Justice For Our Stolen Children camp offered teachable moment

Healing and education became part of the purpose as protesters told their stories

Where else can people have a peaceful protest?

Given the rather disheartening reaffirmation of stereotypes emerging out of the

Justice For Our Stolen Children camp, it’s hard to see exactly what good it did.

But maybe it taught us we can all do better by simply listening and educating ourselves.

If so, its 111-day existence won’t be all be for naught.

The Regina Police Service moved in Monday afternoon to remove protesters (six were arrested but not charged) 13 days after the Provincial Capital Commission posted a notice that it “has lawful authority of that land” in Wascana Park across from the Legislative Building.

The peaceful protesters were in no more violation of the rules on Day 111 than they were on Day 1. That the camp was cleaned out 13 days ahead of Canada Day celebrations so that everyone else can celebrate 151 years of peace, order and good government seems a lesson in how not to handle such matters.

“Where else can people have a peaceful protest? I think that there’s a freedom of speech (issue),” Heather Bear, vice-chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) told the Leader-Post after police removed the protesters Monday. “You know what? They’re not being heard anywhere else.”

It’s a fair point. The camp was constructed in the aftermath of provincewide racial tensions post- Gerald Stanley verdict. From there, those who participated in the camp attempted to expand the camp’s purpose into both healing and education.

How successful they were now largely depends on your own willingness to listen and learn.

If you somehow believe the treaties we now teach gradeschool kids are somehow not applicable today, or that residential schools bear no relevance to today’s First Nations problems, you’ve accidentally read too far into this column already.

But if you do have a greater purpose in life than anonymous, thinly veiled racist online comments, consider a public park’s role in education. In Wascana Park, we’ve rightly erected all kinds of historic monuments to educate us on everyone from those who went to war to fight fascism to those who were starved to death in Ukraine’s Holodomor famine caused by a communist dictatorship.

They are all there to educate us. And — in its own sometimes clumsy, messy way — so was this camp, whose occupants offered stories about how their lives have been affected by both history and modern-day problems.

We can all do better by listening. And in one of the great ironies, those most educated by the camp may have been those tasked with shutting it down, notwithstanding the insistence of some at the campsite and some online who considered the eviction violent, racist in nature or, as one online poster suggested, carried out by “jackboot thugs.”

The police asked protesters to leave. Some protesters responded they would have to be dragged out and encouraged others to record the event. This was their right, but let us be clear this was not the police’s initiative. Police conduct was exemplary.

“Anytime we get involved in a situation, it is unfortunate,” Supt. Darcy Koch told reporters, explaining their efforts were to be as respectful to the protesters as they could be.

It was an approach that emerged from police Chief Evan Bray’s direction, who stressed in an interview Monday with the Leader-Post’s Pamela Cowan that the role of police was to “allow people to exercise their Charter of Rights and Freedoms in terms of being able to assemble for peaceful protest.

“We played a fairly important role in seeing if they could set up a meeting with government and the protesters, knowing that that’s really what their protest was about,” Bray said. “I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months speaking with the organizers of this protest, and I would say I’ve had a very good relationship, good ongoing dialogue and conversations.”

If those assigned with breaking up the camp can take such a leadership role in education, the rest of us should at least try to learn.

We can all do better.