Policing and Indigenous peoples: from the North-West Mounted Police to Ipperwash

Sergeant Lisa Haddad of the Port Ardent Police Service, who has worked with the class in several courses, joins Sergeant Paul Keeshig for this lesson. She begins by describing a call she took as a young officer, sixteen years ago, to a house where an Indigenous grandmother was caring for three grandchildren. A neighbour had complained about noise. When Haddad knocked, the grandmother opened the door, saw the uniform, and began to shake. 'I thought she was hiding something,' Haddad says. 'She wasn't. Her own mother had told her, when she was small, that if police came to the door the children would be taken. She'd been afraid of that knock for sixty years. I didn't understand that for a long time, and I handled it badly.'

Desjardins says the lesson is about why that knock carries so much weight. Police were not bystanders in the history covered in the last lesson. They were often the people who carried out the policies, and in some cases they used force against Indigenous people defending their land, their children or their way of life. That history is remembered in communities, and it shapes how people respond to officers today. Understanding it is not a matter of blaming today's officers; it is a matter of understanding the starting point.

The North-West Mounted Police and the West

The North-West Mounted Police were created in 1873 to bring Canadian law to the Prairies, stop the whisky trade and prepare the way for settlement. In the same year, American wolf hunters and traders killed more than twenty Nakoda people in the Cypress Hills Massacre, and the force's arrival was presented to First Nations as a promise of protection. Early relations were sometimes good: some officers were respected for treating people fairly, and the treaties were negotiated with the police present. But the force's main purpose was to secure the land for the government and settlers, and as hunger spread after the collapse of the bison herds, officers enforced the policies that kept people on reserves.

After the North-West Resistance of 1885, the police and the military arrested many First Nations people, including the Cree leaders Big Bear and Poundmaker, who were convicted of treason-felony even though they had tried to restrain the violence. On November 27, 1885, eight Cree and Assiniboine men were hanged together at Battleford, the largest mass execution in Canadian history, and the government required people from nearby reserves to watch. In the years that followed, the police enforced the pass system and helped Indian agents withhold rations. In 1920 the force became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and in many parts of the country its officers were responsible for enforcing residential school attendance, including taking children from their families.

The police also enforced the bans on ceremony. In 1921, after a potlatch at Village Island in British Columbia, police arrested dozens of Kwakwaka'wakw people; many were jailed and the community's ceremonial regalia were confiscated, and some items were sold to museums. The return of those objects, decades later, has been part of reconciliation. Sergeant Keeshig says that in his own territory, elders remember officers who arrived with the Indian agent and left with children. 'We had good police too,' he says. 'Some of them hated what they were made to do. But the people remember the knock.'

Confrontations over land: Oka, Ipperwash and after

In the summer of 1990, the town of Oka, Quebec, planned to expand a golf course onto land that the Mohawks of Kanehsatà:ke considered theirs, including a burial ground. Mohawk protesters blockaded a road. On July 11, the Sûreté du Québec moved in with tear gas and concussion grenades, gunfire broke out and Corporal Marcel Lemay was killed. The standoff lasted 78 days, spread to Kahnawà:ke, where the Mercier Bridge was blockaded, and ended only after the Canadian Armed Forces were deployed. Oka led directly to the creation of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, whose 1996 report remains one of the most comprehensive studies of the relationship.

On September 4, 1995, members of the Stoney Point community occupied Ipperwash Provincial Park in southwestern Ontario, land they said included a burial ground and that had been taken from them during the Second World War for a military camp. Two nights later, on September 6, a riot unit and tactical officers of the Ontario Provincial Police marched on the occupiers in the dark. In the confrontation, Acting Sergeant Kenneth Deane shot Dudley George, an unarmed protester, who died. Deane was convicted of criminal negligence causing death in 1997. The Ipperwash Inquiry, led by Justice Sidney Linden, reported in 2007. It found that the OPP had not been adequately prepared, that racism had been present, that political pressure for a quick end to the occupation had contributed and that the shooting of an unarmed man was unjustified.

