We know what lies behind killings
Thoughts and prayers are not enough. Nor are apologies and ceremonial reconciliations. Nor is a public inquiry, unless its terms are broad and deep enough to expose the diseased root of the suffering of 10 generations of aboriginal Canadians, and make it right. Does anyone in Parliament today have stomach for this fight?
It’s noteworthy, in the wake of the appalling and heartbreaking shooting Friday in the remote Dene community of La Loche, Sask., in which eleven people were shot, four fatally, that there has been no rush to judgment about the putative external causes, that I can see. Perhaps that’s still to come. But it behooves us to ask why this horror already resonates differently than it would have had the shootings occurred at a school in downtown Toronto, Montreal or Calgary.
Two of the dead — Dayne and Drayden Fontaine, aged 17 and 13 — were brothers, killed at a home near La Loche Community School. Teacher’s aide Marie Janvier, 21, and teacher Adam Wood, 35, were shot to death at the school itself. A 17- year old boy has been charged with four counts of first- degree murder and seven counts of attempted murder. Under provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act he cannot be identified.
Given the now familiar template for such tragedies, the first questions one might have expected would be about access to guns. Inevitably in the aftermath of a multiple-casualty shooting in Canada, some social engineer or other ventures to suggest that, had Allan Rock’s federal long-gun registry still been in place, the carnage might have been averted. Except in this case the locale is a remote village in the northwest, where guns and hunting are part of everyday life, as is the case across the Canadian North. So that doesn’t scan.
How about video games? Maybe that’s a factor. Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, numerous commentators — most notably former U.S. army psychiatrist and author Dave Grossman — have linked the growing toll of school shootings in the United States to the de-sensitizing effects of firstperson shooter video games, which mimic the stimulus-re- sponse training given to modern soldiers, without imposing the discipline of a chain of command. It’s a thoughtprovoking line of inquiry. I’ve come across no mention of it yet in the context of La Loche.
Next is the shibboleth of the “Americanization” of Canadian culture, which presupposes Canada as an Edenic Shangri- La, gradually being subsumed by the super- culture to the South, assumed to be gratuitously savage. The blame there would be pinned on movies, TV, rap music, gun fetishism — take your pick. Again, in the immediate aftermath of La Loche, I haven’t seen this raised. It’s as though there’s a collective assumption of another external element at play, widely shared but not explicitly named, that trumps the usual suspects named above.
And of course this gets to the nub of it. Because this massacre occurred in a remote aboriginal community where poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunity, family violence and substance abuse are taken as given, those seeking an overriding social causality have their answer readymade. No need to reach for a deeper reason that ties the tragedy up in a neat bow, as they would were the accused shooter a middle-class white kid from Rosedale. In a truly just society, this would be the shocker.
Rachel Browne, writing for Vice. com, quotes Kelly Patrick, a former director of health for the Metis Nation of Saskatchewan: “When you look at this tragic shooting in the context of the number of youth suicides in the area, it puts everything into perspective. And it just goes to show that the access to social services is completely inadequate.” He adds: “Now you have politicians and outsiders describing it as shocking, and the most upsetting thing is that it’s not. It was just waiting to happen.”
Ten days ago a headline came and went on the CBC website, causing barely a ripple in the so- called national conversation: “Prison watchdog says more than a quarter of federal inmates are aboriginal people.” Of 14,624 federal inmates, according to prison ombudsman Howard Sapers, 3,723 are indigenous.
In the Prairie provinces, aboriginals make up just under half the prison population, the CBC reported. Of the women incarcerated in federal jails, more than a third are aboriginal. This is, to put it in context, from a total aboriginal population of about 1.4 million — 4.3 per cent of Canada’s 35 million.
Audit after audit, inquiry after inquiry, have made it starkly clear: The edifice of the reserve system — apartheid in all but name — needs to be uprooted and replaced, beginning with the settlement of outstanding land claims.
This would cost anywhere between $ 6- billion and $15-billion, according to the best estimates I’ve been able to find, which are guesstimates. Where is the political party with a concrete plan to push this forward, even on a grandfathered basis, over an extended period?
There is tinkering, and there are heartfelt expressions of goodwill and reconciliation. Canada’s original sin remains untouched.