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http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/ending-violence-against-aboriginal-women-focus-of-action-plan-1.3056303

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http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/disturbing-trend-in-debate-on-inquiry-into-missing-murdered-aboriginal-women-1.2749508

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https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/world/americas/canada-indigenous-women-highway-16.html

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Highway of tears | The Canadian Encyclopedia

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Highway of tears | The Canadian Encyclopedia

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Warning sign on the section of British Columbia Highway 16 known as the "Highway of Tears," located 31.4 km north of Smithers.

Context

The Highway of Tears refers to a section of Yellowhead Highway 16, from Prince Rupert on the northwest coast of British Columbia to the central interior city of Prince George, British Columbia. Twenty-three First Nations border Highway 16. The region is characterized by poverty and, until 2017, lacked adequate public transportation, which forced many locals to resort to hitchhiking as a form of transit.

The exact number of women who have disappeared or been murdered along Highway 16 is disputed. The RCMP acknowledges 18 murders and disappearances in its list of Highway of Tears cases, dating from 1969 to 2006 (the RCMP also include women who have disappeared from Highways 97 and 5 in British Columbia). Ten of these 18 victims are Indigenous women and girls. However, Indigenous groups argue that this number is misleading because it reflects only the disappearances and murders that have happened in the specific geographic areas around these highways and that the real number in Northern British Columbia exceeds 40. According to Human Rights Watch - an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights - British Columbia has the highest rate of unsolved murders of Indigenous women and girls in Canada. ( See also Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada).

However, this problem is not unique to British Columbia. Considered a national crisis by many Canadians, the federal government announced in 2015 that it would launch an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. In that year, Carolyn Bennett, now federal minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Canada, claimed that the national number of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in Canada is likely over 1,200.

Each reported case of a woman's disappearance, or confirmation of a recovered body, has a cumulative effect within First Nations communities along the highway and across Canada: one of growing fear, frustration and sorrow.

RCMP Investigations, 1981-2005

In 1981, the RCMP organized a conference to investigate the growing number of unsolved cases of murdered and missing women along Highway 16 and other highways in interior British Columbia. Known as the Highway Murders, these cases involved women who either were found dead near Highway 16 or were last seen in that area, often hitchhiking. Approximately 40 police detectives from British Columbia and Alberta attended the conference. Close investigation of the cases revealed a number of similarities, including reports of suspicious vehicles and the names of persons of interest. While the Highway Murders initiative identified prime suspects in certain cases between 1981 and 2005, women continued to disappear, or were found murdered, along the Highway of Tears in British Columbia.

RCMP Project E-PANA, 2005

In response to some commonalities between the murder cases of three women (Alisha Germaine, Roxanne Thiara and Ramona Wilson), the British Columbia RCMP's Unsolved Homicide Unit created Project E-PANA in the fall of 2005 to investigate other cases of murdered and missing women and girls in the area along Highway 16. This project was named, in part, after an Inuit word describing the spirit goddess that looks after souls just before they go to heaven or are reincarnated.

The RCMP use three criteria when reviewing the cases of missing and murdered women to determine whether they should be included in the Project E-PANA investigation:

1. The victim was involved in a high-risk activity that would expose them to danger, such as hitchhiking or being involved in street trade (prostitution);

2. The victim was last seen, or their body was discovered, within one mile of British Columbia Highway 16 (in 2007, this was broadened to include Highways 97 and 5;

3. They were female.

In 2005, when E-PANA was first launched, the RCMP identified nine victims who had gone missing or had been found murdered along Highway 16 (from 1989 to 2006): Alisha Germaine, Roxanne Thiara, Ramona Wilson, Aielah Saric-Auger, Tamara Chipman, Nicole Hoar, Lana Derrick, Delphine Nikal and Alberta Williams. All but one of these victims - Nicole Hoar - were Indigenous.

In order to broaden the investigation, the RCMP used the computer software system, ViCLAS (Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System), as well as other databases and missing person records. In addition, the geographic area under investigation increased from 724 km (Prince Rupert, British Columbia to Prince George, British Columbia) to approximately 1,500 km, which included not only Highway 16 to Hinton, Alberta, but also sections of Highways 97 and 5. This led the RCMP to double the number of Highway of Tears victims from nine to 18, all of whom were murdered or disappeared over a 37-year period (1969 to 2006). The nine additional Highway of Tears victims are: Shelley Bascu, Maureen Mosie, Monica Jack, Monica Ignas, Colleen MacMillen, Pamela Darlington, Gale Weys, Micheline Pare and Gloria Moody.

Victims

From the earliest to the most recent case, the following women are under E-PANA investigation:

Gloria Moody (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Gloria Moody, aged 27, and a mother of two, was last seen leaving a bar in Williams Lake, British Columbia, on 25 October 1969. Her body was found the next day.

Micheline Pare (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Micheline Pare was last seen in July 1970 along the Fort St. John/Hudson's Hope, British Columbia Highway. Her body was found 8 August 1970 near Hudson's Hope. She was 18 years old.

Gale Weys (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Gale Weys, a 19-year-old from Clearwater, British Columbia, was last seen hitchhiking in October 1973, and her remains were found in April 1974. The RCMP suspected Bobby Jack Fowler in her death, but no conclusive evidence existed to convict him.

Pamela Darlington (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Pamela Darlington was a 19-year-old Kamloops, British Columbia, resident who was found murdered in a local park in November 1973. The RCMP suspected Bobby Jack Fowler was responsible for her murder, but no conclusive evidence existed to convict him.

Monica Ignas (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Monica Ignas was 15 years old when she was last seen walking along Highway 16 in Thornhill near Terrace, British Columbia, in December 1974. Her body was found four months later, a few kilometres east from where she disappeared.

Colleen MacMillen (Status: Murdered and Solved)

Colleen MacMillen was 16 years old in August 1974 when she left her family home in Lac La Hache, British Columbia, to hitchhike to visit a friend. Her remains were found one month later. Thirty-eight years later, in October 2012, DNA evidence led the RCMP to announce their belief that Bobby Jack Fowler was Colleen's murderer. Fowler died in an Oregon prison in 2006.

Monica Jack (Status: Murdered and Solved)

Monica Jack was the youngest victim at 12 years old. She disappeared in May 1978 while riding her bike near Merritt, British Columbia. Her remains were found in 1996. Garry Taylor Handlen, a 67-year-old man, was charged in 2014 for her death and that of an 11-year-old girl, Kathryn-Mary Herbert, unrelated to the Highway of Tears investigation. Though Handlen claims he is not guilty of killing Jack, prosecutors maintain that he confessed to the crime during a conversation with an undercover RCMP officer prior to his arrest. Handlen's trial began in 2018 in the British Columbia Supreme Court. In January 2019, a jury found Handlen guilty of the first-degree murder of Jack.

