The Meaning of Splitting The Sky's Life, Then and Now

From Attica, to the British Columbia Indian War, to the Attempt to Arrest War Criminals in a Society Increasingly Ruled By Brute Force Rather Than Adherence to the Reasonable Restraints of Good Law

In my last Substack essay entitled, “The Genocidal State of Israel,” I left off by introducing my friend and colleague of many names. One of his names is John Boncore Hill. His father was Italian-American and his mother was a Hill. The Hills form a large extended family of Mohawk people centred at the Six Nations community in Southern Ontario Canada. To me my friend, who died in 2013, was often “Dac.” Dac is short for Dacajeweiah, a Mohawk name he was given as a teenager. Dacajeweiah means Splitting the Sky, with STS as a short form.

Pretty much everything about Dac’s life seems to belong in the drawer set aside for episodes and topics that are supposed to be ignored or, at the very least, not talked about too much. The unspeakable issues that lie hidden away in such drawers, however, have a way of coming back, but with intensified consequences.

The first forbidden subject concerns people like Dac who grew up poor, abused, institutionalized, and in conflict with “the law.” Then came the role afforded to Dac in the Attica prison episode in 1971. Powerful authorities, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller, committed major crimes against the Attica inmates but STS ended up as the sole individual convicted of murder in an episode where 42 people, mostly prisoners, were shot dead by government officials.

I think the issues Dac raised in partnership with Dr. Bruce Clark are treated to this day as particularly unspeakable. In 1995 the two men were front and centre in what became an Indian War that included the incursions of the Canadian Armed Forces involved in staffing and equipping a military base named Camp Zulu.

With the involvement of a local Indian brain trust, Dac and Dr. Clark found a way to dramatize that the titles to land and resources throughout British Columbia are flawed. The whole system of proprietorships is not founded in legal legitimacy and certainty. The fatal flaw results from the persistent failure of governments to obey the constitutional and Crown law of existing Aboriginal and treaty rights.

That failure has for the most part not been reasonably and rationally addressed, creating much needless uncertainty for all the people of British Columbia. Instead of addressing the legacy of government criminality, Dac and especially Dr. Clark were scapegoated as criminals and as terrorists.

The most unspeakable aspect of this scandal is that a multi-billion dollar land claims industry has been constructed to benefit the very interests whose greed and neglect created the mess. The aim has been to confuse the public and prevent a genuine reckoning with the real root of the problem that could have been handled much more effectively back in 1995. The problem could have been rationally addressed if the controversial land claims file had not been handed off to the ethically-challenged dim wits running the smear and disinformation branch of the RCMP.

By emphasizing the utter failure of law enforcement agencies to enforce the law on those engaged in the highest levels of organized crime, Splitting The Sky had to be smeared again and again. He had to be punished for trying to perform the public service of illuminating the dark truths kept in the drawers where the unspeakable subjects are secreted away.

The fact that the importance of adhering to the rule of law was brought forward so dramatically by a criminalized Native man and 9/11 truther, has been basically wiped from the record even in Alberta and British Columbia. The failure to enforce the law on obvious culprits responsible for monumental crimes has shown up in the impunity implicitly granted to those responsible for the tens of millions of dead and injured victims of the Covidian crimes worldwide.

It is also showing up in the impunity implicitly granted so far to those blatantly violating in Gaza the UN’s Genocide Convention. By treating STS’s message in 2009 as unwanted and ephemeral, just look at how things since then have gotten worse, much worse.

War and Peace and Title to Lands and Resources

Before I met Dac in the late 1990s, he helped trigger an Indian War in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province. The episode began peacefully with a two-month sundance observance in which Dac, as well as his BC-based wife and family, took part.

Most of the sundancers were Shuswap or members of other Native groups indigenous to BC. An incident at the end of the sundance created instant animosity along with sharp attention to the question of who owns the land. Drawing on the Shuswap language, a number of the sundancers reconstituted themselves as Ts‘Peten Defenders.

Led by BC’s Attorney-General, Ujjal Dosanjh, the New Democratic Party provincial government seemed to want a confrontation. So too was this same desire expressed by a faction within the RCMP as well as within Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government in Ottawa. As pictured in the video below, the Armed Forces of Canada got involved after armoured personnel carriers were requested by BC authorities.

The delivery of these Bison APCs to a makeshift base in the BC interior named Camp Zulu, is indicative of the prevailing mentality on the government side of the operation.

https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/tspeten-1995/

According to evidence put forward in court, the camp had armoured personnel carriers, helicopters, small planes, a field hospital, and roughly “400 heavily-armed militarized police.” The RCMP blew up a truck of the Ts-Peten Defenders with an outlawed land mine. The police admitted to firing 77,000 rounds at the protestors. Only one individual, Suniva Bronson, was wounded in the onslaughts. Bronson was an environmentalist with close ties to the founders of the Greenpeace organization.

https://bcanuntoldhistory.knowledge.ca/1990/gustafsen-lake-standoff

The Gustafsen Lake Indian War in British Columbia was on small scale compared with the genocidal assaults of the Israeli and US governments currently underway in Gaza. While the scale of the two conflicts was very different, the underlying injustices in both confrontations are similar. These injustices are very much in line with the pervasive dilemmas imposed on the present by the persistence of colonial oppression in the treatment of indigenous populations.

