Thomas Berger and Indigenous rights
August 29th, 2024
Against the Odds: The Indigenous Rights Cases of Thomas R. Berger (Durvile Publications $37.50) by author Drew Ann Wake (at right) highlights the significant contributions of Berger in the legal field, particularly his advocacy for Indigenous rights in Canada and the US. It focuses on his leadership of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, where he ensured that northern First Nations had a strong voice by holding thirty community hearings. His efforts were consistently successful. The book also covers his work on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) and includes a collection of unpublished photographs of the Dene and Inuvialuit by Michael Jackson KC and Linda MacCannell.
Here is an excerpt from the book, telling of how one family would come to require Thomas Berger’s legal know-how:
When 15-year-old Leonard White rolled out of bed before dawn on the morning of July 6, 1963, he was thinking only of the hunting trip that lay ahead. He had no idea that the events of the day would plunge his family into a landmark legal case that would alter the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Canada.
The book jacket of Against the Odds
The White family’s farm nestled in the forest on traditional Snuneymuxw land south of Nanaimo, British Columbia. There, Leonard’s parents, Clifford and Audrey White, raised their nine children on food from the farm and the forest. It wasn’t an easy life. When the children were young, Audrey would bundle them up, take them to the barn and lay them on the hay with their bottles. Then, she would milk the cows and clean the stalls while keeping an eye on the sheep. She joked that her children grew up in the hay stalls.
As the children grew older, they took on some of the farm labour. They helped milk the cows and feed the chickens. They took milk cans down to the river and hauled them back up the hill filled with drinking water. In the summer, they tended a large garden and helped their mother can enough fruit and vegetables to last through the winter. The White family set nets across the Nanaimo River just below the house, fishing for salmon. Leonard’s sister, Jackie, remembers that her father would ask the children to carry the salmon up to the house. “In those days I wasn’t very tall, so I’d drag the salmon up the hill for our dinner.” Clifford White, like most men in the Snuneymuxw community, worked as a logger and a fisherman.
Thomas R. Berger
He would be away for days at a time. When he returned, he would hunt for deer to sustain the family. His wife made pots of venison stew and ladled it into jars for the coming weeks. “We hunted deer because we needed to,” says Leonard. “One deer would last us a week. The jobs weren’t great so if it wasn’t for the deer and salmon, where would we be?”
But Clifford didn’t just hunt for his own family. Leonard recalls: “We had friends across the river and old people down the hill who couldn’t get out anymore. We’d give them deer and they loved us for that. “Leonard had learned to shoot when he was six, so by the age of fifteen he was making a contribution to iceboxes across the community.
On July 6, 1963, when his father and David Bob decided to go hunting, Leonard and a friend, Gerry Thomas, jumped in the back of the car. Together, they headed up a back road behind Mount Benson, which crossed traditional Snuneymuxw land. Over the next few hours, the hunters shot six deer. They cleaned the carcasses and packed the meat into the car. Then they headed home. But as they approached the farm, the local conservation officer, Franklin Greenfield, was waiting for them. Leonard’s sister, Jackie, remembers: “The conservation officer went up to my dad’s vehicle and said: ‘Cliffy, Cliffy, Cliffy’.” Dad said: “What?” The officer said: “I see you’re at it again.” My Dad said: “I hunt for my family. I have to feed nine kids.” But his argument fell on deaf ears. Clifford White and David Bob were ordered to appear in court the next day.
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