Update: Who is killing the young men of Kenya?

A United Nations investigator has called for the resignation of Kenya's top police officer following ongoing reports of extrajudicial killings in the country.

See the story, here.

And see my original story here.

-Tim Querengesser

The man who learned to smile

By Tim Querengesser

We rarely see people re-invent themselves. We see them before and after, but never during. George Foreman, the boxer, had an ego bigger than his uppercut but was knocked out by Muhammad Ali. Now he hawks meat-grills on late-night TV. Only he knows what that transformation looked like. We’re intrigued to peek behind the curtain, though, if only to understand how those who’ve fallen renew themselves. Do they pick who they become? Or does a new persona pick them?

Stephen Kakfwi is still re-inventing himself. In his Yellowknife home, where he isolates himself from the world, he picks up his guitar and starts singing. The security of the room eases him out of his shell, but he still can’t relax. Strumming and singing, he looks at me for approval, then looks away. He’s not quite confident about what his fingers are up to on the guitar. His voice falls. Then, in mid-song, as if he’s realized he’s giving a speech wearing a fig leaf, he puts the instrument down. This is why we don’t see re-inventions. They’re too painful to be shared, incongruously painted by embarrassment and soul-searching.

In 1950, Kakfwi was born in Fort Good Hope, NWT. In the electrifying days surrounding Justice Thomas Berger’s report on the Mackenzie Valley pipeline – a bombshell that gave NWT aboriginals a national voice – Kakfwi became an activist. By 1983, he was chief of the Dene Nation. Four years later, he became an MLA and a cabinet minister. He was named premier in 2000 and retired, abruptly, in 2003.

“After 25 years in politics, I felt like I’d been in a war,” Kakfwi says. “I was out there taking hits, fighting bullies, but there’s not much room for feelings. Then, all of a sudden, you’re sitting alone at home in your kitchen with the wrong attitude. You have to re-learn life. I did it by writing songs and lyrics.”

Kakfwi’s singing voice has a deep timbre. And he writes heartbreaking, metaphorical lyrics. He’s already recorded two albums – 2005’s Last Chance Hotel, which saw him nominated for male artist of the year in 2006 by the Canada Aboriginal Music Awards, and In the Walls of His Mind, released in 2006. Performing live may still be difficult, but using music, he’s trying to save himself from himself. “I always saw myself as a bit of an artist and wanted to write stories, poems and songs, but I think too many years at residential school made that difficult,” he says. “I needed to learn to live with myself and become a little more human. Maybe things needed to fall apart completely first.”

They did. In 2003, with an election on the horizon, Kakfwi saw Brutuses, real or imagined, lurking in the shadows. Two friends had been politically lynched for their loyalty to him, he says. Other former confidantes were turning “ugly” and “abusive.” “I couldn’t face another four years of working with people I couldn’t trust,” he says. He’d put in manic hours, antagonized colleagues and largely isolated himself. In most pictures between 1983 and 2003, he wears the same expression: metallic intensity. He’s been back to the legislature only twice since. “It could have been a warehouse,” he says. “I used it for what I needed.”

One year later, Kakfwi split with his wife, Marie Wilson, long the counterweight to his heaviness. He took self-imposed exile in an apartment in Yellowknife. He was asked to run in the 2004 federal election, he says, but chose not to. Then, in 2005, he suddenly re-appeared, representing several First Nations communities as a negotiator with oil companies over the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. He was his bellicose self. And he was fired. It was then that Kakfwi finally faced who he’d become. During this time, his daughter, one of his three children, visited his apartment and asked, “Do you see people here besides us?” His answer was no. He descended to bars for the first time in decades. But during his escape to the freedoms that failure provided, a strange thing happened. Words started coming out. Feelings. They landed on bar napkins, notebook paper and cassette tapes. The more he battled himself the more they flowed. Afraid to Feel, a ballad from his first album, captures pieces of the man that Kakfwi was discovering.

Are you afraid to feel? / Will you ever know what it’s like to heal?

At nine, Kakfwi was sent to a Catholic residential school in Fort Smith, NWT. There he was whipped, starved, isolated and abused sexually. Off and on, he spent seven years in residential schools. He blamed his father, who raised Kakfwi and his siblings in the absence of their mother (she’d fallen ill from an influenza outbreak and, like many First Nations people of the era, lived in a hospital). “I always had intense anger toward him. I saw him as the one who sent me away all those years,” he says. “My brothers and sisters and I all went to residential school. I love them but I don’t relate to them – that’s part of the pain I live with.”

He says there were warning signs something was destroying him, but he never clued in. In 1986, addictions counsellors asked him what grief was driving him to drink. “I literally didn’t know what they were talking about,” he says. A spiritual leader in Déli¿ne once told him he “needed to smile more.” And there were the chronic headaches. In 1996, a doctor said, “Now, you tell me what’s wrong with you.” Finally, at a party, when he related a story about being spanked at residential school, his wife looked at him and said, “Don’t belittle it. You weren’t spanked, a nun whipped you.”

“I couldn’t say it,” he says.

Here’s another thing about re-inventions. They’re never complete. Kakfwi’s former self is always lurking. To rebuild his broken family (he got back together with his wife last year), he’s put distance between himself and politics. “Some people say you never lose it, but I don’t believe that,” he says. There’s resignation but also bitterness in his eyes as he says this. “I’m not a populist. I know a lot of politicians who haven’t accomplished anything but are popular.” Probe too hard into this area and suddenly you’re in a cabinet office in 2001, as Kakfwi’s eyes narrow to incisive slits.

