CPT Aboriginal Justice Delegation Day 3: Court

11 Aug 2014

Note: these are my own observations/reactions/musings, not Christian Peacemaker Teams’ official communications. Please also follow Caitlin’s delegation blog, Peace Pigeon, and the official CPT Aboriginal Justice tumblr!

Personal ethnographic note: I am white, Jewish descent, and from San Francisco, California, Turtle Island.

##Bail Court

Our delegation spent a number of hours in bail court this morning, watching a very white, very male-dominated set of court officials set bail conditions for a set of very non-white set of defendants.

A few brief observations: none of the defendants was over 30 years old, and a number were in their mid-/late-teens. 7/8 of the defendants we observed were probably Anishinaabe, with one being either settler or white-passing (all court officials, lawyers, and police were either white/settler or white-passing). More than half of the alleged offenses or bail conditions made reference to alcoholism (and one to the drinking of gasoline, which was a new one on me…and lemme tell you: as a recovered alcoholic and someone who spends a lot of time working in hospitals with alcoholics, it takes a lot to surprise me in this area).

Clearly all of this was old-hat to the judge, court officers, and lawyers. At one point, it became clear that one lawyer had given the wrong name for the mother of a defendant, which was important as the paperwork had to specify that the correct person had custody of the defendant. It’s hard to know what this means, but it did not seem as if the duty solicitor was very involved in the lives of their clients (which is perhaps unsurprising).

3/8 defendants requested and received an interpreter, who translated back and forth between English and Anishinaabe Mowin (aka Ojibwe, an Algonquian language and the primary indigenous language of the area). I was very pleased to see that the court provided an interpreter in these cases without question, though he did seem somewhat overworked: he kept moving between two courtrooms. I also felt it a little odd to see Anishinaabe Mowin treated as a “foreign” language, in some sense, which needed special provision in the current, dominant justice system of this region. As one delegation member said, “English is spoken, but Anishinaabe Mowin is whispered”. I had a moment where this felt just surreal: after all, Anishinaabe Mowin is historically the language of the area, and I tend to feel it polite for newcomers (as all the whites of this area are, comparatively) to accommodate to the established language of an area, and not the other way around. It was a moment where the sheer bizarreness of colonialism, and the persisting colonial mentality, hit me like a ton of logs.