While the above events were taking place one group of natives in British Columbia occupied a site on the shore of a remote lake and issued a challenge to the authorities that they would by force of arms defend their right at law to be there, at least until the government, the police and the courts agreed to address the jurisdiction issue in the constitutionally guaranteed third party court.

For this they were pilloried by the Attorney General and the police in the national media as "terrorists." The hate propaganda was so strong as completely to have blotted out the underlying issue. Those Indians unquestionably have the better right of jurisdiction and possession, and have had ever since 1537. Since 1704 it has been settled law the courts of the illegal invaders, let alone the police, have no jurisdiction to dislodge them. The very opposite is the case. The Indians are legally entitled to eject the invaders, and the police are bound at law to protect the Indians in the endeavour. But again the law was inundated and obscured by the bellicose and genocidal hate propaganda of the police and the Attorney General.

From the outset of the said armed standoff it was common knowledge across Canada that the natives were acting upon the basis of the legal opinion given by me concerning their vested right of jurisdiction and possession.

Yet when, eventually, they were arrested by the police I was denied access to them and they to me on the ground that they had other lawyers. The police ushered in legal aid duty counsel to talk to my clients about getting immediate bail as soon as they were arrested and then used that as a pretext for blocking the lawyer-client relationship upon which the jurisdiction issue depends for its presentation and argument. Not only was I denied access to my clients in their cells but my access to the courtroom in which my clients were being arraigned after their arrest physically was blocked by police. I forced my way in. When I informed the presiding judge that I was acting he said I had been dismissed and replaced by other counsel, but refused to allow the clients into the court room to ask them, on the record, who was acting for them. When I filed my clients' written motion objecting to jurisdiction and advised the judge of the treasonable, fraudulent and genocidal character of his jurisdictional assumption, he cited me for contempt, and I was jumped from behind and pressed to the floor by a scrum of police officers, who then charged me with assault. I was held in custody over the weekend and subjected to deprivation of sleep for two nights. I was paraded past the national media reporters and taken in leg irons as well as hand cuffs, like some Silence-of-the-Lambs psychotic killer, before the same judge. He then remanded me in custody to a forensic psychiatric hospital on the basis of his own preliminary diagnosis that I was suffering from a "paranoid mental disorder" for having raised my clients' legal objection to his jurisdiction.

The resulting psychiatric report established that the judge's diagnosis was insupportable; that there was no clinical basis whatsoever for an interference of paranoia or any other mental disorder. I was released. I became an exile from Canada on my clients' adamant instructions that I not return to that judge's court room and, in consequence, incarceration. When I failed to appear at the next court date that judge ordered my arrest.

The judge who ordered my arrest is based in the town of Quesnel, British Columbia. It was in Quesnel, in 1864, that the first large scale "judicial murder" of Indians occurred. Contrary to the 1763 instrument's clear and plain injunction against the "Warrants of Survey" upon "any Pretence whatever" in relation to "any Lands which not having been ceded to or purchased by Us are reserved to them or any of them as their Hunting Grounds," upon which Hunting Grounds the Indians "should not be molested or disturbed," surveyors were sent by the newcomers' local government into the unsurrendered territory of the Chilcoten Indians.

The surveyors entertained themselves by raping an Indian girl. The Indians retaliated by executing the surveyors, an act of administering justice under the Indian law that alone had jurisdiction to speak in the yet unceded Indian territories, an act recorded in the non-native records as the infamously murderous "Chilcoten Massacre."

The Indians later went to see the local government's officials, who were then resident at the village of Quesnel, itself being established in direct and blatant contravention of the 1763 instrument's express and explicit injunction against "Settlements." The Indians thought to negotiate a peace treaty. the Indian peace emissaries summarily were put on trial, and hung.

The law establishing that the judge ordering the hanging was not only without jurisdiction but treasonable and fraudulently so was not addressed. Had a lawyer raised the law he probably would have joined the Indians on the scaffold. When I raised the law over a century later I was sent to a mental hospital and threatened with indefinite incarceration until I recant and apologize.

A person is not a fugitive from justice in circumstances where there is no prospect of justice. There is no prospect of justice in circumstances where judges refuse to do their minimal duty to at least read the law. There is no prospect that judges will read the law where to do so is tantamount to accepting a share of culpability for the historic and ongoing crimes of treason, fraud and genocide. From this perspective, I am not a fugitive from justice, but, rather, for justice.