Maureen Mosie (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Maureen Mosie was 33 years old when she was last seen hitchhiking near Salmon Arm, British Columbia, on 8 May 1981. Her body was found at the end of a run-off lane leading to Highway 97.

Shelley (Shelly-Anne) Bascu (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Shelley Bascu was 16 years old when she disappeared from Hinton, Alberta. She was last seen by witnesses on 3 May 1983 near Highway 16.

Alberta Williams (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Alberta Williams disappeared in August 1989 at the age of 24. Her body was found several weeks later near Prince Rupert, British Columbia. In 2016, CBC News produced an eight-part podcast about her death entitled Who Killed Alberta Williams?

Delphine Nikal (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Delphine Nikal disappeared on 14 June 1990. Aged 16, she was hitchhiking on Highway 16 between Smithers, British Columbia, and her home in Telkwa, British Columbia.

Ramona Wilson (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Aged 16, Ramona Wilson was hitchhiking to her friend's home in Smithers, British Columbia, on 11 June 1994. Her remains were found in April 1995, alongside Highway 16, near the Smithers Airport. Ramona was a member of the Gitanmaxx Band. Her tragic story was part of a 2006 documentary film by Métis filmmaker Christine Welsh, Finding Dawn, about missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada.

Roxanne Thiara (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

At the age of 15, Roxanne Thiara disappeared in November 1994 from Prince George, British Columbia. Her body was found near Burns Lake, British Columbia, off Highway 16.

Alisha (Alishia) Germaine (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Living in Prince George, British Columbia, Alisha Germaine was 15 years old at the time of her disappearance. Her body was found near an elementary school, close to Highway 16 West, on 9 December 1994.

Lana Derrick (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Lana Derrick, a teen from the Gitanyow Band, was 19 years old when she disappeared on 7 October 1995. Last seen at a gas station near Terrace (Thornhill) in British Columbia, she was traveling east on Highway 16 to her home in the Hazelton area. She was enrolled in studies at Northwest Community College in Houston, British Columbia.

Nicole Hoar (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Nicole Hoar was from Alberta and working in the Prince George, British Columbia, area as a tree planter. She was last seen hitchhiking from Prince George to Smithers on Highway 16 West. Nicole was 25 years old at the time of her disappearance on 21 June 2002.

Tamara Chipman (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Tamara Chipman was 22 years old when she disappeared on 21 September 2005. She was last seen hitchhiking on Highway 16 near the Prince Rupert, British Columbia, industrial park. Tamara's home community was Moricetown First Nation.

Aielah Saric-Auger (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Aielah Saric-Auger was 14 years old and a student at D.P. Todd Secondary School in Prince George, British Columbia, when she went missing. She was last seen by her family on 2 February 2006. Her body was found on 10 February 2006, in a ditch along Highway 16, approximately 15 km east of Prince George.

Cases Outside E-PANA Investigations

Indigenous groups claim that there are more missing and murdered women and girls than Project E-PANA acknowledges. These include, but are not limited to:

Helen Frost (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Helen Frost was a 17-year-old teenager living in Prince George, British Columbia, at the time of her disappearance. On the evening of 13 October 1970, she left her apartment in the 1600 block of Queensway Avenue for a walk and never returned.

Virginia Sampare (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Virginia Sampare was one of six children in her family. On 14 October 1971, her cousin, Alvin, saw her for the last time. She was standing near a bridge on Highway 16, outside her First Nation community of Gitsegukla, British Columbia. She was 18 years old.

Cecilia Nikal (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Cecilia Nikal was 15 years old when she was last seen in 1989. Her family claims she went missing along Highway 16 in Smithers, British Columbia. However, the police believe she went missing from Vancouver. Therefore, she is not on the RCMP's Highway of Tears list.

Deena Braem (Status: Murdered and Unsolved)

Deena Braem was 16 years old when she was last seen alive, hitchhiking to her home in the Bouchie Lake area from Quesnel, British Columbia, on 25 September 1999. Her body was found on 10 December 1999, in an area northwest of Quesnel, near Pinnacles Provincial Park.

Bonnie Marie Joseph (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Bonnie Marie Joseph was 31 years old when she was last seen in the Vanderhoof, British Columbia, area on 8 September 2007. This Indigenous woman from the Yekooche Band in the Fort St. James area was known to be very independent and was also known to hitchhike frequently between the communities of Fort St. James, Vanderhoof and Prince George, British Columbia.

Madison Scott (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

On 28 May 2011, 20-year-old Madison Scott, also known as "Maddy," went missing while camping at Hogsback Lake, located approximately 25 km southeast of Vanderhoof, British Columbia. Her pickup truck and tent were found at the campground with no sign of her, despite an extensive ground, water and air search.

Immaculate Basil (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Immaculate Basil, also known as "Mackie," was last seen walking on a forest service road northwest of Fort St. James, British Columbia, on 13 June 2013. Despite extensive ground searches, she was never found. Immaculate was 26 years old when she disappeared.

Anita Thorne (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Anita Thorne is a 49-year-old Prince George resident who has not been seen by family members since the evening of 19 November 2014. Her car was discovered the next day at a Highway 16 rest area approximately 35 km east of Prince George, British Columbia.

Doreen Jack and family (Status: Missing and Unsolved)

Nothing underlines the profound sense of loss and tragedy surrounding the unsolved cases of missing and murdered women and girls along the Highway of Tears more than the case of Doreen Jack, as it was not just she who disappeared on the highway, but her entire family. On the evening of 2 August 1989, Doreen's husband, Ronald, met a man at a local pub in Prince George, British Columbia, where the man offered him a job at a ranch or logging camp. That night, the family prepared for the trip to the area of Ronald's new job. Around 1:30 am, Ronald called his mother from a resort located approximately 50 km west of Prince George, British Columbia on the Highway of Tears, informing her that he, Doreen, and their two boys, nine-year-old Russell and four-year-old Ryan, were leaving for about two weeks. That was the last anyone ever heard from the Jack family.

Solved Cases

In 2012, the Project E-PANA investigation unit achieved a breakthrough in the case of 16-year-old Colleen MacMillen, who disappeared in 1974. DNA evidence linked American felon Bobby Jack Fowler to her murder. The RCMP also indicated he was a strong suspect in two other Highway of Tears Project E-PANA cases: those of 19-year-olds Gale Weys and Pamela Darlington.

