This will shed some light onto Aunt Gwen:
OPP flays feather symbol
Top-rank OPP officer condemns Ipperwash trinkets.
By PATRICK MALONEY, FREE PRESS REPORTER
FOREST -- When OPP Commissioner Gwen Boniface looks at the single feather depicted on "mementoes" made by officers since the 1995 Ipperwash standoff, she sees a highly charged reference to Dudley George.
The family of the slain native protester, killed by an OPP sniper in the standoff, sees the mugs and T-shirts -- some of which depict an OPP patch looming over a fallen feather -- the exact same way.
"She was pretty well right on when she talked about the feather," Dudley's brother, Sam George, said after Boniface yesterday expressed to the Ipperwash inquiry her displeasure with the images.
"(It) represents to us a fallen warrior."
Boniface's testimony yesterday -- she said the feather "signalled to me defeat, or (Dudley George's) death" -- was a watershed moment for the George clan, which accepted her remarks as honest and sincere.
She's the first high-ranking officer to criticize the so-called mementoes, Sam George said.
"What Commissioner Boniface was saying up there was sincere and it was coming from the heart," he said. "This is the first time we've heard that from any OPP officers that high in the organization."
The latest such item cropped up in May -- a T-shirt featuring the OPP's emergency response team logo breaking an arrow, another native symbol.
"I find it highly inappropriate," Boniface said. "It reflects the me-against-them (attitude). Again, the broken arrow I find offensive. I just find it was difficult."
Boniface had plenty of experience handling native issues earlier in her career: In 1994 she was in charge of Ontario's First Nations policing and later taught First Nations issues at the University of Western Ontario.
She said she played "no role" in the Ipperwash standoff in September 1995.
Over the past decade, however, the OPP has taken strides to improve what she termed "native awareness," including making native-issues training for new recruits mandatory and hiring more aboriginal officers.
In 1995, the OPP had fewer than 50 aboriginal officers. Now, of the 5,000 OPP members, about 130 are native.
"Mementoes of the death of somebody are, I think, highly inappropriate," Boniface said. "It's highly inappropriate to do any memento . . . at all,"
Boniface's testimony is expected to wrap up today.
She must have attended the Romeo Dalliare School of Forget From Where You Came From. No doubt eyeballing a patronage appointment of some sort.
So you can see, in the face of such disloyalty, and blatant disregard for the actual facts out of Ipperwash, the lads in Caledonia have no chance of doing anything effective. I wish they would just walk away and make it a federal problem, but because they are providing professionalism in the face of administrative abuse, they won't.
