It is far too early to withdraw our consideration from the brutal events which occurred on the James Smith Cree Nation. They were horrible simply in the scale of the slaughter—10 dead and 18 variously injured—and made more horrible in that from what we know it was deliberate and calculated and remorselessly pursued, with the murderers going from house to house, indeed door to door, on their vicious rampage.
This was ultimate malice and cruelty without bounds inflicted on a close-knit and innocent community.
Every decent heart in Canada has had a huge response of sympathy to all those people, all those families and friends who experienced the death by violence of their loved ones, and those who had to attend the terrible injuries of their relations and loved ones. An attack of this gruesomeness and magnitude prompted inescapable shock to the whole country, but the shock of the nation cannot in any measure equate to the shock that was delivered to the entire close, small, rural community that was the home of the rampage.
When, as is so unhappily the case, large-scale brutality and murder take place in urban centres—when psychopath or malignant gangs exercise a killing spree—although the moral and psychological shock felt by families is the same as in any other setting, nonetheless the impact on the full community is necessarily dissipated or diffused by the brute fact of the large populations in which they occur.
This is in no way to suggest they are in any sense less cruel or that somehow the public should or could take less notice of the wantonness of these events.
However, in the case of the James Cree Nation there is superadded the consideration of the tremendous reverberations so horrid an event has played and is playing out on the community itself, the community as a community. In such places where, literally, everyone knows everyone else, where everyone has at one time or another had a personal interaction with one of the killed, one of the injured, with members of the families of those attacked—or even has perhaps some acquaintance, meeting, or recollection of one or both of the perpetrators—the impact of the event is greatly intensified.
I recall when the horrible Ocean Ranger disaster occurred in Newfoundland, when the offshore drilling rig was overwhelmed by a great storm and all 84 crew members on it went to their deaths. Because it occurred in Newfoundland, a small province, and because so many of the workers lost were from the tiny intimate coastal outports, it seemed—or perhaps it was not “seemed” but actually the case—that everyone knew someone who was to some degree connected in a personal way with a friend lost, a family who had lost a member, or who had known, met with, or shared an evening with a man lost.
The grief from that event darkened the whole island, and whole villages and outports were collectively stunned and numbed by the tragedy. When terrible things happen within a concentrated population, the aftermath comes close, in power of impact, to the original event.
The Ocean Ranger disaster, however, came from what we call “natural” causes. Bitter and bleak as it was, it did not carry the gravity, the immense shadow, of deliberate perpetration by—forgive the use of the term here—fellow community members. It is impossible to conceive how much the anger and grief of the James Smith Cree community, of only 2,000 people, is magnified, made more intense, by the fact that the enormity was so concentrated.
It has to be something of an insupportable burden for the people of that town to carry so terrible an event, to see in every face they meet the stroke or sorrow and pain, and who have now to begin the insupportable effort of somehow coming to terms with what has happened.
Large world events are, for the moment, eclipsing the response, and all the headlines are in another place. But I believe to a certainty that all Canadians still hold compassion in their hearts for the citizens of James Smith Cree Nation, and are one with the wish that insofar as time can, time will offer some succour to their grief, and that the consciousness of their fellow Canadians giving thought to them offers at least some glimmer of light in a very dark time.
Good wishes and prayers may not change things, but the offer of them has the power at least to colour in a positive way the hard journey forward. All decent Canadians are with you in sympathy and good feeling. May you find the fortitude to bear this terrible stroke upon your peace.
