Unequal justice: Racist attitudes root cause

A Native activist's untrained eye has detected something that University of Windsor law professor David Tanovich has examined in detail in his recently released book.

Isabel Cuerrier is a Native woman on a mission. She wants to draw attention to what she sees as obvious examples of the unequal application of justice by Canadian authorities when it comes to Native people.

She has written many letters to police services, government ministries and human rights organizations trying to raise awareness of what she sees as differing levels of enthusiasm in police investigations, prosecutions and in sentencing when crimes involve Native people.

Crimes against Native people are not as harshly punished as crimes committed against non-Native people, she argues. And crimes committed by Native people against non-Native people are much more energetically prosecuted and sentences are harsher.

In an open letter that Cuerrier wrote to Amnesty International and Canada's ministers of Justice and Foreign Affairs, she took issue with media reports about the so-called stolen sisters, the estimated 500 missing Native women.

"I believe that officials and police have failed to protect Aboriginal women from violent attacks and most certainly have ignored acts when they occurred. However, I must strongly contest the given statistics over the last 30 years. I firmly believe they are much higher," she wrote.

Cuerrier is a 52-year-old residential school survivor. She is also an author, a sessional university instructor at the University of Brandon (Manitoba), a keynote public speaker, and a loss-grief and childhood sexual abuse workshop facilitator.

She told Windspeaker that her father is non-Native and she does not appear Native. She has been able to fit in to mainstream non-Native society. She grew up on the Pukatawagan reserve in northern Manitoba and though she says she was the victim of physical and sexual abuse, her relatives who do appear Native have been victims of more violence than she can bear to think about.

"Though in many respects my life may appear to be normal, certain burdens within my heart are not. Like many in the Aboriginal community, I am responding to a soul-deep call for enlightenment of our society's dirty secrets. It is time to speak up and place the secrets out where everyone may see them. It is time to talk about the deaths of my own sisters, mother, and grandmother," she wrote.

Her grandmother died in 1981 on the Pukatawagan reserve in northern Manitoba. Police ruled the cause of death was asphyxiation, saying she had choked on her own vomit.

"My family and I travelled north to attend her wake and funeral. During the all-night wake, we all were shocked and dismayed to see her covered in bruises. Something was horribly wrong," she wrote.

In 1986, her 49-year-old mother's body was found near a bridge in Flin Flon, Man. It was reported that she had drowned.

"I made the journey for yet another wake and funeral. I noted nothing out of the ordinary although there were variances in the stories of how she had died," she said.

In 1991, her 28-year-old sister's body was found behind a Main Street hotel in Winnipeg. The death was ruled a suicide. Family and friends disagreed. They believed she had been murdered.

Two-and-a-half years later, the body of her 37-year-old last surviving sister was found in a parking lot in Winnipeg. Officials ruled she died from natural causes.

"What I failed to understand was how natural is a death when the victim's shoes are in one area of the parking lot, and her shirt is lying next to her? Furthermore, during the wake, the family noted a head injury," she wrote.

These were not Cuerrier's only brushes with death. In 1973, her uncle Alison was murdered, stabbed twice in the heart. His killer received three years.

"This sentence pales in comparison to the recent sentence of an Aboriginal man who raped and murdered a little girl in Alberta. On May 26, 2005, he received a life sentence with no chance for parole for 20 years. What's wrong with this portrait? Alison was Aboriginal, and the little girl was not," she said. "Adequate justice for an Aboriginal's murder has been rare as far as I can recall, yet despite this dark and ugly truth, there is a light at the end of the tunnel," she wrote. "Groups, including Amnesty International, are all doing their part to bring about change and, yes, possibly even justice. Many individuals are currently working hard to assist in this struggle for change."

She was delighted when she learned last May that Kingston Police Chief Bill Closs had commissioned a study of who his officers stopped and why. The study revealed that visible minorities were stopped a disproportionate number of times.

Bill Kloss became one of the first police chiefs in Canada to acknowledge that officers make decisions based on racial stereotypes.

"This man is my hero, and I applaud his good heart and intentions. I can only hope that many more forces, groups, and individuals will have a change of heart or a wake-up call. Yes, I call upon all politicians, policy makers, judges, and officers to do something about this travesty of justice to my people," she wrote.

During a phone interview, Cuerrier was asked why she challenged the accepted number of 500 missing Native women.

