Six Indigenous people in two weeks

The overwhelming silence about police murder in Canada

Early last week, I had received a copy of the script for the Daily News (our wonderful script writer prefers to stay anonymous so many thanks to them!) They had included a story about a police intervention that ended with someone being killed at Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation.

Here’s how CTV’s David Prisciak reported it: “During the police response, RCMP say a firearm was discharged and the suspect was injured as a result.

Officers on scene provided life-saving efforts until paramedics responded.

The man, who was from Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation, was pronounced dead by paramedics at the scene”

Compare that to the ASIRT press release: “Additional RCMP resources arrived at the residence, and at approximately 8:38 a.m., a confrontation occurred between the man and police, during which one member of the RCMP's Emergency Response Team (ERT) discharged a single round from a service firearm, striking the man.

Following the shot, RCMP members provided first aid to the man and contacted EMS. EMS arrived at the scene and assumed responsibility for the man's care, ultimately pronouncing him deceased at the scene.”

Aside: what exactly is the point of CTV if we can read a more full report from the police themselves? Anyway.

As I was reading the script, I knew that there had been another person killed, Iggy Dedam at Elsipogtog First Nation in New Brunswick. Originally announced as a wellness check gone wrong, the RCMP clarified that they were not responding to a wellness check (Assistant Commissioner DeAnna L. Hill didn’t say what they were responding to).

I added the second report to the podcast script.

Two Indigenous people killed in 24h should be national news, but the news was actually far worse than that. In two weeks, six Indigenous people were killed by police in Canada, including a boy — Hoss Lightening — who was afraid for his life and called 9-1-1 to ask for help.

Image compiled by APTN

The six were: Jack Piché, Hoss Lightning-Saddleback, Tammy Bateman, Jason West, Daniel Knife and Steven “Iggy” Dedam.

The news circulated a lot in Indigenous circles online but in the mainstream? Total silence. In fact, if you search for "six Indigenous people in two weeks" online, only two stories pop up: one from APTN and one from CityNews Winnipeg. When I searched on Sept 15 for the names of the victims, the same APTN article is the only one that pops up too. CityNews now appears in a search.

I ran out of time last week to write about this, and I promised myself to do it first thing this week. But it was also on the mind of freelance journalist Brandi Morin, who called out the mainstream media for their lack of attention to this during her keynote address at Unifor’s Media Council this past weekend in Port Elgin, Ontario.

Morin made a critical point during her speech. If the proportion of Indigenous people killed by police was put into the terms of the general population, it would equal 127 Canadians killed by police in two weeks.

Or, we can look at it another way: when six men were killed in a Quebec City mosque by a single shooter, it was widely seen as being a horrific, Islamophobic attack.

But here we have isolated incidents, where people invested with the power of the state, kill with impunity, more or less. Accidental. Unfortunate. In the regular course of duty, these things happen. It’s so mundane and not newsworthy that no non-Indigenous media made the point of identifying this crisis.

The genocide in Canada has never stopped. Relentless posts on social media of desperate mothers and fathers, aunties and cousins, praying through a Facebook post that their beloved isn’t lost forever. The racial segregation that divides who is keeping themselves warm with a fire in a coffee can on the sidewalk versus the ones keeping them warm inside an apartment. The screams that are never responded to by a colonial media that still has not figured out how to shed the whiteness that makes it impossible to cover these issues in the way they deserve to be covered.

Six Indigenous people dead in Canada at the hands of police in less than two weeks is a scandal. A national emergency. A failure of larger proportions of the RCMP failings that lead to the worst massacre in Canadian history. But, the victims weren’t white. They were brown. They were poor. Marginal. Living in conflict with the state by no fault or desire of their own…

If you have a desire to kill people who are Indigenous, who are in mental distress, who are marginalised, become a cop. Being a cop will be your license to commit the most depraved acts you can imagine and still be given a pass. In fact, in much of the coverage, police actually ask us to think of the other victims in these situations — the police who did the killing — without fear that Canadians would rise up against them over such horrifying and blatant racism.