What exists now is systemic disregard and antipathy, said Anthony Merchant, a lawyer with Merchant Law, which is representing plaintiffs in a proposed $600-million class action against the RCMP and the federal government over their handling of MMIWG investigations. Mounties forced Indigenous people, including Inuit, onto reserves, and removed Indigenous children from their homes to send them to residential schools. The pipeline would run from the Dawson Creek area of northern British Columbia to a facility near Kitimat on the Pacific coast. 3) The RCMP was created to forcibly displace indigenous people from their land. Can a Mountie be expected to fix the Mounties? The RCMP was modelled after a British police force created to control Irish people. That’s a common tactic, according to Farida Deif, who does research on policing abuse for Human Rights Watch. Notes from a strategy session for a militarized raid on ancestral lands of the Wet’suwet’en nation show that commanders of Canada’s national police force, the Royal … He did, however, highlight RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki’s 2018 apology to families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, in which she promised the force would do better. Canadian police were prepared to shoot Indigenous land defenders blockading construction of a natural gas pipeline in northern British Columbia, according to documents seen by the Guardian. “We also took into consideration the unpredictable nature of what we could face in the remote area, and so we moved additional police resources including members of the tactical and emergency response teams to provide support.”. Hospitals, Woman behind ‘Zombie Angelina Jolie’ sentenced to 10 years in Iranian prison, Tam calls on provinces to impose tougher rules now, Merlo-Davidson sexual harassment settlement, $220M and counting — The cost of the RCMP’s ‘culture of dysfunction’, ‘Statues are not history’ — considering the removal of Sir John A. Macdonald, Why ‘genocide’ was used in the MMIWG report. Established in 1873 under Prime Minister Sir John … The statement of claim is rife with such allegations: Diane BigEagle says that in more than 50 meetings with the RCMP about the disappearance of her daughter, Danita Faith BigEagle — who vanished in Saskatchewan in 2007 and is presumed dead — she felt the officers didn’t listen, didn’t write down any notes and never gave Danita’s case “meaningful attention.” Jennifer Catcheway disappeared the next year in Manitoba. “What I’ve witnessed over the last year is not only violent oppression by RCMP and the state on 7 January, but the continuing occupation of our territories and surveillance of our people and camp by CIRG,” she said. Her family says they, too, were brushed aside, told their daughter was probably off drunk. Since the January raid, an RCMP detachment known as the Community Industry Safety Office has maintained a large presence in an effort to forestall any resistance to pipeline construction. A year prior, the federal government passed an Order-in-Council prohibiting Mountiesfrom unionizing under threat of “instant dismissal.” So the government … As construction crews dynamite the land in preparation for laying pipe, and RCMP and private security forces patrol the territory, they trap for food and build new cabins. “They have proven [that] through their harassment of my people to support Coastal GasLink in invading our territories.” Close. Posted by 1 year ago. Armed RCMP officers can be seen patrolling the area, and three police trailers are tucked away in the woods alongside the access road. “If an Indigenous family contacted the police and indicated their 16- or 26-year-old daughter, sister, niece had not come home as expected or was missing, the almost invariable reply was ‘perhaps she’s partying,’ ‘is she with her boyfriend’ or anything to avoid undertaking an investigation,” Merchant said in a statement. Can a Mountie be expected to fix the Mounties? Also in 2016, the RCMP arrested Inuit and Innu people blocking the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project in Labrador, and were revealed to have launched a cross-Canada surveillance operation entitled “Project Sitka” just a few years earlier in order to build profiles of individuals and to monitor all forms of Indigenous dissent, including completely legal calls for a National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered … The RCMP’s history with Indigenous peoples dates back to the beginnings of the force itself. To clarify, it describes the deployment of an officer who is prepared to use lethal force, who may or may not be positioned as a sniper. “In our experience, since first contact, RCMP have been created by the federal government to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands,” Huson said. “OK,” she says, “but that doesn’t make sense. But our response is always that we’re not really concerned about the policies, we’re concerned about the practice and the implementation of those policies.”. Close. READ MORE: The pipeline would run directly beneath the Morice River, a river system several municipalities rely on. History books, commissions, inquiries and public apologies reveal what happened next: Indigenous people who resisted were starved onto reserves. READ MORE: The RCMP was created to control Indigenous people. According to the RCMP spokesperson, the police detachment will remain in place in Wet’suwet’en lands “as long as deemed necessary”. who were fighting against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion on their territory. True enough. Hewitt doesn’t see Canada disbanding the Mounties a la Northern Ireland. share. A new force, Hewitt says, “wouldn’t have that sort of history and baggage.”