But today, at home, those eyes are bright and expressive – more those of a man who “likes people more now” than of a willful politician. His hands look timeless, like his ancestors have passed them down. From certain angles he looks like an owl, but from most, especially head on, he’s surprisingly youthful. He gives broad smiles, but pulls them back quickly. Rather than picking fights, he tends now to use words to indulge in therapy. “I found I hadn’t appreciated what was around me. My heart wasn’t open. It was too guarded, too wounded.” Playing his therapist, I ask: Who are you closest to? There’s a long pause. “I got married, which was to my surprise,” he says, deadpan. The biggest smile comes talking about his kids. His son and his wife have both started writing songs like him, he says. “If talent for music was $1, I’d have a penny. But look at what you can do if you believe in yourself.” He says it’s a belief others suffering the same pain can find.

Later, in his office, Kakfwi plays Afraid to Feel from a CD – a much more comfortable approach. “I was unable to let go,” he says over the music. “The whole song is a contradiction. I couldn’t do it. Throughout it I was like . . .” He chops his hands at the air. “It’s wooden, almost ironic.” We continue listening. He plays another song, which starts with a recording of his father singing a Dene love song. Then Kakfwi comes in, and for a moment, they sing together. “It’s more than just music,” he says. “Including him on the CD is my way of making peace with him.” A few more seconds go by. He asks, “Do you like it?” I smile. Then Kakfwi looks out the window. And for the first time, I feel him relax.

Originally published in Up Here magazine.

Narwhal not the issue

The most gruesome memory from my summer in the Canadian army happened in the mess hall. One morning, I and several other soldiers-in-training stood waiting for our breakfast. As we obediently queued for food, we peered into the mess's normally closed-off kitchen, watching a haggard woman in a white coat covered with ketchup fry pre-cracked eggs by dumping them on a skillet from gallon-sized jugs. Nearby, a dozen trays of deep-fried sausages sat on racks glistening and congealing, while teetering mountains of pre-buttered toast threatened to collapse at any moment. "This is f**cking disgusting," said one of my colleagues, who happened to be from the suburbs. "Seriously, I can't eat after seeing this."

I'd worked in several restaurants and knew that food delivered to the restaurant table is prepared in a medley of fats, odors and greasy fingers. But my soldiering colleague, evidently, had never thought about what mass food-production might look like. He hadn't pulled back the curtain on what is an every-day part of Western life. I realized our culture depends on, even fosters, such moral screens, likely so that it can hum serenely along without questioning itself. Without them, our proximity to unsophisticated, savage practices all around us, ones that allow, for instance, people to buy processed chicken made into cartoon-character shapes, would become unbearable. But once in a while we encounter cultures without this distance. And often, their comfort with the savage and brutal parts of survival mixes with our reluctance to look at our metaphorical mess-hall kitchens to create a lot of misdirected rage.

I think the culling of hundreds of narwhal about to be trapped beneath freezing ice on north Baffin Island is one such event. It has aroused the sensibilities of many Canadians: Passionate blogs are being written, angry opinion pieces pumped out and, surely, dinner-table conversations inspired by articles like Paul Watson's in the Pacific Free Press.

And so I feel it's only fair to inject a view from the other side, from up here. From where I stand in the North, this debate isn't about narwhals, the unicorns of the sea. It isn't about ice-breakers or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans or ivory markets. Instead it's about two cultures that usually exist in blissful ignorance of each other, but are now discovering, yet again, that they don't understand one another. One side has a lot to say in these instances; the other barely has a voice.

The cultural encounters between Inuit and the rest of Canada seem to be sparked by the killing of wild animals -- something Inuit have done for thousands of years -- without first seeking southern Canada's moral okay in the matter. Today's narwhal controversy is yet another example of this. A report that describes the killing in lurid, almost fetish-like detail -- "a torrent of violence that has spewed the hottest of blood into the frigid seas of the high north," was how Watson described the narwhal cull -- awakens the world to the not-so-noble-savage side of Inuit life. And then the world reacts with outrage.

But let's be big enough to call this what it clearly is -- a moral curtain. And let's consider the folly of debating it in the media, where one side of the story has little chance of winning.

The Inuit are a people of the land who are moving, some would say being forced, into the information age. Outnumbered and unprepared, they're bound to lose a media fight for hearts and minds over the fate of the narwhal, possibly because they have more pressing things to worry about. Inuit often live in overcrowded, disease-fostering conditions – the worst in the developed world, in fact. Let's not pity them; they don't ask for it, and I'm not writing this to encourage it. But let's honestly ask how often the Canadian media spreads word about the Inuit's intensely human and constant crisis? And when they do, how often do Canada and the world raise the flag of indignation as high as it does when narwhal or polar bears are threatened?

Everything is about perspective. I don't blindly support the actions of the Inuit. I've never seen a narwhal, eaten muktuk, shot a rifle at a living thing or even been to Pond Inlet. I would prefer the narwhal to survive another day. There are blind-spots to my experiences, for sure. But I think it's incumbent on all of us to identify ours in the debate as well, before we chime in.

When's the last time you heard the Inuit judging your ways? They predominately eat animals that live wild and free; you likely eat or have eaten animals that lived on a feedlot. Their culture, older than ours, is being threatened by the spread of your culture. And when they have challenged us, about climate change and the threats it poses to their existence, what have we done? Have we changed our culture to suit theirs? If not, then why should they?

This is not intended to be a feel-bad-for-the-Inuit argument. It's just to be honest about our moral curtains. What I can assure you is that hundreds of narwhals will die this winter, trapped under freezing ice in some uninhabited place in the North few Canadians could place on a map. No one will see it. And we will rest easy, ignorant of it, or accepting of it because nature has its wisdom. Just realize that the more you pull back the curtain in the debate over the narwhal cull, the harder it will be to find outrage. -Tim Querengesser

(Originally published by Up Here magazine)