KEVIN MENZ
Associate News Editor

The Indigenous Students’ Council is seeking closure after an incident of blatant racism interrupted a gathering celebrating Aboriginal culture on campus on Oct. 14.

Their gathering and celebration, however, was not welcomed by some members of the campus community.

“In the evening when we were closing out our feast with prayer, a vehicle drove by — there were two individuals — saying some aggressive things and swearing: ”˜What the hell, you guys? What the eff you guys doing here? Get the eff out of here,’” recounted John Desjarlais, president of the ISC, of the altercation.

“One of the younger females, Katie Peters-Burns, responded quickly — she was very upset — and said some things back. They pulled into the back entrance of Arts and she approached them and exchanged heated dialogue with one of the fellas. He eventually went into Arts, but the person in the car spit on her as he was pulling away.”

The event was strategically held in the area between the Murray Building and the Arts Building because it is the proposed site for a new Aboriginal Students’ Centre and a high traffic area. This traffic helped draw attention and exposure to Aboriginal culture and helped make “people comfortable with seeing tepees in that area,” said Desjarlais.

Peters-Burns was greatly affected by the incident.

“I am a young Aboriginal woman trying to get a strong education at the U of S. I’m only two months in and I had to experience this unsettling incident,” she said. “I feel like I have been targeted. Spitting on someone is a type of assault and it is one of the most disrespectful things you could ever do to someone — especially a woman.

“Our elders were in the middle of a sacred prayer when this happened, imagine how disrespected they felt?” she asked. “They disrupted our ceremony and the whole point of these cultural days is to bring cultural awareness about Aboriginal inherent and treaty rights to the university.”

“It discouraged her in terms of expressing her culture; she doesn’t feel like this is an environment that is safe for that,” added Desjarlais.

He did say, however, that Peters-Burns has since become more involved in the Aboriginal student community.

“She is actually part of our council now,” he said. “If anything, a lot more people became involved because of it, but that’s not how we want to bring people together.”

The initial reactions of anger were not acted upon, as the ISC took their time approaching media.

“We wanted to think about this — especially the council. If we are going to get involved and do things about it, we want there to be substance behind it. We don’t just want to react through aggression.”

Of course, they did give statements to campus security, but are a little discouraged by the fact that campus security cannot do a follow-up.

“There are no cameras outside any of the buildings on campus,” said campus safety director Bob Ferguson. “Griffith Stadium is the only place we have cameras.”

He added that those involved in the incident did not get the complete licence plate number, which makes it difficult to investigate.

“They got the first three digits of the British Columbia plate on a red car. If it was a Saskatchewan plate, with likely about a month’s worth of work we could track down the vehicle — maybe. It would give us the first three digits of every red car — they didn’t have a make of car so that didn’t help.”

They did get a description of the people involved, but were unable to find them.

“We searched the Arts Building for them, but couldn’t find anybody that matched the description.

“There is not much we can do with it, given what was there [in the report], but it did happen,” Ferguson added. “There is actually no follow-up that we can do; I wish we could have resolved it.”

The ISC notes, however, that it is not angry at Campus Safety.

“We don’t expect absolute closure. No one is going to get punished, because there is no one [to punish], per se,” said Desjarlais. “We’re just disappointed that people can feel comfortable expressing this type of hate and aggression and we’re more interested in the awareness and students reading that it happened.”

The ISC has been meeting with the university to discuss issues of racism on campus, in the hopes of resolving the incident. They are interested “to see how the university can communicate to its students that this can happen, but shouldn’t happen and will not be tolerated.”

They will meet with Susan Bens of Student and Enrolment Services Division on Dec. 1 and will also meet, at a later date, with Joan Greyeyes, special advisor to the president on Aboriginal initiatives.

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image courtesy of Indigenous Students’ Council