Racist remarks produce nothing but silence

Page 2

No editorials or columns were written about it in national mainstream newspapers.

There were no political or public affairs talk shows that took up the question or looked for an explanation.

There was nothing - nothing but silence.

When Cheryl Soucy launched a heated attack on Marji Pratt-Turo in front of the Saskatoon provincial court building on May 3, the CBC and other media outlets covered it, but that was where it ended.

As Soucy arrived at court to attend a preliminary hearing for two officers charged with the forcible confinement of a Native man, Soucy attacked the press for blowing the matter out of proportion and taking the Native side in the dispute.

Dan Hatchen and Ken Munson were suspended from the City of Saskatoon police force after admitting they abandoned Darrell Night, a 33-year-old Aboriginal man, on the outskirts of town without a coat on Jan. 28, a night when temperatures plunged to minus 26 degrees Celsius. On April 12, several weeks after an RCMP investigation into Night's complaint was completed, the officers were charged with forcible confinement and assault in connection with the case.

Soucy, a friend of the officers, exchanged words first with reporters.

"You're taking the Native side," she said to reporters. "Give it a rest."

When Pratt-Turo, a member of Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan, interrupted to ask Soucy if she didn't believe Native people, including Night, should receive respectful treatment from police.

"You think it's all right to murder Indian men?" asked Pratt-Turo, a member of the Grandmothers Vigil for Justice, a mostly Native group of women who have been holding candle-light vigils outside of the Saskatchewan Justice minister's office every Thursday since the bodies of two Native men were found outside the city in early February.

"They didn't murder anybody," Soucy responded, turning her attention to the protesters.

Pratt Truro said later that Soucy then tried to blow out her candle.

"You can blow out my candle, but you can't kill me," she responded.

"You can't kill me, either," Soucy countered.

"I don't want to . . . "

"And you can't take them down, either."

"Racism - You don't have a patent on racism," Pratt-Turo said.

"Racism has dick-all to do with it," Soucy responded. "Well, if you guys had let it go, it wouldn't turn into a racist issue."

"Are you kidding . . .?

"How many people died?" another protester asked.

"But why are these two taking the blame for everyone's that dead," Soucy answered. "Yeah, I have a certain amount of racism because I've dealt with enough of . . . Natives that've caused me nothing but hell and havoc . . . broke into my home! OK!"

"White people have done that to me. My nose is broken. I have bullet holes in . . . " Pratt-Turo said.

"All right, how many beers do you drink and how much bingo do you do? And how much welfare are you guys on and how many jobs do you people have?" Soucy.

Many Native observers feel the fact that Soucy apologized two days later only underscores the seriousness of the problem. They feel she may have inadvertently proved the point the officers' accusers are trying to make with her outburst and was then advised to apologize as a means of controlling the damage to her friends' case.

Forcible confinement is a serious criminal offense. Should the officers be convicted on this charge, there's a chance they'll serve time in jail - perhaps even time in a federal institution.

Pratt-Turo later told Windspeaker she was embarrassed by the part she played in the incident, but she hoped that people across the country had a close look at a phenomenon that she said is too rarely dealt with directly in the national press. No Native person who saw the exchange was surprised by it, but many see an opportunity in Soucy's remarks.

Alfred Gay, a member of the Gull Bay First Nation in Ontario who now works as a researcher for the Lustiguj First Nation (located near the Quebec/New Brunswick border), saw the confrotation on television. He thinks all Canadians should take a hard look at what Soucy's words and actions say about Canadian society.

"Well, you know what's so funny about that is, you see it and you're kind of repulsed by it, but she speaks for all the people out there," Gay said. "Everybody's probably going to condemn her, but that's what the lawyers think, that's what the grocery store owner thinks, that's what the cab driver thinks.

"I grew up in a non-Native community and that's what the white people were saying. It's out there. She's representative of everybody from Joe Banker to Joe Welfare Recipient. Now that the issue's out there, now that we know that's in the mind of the public, how do we bring that out and allow the public to say what they think? It's like healing. If you go to a healing session or a sweat lodge, it's all those dark thoughts that you want out there."

