Natives ill-served by justice system

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Natives have not been well served by the non-Native justice system, the long-awaited Cariboo-Chilcotin Justice inquiry concluded.

The "reactive" attitudes of local RCMP towards Natives, combined with the ignorance of the Canadian justice system of Aboriginal cultures, created a culture clash where the Natives lost out, head commissioner and Judge Anthony Sarich said.

"It wasn't just a police problem, it was a problem with the whole justice system - an attitudinal problem.

Although the report criticized the justice system in general, Sarich focused on the role of the RCMP.

"There were unquestionably some members of the RCMP who used excessive force and intimidization against Native people," he said.

The RCMP had no comment on the report at time of publication. Spokesman Sgt. Peter Montague said the force wants more time to consider the document before making any statements.

An RCMP press release issued Oct. 29 said the force has made "great strides in the last few years in terms of community policing concepts as they apply to the Native communities."

The release also criticized Sarich's report for not emphasizing recent improvement in the "delivery of sensitive, efficient and caring service to our Native communities."

Sarich made several recommendations in the report, including:

- a posthumous pardon from the province and proper burial of five Chilcotin chiefs hung in 1864 after the massacre of 13 whites in what's commonly referred to as the Chilcotin War;

- the province should enter into an accord to ensure traditional lands are not stripped of resources pending treaty and self-government negotiations with First Nations;

- the restructuring of the RCMP complaints system, the establishment of an Aboriginal police force in communities which desire them, the acculturation of selected RCMP to deal with Aboriginal communities and the establishment of ties between RCMP and community leaders;

- increased Aboriginal understanding of and access to the justice system and the operation of law centres involving Aboriginal court workers at Williams Lake and Quesnel.

Many of the problems between Natives and the justice system arose out of ignorance and isolation, Sarich said. The resident so of the Cariboo-Chilcotin area, including the Chilcotin, Shuswap and Southern Carrier, are a "self-contained, tight-knit group of people."

"A good number of the communities are quite isolated from the urban areas and the people don't get to them too often," he said. "It happened to be that, historically, there were problems that arose in their relationships with authority figures in the area and these developed into a bad relationship and continued."

The commission, which commenced hearings in December 1992, heard testimony from more than 80 Aboriginal people and received submissions from he 15 regional bands, provincial and federal governments and the Legal Services Society.

"I was surprised by the amount and the number of things that came out in the inquiry," Sarich said. "There were complaints of excessive force, there were complaints of invasion of privacy, there were complaints of insensitivity."

A large number of complaints centered around the police force because the police were the reactive "first contact" of authority, he said.

"If a problem occurred, then they reacted to the problem. They didn't go into the communities, they didn't make themselves known. They were just simply a force that reacted whenever they were required and they didn't show themselves much on the reserves except when they came on to arrest somebody. They were strangers to the Native people."