. They took care to hide their carbine rifles on the approach to the roadblock because the “optics” of the weapons were “not good”, according to one of the documents. Jan. 21, 2020 – (Toronto Star) The same urgent calls to action are raised in the final reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), as well as two recent parliamentary committee studies on Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system. Although the North-West Mounted Police didn’t become the RCMP proper until it absorbed the Dominion Police in 1920, its paramilitary origins are still highly visible in everything from its training depot to how it organizes its officers into troops, right down to the horse and the uniform, Hewitt says. “They will often drown us in policing protocols and policies to show how advanced they are and how much in line they are with international standards. More recently, the Canadian state has thrown its national security apparatus behind oil and gas development – often directly at Indigenous people’s expense. The organization has written lengthy reports highlighting alleged Mountie abuse in northern B.C. The job of the Mounties “effectively, was to clear the plains, the Prairies, of Indigenous people,” he says. The force immortalized by American movies as "Dudley Do-rights" who "always get their man" gave themselves a public relations party this summer. As Jocelyn Thorpe, a history and women and gender studies professor at the University of Manitoba, explains, the Mounties were created for a specific purpose: to assert sovereignty over Indigenous people and their lands. READ MORE: hide. For example, Canada’s federal policing system, the RCMP, was created … Despite the onset of winter, Wet’suwet’en land defenders remain at the camps to protect their lands and waters. And mistrust of the RCMP — a force created to control Indigenous people — runs deep in those communities. The word “the” does not actually appear in the record. The camp is one of several instances where Indigenous people in British Columbia have reinhabited ancestral territory that falls outside of demarcated reservations, in what they refer to as “reoccupation”. It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. In a 1997 ruling, the supreme court of Canada determined that aboriginal land ownership had never been given up across the Wet’suwet’en’s 22,000 km sq of territory. An RCMP spokesperson declined to comment on the specific content of the documents, saying they were merely carrying out a December 2018 injunction against people who interfere with the CGL pipeline. Wet’suwet’en people and their supporters set up the Gidimt’en checkpoint in December 2018 to block construction of the pipeline through this region of mountains and pine forests 750 miles north of Vancouver. 29. “We will continue to resist, to insist on respect for our way of life,” said Spice. The spokesperson said the investigation was timely, “very thorough,” and highlighted comments made at the time commending the force’s “very admirable job of investigating.”. Top Podcasts Episodes Gary Denny was trying to keep his 16-foot aluminum boat from getting swamped by a big wave when he heard the first gunshot. Wet’suwet’en people have retained their legal traditions and continue to govern themselves through the Bahtlats (feast hall), where decisions are ratified and clan business is conducted. The implication of that meeting was clear, says Hudson, who is from Berens River First Nation: she believed he wanted her to solve the case by clearing the Mountie of any wrongdoing. CGL has also retained two private security firms that track Indigenous people’s movements. Posted by 1 year ago. – Listen to Ep. Days later, Chantel Moore, an Indigenous woman from B.C., was shot dead by police in Edmundston, N.B. “In our experience, since first contact, RCMP have been created by the federal government to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands,” Huson said. “The police are here to support the invasion of Indigenous territories,” said Tlingit land defender Anne Spice. Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, got the idea for the Mounties from the Royal Irish Constabulary, a paramilitary police force the British created to keep the Irish under control. The documents show that ahead of the raid, the RCMP deployed an array of surveillance, including heavily armed police patrols, a jet boat, helicopter, drone technology, heat-sensing cameras and close monitoring of key land defenders’ movements and social media postings. One of its recommendations was the decolonization of the justice system. Ward took part in a live, hour-long Facebook session on Saturday and has said investigators from Quebec’s independent police watchdog agency are working with family members to determine if charges should be laid against the RCMP. The RCMP was modelled after a British police force created to control Irish people. Will Parrish, Fri 20 Dec 2019 05.30 EST Archived. a militarized raid on ancestral lands of the Wet’suwet’en, a term for deploying an officer who is prepared to use lethal force, the Wet’suwet’en have never relinquished their land to the Canadian government, disproportionate number of Indigenous children, Indigenous people fighting the proposed Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline, rooted in its founding as a paramilitary entity 150 years ago. Advocates say it was the police force which enabled the Canadian government to seize Indigenous homelands and undermine Native sovereignty. Can that relationship be reset? The RCMP was created to control Indigenous people. