REVIEWS JUSTICE DENIED d Marshall re Law versus JUSTICE DENIED.The Law versus Donald Marshall. Mac- millan of Canada, 1986, 405 pp. $17.95. If Canada had capital punish- ment, Donald Marshall would be dead. As it is, he spent 11 years of his life behind bars for a crime he never committed. Justice Denied serves as a cold reminder of how the “justice sys- tem” functions in this country. As one reads it becomes increasingly obvious that the scales of justice are hardly balanced — that while everyone is equal some are more equal than others. Being young The law versus Donald Marshall and unemployed made Donald Marshall less equal. Being Native made him guilty. In 1971, the 17-year-old Mic- mac Indian was charged with murder after a high school stu- dent was brutally stabbed to death in a park in Sydney, Nova Scotia. He was convicted by an all-white jury on the basis of per- jured evidence and sentenced to life imprisonment. In Justice Denied, Michael Harris provides a lucid and grip- ping account of one of the most disgraceful episodes in Canadian judicial history. The odds were stacked against Donald Marshall from the start. Born into a family of 13 children, he grew up on the Memberture reserve, trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, unemployment and despair. As one Micmac father put it, “It’s not exaggerating to say that people would be better ‘off dead than living under this horrible system.” Harassment and brutality at the hands of the Sydney police were part of the daily reality for Native youth. Donald Marshall was no exception: “While Sydney agonized over its future, the four hundred Mic- mac Indians who lived on Mem- Donald Marshall being led into court for sentencing in 1971. bertou, a 66-acre urban reserve overlooking one of the city’s elite residential areas, were unaffected by the change in the steelworkers’ fortunes. “Caught in a depressing cycle of odd jobs and welfare, they had simply never shared in the wealth created by the mill, as the reserve’s collection of ramshackle houses and unpaved streets made clear. The men had never been. employed at the steelworks, and although the reserve was a mere ten-minute walk from downtown Sydney, no Indian women worked in the shops along Charlotte Street. A number of them did hold jobs as scrubwomen in pri- vate households. Bleak and run- down, Membertou was a world apart, its poverty, alcoholism, and paralysing social. isolation largely ignored by the city in whose midst it existed.” A local murder would find Donald Marshall no _ longer merely a victim of racism but a prime suspect. In the face of mounting community pressure to solve the crime, the Micmac tee- nager who had had previous run- ins with the police, proved to bea convenient scapegoat. By accessing the original police records and statements and inter- viewing people inyolved in the case, Michael Harris lays bare the shocking evidence of how Mar- shall was railroaded by the police and the courts. Police coercion was used to extract false testimony. People who had been nowhere near the St en th to Vi V of $y ne ac er Sc if la m in scene of the incident turned up as fo star “eyewitnesses” for the prose- cution. Their original statements in to the police, which would have revealed the fraud, were withheld er from Marshall’s lawyers. ac Almost as soon as Marshall was convicted, evidence pointing ac to the real killer began to surface, ne including testimony from an || w eyewitness who accompanied the | fa murderer. fr Despite this, it took 11 years for Marshall to be acquitted. Meanwhile, the authorities insisted be considered eligible for parole. _ He spent much of that time in Dorchester penitentiary, one of Canada’s most brutal, maximum security prisons. — Cathy Laurier mR pe th Marshall must declare his guiltto |} gj, to th as Touching the memories from a Midwest past HOOSIERS: Written by Angelo Pizzo. Directed by David Anspaugh. Starring Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, and Dennis Hopper. At local theatres. It really happened about 35 years ago in Indiana — a tiny high school in a basketball-crazed state won the state finals. It was against all odds. It couldn’t happen today. The school sys- tem that once covered far-flung schools ~ dotted across the country-side has been consolidated into large central schools. As the wife of a former high school basketball coach at Balsam Lake (pop. 400), Wisc., seeing Hoosiers brought back a lot of memories — the fiery, controversial young coach who was an ’ outsider, the dignified old school build- ing with the sagging, highly-polished floors, hollowed-out steps, scarred desks, the tiny gym. The remote and politically conserva- tive town, essentially the centre of supp- lies, religion and recreation for farmers around it, is a somewhat claustro- phobic place for two New Yorkers. Still, it is a microcosm of the world at large. There is even the village liberal, a man who had been a member of