Jim Sinclair:
'Halfbreed' leader proud to serve his own
Article by Carmen Pauls Orthner
Jim
Sinclair has never been a man short on words.
Whether he was cheekily denouncing England's Queen as "the
world's biggest welfare bum," stoutly refusing to compromise
after launching a lawsuit against a sitting prime minister, or
chatting privately with Pope John Paul II about the Metis struggle
for self-determination, Sinclair's voice has rung out loud and
clear with his passion to see his people achieve their rights.
Forty-six years ago, though, that voice was nearly drowned in
alcohol. Born in 1933, Sinclair grew up literally on the sidelines.
A self-described half-breed, the son of a treaty Indian mother
and a non-status Indian father, he was one of the so-called "road
allowance people," living in a tar-paper shack on the strips
of land set aside for roads and utilities.
As Sinclair's father searched for paid work, the young Jim grew
up under the thumb of the police and the Roman Catholic church,
watching his family harassed and oppressed by both. When he was
able to attend school, he sat watching his classmates eat lunches
provided by school lunch programs that, as the child of non-taxpayers,
he was refused.
Sinclair watched his father enlist in the Canadian army as a
way of earning some money and some rights for his family. He
returned to the same grinding poverty and indignities they'd
dealt with before the Second World War. He also saw neighbors'
tar shacks burned down, and people loaded into boxcars and shipped
to northern Saskatchewan communities like Green Lake. By his
teenage years he was told by every priest he met that he was
headed straight for hell, with no answers as to why that was
so.
Not surprisingly, the confused, hungry, emotionally scarred child
became an angry young man, and by age 27 he was a full-blown
alcoholic with plenty of jail time to look back on. Most, if
not all, of his friends from that time are dead. But on Oct.
8, 1960, he made a decision: "I was either going to die
an alcoholic," he says now, "or try to make a life."
He quit drinking that day, "and from that day forward I
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