EXCERPT

I WENT TO school with a boy named Clayton Matchee. We learned the same things: that Canada is the true North strong and free, that Columbus sailed the ocean blue, that six times nine is fifty-four. We also learned that I was white and Clayton was an Indian. This lesson was not on the curriculum, but it was the one that mattered the most. Our knowledge of the distinction between white and Native came with rules about who we could associate with, where we could feel safe, what we could become when we grew up. There were some exceptions to the rules, of course, but they were always invoked with the knowledge that they were exceptions: Gilbert Lachance was welcomed among the white kids because he was a good athlete, and Frankie Caplette was tolerated because his parents had given him a motorcycle for his thirteenth birthday. But Clayton was not an exception, at least not then. To me, he was just a skinny Native kid with a mean streak. It was only years later, when he married a white woman from town and got a good job in the army, that people started considering him an exception. No one could have predicted he would do so well for himself.

Then came Somalia. This is the part of his life that everyone knows, the part when Master Corporal Clayton Matchee entered history. He was one of the Canadian peacekeepers charged in 1993 with the torture and murder of the Somali youth Shidane Arone, who had entered the Canadian military compound at Belet Huen. After several years of news coverage and a parade of inquiries and court martial trials, the story is nauseatingly familiar. The soldiers held Arone under armed guard while they kicked him relentlessly and beat him with sticks and metal bars. His cries of pain and his pleas for mercy echoed across the compound, but no one intervened in the attack. Eventually Arone’s captors burned the soles of his feet with cigarettes, and they posed with his semi-conscious body for trophy-hunter-style photographs. After more than three hours of torture, Arone finally escaped into death.

It is almost certain that the attack was racially motivated. Shidane Arone was systematically dehumanized, tortured and killed not because he was an interloper in the military compound but because he was black. He became the sacrifice in an almost ritualistic act of racism, a ritual that was preserved on Private Kyle Brown’s camera and later published in several Canadian newspapers.

For a long time I couldn’t look at the newspaper reproductions of Kyle Brown’s photographs, because I knew that Clayton was the main figure in many of them. I suppose I felt that seeing him there would have brought the crime too close to me. And yet, despite my unwillingness to face it, the attack on Shidane Arone has haunted me. How could a man from my own community have become entangled in an atrocity of such magnitude? The easiest explanation is the official one: that the Canadian military—rife with racism, poor leadership and morale problems—provided the catalyst for the soldiers’ brutality. This is true, but I don’t think it’s the whole truth. And even more troubling possibility is that the crimes against Shidane Arone might not have been solely a military problem.

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