Presi- dent Roosevelt’s Brain Trust. He has, lamentably, taken to drink. Hoosiers superbly conveys the feel- ing of a Midwest village of those days — the distrust of strangers, the intense interest in hometown gods who compete in sports with other, distant school teams, the sense of space as vast as a Russian steppe, the love of family, the pride and sturdiness of farmers that 10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, APRIL 15, 1987 capitalism has relentlessy undercut with corporate takeover of family farms. Hoosiers is a moving story superbly told, Gene Hackman as the new coach creating a team out of a group of untrained players and Barara Hershey as an anti-sports teacher are fine. Den- nis Hopper is heartbreaking as much more than just the town drunk. A touching moment cames near the end when the coach and his team enter the vast gym in Indianapolis where they are to compete in the finals. The kids are awestruck but Coach gets out his tape and proves to them that measure- ments from the rim of the basket to the floor and to the foul line are identical to those in the home gym. This is not a sugar-coated nostalgia piece. Life has always been raw and hard on Midwest farms. A sense of community and working together for the good of all was a strong element in the survival of small farmers. Sports comprised more than just recreation. Hunting and fishing supp- lied essential food and the competition of intermural sports served as an almost spiritual catalyst that wove communities even more tightly and passionately together during long, freezing winters. Young and old should see Hoosiers to get a deeper look into the personal background of the people who are now fighting tooth and nail to keep their farms. — Pat Hickerson Peoples Daily World A new weaving of music: from Senegal’s N'Dour NELSON MANDELA: By Youssou N'Dour. Polydor 831-294-1 The ringing, clarion voice of Senegalese pop singer Youssou N’Dour, the King of Dakar, can weave magic, period. It has to be heard to be believed. That opportunity is now available to North American ears, thanks to the release of N’Dour’s latest: Nelson Mandela. Certainly, the timing is good. The record rides into a receptive audience in the wake of a renewed interest in African pop gener- ated in part by Paul Simon’s Graceland. So far, the reception has been good. “This is a new type of music for the Ameri- can audience that they are just beginning to discover,” N’Dour told the Los Angeles Times. On one hand, N’Dour’s music is based on his own cultural and family background: he is a Muslim, a native speaker of the Wolof tribal dialect, a descendant of a line of “qawlos” (intertribal singer-storytellers), and a percussionist trained in the traditional styles. However, his music forges an interna- tional fusion of Afro-Cuban, traditional Senegalese and West African pop and rock music, as well as a heavy dose of Afro- American influences. N’Dour’s cover of the Spinners’ Rubber- band Man, sung in phonetic English, is a conspicuous example of this influence. So is Magninde, a sort of pop-jazz ballad — its lovely melody flavored with Islamic semit- onal inflections. _ But the underlying Black American pop influence is seen ‘in the verse-chorus struc- ture of his compositions. This may make him ultimately more accessible to a mass audience, as compared to the extended instrumental forays of High Life/Juju stats like King Sunny Ade and Fela Kuti. What should make N’Dour’s music bot successful and respected in this country wl be the musicianship of his exhilarating, 10 piece back-up band, Super Etoile de Dakafy and the stunning quality of the man’s voicé itself. But N’Dour prefers to talk about tht character of the music, and about his beli¢# that “with my music, I can be an ambass@ dor for Senegal and Africa as a whole. | “I use Senegalese music as a base, wit! elements of foreign music — Black Amé! can music, mainly — to internationaliZ the kind of music I play.” It is notable that N’Dour sees his music a vehicle for fruitful cultural exchange an for promotion of a progressive politic stance, even though he claims, “I’m 1@ politically inclined.” But, he says, “there are certain thing going on in Africa that people have to talk about, like apartheid. Being an artist who well known, I try to talk about things ! Africa that people need to know throug out the world.” That commitment made for moments & inspiration in the recent Peter Gabriel to N’Dour and his Super Etoile de Dakar pe formed Nelson Mandela early in their S%™ then returned to the stage, fists raised, accompany Peter Gabriel in his tribute © Biko. Gabriel then left the stage arm-in-am™ with N’Dour, leaving the audience to c0 tinue the closing chant. The gesture exe! plified the commitment of both artists to the common ideal of international solidat™ through the common ideal of internatio?® solidarity through the cross-cultural fus!© of popular music forms. i — Paul Rossm*, Peoples Daily Wo"