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Bill Blair are so far defending Lucki, saying she has the right vision and just needs more time to change the culture at the RCMP. The allegations in the proposed class action have not been proven in court. READ MORE: Office of Correctional Investigator Annual Report Feb 18, 2020. In 1995, at Gustafson Lake, where indigenous “warriors” were seeking to reclaim an ancestral burial ground, the RCMP, joined by Canadian military … - National | Globalnews.ca The RCMP was modelled after a British police force created to control Irish … The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP; ... a paramilitary police force the British created to keep the Irish under control. WATCH: How the Mountie image can affect its ability to police, It sends a strong message for RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki to appear before the inquiry and to talk about policy changes, Wahpasiw says — “but how is the message getting from those people at the top of a national organization into the communities with detachments with very few people in remote locations?”. Just go out and do it.”. The RCMP was created to control Indigenous people. Can that relationship be reset? The RCMP still carries its baggage, the MMIWG report makes clear: “This historic role of the RCMP has not changed significantly. Benjamin Neufeldt, the Mountie under investigation, pleaded guilty to two sex-related charges: for asking the teenager to touch him sexually and for bringing her to his home while he was on duty and trying to sexually assault her. Office of Correctional Investigator Annual Report Feb 18, 2020. And yet, it already feels like more of the same, Hudson says. Mounties forced Indigenous people, including Inuit, onto reserves, and removed Indigenous children from their homes to send them to residential schools. The revelations come as the Wet’suwet’en camps brace for a provincial supreme court ruling on an injunction applied for by the pipeline builder TC Energy (formerly TransCanada), which seeks to permanently restrict the Wet’suwet’en from blocking access to pipeline work sites. 29. Why ‘genocide’ was used in the MMIWG report. The documents also show close collaboration between the RCMP and TC Energy: police officers attended company planning sessions and daily “tailgate” meetings, and were privy to CGL’s legal strategy. For example, Canada’s federal policing system, the RCMP, was created in order to control the Indigenous population in post-Confederation Canada. Get a roundup of the most important and intriguing national stories delivered to your inbox every weekday. Even if it’s a “tainted image,” Hewitt says, “the symbol is so powerful.”, Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of our January 2019 series on the force’s “culture of dysfunction.”. It’s an issue for the future, too, he says, one that will likely continue to manifest in confrontations between Mounties and Indigenous people standing firm against pipelines crossing their lands. Hudson — who left the force a year later and was part of the historic $100-million Merlo-Davidson sexual harassment settlement a few years after that — thinks about that moment now. And then, earlier this month, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry released its final report, blunt in its assessment of the famous force: “The RCMP have not proven to Canada that they are capable of holding themselves to account.”, The Mountie response to the MMIWG report has been to acknowledge reconciliation “is not a single event or action,” to highlight training initiatives — including a “Cultural Awareness and Humility course” currently in the works — and to say it continues to study the report and will give “careful consideration to change.”. On 7 January, RCMP officers – dressed in military-green fatigues and armed with assault rifles – descended on the checkpoint, dismantling the gate and arresting 14 people. Another makes reference to possible child apprehension by social services – a troubling disclosure given the violent history of residential schooling in Canada and the disproportionate number of Indigenous children currently in the child welfare system. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Please read our Commenting Policy first. “We like to think that having good people in the right places changes things, and I think, to a certain extent, that’s true,” Thorpe says. Can that relationship be reset? All rights reserved. #331 The RCMP Exists to Control Indigenous People The history of policing back to John A. Macdonald, the killing of Dudley George at Ipperwash in 1995, and its impact on two Indigenous journalists June 29, 2020 And mistrust of the RCMP — a force created to control Indigenous people — runs deep in those communities. on: December 20, 2019. Problems with RCMP long predate Lucki’s appointment. Mounties forced Indigenous people, including Inuit, onto reserves, and … Conventional Canadian mythology maintains that the RCMP were created to protect Indigenous people from marauding Americans at Cypress Hills. The RCMP, known around the globe as benign "Mounties," commemorated early beginnings this summer, and identified the establishment of friendly relations with Native people … The Catholic community saw the constabulary as a Protestant force, biased against Catholics. Can that relationship be reset? With a population of about 5,000, the Wet’suwet’en are composed of five clans (Gilseyhu, Likhts’amisyu, Laksilyu, Tsayu and Gidimt’en), which are further divided into 13 house groups, each with its own distinct territories. WATCH: Is it time to start fresh with the RCMP? Can that relationship be reset? The RCMP was created to control Indigenous people. The RCMP commanders also instructed officers to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want” ahead of the operation to remove a roadblock which had been erected by Wet’suwet’en people to control access to their territories and stop construction of the proposed 670km (416-mile) Coastal GasLink pipeline (CGL). She says a supervisor called her into the Winnipeg office and told her she had better go — “you know what we want, eh?”