Alma Brooks

U.C.E.P. Student, St. Mary's First Nation

Good afternoon. As I was looking at the agenda and saw the people that were listed here to speak, I wondered why I was asked to come. Sometimes I feel a little bit apprehensive when an individual is sought out because a lot of departments look around for an native person to sit on a panel, so that they can go back and put on their paper that they had native participation. I want everyone here today to know that I don't represent anyone unless I have had a chance to speak with them for I can't speak for them.

There sounds to me like there has been a lot of planning that has already taken place, certainly some major decisions have been made already. I am not aware of any Aboriginal communities that have participated in that. I guess the first thing I should talk about is community - I am not sure what was meant when I was asked to talk about community corrections. I think there are an awful lot of different interpretations of what a community is and what community corrections is. As an Aboriginal person looking out at the dominant society, I don't see community. If you call what is there community, then it means something different than what I see it as. I see cities, I see municipalities, I see different classes of people who associate with people within their classes. But as a community living in a particular area who take care of one another, I don't see that. Just as an example so that you understand what I mean; if they took some of the people from Centre Care and sent some of them to Fredericton, I think that they would probably end up on park benches. Maybe a few people might care - that is how I see it. I see institutions in your society and I see a lot of involvement in institutions. But to me when I think about institutions, institutions are mechanisms to control.

In reserves we still have a sense of community but they have become very dysfunctional communities. A lot of that was born out of the imposition of somebody else's value systems, somebody else's laws, somebody else's ideas of things that were good for us. But one thing that is really interesting, in our communities the numbers that the Solicitor general mentioned this afternoon about the incarceration rates, a disproportionate amount of those numbers are Aboriginal people, especially in the west where the population of Aboriginal people is more. One interesting thing is that while there is some theft in Native communities, over all there is very little. Just taking theft as an example, most of the theft occurs when we go and steal from you and your society. There is very little that we steal from each other. We believe that there is a reason for everything that we do, and that everything is linked to everything else. Everything we do is learned behaviour, we learn these things. That is what my elders tell me. When we look at the dominant society that has come here to occupy this part of the hemisphere, you occupy our land. We see that as a theft but you act like it is not a crime. Through the process of generations, maybe we learned that; do you see what I am trying to get at?

There have been large institutions who have had a lot of money, and a large portion of the society has benefitted very profitably from these institutions. I am in university now and I am taking sociology and they tell me that the larger society develops its economic base by focusing on the problems. I thought to myself how negative to build a society based on problems. You end up making your living at the expense of somebody's misery, somebody's misfortune, or somebody's sickness when so much energy could be put in a positive way.

So I guess it depends upon what the interpretation of community corrections is. If you are just talking about governments moving to a global level, is it that they are downloading a lot of the responsibility that they had before to the community level? Does it mean that they are just going to be taking money that was being spent at different levels and plunking it down in certain communities? Is that what they are going to do, is that what the idea of community corrections is? And if that is what it is, you will achieve a little bit more employment for a few more people in the community but whether or not real changes will take place is questionable because it is just another mechanism to control at a different level.

If we want meaningful change then we have to not focus on just an individual; the focus has to be on the community and community healing. The young men, the older men, sons, whoever they are in these correctional institutions come from a family somewhere. There are so many of them who have been abused, that come from dysfunctional families - families make up a community; communities make up the society. Unless everyone commits to a process of healing in the community, and I am not just talking about poor people, I am not just talking about "dark" people, I am talking about all of us. I know in my community you could start with the Chief-in-Council, leadership. You could start there but it is more than likely that they will be the last to join the process because they are benefitting greatly. If all the money that has been spent over the past few generations to keep people housed in prisons was spent in the communities, on family and community healing, educating, sharing, allowing people to express those frustrations of anger and rage in a good way. Our people are not in the situation we are in because of alcohol and drugs. Our people are taking alcohol and drugs because they do not have the power to change the situation they are in. And I speak to you from experience. We know what that is all about, we had generations of it.

Somebody mentioned the United States, and I hope that Canada is not once again going to go running off to the big brother and asking them what we should do. In the United States their society is putting their children on death row because they don't know what to do with them. Their children are rebelling in their society, and they do not know how to fix it. It reminds me so much, on a smaller scale, of one of our communities here when the children, the young people took that power in their hands and started taking their own lives. The only difference between the two is that one is internalized and the other is externalized. They are putting their children on death row, and I do not know if that is what this society is going to do. In my years of experience, I have seen Canada turning to the United States to make their decisions instead of going to the people. When the Oka crisis was going on, Brian Mulroney was running down there and asking Bush "what can we do with those Indians, how do we force them to stop doing what they are doing?" Surely we can come up with solutions here. If we all put our heads together and decide what community corrections is, but not to exclude ourselves because we wear a uniform, or because we get a high pay check, or because we are in a "position of authority". We are all included. We are so busy struggling to survive that we have forgotten to live. I think that if there is going to be community corrections, all of us in the community need to be involved and participate. We can help one another, we can heal one another - if we have a community, if we have a sense of community and we know what that community means then we can heal ourselves so that we can care about one another. We can help our children and our grandchildren because that is who we are talking about.

Crime rate might be dropping on paper, but we really don't know what is going on in the communities a lot of the times. Behind closed doors we are not able to know how many children are suffering, how many spouses are suffering. Just because they are not behind bars does not mean it is not there. To me that means that more focus needs to be put on the community, not to just set up a program where you are going to hire one or two people to take care of these people that are being sent out of jail. I think there has to be a process in the community where everybody is involved and that should be supported financially. I know the government is downloading their big institutions, which I do believe needs to be done to bring matters closer to home. Everybody in the community, the elders, the men, the women, the youth - nobody is listening to the youth. I had my tepee up one time where our ancestral burial ground is for ten days, and every evening the teepee was full of Native and non-Native people who came to talk to each other and listen to each other. Even Bud Bird came and he had to listen. He did not quite know how it worked until he got in there, but he listened to people who he probably never even knew was alive. It is not that people don't care, its not like people don't want to get involved because they will. It is just that the authorities have to give people that opportunity; the authorities can not go around with the idea that they know it all.

Somebody mentioned these assessment tools for "high risk", I think that is something that will have to be done. As far as Aboriginal incarcerated people, the assessment tools being used to assess them for high risk are not culturally appropriate. I filled out one of those assessment tools and I am considered a high risk to society, and it is basically because I am a Native person. For instance, one of the things was unemployment. Most of us are unemployed but it is not because we are lazy and don't want to work. I have been unemployed most of my life, but I have worked all my life, I just didn't get paid for it. Also, people who are implementing these assessment tools to our people who are in prison assume that because we speak english that we have assimilated, and therefore can use those generic tools. "You are no different from anybody else": I hear that so often. I have been visiting with our brothers inside for the past fifteen or more years, and I still experience racism. I not only experience racism, I also experience sexism. There is another woman that goes with me sometimes, and we are treated much differently then men by the people who work there. We have had our spiritual evenings disrupted, we have had them harassing young Native men where they would not have done it to others. Somebody said they were going to do away with racism by spraying it, and I thought wow I want to meet that person. Thank you very much.

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© 2007 Atlantic Human Rights Centre, St. Thomas University