Aspirations of Canadian Justice - Part 1
Transcript
Hello. My name is Simoogyet Xyadiit. I'm a hereditary chief from the Gitxsan Nation in northern BC along the Skeena River. My cowboy name is Charles Peter Heit Junior. And one of my favourite things to carve is red cedar, totem poles being my favourite, the bigger the better.
For this particular commission I wanted to do something different. And you always start out with a piece of square wood. I came up with the idea to leave it square and do more high relief style carving than real totem pole carving. Then the theme helped me even further.
This totem pole I call "Aspirations of Canadian Justice". It's in the Federal Court House in Toronto, Ontario. And I know a lot about Canadian jurisprudence from a native point of view. I mean, I would love for Canadian law to be truthful and to be just. But it's far from that. I've seen that in land claims courts and criminal courts and child protection courts. It's a very, extremely prejudice place, Canadian justice. They serve very little justice to Native people of this land. I've been in many courtrooms, most of the time for nothing, and I never see smiling judges.
The first side of this totem pole, the one you see when you walk in the door, this judge wearing his judges' robe, and he's holding a big sword. On the opposite side of this totem pole there is a judge and he's holding a few scrolls. The one that is unfurled is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That's a really wonderful thing to read and it is almost always totally ignored. So I put it there hoping that some judges might read it whenever they're coming to work. It's a friendly reminder that, even though I don't have much personal hope for Canadian justice, I wish it was good, gooder than it is.