In December 2014, an arrest was made in the murder of Monica Jack. Having confessed to an undercover police officer that he committed the crime, Garry Taylor Handlen was charged with first-degree murder in the case of Monica Jack and in another case, both going back nearly 40 years. Handlen's trial began in 2018. The following year, he was found guilty of murdering Jack.

While no new cases have been added to the RCMP investigation since 2007, the use of forensic evidence has helped investigators to arrest and charge some of the perpetrators, and to keep these cold cases open. The RCMP reports that since the creation of E-PANA, it has collected 750 DNA samples, conducted 2,500 interviews, investigated 1,413 persons of interest and administered 100 polygraphs.

Private Investigations

Police investigators have not been the only ones searching for the person(s) responsible for the abductions and murders of women and girls along the Highway of Tears. Some families of lost loved ones have launched their own investigations with the assistance of those in their community.

Private Investigator Ray Michalko, an ex-RCMP officer, has also been on a personal mission to solve the Highway of Tears cases. Without any compensation or pay, Michalko has made numerous trips to British Columbia's North-Central Interior to meet with the victims' families and conduct his own personal investigations.

Controversies

There is still much debate over the exact number of women who have gone missing on or near the Highway of Tears. Many in the Indigenous community claim that this number exceeds 40. Some argue that socio- economic inequalities limit the resources available to fund searches and awareness campaigns. Others contend that systemic racism, as well as lack of knowledge about Indigenous issues, prevents proper investigations into these cases.

Inequalities in Investigations

Some activists argue that institutional racism and sexism has affected the searches for missing and murdered Indigenous women. Although disappearances date back to at least 1969, activists point to the fact that the RCMP did not launch E-PANA until 2005. In addition, the case which has arguably received the most media attention is that of Nicole Hoar, a non-Indigenous woman who disappeared in 2002. While some credit Hoar's case with initiating investigative efforts into the matter of missing and murdered women, others claim that her case likely received special attention because she is white.

A 2012 Human Rights Watch investigation and report titled, Those Who Take Us Away, reveals a deep distrust of the police amongst Indigenous peoples in Northern British Columbia, due to experiences of discrimination and abuse. Those experiences have influenced their perceptions of the Highway of Tears investigations. According to some families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the police had assumed that many of the women were drunk, prostitutes or had consented to sex before their disappearance or murder. As a result, they argue, these women were ignored by police, and essentially blamed for their own murder or disappearance.

Others contend that Hoar's case received more attention because her family and friends had access to greater financial resources and social connections than did most other families of missing and murdered women. In the case of Hoar, the city of Red Deer, Alberta, did some very effective fundraising to support the investigation. Similarly, Madison Scott's family had extensive financial and networking resources, resulting in a large monetary reward for information about her disappearance, multiple billboards along the highway, posters and bumper stickers and a website dedicated to her case. In contrast, most Indigenous families have limited resources compared to non-Indigenous families. The families of missing or murdered women will use every resource and recourse available to them in efforts to find their loved ones or solve their murders. However, poverty, lack of resources and the marginalization of Indigenous families limit family efforts in launching effective public awareness campaigns for their missing or murdered loved ones.
Email Scandal
In October 2015, an email scandal among government officials in British Columbia raised doubt about the handling of the investigations. Access Denied, a 65-page report written by Elizabeth Denham, the province's Information and Privacy commissioner, outlines how government officials "triple deleted" emails relating to the Highway of Tears, permanently removing them from the government's computer system. In so doing, Denham argues that these officials breached the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. This scandal only adds to the concerns of activists and Indigenous groups that the Highway of Tears is seemingly irrelevant to certain high-ranking officials.

The 2006 Highway of Tears Symposium

The families of missing and murdered women have been at the forefront in raising public awareness for their lost loved ones. These families initiated a number of Highway of Tears awareness campaigns and walks over the years, culminating in one of the most notable walks, which started in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and ended in Prince George, British Columbia, on 30 March 2006. The end of that walk signaled the start of a Highway of Tears Symposium attended by the victims' families and over 500 delegates representing all sectors of society, including the RCMP and various levels of government.

The 2006 Highway of Tears Symposium was a collective and unifying voice from the victims' families and the community. The symposium report made 33 recommendations in the following areas:

1. Victim Prevention

2. Emergency Planning and Team Response

3. Victim Family Counselling and Support

4. Community Development and Support

Few of these recommendations were implemented. However, the announcement of a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women in 2015 has led some to believe that real change is on the way.

National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Street art in Montreal

Activists had long called for a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Elected in October 2015, the federal Liberal government promised to hold a national inquiry into Canada's missing and murdered women. From December 2015 to February 2016, the government completed a series of Canada-wide meetings with the victims' families, to determine both the expectations and scope of a national inquiry on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Hopes are high that the national inquiry will result in significant action - action that the families of victims along the Highway of Tears have been working towards for more than a decade.

On 3 August 2016, the federal government launched the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, naming five commissioners and outlining its terms of reference. It committed $53.86 million over two years to the initiative, with the goal of producing recommendations on concrete actions to address the disproportionately high rate of violence toward ​Indigenous women and girls in Canada. The inquiry set out with a focus on prevention in addition to tackling issues of systemic and societal discrimination.

Transit Response

After much public pressure, BC Transit started three new bus routes along Highway 16 in 2017. One actively services the areas between Smithers and Moricetown. The other two service the areas between Burns Lake and Smithers, and between Burns Lake and Prince George. Although the 2006 Highway of Tears Symposium recommended a shuttle, it took over a decade to see any change.In 2018, the province's Ministry of Transportation reported that about 5,000 people have used the new bus routes in first year of service.

Greyhound Canada announced in 2018 that it would stop servicing routes along the Highway of Tears, as well as other stops across Canada. The mayor of Smithers, Taylor Bachrach, has argued that the expanded local transit service along the Highway of Tears does not make up for the services Greyhound offered. Claire Trevena, the province's Minister of Transportation, said she plans to work with the communities affected by this service disruption to "ensure their [ transportation] needs are met."

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The Highway of Tears refers to a 724 km length of Yellowhead Highway 16 in British Columbia where many women (mostly Indigenous) have disappeared or been found ...

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Dozens of Women Vanish on Canada's Highway of tears | Canadian Encyclopedia

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Dozens of Women Vanish on Canada's Highway of tears | Canadian Encyclopedia

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A billboard along Highway 16. The stretch of road is known as the Highway of Tears because dozens of women, mostly aboriginal, have been murdered or have disappeared in the area. Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

SMITHERS, British Columbia - Less than a year after her 15-year-old cousin vanished, Delphine Nikal, 16, was last seen hitchhiking from this isolated northern Canadian town on a spring morning in 1990.