"When my mother and my grandmother died, it was over and that was the end of the story. There was no investigation into their death. It was kind of swept under the rug. I've talked to many women and they have similar stories and that's the main reason I challenge the stats that were given," she said.
For years, she lived a comfortable life, safe from the ravages of racism because of her non-Native appearance. It was only when she disclosed her Native heritage that she felt the sting of prejudice.
"I have experienced covert, subtle racism. Being treated as an equal and then later on the subject comes up that I'm part Native and then people become condescending-not all people but some," she said. "People would treat me as an equal but then when they'd find out their attitudes would change. That would hurt. That would be very disappointing."

She decided not to mention her heritage for a while. But eventually her conscious started to bother her and she decided to use her skills to highlight the injustices she saw.

Professor David Tanovich isn't at all surprised when he's told of Cuerrier's experience. He said there is a long history of racism and a very deeply ingrained national case of denial in Canada. His superbly researched, ground-breaking recently released book The Color of Justice-Policing Race in Canada makes a powerful case that this state of affairs must be addressed. The first sentence in the introduction to the book says it all: "The color of justice in Canada is white."

But he knows it won't be easy to convince Canadians of that fact.

"It's not recognizing that we have this history of overt racism that prevents people from realizing just how systemic racism is today. That's what distinguishes us from the United States. I mean they're certainly no better but they certainly recognize that it's a problem and certainly recognize that it's their history and they're certainly taught about it. Whereas in Canada it's just completely ignored," he said, during a phone interview on March 21. "I think we've used that to somehow distinguish ourselves from the United States and when we think about race we see it as a problem down south but not here."

One of the best opportunities to start the process is by following through on what Kingston Police Closs has already started, he said.

"The best way to do it in the context of policing is to force the police to keep track of who they stop and search. So that we at least get a sense of who's coming under their radar. Where we have kept track of the data, we're finding out just how many false positives there are. We're really encapturing so many innocent people and missing the real criminals," he said.

He argues that this kind of treatment actually angers members of visible minorities to the point where they may do something unlawful. And since the overwhelming majority of those groups-as is the same with white people-never commit crimes, the misplaced focus on minorities allows the real criminals to go undetected.

One passage in the book superbly illustrates what is wrong with racial profiling.

"Suppose for example that Revenue Canada decided to focus all its attention on restaurant owners because of a belief that a significant percentage of income in this business was not reported," Tanovich wrote. "Assuming that the over-policing worked and a significant number of arrests were made, so that fraud among restaurant owners was 50 times higher than in other businesses, would we be prepared to say that this depiction of fraud rates was accurate?"

That illustration shows, he said, that "arrest rates are more of a reflection of the people the police focus on than a reliable indicator of offending rates."

More research must be done on the profiling of Native people in Canada, the law professor added.
"To the extent that profiling became a national issue in the United States and even in Canada, it largely centred around the black and urban Muslim communities," he said. "Even the data we have in Canada has focussed on the black community in Ontario. There hasn't been a lot of discussion about profiling in the Aboriginal communities. Why is that the case? Is it because it will reveal some other assumptions about Aboriginal offending?"

Another problem that will need to be confronted is that marginalized people are ill-equipped to fight back against unjust treatment.

"In the States racial profiling became such a prominent issue because it was largely impacting on middle class black men. Because they were driving expensive cars and living in affluent neighborhoods, they were being exposed to it," he explained. "They also had access to some power to at least come out and speak out against it. I am troubled about how we don't talk about-at least in the mainstream-profiling in Aboriginal communities. And profiling is seen as one of the causes of over-representation."

Police unions frequently fight when charges of racial profiling are made. Tanovich believes they are unconsciously defending the police right to be racist. The aggressiveness of the unions in protecting their officers has consequences.

"I think that fear of a lawsuit may be one of the reasons, in addition to this denial 'it's not part of our history' and 'it doesn't exist' is part of the reason why we don't have social scientists in Western Canada looking at the problem of profiling in Aboriginal communities," he said.

The resistance offered to the reality of the harm done by racial profiling comes in part because Canadians are very uncomfortable dealing with race issues.

"They are not taught at all what racism is in school. They're not taught about the incidents of racism in Canada. So it's almost like a shock to the system. I think it's a fear also of just looking inward and recognizing that everyone plays some role in the perpetuation of racism. It starts with education in high schools and that will go some distance," he said.