Action must be taken, or everyone complicit

Edith Cloutier is appalled at the situation, but relieved that action is finally being taken in response to allegations by a growing number of Aboriginal women – and a handful of men – that members of the Val-d’Or police abused them.

But it took the airing of the Radio Canada investigative program Enquête in mid-October before Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard responded.

“It needed that because nobody believes us anyway when we come out with something,” said Cloutier, executive director with the Val-d’Or friendship centre.

Cloutier says she made members of the Quebec government aware of the allegations in mid-May following a May 11 roundtable at the friendship centre, when the women spoke about the abuse. Some of the mistreatment dated back two decades.

“This is where the women found cultural safety to talk,” said Cloutier, pointing out that the women, who are marginalized, living on the streets, many working as prostitutes and suffering from addictions, have little confidence they will be heard on their own.

The discussion was sparked by CBC.

“The (CBC crew) came through that door and started speaking to friends of (Sindy Ruperthouse) and through those conversations these things started to come out, how police were treating them,” said Cloutier. Ruperthouse, 45, is an Aboriginal woman who has been missing for 18 months.

In the days that followed the roundtable, three women swore out complaints and members of the Val d’Or police took those complaints. That disturbed Cloutier.

“I needed to raise a very high red flag knowing how issues surrounding Aboriginal people gets very political … and if we want to be heard, knowing the complexity of what was brought to my attention,” she said.

Cloutier wrote a letter to the chief of the Val d’Or police and copied that letter to the provincial ministers of justice, Aboriginal affairs and public security. But she then decided copying letters to the province wasn’t enough.

“I made a cover letter to each minister stating that because of the gravity of what had been brought to my attention directly by those women, I have the moral obligation to request immediate action because of the allegations – and it’s written black and white–sexual abuse and brutality toward Aboriginal women and this is a very high profile issue when you consider missing and murdered Aboriginal women,” she said. “This is basically an issue of systemic racism in the justice and police force.”

Cloutier says she was in contact with investigators from Val d’Or police throughout spring and summer, but things remained at a “very superficial first degree intervention” level. Even letting the provincial government know that a television broadcast was pending on the subject got Cloutier nowhere.

Then Enquête aired on Oct. 22. The following day, Cloutier held a press conference jointly with the family of Sindy Ruperthouse, and Assembly of the First Nations of Quebec and Labrador Chief Ghislain Picard, Grand Council of the Crees Grand Chief Dr. Matthew Coon Come, and Abitibiwinni First Nation Chief David Kistabish.

Only then did the province respond.

Part of that response was Quebec’s public security minister transferring the complaints from the Val d’Or police to the Montreal police force and Couillard appointing an independent observer to oversee the investigation.

Picard said the chiefs wants to appoint their own monitor to oversee the investigation. Fourteen files of allegations were opened and nine Val d’Or police officers, one since deceased, were implicated.

Couillard also said Quebec would consider holding a public inquiry into relations between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals in the province. Cloutier says she and the chiefs want a public inquiry focused on the “authority relationship” between the police and First Nations people.

If there’s going to be such a public inquiry, said Elizabeth Comack, a professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba, the parameters need to be set carefully.

“What’s more important, if you’re going to have an inquest into those sorts of issues, what sorts of questions are you going to ask, what sorts of information are you going to seek? That’s where my concerns would lie, if there’s an inquiry, if it’s framed in a way that it’s really going to address the systemic problem,” said Comack.

Comack is the author of the book Racialized Policing: Aboriginal People’s Encounters with the Police. Published in 2012, the book recounts, among other practises, the Saskatoon police force’s implementation of what became known as ‘starlight tours,’ where the police took intoxicated Aboriginal men and dropped them on the outskirts of the city during the night, including winter months. These tours led to the deaths of a number of these men. The Val d’Or police were accused of similar practises with the Aboriginal women.

Comack says she was not surprised to hear the allegations.

“My response to that was, ‘Still? Instead of ‘not again.’ It’s still going on,” she said.

The accounts published in Comack’s book and now what has happened in Val d’Or is about “reproducing the colonial order. It’s those power relations between Indigenous people and the police and those relations … they’re there to reproduce order, but it’s a particular kind of order they’re reproducing. It’s colonialism,” said Comack.

And until people start accepting this sort of behaviour is happening, nothing will change, she says.

“I really do think denial of the problem of Indigenous police relations is a huge issue. I think we’re in denial of racism, we’re in denial about the ways racism work, how systemic, how embedded it is. Part of what that denial enables, it enables those kinds of practises to continue,” said Comack.

“A lot of the focus has been the Indigenous communities but I think much more of our focus needs to shift on the settlers, (on) the roll we settlers play in reproducing this issue.”

“This has been a shock for everyone, including our leadership in First Nations communities in Quebec. It’s like an earthquake,” said Cloutier. “We have to say the non-Aboriginal community is just as shocked.”

Couillard’s discussion with the chiefs also resulted in his commitment to work with the Val-d’Or friendship centre, providing $6.1 million in investment toward a 24-unit social housing project for Aboriginal families in Val-d’Or; an innovative cultural traditional site in the forest; a pilot project for a day centre for the homeless; and more frontline workers. These projects have been on the books for a number of years, says Cloutier.

“This is a concrete gesture on the part of the Quebec government, supported by the chiefs, because they’re the ones who pushed this thing. Ground zero is Val-d’Or in all of this. We need to make sure there’s a higher level political conversation going on,” said Cloutier.

“If not, taking action is being complicit of the cultural genocide of Aboriginal people (then) if the Quebec government doesn’t act, if our First Nations authorities doesn’t act, then we are all becoming complicit,” she said.