Ramona Wilson, 16, a member of her high school baseball team, left home one Saturday night in June 1994 to attend a dance a few towns away. She never arrived. Her remains were found 10 months later near the local airport.

Tamara Chipman, 22, disappeared in 2005, leaving behind a toddler. "She's still missing," Gladys Radek, her aunt, said. "It'll be 11 years in September."

Dozens of Canadian women and girls, most of them indigenous, have disappeared or been murdered near Highway 16, a remote ribbon of asphalt that bisects British Columbia and snakes past thick forests, logging towns and impoverished Indian reserves on its way to the Pacific Ocean. So many women and girls have vanished or turned up dead along one stretch of the road that residents call it the Highway of Tears.

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The sparsely populated landscape along the highway. Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

A special unit formed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police officially linked 18 such cases from 1969 to 2006 to this part of the highway and two connecting arteries. More women have vanished since then, and community activists and relatives of the missing say they believe the total is closer to 50. Almost all the cases remain unsolved.

The Highway of Tears and the disappearances of the indigenous women have become a political scandal in British Columbia. But those cases are just a small fraction of the number who have been murdered or disappeared nationwide. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have officially counted about 1,200 cases over the past three decades, but research by the Native Women's Association of Canada suggests the total number could be as high as 4,000.

In December, after years of refusal by his conservative predecessor, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a long-awaited national inquiry into the disappearances and murders of indigenous women.

The inquiry, set to cost 40 million Canadian dollars ($31 million), is part of Mr. Trudeau's promise of a "total renewal" of Canada's relationship with its indigenous citizens, and it comes at a critical time.

Aboriginal women and girls make up about 4 percent of the total female population of Canada but 16 percent of all female homicides, according to government statistics.

Carolyn Bennett, the minister of indigenous and northern affairs, has spent months traveling across the country to consult with indigenous communities. During her meetings, families and survivors have complained of racism and sexism by the police, who she said treated the deaths of indigenous women "as inevitable, as if their lives mattered less."

"What's clear is the uneven application of justice," Ms. Bennett said.

One reason to doubt the estimate by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, she said, is that the police often immediately deemed the women's deaths to be suicides, drug overdoses or accidents, over the protests of relatives who suspected foul play. "There was no investigation," she said, citing one recent case. "The file folder's empty."

A United Nations report last year described measures by the previous government to protect aboriginal women from harm as "inadequate" and said that the lack of an inquiry into the murders and disappearances constituted "grave violations" of the women's human rights. Failures by law enforcement, it added, had "resulted in impunity."

Ms. Radek, a co-founder of Tears4Justice, an advocacy organization, said, "When it comes to the missing, racism runs deep."

The federal government has allocated 8.4 billion Canadian dollars ($6.4 billion) over five years to aid indigenous communities, which have disproportionately high levels of poverty, incarceration, alcoholism and substance abuse, and often lack basic necessities like safe drinking water.

Drucella Joseph and her boyfriend, Corey Coombes, waiting along Highway 16 near Houston, British Columbia, in hopes of catching a ride. Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Ms. Bennett said the breakdown in aboriginal communities was the product of generations of socioeconomic marginalization and trauma tied to government policies. Particularly damaging was a state-financed, church-run boarding school system for aboriginal children who were forcibly taken from their families by officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Many of the 150,000 children who were sent to residential schools over a century became victims of physical and sexual abuse. The program was fully shut down in the mid-1990s.

Covering 450 miles between the city of Prince George and the Pacific port of Prince Rupert, the Highway of Tears is both a microcosm of Canada's painful indigenous legacy and a serious test for Mr. Trudeau as he tries to repair the country's relationship with aboriginal people.

On a recent journey along Highway 16, scenes of stunning wilderness were flecked by indigenous communities reeling from economic decay and the anguished memories of missing and murdered women.

A few miles outside Prince George, the highway plunges into thick forests veined with logging roads and the occasional "moose crossing" sign. "Girls Don't Hitchhike on the Highway of Tears," reads a large yellow billboard alongside the road farther north. "Killer on the Loose!"

As a bald eagle soared overhead, Brenda Wilson, 49, the Highway of Tears coordinator for Carrier Sekani Family Services and the sister of one of the victims, gestured to the wall of evergreens that flank the road. "The trees are really dense here, so if you're looking for someone, it's pretty hard to find them," she said, listing the names of several women who are still missing.

Matilda Wilson wiping leaves off her daughter's gravestone at a cemetery in Smithers, British Columbia. Her daughter, Ramona, 16, disappeared in 1994, and her body was found 10 months later. Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

The provincial government announced plans in December to improve safety along Highway 16, including funds for traffic cameras and vehicles for indigenous communities. But little has changed on the road, which lacks lighting or any public transportation other than infrequent Greyhound bus service that does not reach remote communities.

The perils do not stop desperate people from thumbing rides in a region where public transportation is practically nonexistent. Just outside the village of Burns Lake, Drucella Joseph, 25, an unemployed aboriginal woman, eagerly climbed into the back of a passing car along with her boyfriend, Corey Coombes. "Friends will drive me when I really need a ride, but other than that, we just hitchhike," she told the driver. The couple gets by on his disability payments and on donated food from food banks. Neither has a cellphone. When hitchhiking, Mr. Coombes says he protects himself by carrying a club or a screwdriver.

British Columbia is infamous for serial killers and criminals who often targeted aboriginal women. In 2007, Robert William Pickton, a pig farmer, was convicted of killing six women, though the DNA or remains of 33 women were discovered on his land. Many of them were aboriginal. One of Canada's youngest serial killers, Cody Legebokoff, was 24 when he was convicted in 2014 of killing four women near the Highway of Tears. David Ramsay, a former Prince George provincial court judge and convicted pedophile, was imprisoned in 2004 for sexually and physically assaulting indigenous girls as young as 12.

Anguished family members said they received little help from the authorities, a sharp contrast to the cases of missing white women. After Ms. Chipman vanished in 2005, her aunt, Ms. Radek, said the police objected to the family putting up its own missing posters. "They knew we were searching day and night, and they did nothing to help us," she said. The next day, she said, a white woman disappeared near Vancouver "and the police were out in the streets putting up posters."

After her daughter Ramona disappeared in 1994, the police refused to act, said Matilda Wilson, a member of the Gitxsan First Nation. "They gave us all these different excuses that she might be back tomorrow or next week," Ms. Wilson said. "There was no hurry or alarm about it, so we started looking ourselves."

