It Wasn't Me

In Halifax, November 1998, one Mr. Richard Marriott and Ms. Gail Stone were shot in an as-yet-unsolved double homicide. They were common-law partners, and owned substantial real estate investments. As you may know, both marriage and common-law unions give spouses extremely powerful property rights: as soon as I die, my spouse automatically inherits everything I own. When there is a double homicide of this nature, to put it morbidly, who dies last, wins. Ms. Stone died four days after Mr. Marriott, and therefore her estate inherited everything. Now, if you're in a loving and equitable relationship, and you've done your wills together, and you make certain both sides of the family are taken care of in either will, then you hope that there will be no fighting over the spoils... but quite frankly, every single will in existence has probably been perceived as unfair by most beneficiaries of the estate. In this case, there was a fight over the properties, and during said fight, some interesting facts popped up.

You see, Mr. Marriott was a drug dealer, and his cars and bling and houses were proceeds of crime. Proceeds of Crime statutes exist in pretty much every jurisdiction around the world (possession is 9/10ths of the law, after all!) and they all say more or less the same thing. If a gain is ill-gotten, it don't belong to you. If you get an ill-gotten gain from someone else, it's still ill-gotten. Just because you didn't cap someone's ass and steal their prize-winning pet Japanese Carp to sell on the black carp market, doesn't mean it's not a hot carp any more. The carp's still stolen - it's just now in possession of someone who didn't otherwise commit a crime. As a matter of fact, a person who purchases (for example) a hot carp - even if they had no knowledge of the fact it was stolen - may still be charged for being in possession of proceeds of crime. One key mitigating factor in sentencing is typically the amount of "due diligence" a buyer does before purchase. If a judge asks the question "ok, you had no knowledge that the carp was hot, but how hard did you try to find out whether it was hot or not?" then you'd better have done some searching and legitimately come up with nothing. It's like the typical "but she told me she was 18" defence: if you didn't try to verify the facts, you're still guilty. And a dipshit.

What happened to the properties? Well, they were subject to some pretty serious court wrangling. For those of you whose eyes glaze over at the very sight of legalese, I'll save you the pain and duress. This case was an appeal of an earlier decision that awarded - in the eyes of the Crown - too much to the estate of Ms. Stone. Specifically, the estate had somehow managed to claim one of the houses in its entirety when all money used to purchase the house, except the down payment, was a proceed of crime. The court eventually sided with the Crown, indicating that the house would be forfeited and the deceased's estate would receive the amount of the legitimate down payment. Justice was done, and Her Majesty the Queen of Canada slept well that night, after tucking in all her corgis.

The nice thing about this case is that we can all understand the essential issues of justice surrounding it. If you do something bad, you should not gain because of it, nor should anyone else gain from anything ill-gotten. It's not about the person who possesses the ill-gotten gain, it's about the ill-gotten gain itself. If I come to your house, surrounded in police, and wave a forged title deed in front of your face and have you forcibly evicted, I have uttered a forged document (Criminal Code s. 368) and gained by it. If I die and pass that property on to my squeaky-clean volunteers-in-an-old-folks-home patriotic-to-a-fault rescues-animals-from-shelters always-buys-a-crate-of-girl-guide-cookies-and-gives-them-to-the-homeless son, the property is still ill-gotten. No matter how good a person my son is, he's now in possession of the proceeds of crime: YOUR rightful house! I doubt you'd consider him a particularly good person unless he gave it back to you. His claims of "but *I* didn't steal the house!" would likely (and rightly) fall on deaf ears. We all understand the basic justice in this. It's simple. In the terms of our tradition of English law, it's "Natural Justice": fair and unbiased application of law in the spirit of procedural fairness. Property rights have been an essential part of our laws for centuries.

It's for this reason that we can now, potentially, look at this news story, regarding the use of Beaver Lake Cree land by oil companies, through the lenses of the same justice. When corporations are able to use properties that impinge on the rights of anyone to the rightful use of their own property, they cannot make the "but *I* didn't confiscate the land" defence. When the judiciary of Canada makes a decision that the rights of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation under Treaty 6 could be violated by current oil extraction, we can understand through the lens of Natural Justice that the claim (and the finding) is sensible and right. Whether a corporation says "she told me she was 18" or "we didn't knowingly violate Treaty rights", the result should be the same: under our system of law, in the eyes of our own idea of justice, and in the spirit of Natural Justice, the Beaver Lake Cree have a claim that must be heard. Whatever the final decision, they certainly deserve a hearing.

I didn't come here to talk about some random drug dealers, obviously. When I speak to my (non-First Nations) friends about First Nations issues, many routinely counter the arguments by saying "why are they blaming me for something I didn't do?" Well, it's correct that none of us took First Nations' lands, none of us violated the Treaties directly, we are not in any way directly responsible for the situation almost all First Nations find themselves in... but some among us are benefiting from the proceeds of crime. While that does not mean we are bad - it cannot change our ethical essence - it means we may be in possession of something that isn't rightfully ours. We need to understand that no matter how good we are (and most of us are good), no matter how generationally removed we are from the Treaties, the First Nations are not telling us "you did something wrong", they are saying "some among you are benefiting from the wrong done by others".

I'm a product of British Isles stock and a third generation Canadian. There isn't a drop of First Nations blood in my body (any First Nations peoples reading this will likely add the ellipsis "...that you know about"). I look at things through a distinctively European lens, and my capacity to comprehend the First Nations' worldview is particularly weak - but I do understand the philosophical concept of Justice, as do you. Next time you hear about a First Nations issue, please - PLEASE - use your empathy. I'm not asking for you to give up everything you own, put on a hairshirt, and self-flagellate for the rest of your life. I just ask you, I beg you: please have empathy. Please listen. Please understand that the First Nations are simply trying to claim what is their right under the Treaties the government signed with them. If I took your house by the use of a forged deed and passed that house on to my son, you would still try to get your rights back. Your quarrel is not with my son, but with the rights I passed to him.

