Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, North America

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES-CANADA: Justice Elusive, Prejudice Pervasive

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Nov 9 2004 (IPS) - Neil Stonechild was 17 when, it is alleged, Saskatoon City Police took the drunken youth on a “starlight tour” one night, dumping him on the outskirts of the prairie town in -24C weather, where his frozen body was found four days later.

Dudley George was among a group of indigenous people involved in a standoff with police after occupying a park they claimed as their ancestral land. He was shot to death after seven members of the province of Ontario’s tactics and rescue unit opened fire on the unarmed group.

Helen Betty Osborne, 19, was raped and murdered by four men who targeted the student because she was aboriginal. An inquiry years later condemned local police, who knew indigenous women were being singled out by sexual predators but did not believe the practice required a specific reaction.

Such incidents reveal the troubled relationship between this country’s indigenous people, judicial authorities and the wider society, and raise questions about Canada’s reputation as a champion of human rights.

On Wednesday, Saskatoon Police constables Larry Hartwig and Bradley Senger, accused of dumping Stonechild the night of Nov. 24-25, 1990 and suspended last month after an inquiry into the incident, will learn if the police department will further discipline them.

Police officials in the province of Saskatchewan’s largest city have always denied the “starlight tour” claim, but the inquiry found that “whatever other conclusion one may draw, there is no question that Stonechild was last observed in the custody of those two officers, and that he was later found in a vacant field near the Hitachi plant on 57th Street with injuries and marks that were likely caused by handcuffs.”

Commissioner Justice David Henry Wright added, “The principal (police) investigator assigned to the case, Morality Sergeant Keith Jarvis, carried out a superficial and totally inadequate investigation of the death of Neil Stonechild.”

Willie Littlechild has heard many such stories. A member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the lawyer and former member of Canada’s parliament has travelled worldwide learning about the treatment of aboriginal people. He also led a commission that probed the way Saskatchewan’s judicial system treats First Nations and Métis people, which presented its findings in June.

About one million people (three percent) of Canadians are indigenous, officially divided into three groups: First Nations (once known as ‘Indians’); Métis, or mixed blood, and the northern Inuit. According to the 1996 census, the aboriginal population grew 22 percent over the previous five years, compared to a three-percent rate for non-indigenous Canadians.

Littlechild is pleased the Stonechild inquiry recommended some of the same reforms to the justice system as his findings, such as an independent police complaints system. “On the other hand,” he adds, “how many reports do you have to have to say the same thing, to have real action?”

He suggested to IPS that Canada needs to admit its troubled relationship with its indigenous people before the situation can improve.

Littlechild noted that the United Nations has long ranked Canada as one of the top countries in the world to live. “When those same criteria were applied to the indigenous communities in Canada, (the country) dropped as low as 63 and 64 on the roster. So what’s going on here? Is Canada telling the truth?” he asked.

Although Dudley George’s killer, Ontario Provincial Police acting Sgt Ken Deane, was found guilty of criminal negligence causing death in 1997, the dead man’s supporters have long pressed for an inquiry to determine who gave the order to fire on the unarmed native protesters.

Former Premier Mike Harris, whose office was heavily involved in the police response to the occupation, resisted those calls, but a new Ontario government ordered a hearing soon after taking office one year ago. The inquiry continues today.

That the Stonechild and George killings became public issues is a sign relations are slowly improving between the native and non-native communities, says Olive Dickason, professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.

“What happened in the Stonechild case and in the Dudley George case was just an illustration of those deeply ingrained attitudes that only now are beginning to even be acknowledged,” adds Dickason, a Métis and author of ‘Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times’.

Relations between the two groups began positively after first contact, she explained in an interview: Europeans and indigenous peoples working together to gather furs and whale oil. Officially, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 tried to deal justly with aboriginal people, for instance by recognising their title to land in certain cases.

But dozens of years later, with the whaling and fur industries dying, the concept of the “savage” Indian flourished.

By the 19th century, when the federal government opened residential schools for indigenous children, the purpose was, “quite frankly and quite openly, to ‘kill the Indian in the child’. That expression was used. And (to) absorb that child into white society – mentally, emotionally,” says Dickason.

“I don’t think the white society fully realises the extent of the damage, and I don’t think they realise the extent of the discrimination that the Indians were subjected to, because the idea that the Indians were savages, they were not civilised – in fact it’s still around; it hasn’t been eliminated.”

The sentiment can help explain why indigenous women, ages 25-44, were five times more likely than other women to die a violent death, according to Amnesty International (AI), quoting a 1996 Canadian government statistic.

“All women have the right to live in safety and dignity but overt cultural prejudice and official indifference have put the indigenous women of Canada in harm’s way,” said AI Secretary General Irene Khan, launching the organisation’s report, ‘Stolen Sisters: Discrimination and Violence Against Indigenous Women in Canada’, on Oct. 4.

For example, the report says, “In two separate instances in 1994, 15-year-old indigenous girls Roxanna Thiara and Alishia Germaine were found murdered in Prince George in the eastern (province of) British Columbia (BC). The body of a third 15-year-old indigenous girl, Ramona Wilson, who disappeared that same year, was found in Smithers in central BC in April 1995.”

“Only in 2002, after the disappearance of a 26-year-old non-indigenous woman, Nicola Hoar, while hitchhiking along a road that connects Prince George and Smithers, did media attention focus on the unsolved murders and other disappearances along what has been dubbed ‘the highway of tears’,” it adds.

Ottawa has yet to respond to the AI report, but Patricia Valladao, a spokeswoman for Indian Affairs Minister Andy Scott, told IPS the minister has met with the Native Women’s Association of Canada to discuss the issue.

“He’s very concerned about violence against women, that’s something that he really takes to heart,” added Valladao.

Brock Pitawanakwat, a professor at Saskatchewan’s First Nations University, grew up in the prairie province and knows what prejudice feels like.

“I think there is still an impression that aboriginal lives are worth less,” he said in a telephone interview from west-coast Victoria, where he is working on a PhD on native governance at the University of Victoria. “It seems like when native people are at risk, there is a tendency for government not to react.”

Pitawanakwat believes increased indigenous self-government is the path to better relations between the communities: “the idea that good fences make good neighbours,” he adds.

“If you have an arrangement for First Nations autonomy in the key areas – maintaining language, having social services that are appropriate … protecting land bases to make sure (indigenous people) have a say on economic development that occurs on their traditional territory – I think those kinds of measures would actually do a lot of good in terms of bringing a certain harmony to First Nations relations with the rest of Canada.”

Pitawanakwat stresses that more autonomy need not widen the gulf between Canada’s indigenous and non-indigenous people. Adds Littlechild, “I don’t think personally that (the two groups) want to stay apart.”

“If we’re going to live together and have good relationships we have to learn about each other. And that’s on both sides, that’s not just a one-way street – non-Indians learning about Indians,” he added.