were black and poor, the residents of <a href="http://www.khayelitshacommission.org.za/images/towards_khaye_docs/Khayelitsha_Commission_Report_WEB_FULL_TEXT_C.pdf">Khayelitsha</a> (one of Cape Town’s largest and deadliest townships) are overwhelmingly black and poor.</p>
<p>The tragic irony is that, despite their relatively good salaries, many police officers remain poor. Their income is stretched to support networks of vulnerable kin. So while one group of relatively poor men and women police another, a political and economic elite enjoys the fruits of a violently unjust society.</p>
<p>As such, police signal to the country’s vulnerable young men that the state does not trust them. The signals entrench divisions already established by a landscape many young people literally cannot afford the taxi fair to traverse in search of a job in a market which rejects almost half of young job-seekers. All of this happens against the backdrop a welfare system which offers subsidies to almost every category of vulnerable person but for able bodied, unemployed young men.</p>
<p>The South African Police Service is a very different organisation from its apartheid predecessor. And yet, in its actions and inactions, it is at times too easy to see similarities between them. Ultimately, one cannot reform a police service without reforming the context in which it operates. In South Africa, a broken education system continues to <a href="http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/education/2016/04/19/poor-education-traps-black-youth-in-poverty">trap the poor majority</a> in poverty.</p>
<p>Despite huge changes South Africa remains a country of stark, violence-inducing inequalities and injustices, wounds which police officers cannot heal. Instead, through their work they both shepherd and protect, criminalise and abuse the vulnerabilities and struggles of millions of South Africans still waiting for their winter to end.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60658/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Faull previously received funding from the National Research Foundation.</span></em></p>
It is exactly forty years since the Soweto uprising in June 1976 where the South African police met the students with brutal force. How much has changed in terms of policing?
Andrew Faull, Senior Researcher at the Centre of Criminology, University of Cape Town
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.