Indigenous peoples in Canada: nations, rights and the starting point for justice

Professor Ray Desjardins does not begin this course himself. For the first class he has asked Jesse Morningstar, who is Anishinaabe and grew up in Nimkii Bay First Nation, to introduce two guests. The first is Elder Marion Shawanda, who sits at the front of the room with a small bundle of sage and a shell she does not light, because the college has not yet finished the policy that will let her. She speaks for a few minutes about where the students are sitting, whose land it was before the college was built, and what it means to listen with the whole of yourself rather than only the ears. The second guest is Sergeant Paul Keeshig of the Nimkii Bay Anishinaabe Police Service, who has twenty years of service, the last twelve in his own community.

Keeshig tells the class that he wants to start with a confession. 'When I was a young officer,' he says, 'I thought my job was the same as any officer's job, just in a smaller place. It took me years to understand that I was working inside a relationship that was older than my police service, older than the province and older than the country. Every call I take carries that relationship with it. If you remember one thing from this course, remember that.' Desjardins thanks both guests and says that the course will try to do what Keeshig describes: to help future officers understand the history, law and relationships that shape every contact between police and Indigenous people, and to turn that understanding into better, fairer and safer police work.

The two cases that run through the course

The course follows two files from the Port Ardent Police Service in the winter of 2026. In the first, on Saturday, February 7, Danielle Pelletier came to the front counter of the downtown station at 14:10 to report that her younger sister, Tara, aged 24, had not been heard from since Thursday evening. Tara is a member of Nimkii Bay First Nation and lives in Port Ardent with her partner, Ryan Coulter, who told Danielle that Tara had 'taken off'. The way that report was first received, and then corrected, is the subject of several lessons. In the second file, Kyle Beaudry, aged 20, also from Nimkii Bay, was arrested in the early hours of Sunday, January 18, after a fight outside a bar on Kingsway in which another man suffered a broken cheekbone. Kyle's case follows the path from arrest to sentencing, and the course uses it to study bail, Gladue principles and community-based justice.

Desjardins explains that neither case is unusual. Police services handle missing person reports and bar fights every week. What makes the files worth studying is that the same ordinary calls can go very differently depending on whether the officers understand the people involved, the history that shapes their reactions, the law that applies to them, and the services that exist to help. 'None of this is about treating Indigenous people as a special category of problem,' he says. 'It is about doing the job properly for everyone, which means knowing what properly looks like here.'

Who are Indigenous peoples in Canada?

The Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes three Aboriginal peoples in section 35: the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples. Today the term Indigenous peoples is generally used for all three, and First Nations is used in place of Indian except where the law itself uses the older word. In the 2021 census, 1,807,250 people identified as Indigenous, which is 5.0 in 100 of the population. Of those, 1,048,405 identified as First Nations, 624,220 as Métis and 70,545 as Inuit. Ontario has the largest Indigenous population of any province, at 406,585 people, and it is home to 133 First Nations communities. The Indigenous population is also young: it grew by 9.4 in 100 between 2016 and 2021, almost twice the rate of the non-Indigenous population, and its average age is about eight years younger.

These numbers hide enormous diversity. There are more than 600 First Nations in Canada, speaking more than 70 Indigenous languages from a dozen language families, with their own histories, governments, laws, ceremonies and relationships to the land. The Inuit homeland, Inuit Nunangat, covers about a third of Canada's land mass and includes Nunavut, Nunavik in northern Quebec, Nunatsiavut in Labrador and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Northwest Territories. The Métis Nation emerged from the fur trade in the historic Northwest, with its own language, Michif, and its own political organizations. Officers who learn to say 'Indigenous people' as if it described one group with one culture have learned the wrong lesson.

Where people live matters too. More than half of Indigenous people in Canada live in cities and towns rather than in First Nations communities or other rural areas, and the share living in urban areas has grown steadily. In Port Ardent, the Indigenous population is connected to Nimkii Bay and to dozens of other communities across Ontario and beyond. Many urban Indigenous people move between the city and home communities for school, work, family and ceremony. Tara Pelletier is one of them: she moved to Port Ardent at 19 for a college program, works at a grocery store and goes home to Nimkii Bay most long weekends.

Words matter

Jesse Morningstar tells the class that the words officers use are noticed, remembered and repeated in communities. A report that describes someone as 'a native female' or uses an outdated or insulting term tells the family more about the officer than about the person who is missing. Desjardins agrees and adds that words in reports also travel: they are read by prosecutors, judges, journalists and, years later, by the person described. The safest habit is to ask people how they identify and to use the name of the specific nation when it is known.