I would fight for your rights to your property under law, firstly because it's the right thing to do, but also because protecting your right to your property strengthens my rights to my property. Our approach to our First Nations brothers and sisters should be no different. Protecting their rights to their lands under the Treaties strengthens our own legal claims to our legitimate property. We should seek justice for all. For Canadians like us, it's only natural.

Indigeneity

I’ve read for years about our ecological situation and planned to make a break from the city to live sustainably in the countryside. I’ve come up with more and more detailed plans, based in good science and the inventive know-how of global pioneers (the majority of them ex-British colonials themselves), to make this dream a reality. In the course of my own research on sustainability and ecology, I've been gradually introduced to indigenous forms of land use from North America. Recently, and in part because of this, I've started taking interest in First Nations’ issues. Now, I'm a Canadian, but I'm not a member of any of the First Nations. I don’t have a drop of First Nations blood in me, unless there was more friskiness amongst the ancestors than we've give credit for. Beyond being able to say “hello” in Blackfoot, I'm a black hole of First Nations knowledge: a darkness from which no light escapes. I admit that there are others with this exact same colonial background who revere some strange new-age hocus-pocus: the belief that they have a First Nations “spirit guide” and a “spirit animal” that is typically chosen from the following list: eagle, wolf, mountain lion, bear, or dolphin. To be perfectly clear: I am not one of those people. I have never smudged, done a sweat, or joined a drum circle. I'm your classic European-born-in-a-colony: I can recite the countries of origin of all my great-grandparents, tell you the percentages of each of the nationalities that are coursing through my veins, and I've even done a genealogical trip back to the mother country to trace my roots. I feel pangs of displaced affection for the oak forests and bucolic English countryside. I have a deep cultural affinity for my colonial brothers and sisters in New Zealand and Australia. I'm even nominally a monarchist - if we agree to call the Crown a Constitutional symbol of Canada herself and the people who live there. None of this is particularly abnormal or problematic for a colonial.

Allow me also to distance myself from a great deal of baggage: I do not suffer from post-colonial guilt complex or the delusion of “white man’s burden”. The idea that there are cultures out there that needed to be “civilised” is not only patently asinine, but if this “civilisation of the savages” had been achieved, it would have made the world dreadfully monotonous. I’ve travelled around the world enough, and employed enough people in faraway places, to know that my way does not work in certain contexts. Some cultures are simply not punctual. Some cultures value harmony more than objective truth. Some cultures can’t say “no”, and expect you to be able to tell the difference between multiple different types of “yes”. The only way MY ideas would work in those cultures is if I removed the bits that conflicted with my own conceptions and replaced them with attitudes compatible to mine. Being naturally lazy, I realised it was easier to change my approach than change the entire country I lived in. It is clear the colonial powers thought the opposite: that it was better to change all the local cultures than simply to adapt their own approach. As an efficiency freak, I find that wasteful. As a human, I find it despicable. It’s not my place to “civilise” anybody, and I realise it’s not my fault that this country got colonised; however, let’s be frank: I have benefited greatly because of this colonisation.

At this point in the narrative, however, it’s important that we look back on what’s been written and hilight a glaring omission. I would be willing to bet that most First Nations people reading this text will – right at this point – conclude that I’ve actually contradicted myself. Everyone else will likely still be wondering what the point of this post is. It's this: my entire study has been about a new solution to a problem the First Nations peoples have already solved, and yet my own research treated their solution as peripheral. I’ve already said I don’t suffer from white man’s burden or a post-colonial guilt complex, but I do suffer from an almost imperceptible memetic affliction: I still don’t privilege the discourse of the First Peoples. I’ve taken a problem that modernity has caused, and attempted to find a modern (indeed, European) solution to it. Indigenous methods, I have to admit, I treated as anecdotally interesting but not at all part of the solution I was looking for. In actual fact, indigenous methods of land stewardship are appropriate to place, systemic, and central to the problems of sustainability. It’s struck me more and more that: firstly, the depth and breadth of indigenous knowledge about their specific environments is staggering; secondly, a great deal of the knowledge has been brutalized, suppressed, and erased by colonial powers; and finally, after all this brutality, that knowledge has managed, somehow, to survive. This last point is a highly ironic form of good luck, because that which our ancestors attempted to eradicate appears to be a major part of the knowledge we need to solve our environmental problems today. This has become, for me, a disgustingly obvious case of “the more you learn, the less you know”.

To bring it all home, watch this video on the Mi’kmaq concept of “Netukulimk”, which can translate roughly to our concept of sustainability. What hit me was not the concept of sustainability itself - that idea is becoming clearer to more and more of us late-bloomers nowadays. The specific comment that caught me off guard was when Mr. Marshall said, "We must take the best of what the white man has brought forth, through his education and through his different ways of seeing the world, and our ways". Understanding that difference is something we as colonials, suffering from this post-colonial memetic hangover, were not in a place to fully comprehend. Now that I have shaken the cobwebs out, I'm beginning to see the truth of how these worldviews can work together. The darkness of my black hole had gone unnoticed to me because there was nothing but black. A single glimmer of light has now framed that darkness, and I realise now how much I need to learn from the ancient masters of Netukulimk. It is the way of a mature man that he bows his head and listens when a wise man speaks. I've clearly got to learn to be more mature.