RCMP Watch

Elise Stolte (Edmonton Journal) - When 10-year-old Agnes Grandbois fled the Onion Lake Residential School in 1916, it was a red-coated Mountie on horseback who chased her down and brought her back.

Decades later, she taught her grandchildren to put on their shoes, even before brushing their teeth in the morning.

“It was so we could run,” recalls her grandson Brian Grandbois, now 50. “When we’re little kids on the reserve and we see a cop car, everybody runs.

“The RCMP are always associated with taking people away.”

The uneasy relationship between police and aboriginal communities has gained national attention.

In 2000, two native men from Saskatoon were found frozen to death outside the city limits, and two police officers were fired after dumping a third, who survived.

In 2005, a native youth from Lytton, B.C., was in the custody of the RCMP and jumped off a CN footbridge.

Out of the resulting fatality inquiry came a call for the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP — an Ottawa-based watchdog group formed by parliament — to make itself more visible in the community.

From that recommendation grew a pilot project, which partners the commission with native friendship centres in six communities across Canada. The purpose is to teach community members how to file complaints when they believe they are mistreated.

“Most of our people won’t complain because nothing is done,” says Grandbois, a painter and oilpatch worker who lives on Cold Lake First Nation reserve, 300 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.

“We’re guilty. We’re born with handcuffs.”

One week ago, members of the commission travelled to Cold Lake to hold a session teaching members of the community how to file a complaint against the RCMP.

The session was attended by only about a dozen people; the effort was met with suspicion.

One man walked out of the meeting muttering, “I’ve got several complaints,” after telling how RCMP broke his arm while he was handcuffed.

Only 60 per cent of Canadians policed by the RCMP feel comfortable submitting a complaint against an officer at their local detachment, according to surveys sponsored by the commission.

Brooke McNabb, commission vice-chair, believes that number is a lot higher for aboriginal people and new Canadians, though his evidence is only anecdotal.

Today’s troubled relations between the two groups certainly have roots in history, says McNabb, a former criminal lawyer and former professor of conflict resolution at the University of Winnipeg.

Problems that developed over generations can’t be solved in a year — or even a decade, he says.

“If it’s generational, it just takes time. It’s a process,” McNabb says.

“I think it’s fair to say there was significant mistreatment of the aboriginal community by non-aboriginal people, and that’s not pointing the finger at the RCMP. That’s us and we’re changing.”

At the Cold Lake detachment, RCMP Staff Sgt. Brian Halladay says members have a very good relationship with the local aboriginal community. He credits this largely to strong lines of communication between police members and band council.

Last year, Halladay took a three-day canoe trip with band members, tracing a traditional migration route from Primrose Lake to Cold Lake. He keeps in regular contact with council members, and the detachment’s aboriginal community constable, Trevor Cardinal, makes daily visits to the reserve school.

The Cold Lake detachment also has a high ratio of aboriginal members. Six out of 19, or 32 per cent, of members have an aboriginal heritage, compared with seven per cent in the force nationwide.

Cardinal is a Métis from Lac La Biche. He followed his uncle and joined the RCMP, convinced he could “build a bridge over a gap that didn’t need to be there,” he says, drinking coffee at the detachment before taking McNabb out on a ride-along of the community.

He’s been working on the reserve for the past seven years — longer than any other member at the detachment — and has seen children go from wandering off at the sight of his car to flocking toward it and calling his name — “Const. Trevor.”

When the kids come, the adults follow.

Sometimes victims of crime will call the detachment and refuse to speak to any other officer except him, Cardinal says.

“It’s trust through time. If you can’t come to me, what am I doing here?” he says. “My feeling is, a lot of things come out in the open because I’m around.”

Cardinal’s dark eyes and black hair both help and hinder him. He gets called an apple — red on the outside, white on the inside — and a traitor.

Yet in the end, it’s the person inside the uniform that needs to be sensitive and can make a difference, Cardinal says.

Cardinal won’t be around in Cold Lake forever. With seven years under his belt, his superiors are already talking about arranging a transfer. RCMP policy doesn’t favour anyone remaining in one detachment too long.

Agnes Gendron, a great-grandmother of five and executive director at the Cold Lake Native Friendship Centre, says the change in relations will come as more and more aboriginal people know their rights and stand up for them.

People complain to her when the RCMP keep people too long in the cells, interview teenagers without parents present, and fail to intervene in situations of domestic abuse.

Not long ago, a social worker was going to apprehend two young children from the reserve school. “Two little kids and there were three police cars,” Gendron recalls.

“What does that say to the community? That they can strong-arm you?”

Years ago, she also taught her children to avoid police because their skin colour would make them a target.

“If you’re there, you’re going to be the first one dinged,” she told them.

Her children got in some trouble for small stuff, she says, but her grandchildren are wiser and more educated.

She sees that in other families, too.

“There’s more young people that are lawyers, and we even have a judge now,” she says. “I think attitudes are slowly changing.”