After the first of several suicide attempts, Showshoe was transferred to the minimum security O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi Healing Lodge, operated by the Cree community of Crane River in Northern Manitoba. Here Showshoe was offered “culturally appropriate” programming for aboriginal offenders. He did not participate in any of it. He escaped and fled on day 23, eventually being sent back to maximum security. As we know, Showshoe later took his own life just months shy of his release. This is not to comment on the merits of facilities such as O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi Healing Lodge generally — especially when compared to the treatment Showshoe experienced at other institutions. But the truth is, in this case, Showshoe likely had no connection to the prairie-based “culturally appropriate” programming he was offered there. It would have been as distant to him as his homelands in Teet’lit Zheh in Fort McPherson, N.W.T. It begs asking, what if instead of simply reducing Showshoe to “aboriginal” he was understood on his own terms as Gwich’in? What if he was given the opportunity to heal on his own land — up North on the Peel River? And perhaps the bigger questions. Rather than reducing indigenous people to aboriginal and wondering why we continue to be disproportionately represented in Canada’s justice system, what would it mean for all of us to take the multiple and diverse legal systems of indigenous peoples seriously? cbc.ca/news/canada/north/why-does-the-canadian-justice-system-treat-aboriginal-people-as-if-they-re-all-the-same-1.2886502
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 19:51:12 +0000
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