. Land defenders such as Freda Huson have been identified in RCMP intelligence reports as “aboriginal extremists”. “Sometimes, the way we talk about history is as if history really is in the past,” she says. Jan. 21, 2020 – (Toronto Star) The same urgent calls to action are raised in the final reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), as well as two recent parliamentary committee studies on Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system. It was disbanded as part of the Northern Ireland peace process, Hewitt says: “a new police force for a new era of peace.” Hewitt makes the comparison again two centuries later because the Irish force was disbanded as a matter of trust. “All of that is not an ordinary police force.”. RCMP officers had no qualms about moving in to arrest Indigenous people defending Wet’suwet’en territory against a natural gas pipeline in northern B.C. Founded in 2009, Unist’ot’en camp was the first among a constellation of Indigenous-led uprisings against fossil fuel pipelines in North America – including Keystone XL, Trans Mountain, Enbridge Line 3, Dakota Access and Bayou Bridge. One major media noting the long terrible history of the RCMP vis-à-vis First Nations asked, “The RCMP was created to control Indigenous people. save. They were fine with arresting Indigenous protesters last week in Kamloops, B.C. The MMIWG report tells similar stories underscored by why people continue to see the force’s responses as inadequate — too focused on the “bad apples” rather than the structural issues. “They’re really important, but so many people shelve recommendations,” she says. A spokesperson for the Manitoba RCMP said it wasn’t aware of Hudson’s allegations. In 2008, Marge Hudson was sent north to Bloodvein First Nation in Manitoba to investigate allegations that one of her RCMP colleagues had sexually assaulted a teen girl. Archived. Hereditary chiefs are responsible for the health and sustainability of their house group territories, and Wet’suwet’en law prohibits trespass on the territory of other the house groups. They harass us and profile us under the guise of ‘public safety’.”. share. They ‘patrol’ the roads where we hunt. “During the planning for the enforcement of the court-ordered injunction, the RCMP took the remote location of the Morice River Bridge into account and ensured that enough police officers were present in the area to keep the peace,” the spokesperson said. – Jan 24, 2019, Why ‘the RCMP needs to be… blown up’ – Jan 24, 2019, ‘SNL’ cold open reveals who will play Joe Biden post-Jim Carrey, Ontario reports 2,316 new coronavirus cases, 25 deaths, Tamra Keepness one of many missing Indigenous girls listed in class action lawsuit against RCMP, Tamra Keepness one of many missing Indigenous girls listed in class action lawsuit against RCMP – Jul 5, 2018, ‘This organization is so dysfunctional’ – Jan 22, 2019, How the Mountie image can affect its ability to police, How the Mountie image can affect its ability to police – Jan 22, 2019, Parachute policing: How Mounties serve communities across Canada, Parachute policing: How Mounties serve communities across Canada – Jan 24, 2019, Historian says the Mounties’ modern scandals are nothing new, Why the RCMP’s image is a double-edged sword, 7-year-old N.B. “In our experience, since first contact, RCMP have been created by the federal government to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands,” Huson said. Notes from a strategy session for a militarized raid on ancestral lands of the Wet’suwet’en nation show that commanders of Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), argued that “lethal overwatch is req’d” – a term for deploying an officer who is prepared to use lethal force. In a separate document, an RCMP officer states that arrests would be necessary for “sterilizing [the] site”. The Wet’suwet’en nation have lived on their territories in what is now British Columbia for thousands of years. If you’re going to read the MMIWG report, don’t start with the recommendations, Wahpasiw says. The officer wondered if maybe the teenager had been responsive, even “subconsciously,” because “you understand that when a guy tries to have sex with a female and the female is completely unwilling, it’s very difficult, right?”. 331 - The RCMP Exists to Control Indigenous People by CANADALAND instantly on your tablet, phone or browser - no downloads needed. An earlier version also included the quote “sterilizing the site” from an RCMP record. And mistrust of the RCMP — a force created to control Indigenous people — runs deep in those communities. The RCMP was created to control Indigenous people. Mounties forced Indigenous people, including Inuit, onto reserves, and removed Indigenous children from their homes to send them to residential schools. RCMP created to control Indigenous people The RCMP as an institution was never built to keep Indigenous communities safe, Campbell said. “They have proven [that] through their harassment of my people to support Coastal GasLink in invading our territories.”. globalnews.ca/news/5... 1 comment. RCMP created to control Indigenous people The RCMP as … #331 The RCMP Exists to Control Indigenous People The history of policing back to John A. Macdonald, the killing of Dudley George at Ipperwash in 1995, and its impact on two Indigenous journalists June 29, 2020