The Ipperwash Inquiry made recommendations that still guide policing of Indigenous occupations and protests across Canada. It emphasized that occupations are usually rooted in unresolved land claims and treaty grievances, that governments must address those grievances, and that police should aim for peaceful resolution through communication, patience and negotiation rather than force. The OPP adopted a Framework for Police Preparedness for Aboriginal Critical Incidents, which commits officers to minimal use of force, respect for Aboriginal and treaty rights and constant communication through trained liaison officers. Similar principles have been tested since, including at Caledonia in 2006 and during the enforcement of court injunctions on Wet'suwet'en territory in British Columbia in 2019 and 2020, which drew national protests.

Deaths, investigations and broken trust

Some of the most damaging events have not involved protests at all. In November 1990, a Saskatoon teenager, Neil Stonechild, froze to death on the outskirts of the city. In 2000, after other Indigenous men were found frozen in the same area and one, Darrell Night, reported that two officers had driven him out of town and left him in the cold, the practice that became known as starlight tours came to public attention. A 2004 inquiry led by Justice David Wright found that Stonechild had been in police custody shortly before his death and that the original investigation had been superficial. Two officers in the Night case were convicted of unlawful confinement and dismissed.

In Thunder Bay, Ontario, the deaths of seven Indigenous students who had moved from remote First Nations to attend high school, between 2000 and 2011, led to a coroner's inquest in 2015 and 2016. In December 2018, the Office of the Independent Police Review Director released Broken Trust, a systemic review that found systemic racism in the Thunder Bay Police Service, found that investigations into the deaths of Indigenous people had often been inadequate and recommended that nine deaths be reinvestigated. Across the country, the 2016 shooting death of Colten Boushie, a young Cree man, on a Saskatchewan farm, the acquittal of the farmer in 2018 by a jury with no visible Indigenous members, and a 2021 finding by the RCMP's civilian review commission that officers had treated his mother with insensitivity amounting to discrimination when notifying her of his death, became symbols of the gap between Indigenous people and the justice system.

RCMP commissioners have apologized for the force's role in the residential school system, first in 2004, and many police services have issued apologies for specific failures. Keeshig says apologies matter, but they are measured against the next call. 'Every officer who does it right is part of the apology,' he says. 'Every officer who does it wrong cancels it out.'

What the history teaches police

Desjardins asks the class to draw lessons from the history, and the students produce a list that he sorts into four themes. The first is that police have often been used to carry out government policies against Indigenous peoples, and officers should be alert when an order appears to put them on one side of a political or land dispute. The second is that force used against Indigenous people defending land or rights has repeatedly made situations worse and left lasting damage. The third is that neglect can be as harmful as force: slow responses, dismissed reports and poor investigations have cost lives and trust. The fourth is that trust rebuilt slowly can be lost quickly.

Haddad adds that the history also includes officers who did it differently, and that their example matters. She describes the Nimkii Bay Anishinaabe Police Service, whose officers are mostly from the community, speak with elders before major decisions, and handle many incidents through the community's own processes rather than through arrests. 'They have the same law we do,' she says. 'But they start from inside the relationship instead of outside it. That changes everything.'

Why it matters on an ordinary call

Most officers will never police a blockade. But the same history shapes ordinary calls: the grandmother who shakes when an officer knocks, the young man who refuses to answer questions because his uncle was beaten in a cell, the family that does not report a missing daughter for two days because they assume no one will care. Keeshig says the officers who do well in his community are the ones who expect that reaction and do not take it personally. 'Introduce yourself. Tell them why you're there. Tell them what happens next. Ask if they want someone with them. Then do what you said you'd do,' he says. 'It sounds simple. It is simple. It's also rare.'

Haddad agrees, and she ends by returning to the grandmother at the door. Years later, she says, she was called to the same house when one of the grandchildren, by then a teenager, was the victim of an assault. This time she sat at the kitchen table, explained every step, and brought a victim services worker the family knew. 'She remembered me,' Haddad says. 'She told me I'd been rude the first time. Then she gave me a cup of tea and told me everything I needed to know.'