Court Case/Appeal for Assistance

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Friends,

We are going--again--to trial on January 23-24th in Lethbridge, Alberta. If
there are any persons on this list, such as attorneys, professors,
practioners in relevant areas etc who have specialized knowledge about and
"credentials" related to scholarship and/or practice related to the ongoing
realities and conditions of genocide in Canada against Indigenous Persons in
general and/or Blackfoot in particular, and who can honestly in good
conscience sign on to any or all of our arguments we will be advancing, we
would appreciate letters of endorsement as soon as possible for presentation
to the Court. You may contact me at my email address and any assistance will
be greatfully appreciated and make a significant contribution to a vital
arena of struggle.

Jim Craven



Mr. Craven,
I understand from the Prosecutors' Office that he continuation date for this
trial has been set for January 22 and 23, 2004 in front of Judge Jacobson. I
have been asked to ensure you are informed of this date. We have Canada's
letter dated September 23, 2003 to you indicating they will not intervene in
the trial at this stage. It would help me prepare if you could, by the end
of November, or earlier, advise me of the following information: 1. Will you
be calling witnesses, or do you intend on just making the arguments you
outline in your correspondence to the Court, Canada, or us? 2. If you are
calling witnesses, who will they be? 3. What is the brief substance of their
testimony? 4. Will you be filing any documents (there are strict rules on
how this is done for some documents)?  If you want to file documents, it
would help me to know which ones you intend to file.  I can help you on the
proper procedure for filing these documents. If you have any questions,
please let me know.

Kurt Sandstrom
Barrister and Solicitor
Alberta Justice
Constitutional and Aboriginal Law
9th Floor, Peace Hills Trust Tower,
10011-109 Street
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada  T5J 3S8
Tel:  (780) 422-4160
Fax:  (780) 427-1230


Dear Mr. Sandstom,

Thanks for the note and I apologize for the delay in writing back as I am
totally swamped with work and did not want to reply in a cursory or
superficial way.

First of all, I did get notice from Mr. Lambrecht that the Canadian Federal
Government would not be intervening at this stage but did want to be
notified in the event of an appeal and perhaps would step in at that stage.
I do also need to contact Mr. Lambrecht and perhaps this note to you will
suffice for his purposes as well so please feel free to share this with him
and whomever else is concerned with this matter including Judge Jacobson,
Mr. Falconer, Mr. Brooks and any others.

As you know our defense involves several dimensions. I do apologize for any
delays caused by our not having had full documentation available, but, as
our resources are meager relative to those of the Canadian Federal and
Alberta Governments, and as I am forced to rely on others to take care of
some matters inside Alberta, and as I am assisting a pro se defense without
legal assistance in Alberta, such problems are likely and unintended. For
the record, we Blackfoot do not have or practice any of the concepts and
practices so typical of the adversarial eurocentric court systems that have
been routinely used to facilitate and give legal cover to genocide and
genocide cover-up in Canada: excessive ritual and protocol; jury/judge/venue
shopping; contrived and shaped scopes/content of direct examinations in
order to limit and shape possible scopes/content of redirect examinations;
not asking questions to which we do not already have an answer; attempting
to magnify the exculpatory and minimize the inculpatory in our own case
while attempting to minimize the exculpatory and maximize the inculpatory of
the opponent's case; obstruction of discovery and use of discovery to cause
prohibitive legal costs and obstruct justice; paid--duling--"expert
witnesses" whose formal credentials give their opinions "probative value"
and the status of "evidence"; etc.

As you probably noted, not only did we give notice of intent to raise
Constitutional issues (I am still exploring getting documentation that
notice was indeed sent from the Peigan Band Reserch Department on April 22
as was represented to me to have been done) but we gave notice of the
specific content of those arguments. These are indeed the arguments we will
be raising. Further, we provided a letter of endorsement from the National
Lawyer's Guild, composed of Canadian as well as U.S. lawyers and many of
them considered experts in international law, that was intended to show that
the arguments that we proposed to advance were not frivolous or a frivolous
use of the Court's time--in terms of available supporting evidence,
reasoning and international law. We asked the NLG only to support our
contention that our arguments were not frivolous without necessarily
adopting or endorsing them, but the NLG came back, to our surprise, actually
endorsing and adopting those arguments.