From left, Eryn Joseph, Rochelle Joseph, Tiniel Namox and Tricia Joseph near Highway 16 in Moricetown, British Columbia. The women grew up hearing about the victims. Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Despite multiple searches, Ms. Wilson, a single mother of six who is now 65, said there was no sign of Ramona until she had been gone for seven months, when Ms. Wilson received an anonymous phone call telling her that the girl's body was near the airport. Police officers searched the area but found nothing, she said. In April 1995, two men riding all-terrain vehicles by the airport discovered Ramona's remains buried under some trees. Plastic flowers and a glass cross now decorate her grave in a Smithers cemetery, a few blocks from Ms. Wilson's tidy trailer-park home.

Angry with the police for failing to find the teenager or to alert people to the history of missing women near Highway 16, Ms. Wilson and her family organized a memorial walk in June 1995 that has become an annual event, garnering attention from the news media and inspiring activism from families of other missing women.

"We want closure, and we're not going to give up," Ms. Wilson said as she swept leaves from her daughter's gravestone.

One recent afternoon, three young aboriginal sisters and their female cousin were walking across the Moricetown Indian Reserve, which abuts the highway. Asked about the Highway of Tears, one of the women, Rochelle Joseph, an unemployed 21-year-old, said the sisters never hitchhiked because they grew up hearing about the victims, including their cousin, Ms. Chipman.

Still, the menace of the highway haunts their lives.

"The stories made us cautious," Ms. Joseph said quietly, voicing their fear of a serial killer lurking behind the steering wheel of any strange car. "He's probably still out there."

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Dozens of Women Vanish on Canada's Highway of Tears, and Most Cases Are Unsolved (Published 2016)

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SMITHERS, British Columbia - Less than a year after her 15-year-old cousin vanished, Delphine Nikal, 16, was last seen hitchhiking from this isolated northern Canadian town on a spring morning in 1990. Ramona Wilson, 16, a member of her high school baseball team, left home one Saturday night in June 1994 to attend a dance a few towns away.

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RCMP say Highway of tears killers may never be caught

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RCMP say Highway of tears killers may never be caught

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A decade after the launch of the RCMP's high-profile E-PANA investigation into missing and murdered women in Northern B.C., police admit they may never find the killers or make more arrests.

'Perhaps they'll never be solved'

"I've been honest with our [victims'] families and I say perhaps they'll never be solved," RCMP Staff Sgt. Wayne Clary of the E-PANA unit told CBC host Anna Maria Tremonti during a town hall meeting on missing and murdered women, which was packed with several hundred people in Prince George Thursday night.

For a decade, E-PANA has been investigating the cold case deaths and disappearances of 18 young women along a 720-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 in Northern B.C. dubbed the Highway of Tears, as well as stretches of highways 5 and 97. "Pana" is an Inuit word for the god who cared for souls in the underworld.

At the height of E-PANA's work, 70 people worked the investigation. Now, just eight investigators are left.

"That's the reality and that's what I tell the families," said Clary. "We can't keep that going forever when there's no work."

RCMP have named 2 suspects in 4 women's deaths

E-PANA was launched in 2006 amidst outrage over the number of deaths and disappearances of mostly Indigenous young women in Northern B.C.

Indigenous leaders said 50 girls and women had been murdered or had gone missing between Prince George and Prince Rupert since 1970.

E-PANA initially took on nine of those cases, and soon expanded it to 18 across a wider area, re-interviewing witnesses and families, following new leads and tips and converting 700 boxes of dusty police files into a searchable database.

Officers have identified a suspect in three of the murders, but that man is now dead.

A different man has been charged in the death of Monica Jack, but that case is still before the courts.

Still, many families are still waiting for answers and justice for their missing and murdered loved ones.

"We care and we're trying and we'll keep following up on the tips and interviews that come in," said Clary.

'These ... are the toughest to investigate'

"These kinds of stranger-on-stranger investigations are the toughest to investigate, especially in this area where it's very isolated, it's very lonely. A lot of these crimes happened a long time ago. Some of our victims don't get found, some don't get found right away, and evidence is lost," said Clary.

"Witnesses die. They may or may not know they had important information and [now] we'll never retrieve it. In some cases, some of the men who committed these crimes are dead," said Clary.

Still, Clary says when victims' families hold vigils or walk the Highway of Tears, the media attention often triggers a spike of tips to police.

"It's important to keep this alive," Clary said.

'I imagine 50 women missing from West Vancouver'

"It's the people from the communities that are going to solve these crimes," he said. "We've turned over every stone we can."

"Who's protecting our young Indigenous girls and women?" asked Mary Teegee, the director of child and family services at Carrier Sekani Family Services in Prince George.

"I often imagine 50 women missing from West Vancouver. What would be the outcry? For one thing, the [death toll] would never reach that in West Vancouver."
With files from Liz Hoath

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RCMP say Highway of Tears killers may never be caught | CBC News

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A decade after the launch of the RCMP's high-profile E-PANA investigation into missing and murdered women in Northern B.C., police admit they may never find the killers or make more arrests. "I've been honest with our [victims'] families and I say perhaps they'll never be solved," RCMP Staff Sgt.

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Inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women issues final report with sweeping calls for change

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Inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women issues final report with sweeping calls for change

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Inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women issues final report with sweeping calls for change | CBC News

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After more than three years, dozens of community meetings and testimony from well over 2,000 Canadians, the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls inquiry delivered its final report to the federal government at a ceremony in Gatineau, Que., today.

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Backgrounder - National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

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Backgrounder - National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

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Eliminating violence against Indigenous women and girls is an urgent issue in Canada. The Government of Canada is committed to addressing the systemic causes of violence and increasing the safety of Indigenous women, girls and LGBTQ and Two Spirit people.

In 2016, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was launched as a key government initiative to end the disproportionally high levels of violence faced by Indigenous women and girls. The Inquiry was also the Government of Canada's response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Call to Action #41.

The National Inquiry conducted in-depth study and analysis between September 2016 to December 2018 on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, including LGBTQ and Two Spirit people, collecting information from community and institutional hearings; past and current research; and forensic analysis of police records. The Inquiry also gathered evidence from over 1,400 witnesses, including survivors of violence, the families of victims, and subject-matter experts and Knowledge Keepers.

On November 1, 2017, the National Inquiry issued its Interim Report, and the Government of Canada has taken a family-first approach to addressing the recommendations contained therein, recognizing the significant strength and courage of the family members of murdered or missing Indigenous women and girls that contributed to the Inquiry. This included an allocation of $50 million in funding to:

provide health and support services to survivors and families of missing and murdered women and girls, including LGBTQ and Two Spirit people;

support a national oversight body at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police;

support a review of police policies and practices; and,

commemorate the lives and legacies of Indigenous women and girls.

