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The Vancouver Sun, Friday, April 2, 1993
PETER O'NEIL
Sun Ottawa Bureau
OTTAWA - One-sided views of native people that led to a 1990 B.C. Supreme Court decision against the Gitksan and Wet'su'wet'en people must be extinguished, a United Nations human-rights expert said Thursday.
Miguel Alfonso Martinez called the 1990 decision an unfortunate reflection of European bias...
The report on world-wide discrimination against aboriginal people singled out the McEarchern decision, which rejected the Gitksan Wet'Su'wet'en claim to 57,000 square kilometres of territory. The report quoted McEachern's ruling, which said the Gitksan and Wet'Su'wet'en ancestors "had no written language, no horses or wheeled vehicles, slavery and starvation was (sic) not uncommon, wars with neighboring peoples were common, and there is no doubt, to quote hobbs (sic) that aboriginal life in the territory was, at best, 'nasty, brutish and short.'"
The Globe and Mail, Friday, April 2, 1993
BY GEOFFREY YORK
Parliamentary Bureau
OTTAWA - A senior British Columbia judge was displaying an "ethnocentric" bias when he dismissed an Indian land claim in a landmark ruling in 1991, a United Nations study has concluded.
The study, written by an investigator with the UN Human Rights Commission, said the B.C. judge's ruling was proof that "deeply rooted Western ethnocentric criteria are still widely shared in present-day judiciary reasoning."
The UN report, which was distributed at a conference in Ottawa yesterday, quoted some of the judge's words as examples of ethnocentric thinking in the Canadian judicial system...
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