As suggested by former US Attorney-General Ramsay Clark in the video below, the Gustafsen Lake Indian War was rooted in similar underlying circumstance to those expressed in the Gaza genocide underway now. Both confrontations emerge from the crimes inherent in the imperial expansion of the Anglo-American Empire. Both Native Americans in BC and Palestinians in Israel-Palestine, share similar and sometimes overlapping histories.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763, the American Revolution and Indian Land Title in British Columbia

Questions concerning interactions between Indigenous peoples and conquering peoples entered a new era in 1492. The era initiated with Spain’s conquistadorial land grab continues as currently manifested in the unfolding saga in Palestine as the dominant population of European Jews continues their genocidal campaign to eliminate and uproot native Arab Semites.

The political upheaval resulting from King George’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 was one of the main causes of the split resulting in the secessionist movement within British North America leading to the formation of the United States of America. The Royal Proclamation included imperial provisions regulating the western expansion of Euro-American settlers into the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes areas.

After imperial Britain acquired through conquest many French claims to the lands of North America, King George prohibited the addition of new non-Indian settlements in the continent’s interior. No such non-Indian settlements should be established, he decreed, until Crown officials obtained consent for such developments from local Indians.

Many of the British subjects in the Thirteen Colonies bitterly resented the imposition of this very significant restriction on western expansion. How ironic that the British sovereign has been painted as a tyrant for recognizing in a rudimentary way the human rights of Indigenous peoples not to be unilaterally dispossessed. The authors of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 determined that Indigenous peoples in British North America would have a say in determining some aspects of their own futures on portions of their own ancestral lands.

This recognition formed the basis for the allegation in the American Declaration of Independence, a document mostly drafted by Thomas Jefferson, that King George “did bring on the murderous Indian savages.”

This aspect of the Royal Proclamation presented a feature that has not to this day been extended to the Palestinians by the Zionist founders and builders of Israel. The Palestinians were never properly asked if they consented to the creation of Israel on their ancestral lands. Instead the Palestinians faced in 1948 and 1967 violent Israeli seizure of their property by military conquest.

In 1967 this seizure included lands reserved by the United Nations for the new Arab country promised the Palestinians in 1947 in Resolution 181. Even now the Israelis pretend that they have the right to exclude Palestinians from any role role in the Jewish state’s negotiations with other Arab countries as in, for instance, the making of the Abraham accords.

Going back to the years following 1763, the British decision to protect with soldiers the designated Indian Country west of Euro-American settlements involved added expenses and thus added taxation on the people of the Thirteen Colonies. This burden of added tariffs on imports without political representation in the British Parliament was so infuriating for some, that they began to contemplate their secession from the British Empire.

This decision of the imperial government to enforce the principle that only agents of the Crown had the exclusive right to negotiate land issues with Indians, was intensely disliked especially by the dominant complex of speculators in North American lands. The land speculators cartel prominently included George Washington, a British Army veteran of the French and Indian War.

Benjamin Franklin was near the centre of the hub of those who speculated in the future value of Indian lands. Franklin considered himself an expert on Indian people and on the process whereby non-Indians might acquire new wealth through the purchase and reconstitution of Indian lands.

Franklin’s maps of Indian Country in the Mississippi Valley were in great demand especially in France. With Franklin as the intermediary between France and the Continental Congress, the French monarchy helped to arm and support the American rebels culminating in the international recognition of the new US republic in the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Land speculators would thrive in the new republic released from the impediments to western expansion as imposed by the principles of the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

In the Dominion of Canada, the part of North America that retains its ties to the British monarchy to this day, the Royal Proclamation is still in effect. The implementation of the terms of the Royal Proclamation, as tenuous and problematic as this process of Crown-Aboriginal negotiations has often been, led to the making of many Crown-Aborginal treaties. These treaties have generated a grid of legal arrangements covering most of Canada.

This grid, however, has not yet been been extended throughout most of British Columbia. In other words, the Aboriginal titles of the First Nations people in most of British Columbia have never been “ceded.” Those First Nations involved in treaties with the Crown do not necessarily agree with this interpretation. They tend to see their treaty agreements as signifying the Crown’s recognition of Aboriginal rights for as long as the suns shines and the waters flow.

Crown-Aboriginal Treaty map by Anthony J. Hall.

Smear Campaigns Are a RCMP Speciality

This eighteenth century history anticipates some of the unresolved issues still driving the Israel-Palestine antagonisms. This same history also sets the stage for the violence of the Gustafsen Lake Indian War in 1995. Largely through the intervention of Splitting The Sky, the Ts’Peten Defenders were able to retain the services of lawyer and Ph.D holder, Dr. Bruce Clark. Over many years Dr. Clark specialized in addressing the legal status of Indian people whose Aboriginal titles are not subject to the negotiation of Crown-Aboriginal treaties. See

Bruce Clark, Native Liberty, Crown Sovereignty: The Existing Aboriginal Right of Self-Government in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University in Canada, 1990)

As is well demonstrated in Above the Law Part 2, the authorities including the RCMP spin doctors led by Sergeant Peter Montague, sought to sabotage due process by smearing Dr. Clark’s reputation. As announced by the chief RCMP negotiator, Dennis Ryan, on behalf of the RCMP Command structure, "kill this Clark and smear the prick and everyone with him." The Judges in the Gustafsen Trials seemed to comply with instructions from the RCMP. Prison News Servce reported,

On July 8, 1996 the B.C. Supreme Court trial of the Gustafsen Lake 18 began behind a bullet-proof, bomb-proof curtain of glass and steel in a "secure" anti-terrorist courtroom in Surrey, 30 km south of Vancouver. Thirteen men and five women, including four white supporters are charged with assorted offences ranging from trespass to attempted murder. These charges arise out of the month-long armed siege of the Ts'peten Sundance grounds last summer by the largest and costliest R.C.M.P./army operation in Canadian history…..