The Path Forward
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls presented its Final Report to families, survivors, Indigenous leaders, as well as federal, provincial and territorial governments at a televised closing ceremony in Gatineau, Quebec, on June 3, 2019. At this event, the Prime Minister stressed the Government of Canada's commitment to addressing this issue.

The Government of Canada welcomes the release of the Final Report and is committed to ending the ongoing national tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ and Two Spirit people, and to help prevent and eliminate violence against them in future generations. It is an integral part of the Government's commitment to reconciliation.

The Inquiry's Final Report is far-reaching and deals with many underlying systemic issues. Its recommendations, directed towards multiple levels of government and various stakeholders, will help identify the Government of Canada's next steps in preventing the systemic violence that has resulted in this national tragedy.

The recommendations require careful consideration and examination in order for the Government of Canada to establish a holistic and effective path forward that will empower Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ and Two Spirit people. As next steps, the Government of Canada will be reviewing and bring forward a National Action Plan to address violence against Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ and Two Spirit people.
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Commemoration Fund
The National Inquiry reminds us that commemoration is an essential part of truth gathering, healing, and reconciliation.

The Government of Canada created the Commemoration Fund to address recommendations and calls for early action from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls interim report. The Fund will invest over $13 million over two years to help honour the lives and legacies of missing Indigenous women and girls, and LGBTQ and Two Spirit people.

In February 2019, Minister Monsef issued a Call for Proposals through the Department for Women and Gender Equality's Women's Program, soliciting Indigenous governments and organizations working with families, survivors, and communities to develop and implement commemoration initiatives for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and LGBTQ and Two Spirit people. The Department for Women and Gender Equality has a longstanding relationship with Indigenous women's organizations, particularly addressing the issue of violence against Indigenous women and girls, both through funding opportunities and ongoing dialogue.

After the call closed on March 28, 2019, the Department engaged Indigenous external review committees, composed of affected individuals, including family members, community representatives, Indigenous artists and grassroots advocates, to review and recommend proposals for funding. Over 100 projects have been approved.

Commemoration includes honouring, educating, remembering, memorializing and paying tribute to missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ and Two Spirit people, and acknowledging the broad and systemic causes of this violence. It is an important part of the healing journey for families and survivors, public education and awareness, and bringing communities together as part of the reconciliation process. Examples include (but are not limited to):

Holding events that contribute to healing by acknowledging those who were murdered or went missing, and bringing people together to share and support one another.

Creating items that leave a legacy or educate people about missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ and Two Spirit people.

Coordinating and supporting commemoration initiatives.

Developing and implementing region-wide or nation-wide commemoration initiatives.

Funded projects
Today's announcement highlighted over 100 groups receiving financial support for commemorative projects under the Commemoration Fund:

Abegweit First Nation Mi'kmaq Wellness Centre

Aboriginal Friendship Centre of Calgary

Aboriginal Friendship Centres of Saskatchewan

Aboriginal Legal Services

Aboriginal Shelters of Ontario

Aboriginal Women's Association of Prince Edward Island Inc.

Aboriginal Women's Organizing Network Society

Aimayunga Women's Shelter

Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation Tribal Council

All Nations Hope Network Inc.

ANDPVA

Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Secretariat Inc.

Atikameksheng Anishnawbek

Atlohsa Native Family Healing Services Inc.

Bear Standing Tall & Associates

Big Cove First Nation Wellness Committee Inc.

Blood Tribe Department of Health Inc.

Brandon Friendship Centre Inc.

Carcross/Tagish First Nation

Carrier Sekani Family Services Society

Central Urban Métis Federation Inc.

Conayt Friendship Society

Congress of Aboriginal Peoples

Conseil Atikamekw de Manawan

Conseil de la Nation Anishnabe de Lac Simon

Conseil de la Première Nation Abitibiwinni

Creating Hope Society of Alberta

Cree Women of Eeyou Istchee Association

Curve Lake First Nation

Driftpile Cree Nation

Dze L K'ant Friendship Centre Society

Eagle Vision Inc.

Ebb and Flow First Nation

Eskasoni Band Council

Federation of Saskatchewan Indians Inc.

Femmes Autochtones du Québec Inc.

File Hills Qu'Appelle Tribal Council

Fort Nelson First Nation

Fort William First Nation

Friendship House Association of Prince Rupert

Ganohkwasra Family Assault Support Services

Grande Prairie Friendship Centre

Ikayuqtiit Inc.

Indian Residential School Program

Indian Residential School Survivor's Society

Indigenous Women's Association of the Maliseet and Mi'kmaq Territories Inc.

Indigenous Women's Sharing Society

Kermode Friendship Society

Kokums and Mochums Against Drugs and Alcohol Inc.

Ktunaxa Nation Theatre Dance Ttoupe Society

La Maison Communautaire Missinak

La Ronge Native Women's Council Inc.

Labrador Friendship Centre

Legacy of Hope Foundation

Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak/Women of the Métis Nation

Les Filles de Madelaine Secretariat Inc.

Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation

Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Inc.

Manitoba Moon Voices Inc.

Mannawanis Native Friendship Centre Society

M'Chigeeng First Nation

Métis Central Western Region 2 Council. Inc.

Miawpukek First Nation

Minwaashin Lodge - Indigenous Women's Support Centre

Missanabie Cree First Nation

Morning Sky Health and Wellness Society

Mushuau Innu First Nation Band Council

Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre

Native Child and Family Services of Toronto

Native Women's Association of the NWT

Newfoundland Aboriginal Women's Network

Niwasa Kendaaswin Teg

Nokiiwin Tribal Council Inc.

North Peace Tribal Council

N'Swakamok Friendship Centre

Nunatsiavut Government

Onion Lake Cree Nation MMIWG

Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres

Ontario Native Women's Association

Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada

Prince Albert Grand Council

Prince George Red Dress Society

Puakuteu comité de femmes de Mashteuiatsh

Qaggiavuut! Nunavut Performing Arts Society

Qalipu First Nation

Reconciliation Regina Inc.

Rolling River

Sacred Fire Productions

Sagkeeng First Nation

Samson Cree Nation

Sixties Scoop Indigenous Society of Saskatchewan Inc.

Skeetchestn Indian Band

Southeast Resource Development Council Corp.

Southern Chiefs Organization Inc.

