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Reviewed by:
  • Wartime Images, Peacetime Wounds: The Media and the Gustafsen Lake Standoff
  • Anthony J. Hall
Wartime Images, Peacetime Wounds: The Media and the Gustafsen Lake Standoff. Sandra Lambertus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pp. 277, $55.00

If Canada were not a deeply racist country where the police, politicians, and media can sometimes work in unison to subordinate the rule of law to the rule of expediency, then this book by Sandra Lambertus would [End Page 562] probably garner considerable attention. Unfortunately, however, her text will probably languish in obscurity even as the officials whose wrongdoing Lambertus helps expose will probably never have to face real accountability for their often illegal and unprofessional actions. Because of the success of police propagandists in publicly demonizing some of the most determined hard-liners in the Aboriginal sovereignty movement, a wall of impunity has been created to protect officials who assaulted the integrity of the entire body politic by abusing Crown power in our own dirty little Indian war. As long as there is the perception that a few radical Indians were wrongdoers, rather than some of Canada's most important institutions, the fuller meaning of this spectacularly telling episode in recent national history will probably never come fully to light.

Wartime Images, Peacetime Wounds is a slight revision of a PhD thesis in anthropology at the University of Alberta. Its focus is the relationship between law-enforcement officials and news outlets in the course of the battle of Gustafsen Lake. This incident drew the Mounties and members of the Canadian Army, including the elite members of Joint Task Force 2, into an armed conflict with about two dozen resisters of diverse ancestry who initially gathered in the BC interior for an Aboriginal sun dance. Even within the relatively narrow outlines of her lamentably blinkered academic study, Lambertus arrives at conclusions that are extremely damning to the RCMP and the news agencies that covered the event. The RCMP spin doctors and the representatives of some of Canada's largest print and broadcast outlets were often antagonistic in their professional interactions. Nevertheless, both the police and the journalists ended up collaborating to criminalize without due process and to discredit without balanced coverage the protagonists in an armed confrontation that had at its roots an intense disagreement over the constitutional status of Aboriginal title in Canada's westernmost province.

Lambertus is at her best where her narrative documents the police-media relations over the course of the real confrontations, the invented incidents, and the explosive rhetoric that characterized the battle of Gustafsen Lake. This episode represents the most aggressive episode of government Indian fighting in western Canada since Crown forces mobilized against Metis and Cree freedom fighters in 1885. In naming their central operational base Camp Zulu, government forces exposed the primitive colonial mentality that drove all their actions. By their own accounts, the RCMP and the Army fired 70,000 rounds of live ammunition into the sun dance camp. The Mounties also fought the sun dancers by detonating a trigger-wired explosive device that some have described as a land mine. The most aggressive aspect of the war waged by government [End Page 563] forces, however, was the struggle to control public opinion. Along with many politicians, the police and the media opted to characterize the protest as garden-variety criminality at best, as terrorism at worst. To quote the RCMP, the redcoats made the media a vehicle for a government-orchestrated campaign of 'disinformation and smear.' In so doing, the police served the political agenda of their provincial, federal, and corporate masters by evading any serious public reckoning with the protestors' core argument. The sun dancers asserted that almost the whole of BC has been developed through a form of Crown-authorized trespass that violates Aboriginal title as recognized in imperial, constitutional, and international law.

The head RCMP spin doctor was Sgt. Peter Montague. Boasting on tape that smear campaigns are an RCMP specialty, Montague would in later years apply the same techniques originally deployed on the sun dancers to the takedown with BCTV of NDP ex-premier Glen Clark. The treatment afforded to the former BC premier and his dubiously...

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