Keeshig adds a practical point. 'On a call, nobody expects you to know every nation's name,' he says. 'But they expect you to ask, to write it down properly and to spell it right. If someone tells you they're from Nimkii Bay, don't write "reserve north of town". That's somebody's home.'

Nations, not minorities

The most important idea in this course is that Indigenous peoples are not simply one more minority group. They are the original peoples of the land, with rights that exist because they were here first and governed themselves long before European settlement. Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes and affirms existing Aboriginal and treaty rights. Treaties signed between the Crown and First Nations, from the Peace and Friendship Treaties of the 1700s to the numbered treaties and modern land claims agreements, are agreements between nations, and courts have held that the Crown must act honourably in all its dealings with Indigenous peoples. These are political and legal relationships, not matters of race or culture alone.

This matters for policing in three ways. First, it means that different laws and different police may have authority depending on where a call happens and who is involved, which is the subject of Lesson 5. Second, it means that Indigenous communities have their own institutions, including police services, justice programs and governments, which officers should work with as equals rather than as helpers. Third, it means that the long history of the state's treatment of Indigenous peoples, including the role police played in it, is not a story about the past. It shapes the trust, fear and expectations that people bring to every contact with police today.

Over-policed and under-protected

Desjardins writes a phrase on the board that the class will hear many times: over-policed and under-protected. It sums up what reports, inquiries and research have found again and again. Indigenous people are more likely than others to be stopped, arrested, charged, held in custody before trial and imprisoned. At the same time, they are more likely to be victims of violent crime, and when they are victims, their reports have too often been dismissed, delayed or poorly investigated. Both halves of the phrase are real, and they reinforce each other. A community that has seen its young men arrested again and again and its missing women ignored has little reason to call the police, and a police service that rarely hears from a community has little chance of protecting it.

Lesson 7 looks closely at the evidence of overrepresentation. To give the class a sense of its size, Desjardins puts up one figure from Statistics Canada: in 2023/2024, Indigenous adults made up 33.2 in 100 of the people in custody in six provinces that report detailed data, including Ontario, while they were only 4.3 in 100 of the adult population in those provinces. Lesson 9 looks at the other half of the phrase, including the national crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people.

Linh Tran asks whether the course will spend all its time on problems. Keeshig answers before Desjardins can. 'No,' he says. 'You'll hear about some of the worst things that have happened, because you need to know them. But you'll also hear about communities that run their own police, their own courts and their own healing programs, and about officers who built real relationships. The point isn't to make you feel guilty. The point is to make you useful.'

The principles that run through the course

Six principles appear in every lesson. The first is respect for self-determination: Indigenous nations have the right to govern themselves, and police work best when they support community institutions rather than replace them. The second is that history explains the present: officers cannot understand a family's reaction to a uniform, or a community's silence, without knowing what came before. The third is knowing the law: who has authority, which rights apply and which services exist. The fourth is taking every report seriously, especially reports of missing and harmed people, because the cost of delay has been measured in lives.

The fifth principle is relationships before crises: trust is built at community events, at schools, through regular contact with Nimkii Bay's police service and council and through follow-up after calls, not in the middle of an emergency. The sixth is cultural humility rather than cultural stereotypes: officers should learn about the communities they serve, but they should never assume that a person holds particular beliefs, speaks a particular language or wants a particular kind of help because they are Indigenous. The right approach is to ask, to listen and to offer choices.

What the course is not

Desjardins is careful to set limits. This is not a course in Indigenous spirituality, and officers should not try to perform ceremonies or speak for communities. Elders, knowledge keepers and community members are the right people to teach those things, in their own way and their own time. Nor is it a course that will make anyone an expert on all Indigenous nations. What it can do is give officers the history and law they need, the habits that make contact respectful and effective, and the humility to know what they do not know.

Elder Shawanda adds a final point before she leaves. She says that many people in her community have stories about police, some good and many painful, and that the students will be part of those stories whether they like it or not. 'You will be talked about at kitchen tables,' she says. 'What do you want them to say?'

How the course is organized

Lessons 2 to 4 cover the history and law that frame everything else: colonialism, the Indian Act and residential schools; the long history of policing and Indigenous peoples, from the North-West Mounted Police to Ipperwash; and Aboriginal and treaty rights under the Constitution and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Lessons 5 and 6 cover jurisdiction and policing in First Nations communities, including the First Nations and Inuit Policing Program and self-administered police services such as Nimkii Bay's. Lessons 7 and 8 cover overrepresentation and the courts, including bail and the Gladue principles. Lessons 9 and 10 cover missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people and how police should respond to reports. Lesson 11 covers reconciliation and community safety, and Lesson 12 is a capstone review of the Pelletier and Beaudry files.