I am sickened by the knowledge that you must go into court without legal counsel present on 11 December 1995. But even if I were with you the probability is overwhelming that the presiding judge will follow the lead of his brothers in crime, and accordingly not allow the issue of jurisdiction to be raised in any event. Even if he were willing to break rank by listening to the law, the problem remains that the police will in all probability intercept me in virtue of the outstanding British Columbia arrest warrant. Once I am returned to the clutches of the judges of British Columbia the probability is that I will be incarcerated until such time as I purge my alleged contempt of court by recanting and apologizing for having raised and offering to substantiate my clients' point of law. If I thought that my being in jail, even indefinitely, would contribute to the rehabilitation of the justice system I would not hesitate to attempt to run the gauntlet so to as to be with you on the 11th. But everyone says that I must stay out of jail so as to be able to work and write more effectively in the long range interest of upholding the rule of law's preclusion of genocide in the Americas. I have to admit, Verna, that I just do not know any more what to do. Everything that is happening seems to me to be impossible that it is happening in Canada. Yet it is happening to me. And it has been happening to the Indian people for a very long time.

The criminalization of Indian resistance, even when it entails the [[bringing]] forward by them of existing law, is such a deeply entrenched modus operandi in the judicial genocide of the indigenous people as to seem normal, and irremediable. Yet we must remedy it. For not to resist genocide, when you know as we do that it exists and can not like the judges pretend not to see it, is to condone the genocide.

If the judge at your trial will hear me by way of conference call I will answer any questions or, if permitted, will submit more detailed written argument in writing.

That possibility aside, please show him this letter. From it, he will know at least three things. First, the Bear Island case judgment, upon the basis of which the prosecuting attorney will argue that your aboriginal rights defence of sovereign immunity can not be raised by you in your own defence to the non-native charge of breaking and entering into the tribal offices, is itself prima facie a nullity, having been adjudicated before a court whose assumption of jurisdiction is not only civilly extraterritorial, but, in addition prima facie criminally treasonable and fraudulent and, arguably, complicitous in genocide.

Secondly, he will know that even if the court system deciding the Bear Island case does have jurisdiction, the treaty to which your people supposedly adhered is itself a nullity, having been induced by fraud, duress and undue influence. Hence the so-called adhesion is a legal impossibility. Thirdly, he will know that even if the court system of which he is a part does have jurisdiction, and even if the treaty and the adhesion to it are not nullities, the extinguishment of aboriginal rights geographically must be limited to the Family Hunting Grounds of the descendants of Nebanegwune, which lands do not include the lands where the tribal offices are situate.

Your stand upon principle is of importance to your people, to the indigenous people of the rest of Canada who may occupy yet unsurrendered Indian territory, to the Indians of the United States in similar positions, and to the natives of every other country in the Americas and around the world, whether it be East Timor or Nigeria.

For the law applicable to the United States is the same as the law upon [[which]] you rely, with the two exceptions. The US Indians' due process right of access to Queen Anne's court of 1704, and the 1763 proclamation's crimes of treason and fraud, may have been repealed by the Peace of Paris, 1783 and the Constitution, 1789, leaving the Indians there with the basic 1537 right and the 1948 anti-genocide remedy for its negation.

Your victory relative to Canada can and will serve as a staging place from which to ask the US courts to reassess the doctrine of "eminent domain" by which the US courts genocidally have negated Congress' obligation to buy rather than take.

Although it may not at first impression be obvious to you, Verna, the translation of your case to the United States' context is not as remote as one might assume.

The Spanish Royal Regulation of 1772, which is relevant to the status of aboriginal rights in the south and west, certainly complemented and in one respect even went farther than the British Royal Proclamation of 1763. The former constitutive instrument confirmed that Indians arrested by the forces of the newcomers were to be held and dealt with as prisoners of war, as contrasted with persons subject to the criminal law. By applying the criminal law in contravention of this affirmation of the Indians' autonomy from the normal non-native legal codes, the local authorities were understood by the Spanish crown to be committing war crimes contrary to established international law.

The same activity, criminalizing the resisting Indians, as the Spanish law regarded as a war crime was treated in the British instrument as treason and fraud against the crown. Yet that is the very process to which you, personally, are now being subjected.

And, as Chief Justice John Marshall of the United States Supreme Court made apparent in a triumvirate of constitutive precedents in the 1830's, the United States accepted the previously established international and constitutional law as continuing after the War of Independence. The years that (President-to-be) Jefferson and (Chief-Justice-to-be) Marshall spent in Paris courting world opinion in the aftermath of the Revolution to an appreciable extent had to be spent rebutting the British propaganda against the fledgling democracy that it was really a glorified excuse for the rabble comprising the unruly American mob to steal the Indians' land in contravention of the rule of law governing the civilized international community of responsible nations since at least the year 1537. As, in consequence, the Chief Justice said in Worcester v. Georgia in 1831: "The United States succeeded to all the claims of Great Britain, both territorial and political; but no attempt, so far as is know, has been made to enlarge them...The King purchased their lands when they were willing to sell, at a price they were willing to take; but he never coerced a surrender of them. He also purchased their alliance and dependence by subsidies; but never intruded into the interior of their affairs, or interfered with their self-government, so far as respected themselves only."