Stó:lō Nation Society

Support Network for Indigenous Women & Women of Colour

Tillicum Lelum Aboriginal Society

Touchwood Area Tribal Council

Tungasugit Inc.

Union of Ontario Indians

Victoria Native Friendship Centre

Whitefish River First Nation

Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve

Women of The First Light

Yukon Aboriginal Women's Council

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Backgrounder - National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

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Eliminating violence against Indigenous women and girls is an urgent issue in Canada. The Government of Canada is committed to addressing the systemic causes of violence and increasing the safety of Indigenous women, girls and LGBTQ and Two Spirit people.

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Victimization of Indigenous Women and Girls

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Victimization of Indigenous Women and Girls

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Victimization of Indigenous Women and Girls
PDF Version
July 2017

Research and Statistics Division

Victimization of Indigenous Women and Girls

While all women and girls in Canadian society face an unacceptable risk of violence, particularly at the hands of intimate partners, research shows that Indigenous women and girls self-report experiencing dramatically higher rates of violent victimization.

Self-reported rate of sexual assault of Indigenous women more than triple that of non-Indigenous women

According to the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) on Victimization, the rate of self-reported sexual assault of Indigenous people (58 E per 1,000) was almost triple that of non-Indigenous people (20 per 1,000). The rate of sexual assault self-reported by Indigenous women (113 E per 1,000) was more than triple that of non-Indigenous women (35 per 1,000).

Self-reported rate of maltreatment of Indigenous girls before the age of 15 close to triple that of Indigenous boys

There was a higher proportion of Indigenous people who self-reported being physically or sexually maltreated before the age of 15 (40%) than non-Indigenous people (29%). More specifically, a larger proportion of Indigenous girls (14%) self-reported experiencing both physical and sexual maltreatment before the age of 15 than Indigenous boys (5% E).

Self-reported spousal violence of Indigenous women three times higher than non-Indigenous women

The 2014 GSS found that 10% E of Indigenous women self-reported having been assaulted by a current or former spouse within the last five years compared with 3% of their non-Indigenous counterparts. The proportion of self-reported spousal violence against Indigenous women was almost twice as high in the territories (19%) than in the provinces (10% E).

Injury in cases of self-reported spousal violence more common for Indigenous women victims

According to the 2014 GSS on Victimization, injury in cases of self-reported spousal violence is more common for Indigenous female victims (51%) than for non-Indigenous female victims (39%). Of these Indigenous female victims, almost half (56% E) self-reported severe forms of spousal violence (i.e. where the victim was sexually assaulted, beaten, choked, or threatened with a gun or a knife).

Indigenous female victims of spousal violence more likely to fear for their lives

The 2014 GSS also highlights that Indigenous female victims were more likely to fear for their lives (53% E) in comparison to non-Indigenous female victims (29%). Indigenous females (25%) were also more likely than non-Indigenous females (13%) to self-report emotional or financial abuse by a current or former spouse. In a little over nine out of ten cases (96%), an Indigenous female victim of physical violence also self-reported an emotional or financial victimization.

Indigenous mothers have higher self-reported frequency of abuse compared to non-Indigenous mothers

Daoud et al. (2012) found that self-reported abuse towards Indigenous mothers was higher (31%) than that reported by non-Indigenous mothers (12%). The most common perpetrator was a partner, husband or boyfriend. The study also showed high proportions of abuse among lone-mothers (35%). In another study, Daoud et al. (2013) found that close to one third (31%) of Indigenous mothers reported being a victim of abuse and 16% reported being a victim of intimate partner violence (IPV). In comparison, 12% of non-Indigenous mothers reported being a victim of abuse and 6% reported being a victim of IPV.

IPV can worsen after a separation

It is common for IPV to worsen after a separation. A study by Pedersen et al. (2013) found that 22% of Indigenous women self-reported being a victim of post-separation intimate partner violence (PSIPV) compared to 7% of non-Indigenous women within five years after the separation. Results showed that coercive control and age were predominant factors explaining the inequalities in PSIPV between Indigenous women and non-Indigenous women. The study found that Indigenous women experience more coercive control than non-Indigenous women and that more of them were younger than their non-Indigenous counterparts.

About a third of Indigenous female victims of spousal violence contact a formal victim service

The 2014 GSS on Victimization showed that 71% of Indigenous women who were victims of spousal violence contacted a formal victim service. The 2013/14 Transition Home Survey (THS) show a total of 5% of all shelters are located on reserves. In addition, more than half (63%) of the shelters in Canada reported offering culturally relevant services for Indigenous women, 46% reported offering culturally relevant services for Indigenous children and 21% reported having available services in at least one Indigenous language (primarily Cree, Ojibway or Inuktitut). Although the THS did not report on the Indigenous identity of its clients, there were more admissions in the territories and in western provinces. A previous THS (2005/06) collected data on the nature and use of shelters situated on reserves. Facilities on-reserve were twice as likely to be emergency-oriented than those off-reserve. As well, the on-reserve shelter clientele was more likely to have previously used the shelter compared to clients in off-reserve shelters. Finally, while the majority of women in shelters both on- and off-reserve were fleeing abuse, the proportion of those on-reserve fleeing abuse was slightly higher (78% and 73%, respectively).

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GSS results have consistently showed that the self-reported rate of spousal violence is much higher among Indigenous women than non-Indigenous women (see for example: Boyce, J. 2016; Brennan, S. "Violent victimization of Aboriginal women in the Canadian provinces, 2009." Juristat. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 85-002-X, 2011; Brownridge, D.A. "Male Partner Violence against Aboriginal Women in Canada - An Empirical Analysis." Journal of Interpersonal Violence 18: 65, 2003; Brownridge D.A. "Understanding the Elevated Risk of Partner Violence against Aboriginal Women: A Comparison of Two Nationally Representative Surveys of Canada." Journal of Family Violence 23: 353, 2008.

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PDF Version July 2017 Research and Statistics Division While all women and girls in Canadian society face an unacceptable risk of violence, particularly at the hands of intimate partners, research shows that Indigenous women and girls self-report experiencing dramatically higher rates of violent victimization.

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Common Concerns

Despite differences among First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities, Indigenous women have some common concerns with the Indigenous population as a whole, many of which stem from European colonization. In addition to the loss of their territories in the 19th century, Indigenous people also lost their traditional livelihood and self-sufficiency. Moreover, social, economic and political marginalization, as well as racial stereotyping, discrimination, and the loss of culture, language and often pride, left Indigenous people in Canada with little social or political power. This contributed to economic inequality and even poverty. Urban and rural Indigenous communities continue to struggle with a lack of education, employment, skills, opportunities and income equity. ( See also Economic Conditions of Indigenous Peoples in Canada and Social Conditions of Indigenous Peoples in Canada.)