Once in custody, defendants' repeated demands for access to their counsel, Bruce Clark, were ignored and alternative counsel was imposed. To keep Clark from his clients, authorities went so far as to lock him out of the courtroom. When he finally gained entry, he was wrestled to the ground by police, hauled away in shackles and leg irons. Finally, Judge Friesen ordered him to undergo a compulsory psychiatric evaluation before charging him with assault and contempt of court. A Canada-wide warrant was issued for his arrest, forcing him into exile. Ramsey Clark, ex-Attorney General of the United States, accused the presiding judge of having "created the appearance of an outrageous abuse of judicial power to deprive persons accused of crime of their counsel and to deliberately humiliate that counsel and his clients"

http://sisis.nativeweb.org/court/aug1896.html

http://sisis.nativeweb.org/clark/feb1897.html

Above the Law, Part 2, highlights the tactics of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police during BC’s Indian War in 1995. The RCMP incriminated themselves by making a “training video” covering their own internal discussions. The content of this video makes a mockery of those entrusted to uphold the rule of law. At one point we see police discussing the possibility of hiring journalists to help them with their “disinformation and smear campaign.” “Smear campaigns are our specialty,” Sergeant Montague boasted of the RCMP.

As with the manipulation of much media imagery to depict all Palestinians as natural-born terrorists, the government-police partnership in British Columbia had in 1995 no difficulty finding media collaborators to heap contempt on many people and their arguments. Those targeted for media recrimination were individuals and groups that called attention to the living Aboriginal title still existing in the lands and natural resources of the province.

To take the comparison further, consider legal parallels underlying the creation of the turmoil that mushroomed into crisis in British Columbia in 1995 and in Gaza in 2023.

In the words of Doug Whitlow, during February of 1997, the jury in the eight-month Gustafsen Trial “had a week off to ponder the testimony of 77 crown witnesses whose evidence revealed how the RCMP escalated a land dispute into a deadly standoff.” The escalation began in late summer when the sundancers set up a fence to prevent the cattle on Lyle James’ land from defecating on the site of the sacred ritual.

James immediately protested through the intervention of a cowboy, possibly drunk, who ordered the group of 18 individuals to leave the property immediately. The term “red niggers” is said to have come up in a heated exchange. One thing led to another. Very quickly the Canadian Armed Forces were involved at the secret Camp Zulu set up near the native encampment in the Gustafsen Lake area. The constant stream of RCMP media releases were delivered at a site at 100 Mile House.

https://tworowtimes.com/news/gustafsen-lake-inside-out-how-the-rcmp-really-works-part-1/

As described by the Indigenous Foundations web site at the University of British Columbia, “The siege at Gustafsen Lake has become a controversial event in Canadian history due to government militarization, RCMP smear campaigns, and successful efforts to spread misinformation about the Sundancers. The media were strategically excluded from all but official RCMP accounts of events, resulting in highly skewed reporting.”

https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/gustafsen_lake/

George Wool, a lawyer and former RCMP agent involved in case, was cited as follows by Sandra Lambertus in Wartime Images, Peacetime Wounds: The Media and the Gustafsen Lake Standoff ( U of Toronto Press, 2004, p. 165 ) Wool characterized the episode as

“a police constructed event…. probably 100%. The police didn’t go into this thing as an impartial group, attempting to gather evidence of a crime. They went in as a large media campaign to first create these [Ts’peten Defender] people as ‘bad,’ as ‘terrorists’”

The Ts’ Peten Defenders brought together a formidable brain trust including Dr. Clark, former US Attorney-General Ramsay Clark and his client, Splitting the Sky. The group also included Flo Samson, STS’s wife Sandra Bruderer, Bill Lightbown, James Pitawanakwat, Edward Dick, and Shelagh Franklin. In defending herself in court, Franklin questioned the claims of ranch owner Lyle James while the Ts’Peten Defender’s much-smeared lawyer was being held in custody during the height of the eight-month trial.

The presiding Judge of the main trial in Surrey BC, Bruce Josephson, has been criticized for the “deep bias he has exhibited throughout the year-long trial. Several times he was interrupted by cries of ‘liar’ from the gallery as he read his own version of the events of the standoff.”

http://sisis.nativeweb.org/court/jul30sis.html

A key figure in the Indian War and the Gustafsen Trial was William Jones Ignace, an esteemed Shuswap elder, a Shuswap speaker, and an experienced veteran in the longstanding resistance movement of his people. From my personal conversations with Mr. Ignace I learned, for instance, he had worked closely with Robert Satiacum, who along with film actor Marlon Brando had been instrumental in setting in motion the famous Washington state fish-ins. These fish-ins helped stimulate the growth of the Indian rights movement in the 1960s.

In the Gustafsen Trial, Ignace received the longest sentence of 8 years. Informally know as the “Wolverine,” Ignace and Dr. Clark collaborated closely in what would become the Ts’Peten Defenders’ case, a case that authorities blocked from from being properly presented in the court proceedings. The Wolverine, affectionately known sometimes also as Jonesy, is pictured below. He is the individual that is showing his face.

The prominence of the Union Jack in the image above is not accidental. It may seen ironic that the defence of First Nations in Canada involves for some, including Dr. Clark, Wolverine, Splitting the Sky and myself, an emphasis on the role of British imperial constitutional instruments like the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This emphasis on the legacy of the British Empire in a jurisdiction named British Columbia did not apparently go down well with BC Attorney-General Ujjal Dosanjh. Dosanjh’s East Indian family, with communist roots in the Old Country, had opposed the British Raj.

