S.I.S.I.S. Bulletin

There is significant evidence that the Supreme Court of Canada's September 12, 1995 appeal hearing of the Delgammuukw land claims case was "a hoax."

This appeal was heard at the height of the Ts'peten (Gustafsen Lake) siege and was intimately connected to it. Native rights lawyer Bruce Clark, then lawyer for all the Ts'peten Defenders, was bringing a jurisdictional challenge on behalf of Xsgogimlahxa, a Delgamuukw applicant. This was coordinated with a motion seeking an order enjoining the RCMP against mounting a preemptive raid on the Ts'peten Sundance camp, pending the resolution of the question of whether Canada has jurisdiction to police Indigenous people on their own unceded territories.

Canada's highest court dismissed both motions. Now it appears that there may have been "coordination" between the RCMP and the high court involving that hearing. S.I.S.I.S. has been informed that Dr. Clark has evidence that suggests RCMP knew that the hearing was an orchestrated "hoax", that the result was decided in advance.

For several days at the Ts'peten trial no media coverage has been permitted, as Justice Bruce Josephson heard arguments as to whether he should permit Dr. Clark to reveal this evidence to the jury. Also at issue is a videotape taken by defendant Trond Halle which records "fire from the police directly at and narrowly missing persons from the said Indian emcampment." The shooting incident in late August, 1995, had been reported at the time as an unprovoked assault by the Sundance camp against the police.

Clark's evidence of judicial corruption only adds to that already swirling around BC's precedent setting 1991 Delgammuukw case, in which Chief Justice Allan McEachern ruled that native rights in BC were largely "extinguished", declaring "I have been brutal". Most of the counsel representing both the federal and provincial governments, against the Gitskan Wet'suwet'en, were former partners and associates of the judge.

In 1994, some of the Gitksan chiefs asked the highly successful Vancouver lawyer Jack Cram to initiate a fraud action against both governments, the Chief Justice, and their own legal team. Cram was arrested three times, held in a psychiatric ward, eventually forced to publically recant his allegations and his right to practice was suspended.

The Gitksan's lawyers had deliberately "misrepresented the Native people in the most important legal case in Canadian history....throwing the case...involving a huge territory," Cram wrote at the time. "The native peoples had spent 27 million dollars or more to establish the legal rights to some of the richest territory in Canada...their lawyers had conceded away their best arguments."

Cram concluded: "the alleged corruption in the Judicial system in British Columbia runs deep and is so flagrant that it must be investigated by an impartial inquiry panel from outside of BC."

A Supplemental Affidavit to the Sept. 12, 1995, appeal of this controversial case charges:

"the Attorney General is arguing in affidavit form that, even if the Indians as alleged by Xsgogimlahxa's were defrauded by their lawyers into relinquishing their Indian jurisdiction by attorning to the jurisdiction of the non-native domestic court system, now those Indians, or at least some of them, should be stopped from exposing the fraud in which the lawyers and the judges are the historic accomplices. Such an argument is base, corrupt and inadmissable...the Attorney General of BC argues that 'there is no connection between the RCMP at Gustafsen Lake and the main [Delgamuukw] action.' That allegation is chicanery in aid of treason, fraud and genocide. It is made, not for the lawful purpose of upholding the rule of law, but rather for the illegal purpose of evading the law that exposes the ongoing crimes in progress of the Canadian legal establishment, its lawyers, judges, police and underlings. The constitution is simple, the evasion of it complex....the duty of the Supreme Court is to prefer the public's interest in the whole truth as the basis for the rule of law, over the conflicting interest of the legal establishment in concealing and continuing its own crimes."

Also on September 12, 1995, the very day Clark was in the Supreme Court contesting Delgamuukw on behalf of a Gitksan hereditary chief, the "Shuswap Liaison Group" issued a statement claiming the Delgamuukw case supported the rights of the besieged Ts'peten Sundancers. The SLG included prominent Gitksan politicians like Don Ryan and Gordon Sebastian. Sebastian, a "speaker" of the Gitksan and a BC lawyer, was involved in negotiations with RCMP, and at the Sept. 15, 1995 hearing before Judge Nicholas Friesen purported to be representing Ts'peten Defenders who were Clark's clients. Those accused were denied their right to counsel of choice. After initially being denied entry to the court, Clark was assaulted, arrested, was himself charged with assault and contempt, and was sent to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.

Justice Bruce Josephson, the presiding judge in the Ts'peten (Gustafsen Lake) trial, has also been compromised by a demonstrated bias against Clark in a jurisdictional challenge on which Josephson sat five years ago.

As is the case with the Stoney Point incident, in which the Ontario government ordered armed police against indigenous protesters, shooting and killing Dudley George, a public inquiry into the actions of the Canadian state at Gustafsen Lake is clearly called for.