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Trouble brewing? |
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Written by Gerald Gauthier LETHBRIDGE HERALD
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Wednesday, 18 November 2009 |
Unless meaningful progress is made toward integrating First Nations people in Lethbridge, disaffected aboriginal teens are increasingly likely to be drawn into gangs which may eventually wage turf wars in city neighbourhoods, says a University of Lethbridge researcher.
An incident last week in which a group of aboriginal gang members exacted revenge by beating and stabbing a man for several hours at a northside house is the first sign of what could become a larger migration of low-level gang activity from surrounding First Nations reserves into Lethbridge, said Yale Belanger, assistant professor of Native American studies.
The arrival of the phenomenon comes as no surprise, he said, for police and others like himself who watch these issues closely.
“Part of the reason I suggested this issue may become prominent in Lethbridge is over the last four or five years, out on the Blood Reserve as an example, we’ve seen more and more gang activity. That activity is shielded from people in Lethbridge who remain unaware of what is going on in those reserve communities,” he said.
Lethbridge regional police have described the attack as the work of members of an unsophisticated gang based in Stand Off on the Blood Reserve.
Four of the seven men charged in connection with the attack have since been arrested in Stand Off. Three others, including a 17-year-old youth, are still at large. Each of them has been charged with aggravated assault, assault with a weapon, robbery and unlawful confinement.
“I was not surprised in one way but in another, I was shocked it happened as quickly as it did,” Belanger said.
“There’s been a consistent migration of gang activity westward that really got its grounding in Winnipeg over the last 15 years,” he said. “After Winnipeg you could see them pop up in Regina and then into Saskatoon. They’re up in Edmonton, and they’re gradually infiltrating their way south at this point.”
Unless lingering racist attitudes change, he said, the local gang problem will grow.
His research over the past year has shown that Lethbridge “is not entirely friendly” to First Nations people and that in many instances they are treated as outsiders who are considered unwelcome in the city.
Consequently, “they’re going to find people who are in the same boat and are going to generate that sense of community amongst themselves,” he said.
“Imagine a kid who’s 13 or 14 who feels completely alienated, he’s got nowhere to go, he may be from a broken family, and the only unity he finds is in a group of individuals who will basically beat the hell out of anybody for him. And vice versa, they’ll take a punch for him. Suddenly, you’ve got this strong core unit, and it’s an attractive thing. That’s the family unit they never had, or it’s the stability that Lethbridge does not provide that they can find in a smaller group of individuals.”
Although it may be too late to reach many current gang members, he said, proactive steps would be most effective among vulnerable aboriginal youth between 13-14 years old to create a sense of belonging.
“People in Lethbridge tend to view aboriginal people in the city as kind of lost: ‘You’ve got your reserve, we’ve got our city. How come the two are mixing?’. Folks just don’t understand that we’re into our third generation of First Nations people living in Lethbridge. The numbers are just growing at a rate where 10 per cent of the population of Lethbridge is going to be First Nations by 2011,” he said.
In the past year, Belanger has learned of about a dozen instances where landlords chose to let their properties sit vacant rather than rent them to aboriginal tenants.
“What we’re really dealing with here is a Lethbridge community issue. We have to recognize that First Nations are part of the community. They really aren’t going away,” he said. “I think it’s time to really get a sense of what each side wants to generate in terms of what the community should look like and see if it’s time to fuse those ideas because otherwise, we’re going to see more people lashing out.”
“We can nip it in the bud if we choose to react and respond. If we choose to (ignore it), I think suddenly we’ll be surprised at the level of gang activity in town,” he said.
The migration of gang activity has been made easier, he said, with the advent of cell phones and greater mobility between reserves and cities.
Typically, aboriginal gangs start out as small social groups of teens who claim small pockets of the city as their turf. The potential for conflict grows as those cells become larger and inevitably expand their turf.
“As soon as these groups pop up, they carve out territory,” he said. “You don’t know they’re there until it hits the headlines like it did the other day.
“Lethbridge is so small that even if we had perhaps four or five of these small groups turn into larger groups of 15-20 or even 35-40 individuals, their territory expands exponentially. And what happens soon is (one group) claims a street that another group has claimed,” he said. “Suddenly people are fighting over a very small patch of territory.”
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