The Importance of Genuine Third-Party Adjudication in Interpreting Evidence and the Law

A central feature of the Ts’Peten Defenders’ case involved a rejection of the federally-funded, federally-authorized chiefs who govern their Indian reserve communities according to the provisions of federal legislation known as the Indian Act. Such chiefs are in a conflict of interest. They cannot credibly negotiate, as federal officials themselves, with other federal officials representing the Dominion and provincial Crowns.

The conflict of interest of the BC chiefs governed by the Indian Act resembles closely the dilemma of Israeli-funded and sanctioned officials of the Palestinian Authority (PA). PA officials too are in a conflict of interest when it comes to negotiating on behalf of the Palestinian people with Israeli authorities.

The proper place for such negotiations between governments and stateless Indigenous peoples in Canada, Israel and many other jurisdictions, might in the future within the framework of international law, international courts, and other appropriate international venues.

However, the harsh experiences of Palestinian people demonstrate especially well the the futility, so far at least, of seeking remedies through the resort to international courts as presently constituted. Certainly with the thoroughly corrupt International Criminal Court (ICC) and perhaps with the somewhat more objective International Court of Justice (ICJ), the existing apparatus of international criminal law seems to be mostly about theatrics rather than about substance when it comes to the Big Leagues of international crimes.

The system seems devoid of solid arrangements geared to finding and enforcing real remedies for genuine grievances. Most often, might makes right as “victors’ justice” almost inevitably prevails over the rule of law.

Another censored and much demeaned element of the Ts’Peten Defenders’ case was Dr. Clark’s resort to an Aboriginal rights case that unfolded in the vicinity of Connecticut in the early 1700s. This case was based on claims brought forward by the the Mohegan Indians who challenged the wrongful appropriation of their ancestral lands. The Privy Council of Queen Anne decided that, in the words of Dr. Clark,

The 1704 constitutional order [ sanctioned by Queen Anne] created a special court, to be made up of judges who were not part of the legal system of Connecticut. The principle of that special court has never been disbanded. The constitutional law establishing it has never been repealed. The word "existing" in the phrase "existing aboriginal and treaty rights" refers back to no principle more crucial than the due process right of the aboriginal peoples, of access to this third party court.

Third-party adjudication is a core principle in the rule of law generally. The sacrosanct expectation is that judges should not be biased, or even appear to be biased, towards one side or the other in disputes between contending parties. I remember Mr. Ignace used to raise this topic often in his learned legal discourses.

After recounting the extreme biases of judges in a number of contemporary Aboriginal rights cases, Dr. Clark referred to

the wisdom of the Mohegan case. Judges are human beings. As such, they are prone to the frailties of the human condition; one of which, lamentably, is to see things from one's own cultural perspective, and to manipulate affairs in the interest of one's own race and economy.

http://sisis.nativeweb.org/clark/eclipse.html

Dr. Clark’s analysis leads to the conclusion that Canada does not adhere to the existing Crown law of “existing Aboriginal and Treaty Rights” because it does not create courts equipped to navigate the cross-cultural currents of Crown-Aboriginal contentions. Canada’s courts are not equipped to host disinterested judges from jurisdictions outside Canada and outside the First Nations in Canada. Our country therefore lacks the means to deliver genuine third-party adjudication according to the principles outlined in the ruling on the Mohegan case.

The same principal applies to the courts of Israel that lack a sufficiently objective judiciary capable of providing genuine third-party adjudications in cases involving the claims and assertions of Palestinian petitioners.

Many liberal Jews have throughout 2023 protested against the subordination of the Supreme Court of Israel to the will of the ruling coalition in the Israeli Knesset. Nevertheless a compelling case has yet to be brought forward that the Israeli judiciary has been such an important bastion for the protection of Palestinian rights that its powers need to be retained. The current spectacle of Israelis cheering on the genocide of civilians, mostly women and children, does not bode well for the possibility of an internal resolution to the Israel-Palestine antagonisms.

In all Dr. Clark’s representations, including in his foiled effort to present the case of the Ts’Peten Defenders, he has attributed many of Canada’s violations of the Genocide Convention to the failure of Canada’s judicial system to provide a credible system of third-party adjudication as called for in the Mohegan case. In fact he has written in 2018 a book entitled, Ongoing Genocide Caused by Judicial Suppression of the “Existing” Aboriginal Rights.

Drawing on his own struggles with the courts to even bring his legal arguments forward, Dr. Clark emphasizes Article 2 (b) of the Genocide Convention. He explains,

“That section indicts the imposition of ‘serious bodily or mental harm’ against groups, such as that evidenced by the high rates of suicides of Indians in reaction to the courts' injustices, committed for political reasons contrary to the rule of law.”

https://www.amazon.ca/Genocide-Judicial-Suppression-Existing-Aboriginal/dp/1717110916

From Attica to Gustafsen Lake

I met Splitting The Sky, Dacajeweiah, two or three years after the Battle of Gustafsen Lake. As the saga was unfolding I had followed standard news coverage of the BC Indian War very closely. I wrote an op ed about the conflict. The item appeared in early September in Canada’s Globe and Mail. My major personal connection to the story was that I knew Bruce Clark with whom I interacted during the second half of the 1980s.

