Who killed Harriet Nahanee? The casual reader of The Republic will rapidly default to the politically correct version now being touted in “progressive” circles: Harriet was killed by an insensitive judiciary and a corporate government in cahoots with an aboriginal band council hell-bent on acting like white businessmen. Her defiance of the Eagle Ridge injunction and subsequent incarceration provoked pneumonia in a 70-year-old body already desperately ill from a lifetime of abuse and struggle.

All of this is true of course. Alas, it’s not quite so simple.

Say Jack Poole, VANOC Chairman, has gone up on what used to be Eagle Ridge to start building the 1,800 homes slated for the area. He accidentally nudges loose a boulder that careens down the slope and onto the highway killing a carload of tourists driving by. Is he responsible? Yes, of course he is. Let’s also say that you had the opportunity to stop the boulder, but didn’t. Maybe you saw it as an act of God and nature, something that you couldn’t prevent.

The last Arbutus

Harriet Nahanee had gone to Eagle Ridge last spring to stand with those who tried to stop the government and Peter Kiewit and Sons from blasting into dust one of the last arbutus forests on the coast. Warrior flag in one hand, proclamation of 1763 in the other, Harriet politely told the police that this was her land and that she had no intention of leaving. She stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Betty Krawczyk and a few dozen others and sang and prayed until West Van’s finest hauled them away. In court, Harriet refused to apologize to Kiewit for ignoring the injunction and their bottom line. For this, she got a sentence of 14 days in jail. For this, in the end, she gave her life.

So tell me: Were you at Eagle Ridge with her or did you pretend the battle there was all about a bunch of spoiled rich folks fighting a NIMBY issue? No solidarity with the Eagle Ridge protesters because they weren’t real social justice types, right? Were you at the Art Gallery when some brave kids from the Anti-Poverty Committee, Downtown Eastside Residents Association, and the Native Youth Movement tried to shout down VANOC’s obscene Olympic clock unveiling? Did you help APC and DERA at the squats where they tried to protect housing for the poor? Why not?

It’s all too easy to blame others for what happened to Harriet and Eagle Ridge and for those arrested at the Art Gallery. It must be Gordon Campbell’s fault, or Kevin Falcon’s, or Sam Sullivan’s, and again, all of this is true – but only up to a point. All of them, just like much of the NDP hierarchy, as well as COPE (aka the Coalition of Pusillanimous Electors), and the unfunny joke of Vision Vancouver, all are political creatures bought and paid for in various ways by the powers that control Vancouver and British Columbia.

That’s what developers do

The developers want the delivery of Southeast False Creek, Eagle Ridge and the Downtown Eastside for their pet projects, and the politicians snap to attention, knuckle their foreheads, and obey. Who cares about thousands of homeless when there is a Senate seat up for grabs for those who cough up the mega projects? Did you think former mayor and now senator Larry Campbell got that new job because of good looks? Blame them all you like, but in the final analysis they are just doing what comes naturally as creatures drawn to the power provided by those with money. Blame the developers and speculators for being rapacious? What did you think they were like? When the developers and their pals, hand-in-hand with the bought-and-paid-for politicians, wheeled the Olympic torch into view, didn’t you smell that rat? You did, but you shut up because you’re union and your bosses told you the Games would be good for jobs. You probably never thought twice about your pension funds bucking up Jack Poole’s Concert Properties, certainly not with labour bigwigs like Ken Georgetti and Tony Tennessy on Concert’s board of directors.

If you’re in the arts community you shut up too. With funding so tight, you prayed that some of the Olympic bootie could be yours. Did you get anything yet? No, but hope springs eternal, doesn’t it? All you have to do is keep your mouth shut, except to praise the Olympics while discreetly turning your eyes away from the war on the homeless and the rape of nature at Eagle Ridge and the Callaghan.

Maybe you shut up because Jim Green’s watch poodle, the IOCC (Impact of Olympics on Community Coalition), and most of COPE told you that the Olympic monster could be controlled. First Nations? Well, unless you were on the side of Harriet Nahanee, or Rosalin Sam, Chief Gary John and much of the St’at’imc, you figured that a few million bucks to the band bosses, with a native interpretive centre in Whistler chucked in on the side, was worth cutting the Callaghan and Melvin Creek adrift. And don’t forget about all those great jobs for band members hauling trash along the Sea to Sky corridor while the kids “showcase” native culture by dancing for foreign tourists.

Environmental groups? Barely a murmur once Poole and his crew promised the “greenest games ever.” Who needs Eagle Ridge when the Athletes’ Village will have solar panels?

Every con needs two prime ingredients: a con man and a sucker. The Bid Corp and the politicians supplied con men galore—some smooth, others just slimy, but all remarkably glib. Olympic promises of fame and glory fell like November rain. There in the distance was “our time to shine,” and smug, narcissistic Vancouverites—the easiest marks in the world—ate it up with a spoon and begged for more. It was a pathetic spectacle that continues even now: Vancouverites desperately want to believe that somehow, magically, the Olympics will ease that perpetual angst that maybe we really aren’t “world class.” Jack Poole astutely sized up Vancouver as prime suckerville, even bragged about it, then branded us all and drove us like cattle.

Too late now

Waking from the Olympic dream is going to be tough on lots of people who should have known better. By the time they see it for what it is, the party will be over and the Olympic circus will have hit the road. In the post-Games hangover, the best you can do is bite off your own arm and hope the fiscal bleeding eventually stops. What you can do to ease your conscience is another matter since Harriet will still be dead, Eagle Ridge and the Callaghan will still be gone, and the poor and homeless still dispersed.

The Olympic fight was winnable back in 2002. It’s harder now by several orders of magnitude, not only because of time and Olympic momentum, but also due to the sad fact that progressives in this city have gone so long without a real “win” that they’ve forgotten what one looks like. Add the endless bickering between groups to a parochial mindset that states that if you aren’t exactly like “us” then you are ritually unclean and we can’t work with you, and you get the predictable outcome of self-imposed defeat.

Harriet Nahanee’s death was part of the collateral damage of the Olympics. So, dear reader, if you let the Olympic boulder roll on by and can’t be bothered to lift a hand as it destroys everything in its path, you know the answer to the question. Who killed Hariett Nahanee? We all did.