First, I will be calling Bella Yellow Horn back to the stand to clear up
some issues from the previous phase and to set up the next phase of the
trial. Specifically, we will be exploring her state of mind at the time she
was stopped in Lethbridge and her reasons for asserting the existence and
sovereignty of the Blackfoot Nation and not being bound by the Indian Act or
any asserted obligations under Treaty 7. We will also explore how she was
supposed to document what papers she did or didn't have in her possession at
the time of being stopped, and what insurance she did or did not have (as a
matter of personal choice), when her van was taken to a place she was not
made aware of and summarily sold without her knowledge and before her even
being convicted, to a party still unknown to her.

Next, we will call the following witnesses: Mr. John Chief Moon (Thunder
Pipe Carrier and principal spiritual leader of the Kainai Blackfoot); Mr.
George Yellow Horn (one of the Hereditary Chiefs of the Apatohsipiikani
Blackfoot); Elizabeth Yellow horn (principle Beaver Bundle Holder and
spiritual leader of the Apatohsipiikani Blackfoot) and Mr. Floyd Many
Fingers (respected Elder of the Kainai Blackfoot). These witnesses, in
addition to being descendants some of the Chiefs who allegedly signed Treaty
7 and recognized carriers of the oral histories of the events surrounding
the alleged signing of Treaty 7, are also very "expert" on the conditions of
life on the Blackfoot Reserves. We believe that their testimonies will
materially add to our arguments that: a) the scope and content of the Indian
Act and alleged obligations under Treaty 7 are genocidal per se and,in
addition, have produced conditions of life that amount to genocide as
defined in Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide ratified by
Canada in 1953 and thus part of the supreme law of Canada; b) these
genocidal conditions flow inexorably (and foreseeably for anyone with an IQ
over that of a tomato and a semblance of a heart and a conscience) from the
content and applications of the Indian Act and Treaty 7; c) the Canadian and
Alberta Governments have been well aware (and have been repeatedly made well
aware)of these genocidal conditions and their effects and continue to refuse
to ameliorate them and continue to attempt to cover them up; d)in the
context of extreme poverty, isolated reserves, no public transport and
meager incomes given under the Indian Act, any Blackfoot obeying the
requirement to possess highly expensive insurance as a condition of driving
is in essence aiding and abetting his/her own extermination and that of
his/her People; e) by any test or criteria under international law that
defines a nation, the same tests and criteria defining Canada as a nation,
there survives and remains a Blackfoot Nation that has, as fundamental
rights flowing from its status and reality as a nation, the rights to
independence, sovereignty, self-determination, recognition and not to be
exterminated or forcibly assimilated into another nation; f) although we
argue that Treaty 7 was never signed, and has been broken over and over by
the Canadian and Alberta governments, nevertheless, the Canadian and Alberta
governments have built up a whole system of property and purported property
rights predicated on Treaty 7 and in doing so were bound to recognize not
only the authority and standing of the Chiefs who allegedly signed Treaty 7,
but also the traditional
Blackfoot Ways and systems of government that selected these Chiefs as well
as the existence and sovereignty of the Blackfoot Nation as only sovereign
nations form and sign treaties and in doing so recognize treating partners
and co-equals at least in terms of authority and standing to form and keep
treaties; g) Blackfoot may choose to become or recognized as Canadian
citizens but no Blackfoot may be forced to assimilate or forced to take
Canadian citizenship and undertake the obligations of Canadian citizenship
as this amounts to forced assimilation, a form and tactic of genocide; h)
Blackfoot are rountinely subject to "racial targeting and profiling" by
Lethbridge police and routinely have their vehicles seized and sold without
due process such that they are deprived of mobility from--and are indeed
locked into--conditions on Reserves that can only be properly described as
genocidal.