Moreover, I had written an anonymous peer review assessment of the text of Dr. Clark’s Ph.D. thesis that he had transformed into a manuscript being considered for publication by McGill-Queen’s University Press. In the years that followed, both Dr. Clark and I received excellent treatment from those overseeing the operation of this important academic publisher. Dr. Clark’s manuscript was published in 1990 as Native Liberty, Crown Sovereignty.

https://www.mqup.ca/clark--bruce-contributor-107345.php

https://www.mqup.ca/hall--anthony-contributor-106277.php

In 1982 I started my full-time teaching career as Assistant Professor of Native Studies at Laurentian University in Sudbury Ontario. I went straight to the post from the University of Toronto History Department where I was just completing my own Ph.D. thesis on the “History of Indian Policy in Upper Canada.” Upper Canada formed the seed jurisdiction from which Ontario emerged in 1867.

During the 1980s Bruce Clark was living about 120 miles from Sudbury with his Anishnabek/Ojibway clients on Bear Island in Lake Temagami. The Teme Augama Anishinabai had been passed over in 1850 in the course of a Crown-Aboriginal treaty negotiation covering the area north of Lake Huron. In what seemed to me at the time like a pretty idyllic arrangement, Clark was developing the arguments on unceded Aboriginal title that he would later bring to British Columbia.

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-hauntings-of-colonialism-anthony-j.-hall

The issue of unceded Aboriginal title had been successfully highlighted in BC, due in large measure to the prodigious efforts of lawyer, Thomas Berger. Berger had been retained by the Anglican Church and the Nisga’a Indians of the Nass River Valley in northwestern BC. The litigation Berger set in motion came before the Supreme Court of Canada in 1973. Canada’s top judges addressed the issue of unceded Aboriginal title in BC in an inconclusive ruling.

The unfulfilled requirements of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which seemed to have disappeared from sight for about half a century prior to 1973, had been brought back into the light for examination by many officials. The Royal Proclamation’s constitutional requirements, however, had not yet been applied to Crown negotiations with First Nations in ways that addressed the flawed legal status to ownership and control over BC’s lands and waters.

In the late 1990s Splitting The Sky came to visit me in Lethbridge saying he wanted to chat before or after some event he was attending at the nearby reservation of the Blood Tribe. At that time recalled I had once heard Splitting The Sky address a big audience at the Toronto Indian Friendship Centre.

In his presentation Dac addressed the prospect of creating a new seat in the UN General Assembly for an ambassador to represent all of the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. I remember thinking at the time that the proposal, however fanciful, came from someone who was obviously capable of thinking big thoughts.

During our first conversation and in many more exchanges in the years ahead, Dac made it very clear that much of his life had been shaped by events set off in 1971 when the inmates at Attica State Prison near Buffalo New York gained control of the jail. In the late 1990s when we first spoke, I had heard the word, “Attica,” but that was about it. Am am still learning about the significance of what went on there.

Of course I was anxious to hear Dac’s description of the Battle of Gustafsen Lake. Spitting The Sky, however, seemed to want to give me a larger picture of his life’s journey. He had other priorities he wanted to emphasize by stressing the importance of an event where 43 men had been killed. Thirty-three of the deceased were inmates and 10 were correctional officers. All except one had been killed by the bullets of law enforcement agents.

Splitting The Sky let me know that he had been charged with killing that single individual, prison guard William Quinn. Quinn had been killed in the maelstrom that spontaneously broke out at the onset of the fiasco. This initial revelation from STS definitely caught my attention.

Splitting The Sky, aged 19 in 1971, was actually too young to be in the Attica prison population. He was put in the jail nevertheless to finish off a sentence he had received for theft. The Attica prison uprising became for some in the tumultuous atmosphere of 1971 a symbol of the underclass of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans and other marginalized groups rising up in liberating protest. The government of the state of New York went to work to counter these perceptions and protect the reputation of Officialdom by demonizing the inmates through outright lies in a monumental smear campaign.

A classic illustration of the energizing resonance in the word, “Attica,” was dramatized in an iconic scene in the 1975 movie, Dog Day Afternoon. Al Pacino plays the lead role in the telling of a real-life story adapted by Hollywood for mass consumption.

In the film the Pacino character has taken hostages in a bank robbery. He leaves behind his partner in the bank and comes out through the front door. He is met on the street by a large contingent of armed police officers, media, and legions of average folks attracted to the spectacle.

Challenged to surrender by the police officer in charge, the Pacino character wins the sympathy and support of the onlookers when he simply proclaims the single the word, “Attica.” The impactful mention of this term was highlighted to convey “Attica’s” meaning for average folks. It was meant to invest nobility in the idea of those who stand up to repressive authority…. those like the inmates of Attica, both dead and alive.

This scene in a movie nominated for several Academy Awards further emblazoned the term, “Attica,” even more deeply into the popular imagination as a code word for society’s underdogs seeking liberty and justice.

I first learned from Splitting The Sky that John Lennon and Yoko Ono had been immediately drawn to the plight of the Attica Brothers when they arrived in the United States in late 1971 with the intention of staying permanently. STS mentioned in passing that John and Yoko had performed their new song, “Attica State,” at a benefit concert for the families of the bereaved prisoner families. John also sang his new song, “Imagine.”

With the added appearance of Aretha Franklin, the benefit concert took place at the legendary Appollo Theatre in Harlem.

