People take part in a march in Mission, B.C., on June 4, 2022. Indigenous leaders have called a meeting with RCMP in Chilliwack, B.C., to discuss how police intend to proceed after a pickup truck driver allegedly hit four members of a memorial march on Saturday.Robert Jago/The Canadian Press
Robert Jago is a freelance writer based Vancouver, and a citizen of the Kwantlen First Nation.
Indigenous people in this country have a policing problem. The RCMP’s inaction after the recent hit and run attack on a residential school awareness march in Mission, B.C., has reminded Canadians that there is a thin blue line blocking the way to reconciliation.
On June 4, I participated in the memorial march organized by the Crazy Indians Brotherhood – a group of First Nations community activists. After the RCMP denied to provide protection for the march, organizers arranged for their own members to direct traffic, with stop signs and high-visibility gear. As the march began to enter the Pekw’Xe:yles Reserve – site of St. Mary’s Residential School – a 77-year old driver in a pickup truck allegedly struck one of the men holding a stop sign, and then allegedly accelerated into a second group, hitting four more people.
A Facebook live stream captured the second collision and, on a video I took a few metres from the truck, you can hear the truck accelerating between strikes. When it was done, he stopped a few car lengths from us, and leaned out of his truck to yell at us. It was a nakedly malicious, reminiscent of a February incident in Winnipeg in which a driver struck four people protesting against COVID-19 restrictions.
The difference between the two events is that in Winnipeg, police quickly arrested and charged the driver. Meanwhile, the attack in Mission was first described by the RCMP as “a case of someone being unhappy that their trip was slightly delayed” by the march. RCMP have not yet filed charges against the driver of the pickup truck, who later turned himself in, stating that they “need to let the evidence guide the investigation.”
However numerous witnesses, myself included, have criticized the police for not collecting evidence. I spoke to police at the scene, and later I reached out by phone to offer video and audio evidence from the incident, including interviews with witnesses. As of the time of writing, the police have not returned my call.
Some are calling the incident a hate crime. While there is some evidence that could suggest that, the motives of the driver are not yet known, and it would be too early to say definitively one way or another. (One witness said she heard the driver shout a racial slur before accelerating into the crowd; she had to post a video to TikTok before the police brought her in to give a statement.)
But we do know what seems to have motivated the police, and their shameful response – study after study has shown what it was. And that is an institutionally entrenched indifference to Indigenous victims of crime.
There have been far too many cases of police refusing to do their jobs when the victim is Indigenous. In Vancouver, the discovery of the body of Cree woman Chelsea Poorman has led to the accusations by her father that police lied about collecting evidence into her disappearance.
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls noted several studies into police inaction when the victim was an Indigenous woman, as did a provincial inquest into the deaths of seven First Nations youth in Thunder Bay. Time and again, it has been found that police are slow to investigate crimes where the victim is Indigenous.
The purpose of the march was to honour the children who attended St. Mary’s Residential School. As Sto:lo people, many of us had family members who attended that school – including my own grandmother. Some of these children didn’t come home – the people responsible have never been brought to justice.
Most children died from disease caused by neglect. That neglect was a symptom of a system that gave them fourth-rate funding, and services and facilities – and it was a product of Canadian leadership, and a Canadian public that didn’t care that this equality gap was leading to so much suffering.
The big problems in this country don’t come from individuals, like the driver that endangered our lives. The big problems come from institutions that fail us. In the past decade, Canada has made a commitment to fix those institutions – and with that repair the relationship between First Nations and Canada. This appears to be a popular move, as we saw on our march. One man attacked us, but there were dozens of drivers who sounded their horns and waved in support of what we were doing.
Canadians “allegedly” don’t want this to be a racist country. To show that they need to speak up against institutions like the RCMP when they don’t treat Indigenous people fairly. We’re not asking for the RCMP to lower a flag, or wear a pin. They don’t need to put an orange sticker on their car, or say a land acknowledgment. All we want is for them to do the thing that cops do – arrest bad guys, no matter what colour the victims are.
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