In addition to the paper by Tai Helton that I passed on to you, and in
addition to the documents already submitted to the Court, we will be
submitting copies of the diaries of Father Constantine Scullen, charged by
The Crown with witnessing the signatures of the Blackfoot Chiefs who
supposedly signed Treaty 7 in which he stated that none of the Chiefs would
sign or even touch the pen used to sign; we will also be submitting some
statistics, from Canadian Government sources, that document some of the
genocidal conditions, realities and trends on the Blackfoot Reserves today.

That is as much as I can give you at this moment. In the next couple of
weeks I will be able to give you further elaboration on our proposed
arguments and witnesses. If you wish further elaboration on some of our
arguments, you can go to http://www.chgs.umn.edu and under the section
"Histories, Narratives and Documents" you will find some Blackfoot documents
that will give you some of the types of arguments and supporting evidence we
plan to introduce.

I will also be asking about possible incomplete transcripts from previous
Court sessions. For example, at the May 20th session, at which I was not in
attendance, Bella represented to me that the Judge formally inquired of the
police officers present where her van was and asked those police to advise
her where the van was and its status. That discussion is not on the official
transcript I have of that session. I am interested in that issue
particularly in view of the testimony of the arresting officer that he could
only "guess" that her van had been sold and that he had never explicitly
told Bella that it had indeed been sold. Further, I was promised by Mr.
Brooks, in a conversation with Bella present, when Bella asked the name of
the person who had made the phone call that led to her being stopped, Mr.
Brooks said that I must request that name and I have formally requested it
previously and am now formally requesting it again. Further, I may have to
call Mr. Scott as he was present in his office when that officer stated that
the van had indeed been sold and made no mention of "guessing" that it had
been sold.

And yes, any assistance that you can give us in the spirit of being an
"Officer of the Court" and in the interest of justice would be welcomed.

I hope that this answers at least some of your questions. If you require any
further elaboration please do not hestitate to contact me. For the record,
although Blackfoot are generally poor, we are communalists and come to the
assistance of each other as a matter of our Ways. If we could have found a
lawyer to take this case we would have put out an appeal for money and would
have gotten sufficent funds to hire a lwayer. We are not trying to do this
"on the cheap." We do not practice, as is celebrated and taught in Canadian
capitalism and society, rat-race individualism, dog-eat-dog competition,
selfishness, etc. We approached lawyers who agreed that our constitutional
arguments were compelling as a matter of evidence, reasoning and law but
were afraid to advance them in a Canadian Court out of fear of retribution
in future cases and legal practice in Alberta. Others feared they might be
labelled "radicals" for any association with this case (the word "radical"
as you know comes from the Latin root "radix" or root and we regard a
radical as someone seeking to get to the "root" of the issues at hand).

And finally, and please pass this on to Judge Jacobson, he can instruct us
and make rulings that we will obey, although we may make "exceptions" for
the Court record, without resorting to abusive levels and tones of speech
and continual references to supposed "incompetence" on my part. It is out of
respect to the honorable actions and rulings on his part that I do not
challenge his continuing to sit on this case for cause of demonstrated
animus and disrespect in the last session. I am proud to be an "unpaid
agent" of exposing genocide and genocide cover-up rather than a paid--and
perhaps very "competent"--agent of genocide and its cover-up as some lawyers
and judges have demonstrated themselves to be historically and in the
present in Canada [and this is not necessarily an implied or covert
reference to His Honor].

Thanks for your consideration, patience and any assistance in the interest
of justice.

Sincerely,

James M. Craven
Blackfoot name: Omahkohkiaayo i' poyi
Acting as unpaid agent in the pro se defense of Balla Yellow Horn

Cc.
Judge Jacobson
Mr. Falconer
Mr. Brooks
Mr. Lambrecht
Mr. Scott


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