Building trust: collaboration, training and community safety

Two weeks after Tara Pelletier was found safe, the Port Ardent Police Department held a meeting at the Nimkii Bay tribal community center, an hour across the state line, at the family's request. Danielle Pelletier, Elder Marion Shawanda, Sergeant Keeshig, Sergeant Haddad, Detective Whitlock and Officer Morin sat in a circle with about forty community members. Danielle spoke first. She thanked the officers who had found her sister and described the forty minutes at the front counter. 'I almost left,' she said. 'If I'd left, would anyone have looked for her before Monday?' Haddad answered honestly: probably not. Then she explained what the department had changed since.

Desjardins says the meeting shows what reconciliation means for police. It is not a ceremony or a statement, though those can matter. It is a long series of practical changes, made with communities rather than for them, and measured by whether people are treated better on the next call. Many tribes and federal commissions describe the goal in similar terms: a relationship of respect between governments, built on honesty about the past and on practical changes that let tribes and their citizens be safe.

Commissions, recommendations and consultation

Several federal bodies have set out recommendations for public safety in Indian country. The Indian Law and Order Commission's 2013 report, A Roadmap for Making Native America Safer, recommended that tribes be allowed to opt out of federal and state criminal jurisdiction and exercise full jurisdiction themselves, with federal civil rights protections, and that federal funding for tribal justice be increased and simplified. The Not Invisible Act Commission's 2023 report, Not One More, made recommendations on missing and murdered Indigenous people, including more resources for tribal police and courts, better data, support for families and training developed with tribes. Executive Order 13175, issued in 2000, requires federal agencies to consult with tribes on policies that affect them, and many agencies, including the Justice Department, have formal consultation policies.

Progress has been uneven. Federal funding for tribal justice has grown but remains below what tribes and the BIA itself have said is needed, and many recommendations, including the opt-out proposal, have not been adopted. At the same time, real changes have been made: the Tribal Law and Order Act, the restoration of tribal jurisdiction over non-Indians in the Violence Against Women Act reauthorizations, the 2020 laws on missing and murdered Indigenous people, the Tribal Access Program and, at the state level, dozens of task forces, liaison positions and agreements. Desjardins tells the class that local police agencies do not have to wait for Congress. Many of the most practical changes are within their own control.

What police services can change

Haddad describes the changes Port Ardent has made since the Pelletier case, most of them developed with the Nimkii Bay tribal government and urban Native organizations. Every missing person report now goes to a supervisor for a risk assessment within fifteen minutes, whatever the officer taking it thinks. Front-counter officers have a short guide on what not to say, including the phrase 'adults have the right to go missing' unless a supervisor has assessed the risk as low. Missing person reports now include a field, completed by asking, for Indigenous identity and nation, so that the department can measure how such cases are handled. And every high-risk missing person case is automatically assigned a family liaison officer.

Other changes are longer-term. The department has an Indigenous advisory circle that meets four times a year with the chief, including Elder Shawanda, representatives of the Nimkii Bay tribal government and tribal police, and urban Native organizations in Port Ardent and Toledo. Recruits now spend a day on the Nimkii Bay reservation during their field training, and every officer takes a full-day course on Indigenous history and law, taught partly by community members. The department has a written protocol with the Nimkii Bay police on shared cases, which was rewritten after the Pelletier case to cover missing persons explicitly. And the recruiting unit has a goal of doubling the number of Indigenous officers within five years, supported by a cadet program with the college.

Measuring whether it works

Desjardins says that changes like these are easy to announce and hard to sustain, and that the only real test is whether people are treated better and trust grows. Services can measure that in several ways: how quickly missing person reports are assessed and acted on, how many cases involve Indigenous people and how their outcomes compare, how many complaints come from Indigenous community members and what they concern, how many officers have completed training, and how many Indigenous people the service recruits and keeps. Surveys of community members, done with the community and reported back to it, show whether people would call the police and whether they think they would be treated fairly. Some states and cities require police agencies to collect and publish data on stops and use of force by race, including American Indian and Alaska Native identity, which gives agencies and communities a way to see patterns.

Community safety from inside the community

Many tribes have built their own approaches to community safety that go well beyond policing. Nimkii Bay's community safety committee, made up of elders, parents, tribal council members and the tribal police, runs youth evenings at the community center, a land-based summer program, a walk-home program for women and girls coming back late from town, and a phone tree for when young people go missing. Each month, the tribal police, the health clinic, the school, the tribe's child welfare program and the housing office meet to discuss people at acute risk before something goes wrong. Port Ardent has started a similar table for its urban Native residents, with a seat for a Nimkii Bay representative.

Jesse Morningstar tells the class that these programs matter more to him than anything about jurisdiction. 'The best call is the one that never happens,' he says. 'The kid who's at the youth night instead of at the party. The woman who has a ride home. The guy who gets into treatment before he breaks somebody's face. Police are part of that, but only part. If you want to help, show up at the hockey game and the feast, not just the crime scene.'

Acknowledgments, apologies and their limits

Many police services now begin events with a land acknowledgment, recognizing the Indigenous nations whose territory they are on. Elder Shawanda says a land acknowledgment can be meaningful when it is specific, accurate and followed by action, and empty when it is read from a card by someone who does not know what it means. Apologies, such as the federal apology for boarding schools in 2024, and acknowledgments by individual agencies of specific failures, can also matter. Haddad says the most important apology she ever saw was not a speech but a detective who went back to a family, years later, to tell them that their daughter's death had been wrongly classified as an accident, and that it was being reinvestigated.

Keeshig returns to his point from Lesson 3: trust is measured on the next call. He asks each student to write down one thing they will do, as officers, that would make an Indigenous family more likely to call them. The answers include learning the names of the nations in their area, always explaining why they are at the door, never telling a family to wait, asking about identity respectfully, going to community events off duty, and calling the tribal police first on any case that might involve their community. Keeshig collects the cards and says he will send them back to each student a year after graduation.

Recruiting and keeping Indigenous officers

Haddad describes the department's recruiting effort with some candour. For years, she says, Port Ardent advertised at job fairs and wondered why few Indigenous applicants came forward. What changed things was relationships: officers coaching youth hockey in Nimkii Bay, a cadet program run with the college, mentors who had been through the process themselves, and a department that people in the community had begun to trust. Keeping officers matters as much as hiring them. Indigenous officers report that they are sometimes treated as the default expert on every Indigenous matter, asked to explain their whole people to colleagues, or caught between loyalty to the community and to the department. Good practice includes support networks, time for ceremony and community obligations, mentoring, and promotion paths that value community knowledge.

Jesse Morningstar, who has accepted a position with the Nimkii Bay tribal police, says the hardest part for him will not be the law or the calls. 'It'll be policing my own family,' he says. 'But I'd rather it was me, who knows them, than someone who doesn't. That's the whole point.' Desjardins says that the best training for officers who are not Indigenous is often the simplest: time spent in communities, listening, outside of calls, and a willingness to be taught by people like Jesse.

Training that works

Training on Indigenous history and law is now common in police services, but its quality varies. Training that works, according to the people who deliver it, is developed and taught with Indigenous communities, uses local history and local people rather than generic slides, connects history to specific police decisions, and is repeated and reinforced rather than delivered once. It includes time in communities, conversations with elders and survivors, and practical scenarios such as a missing person report or a rights claim on a highway. Training that does not work is a one-hour online module completed once and forgotten. Keeshig says he can tell within one call which kind an officer has had.