Pratt-Turo's sister, Bernelda Wheeler, is a well-known Native journalist and writer who lives in Saskatoon. She believes Soucy was portraying widely-held attitudes towards Native people.

"The only difference is this time they caught it on camera - They caught it on tape," she said.

Wheeler said racism is an everyday reality for Native people in Saskatchewan.

"I see a legacy of racism. I grew up here and I remember as a little child going into the city of Regina and feeling - feeling - looked-down-upon and marginalized and minimalized by white people. Nobody said anything, but I felt that," she said. "The racism at that time was open and overt and ugly and horrid. I don't think they even believed that we were people."

Darrell Night's lawyer, Donald Worme, a Cree man who practices law in Regina, believes such police short-cuts are an indication of a lack of respect for basic human rights in the society at large. He believes the fact that police officers think they can treat some people in such a manner is a sign that the poor are seen as inferior members of society whose basic human righs don't deserve the same kind of respect as those who are financially well-to-do.

Native leaders all over the country are asking for a full public inquiry into alleged police abuse of Native people. There have been dozens of incidents where Native people died or suffered serious injuries at the hands of police officers. In each case, rather than responding with a full blown investigation which would seek to expose any underlying reasons for the violence, governments chose to limit the scope of the investigations so as to avoid confronting racial issues in the full light of day.

Pratt-Turo and her sister believe it's reflective of a national case of denial. Canadians rather smugly look at the civil rights problems experienced in the United States and tell themselves that Canada doesn't have those kinds of problems.

"They don't want to hear it. They don't want to believe they're that kind of a country," said Wheeler.

Worme also believes this case has touched a very sensitive nerve in the Canadian psyche.

"The public is in a state of denial about the human rights aspects of this issue," he said. "Part of the problem is we do have a public that is in a state of denial."

Worme suggests the bigger issue is related to economics. He sees the police acting as a tool of the haves in society, working against the have-nots.

"Yes, definitely," agreed Bob Hughes, president of the Regina-based Saskatchewan Coalition Against Racism. "That is a big part of it and, obviously, in this area, Aboriginal people are certainly in the lowest economic bracket so they're going to get nailed the hardest.

Hughes, 51, saw the CBC-TV report on the exchange. As a life-long Saskatchewan resident, Hughes is worried that hate and intolerance are becoming more evident in the province.

With the farm crisis creating economic difficulties for many people in the region, an acute form of intolerance, a phenomenom that hasn't been seen since the Great Depression, appears to be on the rise in the povince.

The Saskatchewan Party, a political party formed out of the remnants of the corrupt and disgraced provincial Conservative Party, is following an agenda that resembles that of the federal Canadian Alliance (formerly the Reform Party). The Saskatchewan Party is exploiting the fact that Premier Roy Romanow's NDP government is in a minority position in order to force some its far-right policies onto the political stage, including breaking the detente on Native provincial tax exemption.

Hughes said it reminds him of the tactics the Klu Klux Klan used to elect the Conservative Party in the province in the 1930s.

"We see this as heading for dangerous times," he said. "It seems to me to be history repeating itself. We have political parties provincially and federally that are hungry for power and they're using whatever issues that can arouse this kind of emotion - any kind of issue that there is a fair amount of ignorance about that they can use to build a coalition, looking back at the history of Saskatchewan and the way the Klan was used by then a Conservative Party that was hungry for power in the 1930s."

Historians note that the Klan had 40,000 members in the province at that time and a Klan meeting in Moose Jaw in 1930 attracted 10,000 people.

"Whatever they could teach people to fear and hate, they fed them and that's what I see right now," Hughes said. "It's really scary to me. I see us being manipulated."

Adding fuel to the anger of the non-Native population in the province regarding the issue is the fact that Regina is home to the RCMP training barracks. The provincial capital is an RCMP company town and the rest of the province feels that connection in varying degrees. An attack against police - deserved or not - produces strong emotional responses.

"The majority of the middle class haven't had a serious problem with the police so the media that are controlled by them slam us as being critical of people who are doing dangerous work," Hughes said.