The Children of Someone Else's History: Reading for Restorative Justice

Abstract

What is wrong with our justice system that Aboriginal people find it so alienating? Murray Sinclair [1] Aboriginal justice issues have been amply studied in Canada, but the studies have not led to many changes in the system. Bridging the Cultural Divide: A Report on Aboriginal People and Criminal Justice in Canada (1996), part of the massive Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) study, is thorough and intelligent and gathering dust, along with the rest of the report. proportion of Aboriginal people in Canadian (and U.S.) jails and prisons continues to rise; reservation and urban Native communities continue to suffer from poverty, crime, alcoholism, and abuse; and the majority community continues to respond with a legal system based on punishment and retribution (however much seasoned with useless white guilt) that simply makes all these conditions worse, while successful community-based programs die for lack of support, translated into lack of funding, from the dominant society that holds the purse strings. As a position paper by the Community Holistic Circle Healing (CHCH) project put it: The use of judgement and punishment actually works against the healing process. An already unbalanced person is moved further out of balance.... What the threat of incarceration does do is keep people from coming forward and taking responsibility for the hurt they are causing. It reinforces the silence, and therefore promotes, rather than breaks, the cycle of violence that exists. In reality, rather than making the community a safer place, the threat of jail places the community more at risk. [2] What we--and I self-consciously mean a we of all human beings--need to effect change is a tool like Uncle Tom's Cabin that makes Aboriginal justice issues viscerally compelling in terms the dominant society can not only understand but claim as its own. Such a text, I argue, is available in the shape of Richard Wagamese's novel, A Quality of Light. This comparison, of course, raises all manner of questions and problems. American racism--with its history of chattel slavery as well as its overtly violent and proudly invoked pioneer past--is different from Canadian racism. Harriet Beecher Stowe was attacking slavery, not racism. Yet Uncle Tom's Cabin was a revolutionary document in its ability to create in dominant culture readers not only empathy toward Tom and Eliza and George but also an awareness of their own complicity in the system that enslaved the characters. Similarly, Wagamese's novel entails empathy and a willing acceptance, not of guilt but of complicity, in a justice system that does not work. In fact, on one level the book is about learning to take responsibility for complicity and working around the current western democratic tradition of justice as retribution and punishment. Alliance Party's focus on toughening Young Offender, parole, and other policies and the consequent shift to the right in Canada's discussion of crime and punishment make such a responsibility more difficult to realize and more important to advocate for. At the same time, the explicitly Christian elements that Stockwell Day increasingly inserts into the debate may make A Quality of Light an even more effective tool than it was when it was first published. A Quality of Light A Quality of Light begins during the Oka summer of 1990 and continues in flashbacks as the narrator, Joshua Kane, looks back across his life and the life of his best friend, Johnny Gebhart, who is engaged in a hostage-taking in the Federal building in Calgary, through which he hopes to focus national attention on the underlying inequities of Native affairs in general. Josh is Cape Croker Ojibway, but he has grown up in an adoptive white farming family and has become a Christian pastor. Johnny is of German-Canadian heritage. As a boy he coped with his alcoholic father by imagining himself an Indian and systematically educating himself, through books and experience, on indigenous issues in Canada. …