As the sole prisoner at Attica charged with first-degree murder, STS was suddenly caught in the glare of major publicity as either a martyr or a monster depending on one’s perspective. At the time, John and Yoko were at the head of the worldwide peace movement helping to turn public opinion against US continuation of the Vietnam war. The divisions created by the anti-war movement definitely permeated public perceptions on both sides of Attica’s symbolic meaning.

As Lennon saw it

“Media blames it on the prisoners,

But the prisoners did not kill,

Rockefeller pulled the trigger,

That is what the people feel.

Free the prisoners, Jail the judges”

The Political Economy of Universities and of the Aboriginal Rights Industry

I got to know John Boncore Hill across several multiplicities in his complex personality. Like me, he was born in 1951. From the time when I met him in the late 1990s until his death at 62 in 2013, I discovered an engaging friend as well as a thoughtful and erudite activist. Behind his often gruff and aggressive demeanour, I encountered a gentle, kind-spirited and introspective human being with a genuine concern for the future of all of humanity.

Early on I noticed that he had read widely on a broad array of subjects. This attribute one sometimes finds in people who have spent long periods in prison when there is plenty of time for such activity. One of the struggles that Splitting The Sky took on during his first two months in Attica, involved an organized group of inmates who advanced the case that access to books of one’s own choosing is right worth fighting for.

It did not take long before I invited Splitting the Sky to join with me in lecturing to students in some of my university classes. Dac was an excellent speaker with a lot of really important experiences of his own that he could accentuate by adding context and historical background.

Dac had his own unique style of lingo, drawing heavily, often in poetic ways, on the language of the streets, of the ghettos, and of the articulate outcasts he hung out with during his decades inside prison after he was convicted in 1975 of murdering William Quinn. Most students were excited to learn from a Mohawk man whose experiences and perspectives were so much different than the well groomed middle class careerists that dominate many professorial positions in most universities.

While my students were mostly appreciative of the new guest lecturer, my colleagues in the Native American Studies Dept. at the University of Lethbridge were less than appreciative. Dacajeweiah was a part of the American Indian Movement, an organization very critical of the system of federally-funded Indian chiefs in Canada and the United States. The inner dynamics of this system gave rise to a virtual civil war on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in the 1970s. This conflict pitted AIM members against the “Goon Squad” of Tribal Chairman Dick Wilson.

This conflict was part of the lead up to the decision of the American Indian Movement to return in 1973 to Wounded Knee, the scene of the culminating conquest of Indian Country by the US Armed Forces in 1890.

The Battle of Gustafsen Lake in 1995 presented a Canadian variant of the scenario that led AIM’s leadership to famously return to Wounded Knee in orderto make a very public armed stand in 1973. Extending AIM’s position to northern North America, the brain trust of the Ts’Peten Defenders rejected having agents of the Canadian Indian Act speak on behalf of First Nations peoples in the negotiation of Crown-Aboriginal treaties in British Columbia.

The importance of this position was dramatized when the Ovide Mercredi, the National Chief of the Assemble of First Nations, paid a visit to the Ts’Peten Defenders in the late summer of 1995. Since Mr. Mercredi was the National Chief of the main organization in Canada representing the country’s Indian chiefs, elected according to the terms of the Indian Act, it is hardly surprising he was critical of what he was seeing.

Chief Mercredi told the media that the Ts’Peten Defenders were getting bad legal advice and that they were breaking the law. He tried to persuade them to go home and abandon their cause. He added that he believed the Defenders were sincere in their views, however misguided. They were not terrorists, Chief Mercredi indicated.

When I started inviting Splitting The Sky to lecture in some of my classes, the University of Lethbridge was engaged in extending to Ovide Mercredi an honorary doctorate with a view to hiring him into a faculty position in the Department of Native American Studies. The long and short of it was that I was no longer able to feel comfortable in my position as a tenured Associate Professor of Native American Studies.

I took the not-so-subtle signal sent my way and moved along into other departments ending up in Liberal Education and Globalization Studies. It was on this academic platform that I was promoted to Full Professor in 2008. While I enjoyed a good run over a twenty your period as the history person in two different academic units devoted to Native Studies, I moved on with a sense that I was more free to invent my own academic projects with a new set of colleagues. Among them I counted Splitting The Sky who could join me in class now unharrassed.

In our early period of collaboration, Splitting The Sky let me know he was working with a large cache of documents forming the basis of behind-the-scenes communications within the Canadian government during the build up to the Battle of Gustafsen Lake. Some of Dac’s analysis of this material would form a part of the book he was developing, From Attica to Gustafsen Lake.

It is a very big deal to turn the resources of the Canadian Armed Forces on a domestic enemy, but that is what had happened on the way to establishing and operating the militarized Camp Zulu in the BC Interior.

The documents, along with the video of the RCMP filming themselves, were released as part of the discovery process on the way to the Gustafsen Trial in 1996-97. After Splitting The Sky released to me the mother load of the documents, I made a start at trying to figure out for myself what had transpired.

In September of 2000 I was hired by the US Public Defenders Office in Portland Oregon to write an expert report on Article 4, Section 1 (3) of the Extradition Treaty between Canada and the United States. My job was to answer the question of whether the Crown’s criminalization of Ts’Peten Defender, James Pitawanakwat, had come about because of a tainted ruling of a “political character.”

In a 50 page report, I argued that Pitawanakwat’s criminalization was indeed of a political character. Here is how Warrior Publications described the episode:

“While released to a half-way house in Vancouver in 1999, Pitawanakwat left custody and travelled to the US. He was later arrested, and Canadian authorities sought his extradition back to Canada.