Subsequent to the eminently sensible American Supreme Court decisions of the early 1830's, the political atmosphere became disastrously poisoned against the Indians. The infamous Indian Removal Act resulted, an illegal act of genocidal consequence unparalleled since the atrocities of the conquistadors. Congress seemed bent upon living up to the worst prognostications of the British propaganda of the revolutionary era, and there was no longer an established world order capable of bolstering the rule of law ascendancy over the lust for land and the raw power to take it unopposed. The genocide of the removed Cherokees on the infamous trail of tears set the United States upon an adventure in which the law and practice massively went in different directions. The United States Supreme Court in subsequent years invented a doctrine called "eminent domaine" by which high sounding phrase it meant to excuse the manifestly unconstitutional assumption by Congress of a jurisdiction over yet unpurchased Indian lands. But no amount of exculpatory judicial rhetoric can ever alter the simple fact that Congress exceeded its own jurisdiction by extraterritorially leading the invasion of the unsurrendered Indian territories, in breach of every founding principle of natural law, international law and its own constitution.

Even if Congress and the Supreme Court had the jurisdiction to amend the American Constitution by the recent invention of the pretext of eminent domain, or any other glorified excuse, those august bodies politic and juridical do not have, and never have had, the jurisdiction to commit genocide. Even if the US Constitution could have been and was by way of due process properly amended to allow for the introduction of the doctrine of eminent domain relative to the Indians yet unsurrendered lands, to the extent that the doctrine is genocidal, which is to say entirely, it is and always has been illegal, null and void, as a war crime and a crime against humanity.

In sum, while it may well be legally accurate to contend that the American War of Independence, Peace of Paris, 1783 and Constitution, 1789 effectively supplanted the 1704 special British court and the 1763 offences of treason and fraud, it is not legitimate to argue, at least not consistently with the presumption that the United States is a country founded upon respect for the rule of law, that the 1537 instrument requiring purchase and the 1948 instrument precluding governmental genocide are inapplicable.

And even if the 1704 court is dead for purposes of American constitutional law, as contrasted with Canada, the underlying principle of law - that there must in justice be an independent and impartial third party tribunal to address jurisdictional conflicts between natives and newcomers - is of unquestionable validity. The rule of law simply can never be pretended to function where one of the suitors is effectively also the judge. In the leading American case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831 the Cherokees attempted to persuade the US Supreme Court that in virtue of its original jurisdiction over suits between the United States and consenting "foreign nations," that Court effectively could stand in the shoes of the 1704 court. Wisely, the US Supreme Court declined the invitation. A legal fiction can be posited as a truth, but not against the truth. And it would have patently been false for the Court to have accepted the pretence that it genuinely could be seen as an independent and impartial third party vis-a-vis jurisdictional disputes between the Native Nations and Congress.

As goes the United States and to a lesser extent Canada, so will go the rest of the world. For these are the rule of law leaders, the champions of human rights for all humankind. When judicial genocide against the indigenous peoples of these leading rule-of-law countries, Canada and the United States, is duly prevented and punished, it is feasible that the new world order will witness the elimination of that crime against humanity in the rest of the Americas. The step from there to the inauguration of an "international penal tribunal" within the meaning of the Genocide Convention will then genuinely be within humanity's grasp. When that tribunal is a functioning fact, humankind's evolutionary step forward as a responsible social species, a step the foot of which was lifted in 1537, will have made its resting landfall, at the setting of the 20th and the dawning of the 21st century.

You can tell the judge that you refuse to plead to the charge against you on the ground that for you to plead would be to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court to receive the plea, and that in support of your objection to his assumption of jurisdiction you adopt as your own the submissions made in this letter.

Sincerely,

Bruce Clark

Synopsis of constitutive events and key words:

1. 1537. The civil law right: Purchase.
2. 1704. The civil law remedy: Third Party Court.
3. 1763. The criminal law sanctions: Misprisions of Treason and Fraud.
4. 1948. The criminal law sanctions: Judicial Genocide.

Enclosures re the importance of the issue raised:

The EcoGenocide Law Option         TELO

                          Index

                   TELO Prospectus

   * Curriculum vitae of Legal Counsel
   * Book Reviews
   * WILDERNESS AND WILDERNESS PEOPLE 
   * REPLY TO THE "CONTEMPT OF COURT" JUDGE
   * FORMER USA ATTORNEY GENERAL RE THE INJUSTICE
   * CONFIRMATION OF RETAINER AND INSTRUCTIONS
   * NATIVE LIBERTY AND JUDICIAL GENOCIDE

            Representative "demands" of traditional Indians:

   * The Sundancers' "demands"
   * Jan. 3/95 Petition to Queen
   * Jul. 15/95 Petition to Courts of Europe
   * DECLARATION OF THE INDIGENOUS COUNCIL OF CENTRAL AMERICA
   * A letter to the Lord Chancellor of England
   * Which Laws Apply?
   * DEFENDING AGAINST "THE BIG LIE"
   * Saro-Wiwa outside of Africa