The air outside is pure and sweet

AND FREE !

Everything else here is bitter and costly which happens when prison services are privatized. Gordon Campbell contracts out prison labour to private companies. There is a private lumber mill here using prison labour as well as a food service company, making profit from skimping on prisoner's
meals. More details later. Right now my thoughts are still lingering over Harriet Nahanee's death.

Harriet and I, both great-grandmothers, knew why we were at Eagleridge. Harriet was protesting the negotiating away of unceded Squamish land by the band's chief and council. I was protesting the needless destruction of an irreplaceable eco-system by my own chief and council: Gordon Campbell in Cabinet and Wally Oppal, but Harriet's struggle was multi-faceted.

Harriet's struggle was not only with her own chiefs but with my chiefs too: with the West Vancouver police, with Kiewitt & Sons, with arrest by injunctions, with a history of residential school barbarism. And finally, with the racism of Madam Justice Brown's court that refused to allow Harriet to even read the proclamation of 1763 as defense, and instead sent Harriet to Surrey Pre-trial.

May the Grandmothers and Grandfathers take good care of Harriet Nahanee and treat her tenderly.

Betty Krawczyk

Dictated from Alouette Correctional Centre for Women in Maple Ridge, BC.