In October 2000, a court in Portland, Oregon, refused to extradite him. His lawyers [in the US Public Defenders Office] had successfully argued that Canada’s criminalization of the siege at Ts’Peten fulfilled Article 4 (the “political offences exception clause”) of the Extradition Treaty between Canada and the US. This provision was designed to protect genuine resistance “whose criminalized actions arise in the context of legitimate liberations struggles waged against unjust, oppressive regimes.” (Prof. Tony Hall, University of Lethbridge, December 2000).

This same argument was used unsuccessfully by Leonard Peltier in 1976, then facing extradition to the US.

https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/tspeten-1995/

As I saw it my contribution to the process had helped internationalize the issues of Crown-Aboriginal interaction on issues concerning rights and titles to the lands and resources of Canada. That escape from the domestication of the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights can be seen as serving the interests of First Nations people in Canada.

The US Treasury Department paid me $500 for my expert report. I expect a similar transaction in the domestic Aboriginal rights industry within Canada might have cost tax payers about 100 times that amount. When Ovide Mercredi intervened with the Ts’peten Defenders in the effort to reroute the issue of Aboriginal title in BC back into established networks of lawyers, consultants, spin doctors, band councils, elected Indian chiefs, regional organizations and all manner of administrators, what were his motives? He was essentially defending the financial interests of a powerful lobby that served his own career well.

mmmmmmmmm

Once or twice a year I would drive back and forth from Lethbridge Alberta to pick up Splitting the Sky in Chase BC. Then I would drive him back several hundred miles to the home he shared with his wife and children. Chase is near the Neskonlith Reserve (formerly the Adams Lake reserve) where Mr. Ignace, the Wolverine, lived. It was also the home reserve of George Manuel, the Shuswap Indian leader who led the movement to internationalize the worldwide movement for the collective security of endangered Indigenous peoples.

I enjoyed the long drives through the Rocky Mountains when Dac and I could converse at length about a wonderful constellation of topics. As I would come to appreciate, Dac was seen by his peers something of a master strategist, an aspect of his thinking that affected my own thinking a lot. He would often talk about the politics of the University of Lethbridge comparing the intrigue he found there to the plots he had to navigate inside prison. He said he could sometimes smell the fear inside the U of L.

As history went beyond Y2K then the events of 9/11, I noticed Dac was becoming more and more interested in considering what had really transpired on that day created the pretext for something called the Global War on Terror. I had already seen Dac study the documents chronicling the interactions within the Canadian government on its way to trying to stomp out Bruce Clark’s thesis on unceded Aboriginal title. Dac saw this Canadian government’s manoeuvres for the fraud it entailed.

Now I was seeing Dac, the studious researcher, going into the same kind of depth evaluating the on-line evidence of 9/11 in ways that would have been unthinkable before the coming of the Internet.

For a few years I remained non-committal. Then in 2008 Splitting The Sky declared I could not sit on the fence anymore and that I had come to terms with the facts of what had really happened in an episode that was pointing us very deep into the quagmire of never ending warfare. For two days I surfed the net to prepare myself to be able to comment intelligently on STS’s forthcoming lecture to my class detailing how he saw 9/11.

I could quickly see that the holes in the official narrative are gapping and obvious. In this fashion I began making my way into the 9/11 truth movement. On one of our road trips, Splitting the Sky asked me to pull over and stop at Golden BC so he could do an interview on his cell phone. After the interview Dac introduced me on the phone to Kevin Barrett, a Muslim convert who advertises his Internet production to this day as truthjihad. Kevin invited me on his show to talk about my early thoughts now that I was no longer sitting on the 9/11 fence.

Doug Brinkman in Edmonton heard the interview and invited me to give my first formal 9/11 presentation in Edmonton’s main public library. I shared the Edmonton podium with Kevin Barrett who had earned a large following of truth seekers. My written presentation was picked up by Global Research.ca. To this day GR.ca continues to be Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s formidable truth-seeking project in developing the scholarly activism of the Internet.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-lies-and-crimes-of-911/10117

It was surprising to me that, sometime later, Doug Brinkman turned on Splitting The Sky. Brinkman put in the forefront his condemnation of STS as the murderer of Attica prison guard William Quinn. It seemed STS was vulnerable all his life to this accusation concerning an early episode in his life. He and I discussed what transpired in this episode a lot. I can say he dealt conscientiously with moral dilemma that followed him all the way to his grave.

In 2009, however, Splitting The Sky was in great form and was ready to take on new facets of the perennial issues of war and peace, guilt and retribution. As I indicated in the last section of my most recent essay on “The Genocidal State of Israel,” STS phoned me early in 2009 to share the news that George W. Bush was coming to Calgary in about eight weeks. He was coming to Calgary to give his first address as a private citizen, no longer President of the United States.

I immediately altered my plans to address Bush and war crimes war in my preparations for an invited presentation coming up at the University of Winnipeg.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article159233.html

Splitting The Sky began organizing with people he knew in Calgary. Moreover he consulted with his friend and lawyer, Ramsay Clark, who was expert on many facets of war crimes and the deceptions entailed in avoiding the truth to push victor’s justice. As have already mentioned, STS attributed to the superb lawyering of Ramsay Clark the fact that he was alive at all and able to move around freely.

During the years between 1971 and the Attica Trial in 1975, Dac’s lawyer was William Kunstler. Both Kunstler and Clark had played significant roles in the trial of the Chicago 7 after the furor of the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Clark, who was US Attorney-General during the Convention, tried to give evidence for the Defence under questioning by Kunstler. Clark was constrained in contributing to the legal proceedings by Judge Julius Hoffman.

Clark and Kunstler teamed up again in the part of the Attica Trial dealing with the death of William Quinn. Kunstler represented Dac and Clark represented Charles Pernasalice who was also 19 in 1971. There was basically no evidence on Pernasalice who nevertheless was convicted of “attempted assault.” Someone had to be made to pay for the death of Quinn and Dac proved to be that someone.

Clark and Kunstler’s style of defence was very different. There were suggestions that Kunstler grandstanded too much in a “political trial akin to those of the Panther 21 in New York, the Chicago 7, theVietnam Veterans Against the War in Gainsville Florida, Daniel Ellsberg in Los Angeles, Angela Davis in San Jose, California, and Bobby Seale in New Haven Connecticut.”

[Heather Anne Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising in 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), p. 345]

The verdict that Dac was guilty was hardly the end of the story that continues to rumble on even now. Dac fired Kunstler and took on Ramsay Clark as his lawyer. I eventually met Ramsay Clark in Calgary for the trial of Splitting The Sky. With the help and advice of former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, we agreed among ourselves to rejig the name the trial to Splitting The Sky versus George W. Bush.

Over the years the Attica Brothers held together. As a group and as individuals within the group, clemency arrangements were negotiated amounting to some measure of atonement for the crimes that they had suffered. Although it was a little more complicated given the nature of Dac’s conviction for murder, he too eventually emerged from long years of bondage in the notorious penal system of the grossly over-jailed USA.

The ins and outs of his case are really convoluted but, as Dac makes clear, Ramsay Clark somehow guided Splitting The Sky through the dark maize back into the light. STS explained that inside jail his life was threatened often. Imagine the burden of being known to prison guards as the inmate convicted for killing a guard. As STS tells it, he spent much time doing long stints of solitary confinement, a subject he discusses in surprising ways in his book.

On the very day before George W. Bush addressed his audience in the oil-town of Calgary in a province sometimes dubbed Texas North, STS and I gave a short press conference where we presented a statement by Ramsay Clark. The statement addressed the importance of holding the “credibly-accused” former US President accountable for his international crimes including the illegal torture of detainees.

This statement came on the heels of much evidence that we and others had provided to the appropriate police authorities. Police are supposed to be independent law-enforcers, not the political agents of those in power. Having exhausted the available options to persuade the police to arrest Bush, on March 17, 2009, Splitting The Sky attempted a citizen’s arrest of the former US President. For his attempt he faced three counts of assault and obstruction of justice.

https://canadiandimension.com/blog/view/mohawks-citizen-arrest-attempt-on-george-bush

To my way of thinking STS’s sacrifice to call attention to the lawless condition of the world back in 2009 speaks dramatically to our present dilemmas. When those at the top of the pyramids of power and wealth are obviously treated as being above the law, even when it comes to violations of the highest order of international law, there really is no rule of law. Civilization cannot long sustain the unbridled expression of might makes right.

After STS’s inspirational action, I tried to explain my understanding of its significance.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/citizen-s-arrest-of-george-w-bush-for-war-crimes/16377

Here is the introduction,

Who and What is on Trial?

When Splitting the Sky broke through police lines in his attempt to conduct a citizen’s arrest of former US president George W. Bush, the Mohawk freedom fighter pierced a thick wall of tyranny. He broke through a tight phalanx of state protection for the perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace.

With his courageous act, Splitting the Sky announced the unwillingness of millions of global citizens to tolerate any longer the culture of impunity that places a small, interlinked global plutocracy above the law. By breaking police lines, the Attica brother and American Indian Movement activist scouted a route of liberation for those of us seeking to get out from under the weight of complicity in international crime committed in our name. We are all deeply implicated in the state terror permeating the 9/11 wars because it is our tax dollars that fund these imperial assaults.

Splitting the Sky’s action in Calgary highlights the abject failure of law enforcement agencies to do their job. It highlights the unwillingness of police and those who direct them to apply the law equitably and independently.

When he broke through police lines last March, Splitting the Sky built on the message of Muntadar al-Zaidi, the Baghdad journalist who fired his shoes at the departing US president. Al-Zaidi’s symbolic shot was seen and applauded around the world. By dramatizing the role of so-called law enforcers as protectors of international crime, Splitting the Sky highlighted that many millions of global citizens have seen more than enough evidence to understand that George W. Bush and his war cabinet are credibly accused war criminals.

If we lived in a world where the integrity of law prevailed over the power of money, political corruption and military might, the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush syndicate of war profiteers would have been apprehended long ago to face charges in a properly constituted court of international law.

Former four-term US Congressman from Georgia, the sage and vivacious Dr. Cynthia McKinney, joined Splitting The Sky and me at the University of Calgary. Our purpose was to explain to the assembled group some of the concepts and history that might have come out if the trial of Splitting The Sky versus George W. Bush had ever taken place.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-splitting-the-sky-versus-war-criminal-george-w-bush/18115

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In 2013 I attended in Washington DC a memorial service following the death of Splitting The Sky. The Attica Brothers were there is force manifesting the web of solidarity that had held many of them together since 1971. Ramsay Clark moved smoothly among them. I was impressed by the richness of the personalities and diverse politics of those in the circles within which STS used to moved.

When I saw Ramsay Clark at home with the people he so loved to serve, I recalled some of the testimony he gave before the Calgary Judge in the Trial of Splitting The Sky. He explained that to the Judge he had come to see Dacajewieah with great affection, that he loved him like a son.