Demographic Characteristics

According to the 2016 census, Indigenous people make up 4.9 per cent of the total population of Canada. The Indigenous population is growing rapidly, with a 45 per cent increase between 1996 and 2006. In 2016, Statistics Canada reported the population has increased 42.5 per cent since 2006. ( See also Demography of Indigenous Peoples in Canada.)

Although mortality rates have improved over the last two decades, life expectancy for Indigenous people is less than that of the overall Canadian population. Indigenous people also continue to suffer a higher infant mortality rate. Indigenous mortality and fertility rates show a slow trend toward convergence with the Canadian rates. ( See also Health of Indigenous Peoples in Canada.)

More young Indigenous women migrate to urban centres than do men, especially from small northern communities. This migration may be caused by the lack of opportunities for advancement on reserves and in rural areas as well as the perceived abundance of opportunities, particularly education, in urban centres. Studies also show that many of these young women are single parents. ( See also Urban Migration of Indigenous Peoples in Canada.)

Poverty, single parenthood, unemployment and poor housing continue to affect Indigenous women in Canada. These concerns are often more acute in the North, where rural, isolated communities of Inuit, Métis and First Nations people generally suffer higher rates of illness and have fewer services for the well-being and protection of women and children.

Women and the Indian Act

The is federal legislation that pertains to First Nations people. ( Inuit and Métis do not fall under the Act.) Until 1985, the Indian Act took away the rights of women with Indian Status if they married someone without status. Bill C-31 changed the Act in that year by bringing it in line with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The 1985 amendment allows women who "married out" - and those who lost their Indian Status by other means - to apply for the restoration of their status and rights. Bill C-31 also allows their children to apply for registration as Status Indians. The Act no longer requires or allows women to follow their husbands into or out of status.

Since the amendments to the Indian Act in 1985, the number of registered Indians has more than doubled, from approximately 360,000 in 1985 to more than 778,000 in 2007. The increase is a result of more births over deaths as well as through "reinstated" Indian Status.

However, while the amendment addressed discrimination against women, it also created some problems. By placing these women, and often their children, onto First Nations band membership lists, the government stretched already limited lands and funds to serve more people. This has, at times, caused resentment and backlash toward these people by First Nations members.

Further, Bill C-31 created two categories of Indian registration that have had consequences on the number of people entitled to Status Rights. The first, known as sub-section 6(1), applies when both parents are or were entitled to registration. The second, known as sub-section 6(2), applies when one parent is entitled to registration under 6(1). Status cannot be transferred if that one parent is registered under sub-section 6(2). In short, after two generations of intermarriage with non-status partners, children would no longer be eligible for status. This is known as the "Second-Generation Cut-Off" rule. The amendment therefore significantly limits the ability to transfer status to one's children.

Many Indigenous peoples have brought cases against the Indian Act to Canadian courts, including the Bedard case (1971), Lavell case (1973), McIvor case (2007) and Descheneaux case (2015). In 2017, Parliament passed Bill S-3, an Act to eliminate sex-based inequities in Indian registration.

Stereotypes, Violence and the Justice System

Indigenous women have confronted unique problems stemming from stereotypes of them perpetuated by non-Indigenous men since contact. The image of the "Indian princess" gave way to that of the promiscuous "squaw" which rendered Indigenous women vulnerable to violence and mistreatment. Early observations and oral history indicate that widespread violence accompanied the colonization of North America. The removal of Indigenous people from their land, their placement on reserves and the loss of the traditional male roles of hunter-provider have caused role conflicts, frustration and anger which often finds its outlet in violence against women.

The cycle of violence, combined with the poverty and deprivation facing many Indigenous people in Canada, is connected to a higher rate of incidents involving the law than the general population. Simple failure to pay fines accounts for many incarcerations. Lack of resources and few choices often result in limited recourse for Indigenous women. ( See also Indigenous Peoples in Canadian Law.)

High rates of domestic violence afflict Indigenous women throughout North America. The Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba (1990) noted that one in three Indigenous women suffered abuse at the hands of her partner. The findings from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) supported the view that the constant challenges to the culture and collective identity of Indigenous people weakened the communities and contributed to group and individual alienation that led some to self-destruction and anti-social behaviour. In 2014, Indigenous women were nearly three times as likely to report being a victim of spousal violence as non-Indigenous women.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

Although Indigenous women make up about 4 per cent of the female Canadian population, they are significantly overrepresented among missing and murdered women. ( See also Highway of Tears.)

The issue gained increased awareness and attention after Amnesty International published Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Violence and Discrimination against Indigenous Women in Canada (2004) and No More Stolen Sisters (2009). Research conducted by the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) established a database of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. In 2011, the NWAC database included 582 known cases, most of which had occurred between 1990 and 2010.

In 2013, the RCMP launched an investigation into the problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. The report (published in 2014) revealed that from 1980 to 2012, a total of 1,181 Indigenous women were murdered or were considered missing. As of September 2013, 164 Indigenous women were considered missing, 11.3 per cent of all missing women in Canada. As Indigenous women comprise 4 per cent of the entire female population in Canada, this number is disproportionately high. More striking was the revelation that 1,017 Indigenous women had been murdered in this period - 16 per cent of the total for all women homicides in Canada.

In the wake of the RCMP report, calls for a national inquiry into the problem increased. However, the federal government only launched a national public inquiry on 8 December 2015.

The National Inquiry's final report was completed and presented to the public on 3 June 2019. It declared violence against Indigenous women and girls "a national tragedy of epic proportion." The commissioners called for a new era in relations between Indigenous women, girls, LBGTQ+ (see also Two Spirit) and the Canadian people - a relationship centred on the empowerment of Indigenous women and girls. (See also Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada.)

Sterilization of Indigenous Women

Sterilization has been imposed on Indigenous women in Canada. Sexual sterilization legislation was passed in Alberta (1928-72) and British Columbia (1933-73), and increasingly targeted Indigenous women. Coerced sterilization of Indigenous women took place both within and outside existing legislation, and in federally operated Indian hospitals. The practice has continued into the 21st century. Approximately 100 Indigenous women have alleged that they were pressured to consent to sterilization between the 1970s and 2018, often while in the vulnerable state of pregnancy or childbirth. ( See also Sterilization of Indigenous Women in Canada.)

Stérilisation des femmes autochtones

La stérilisation a été imposée aux femmes autochtones au Canada. La législation relative à la stérilisation sexuelle a été adoptée en Alberta (1928-1972) et en Colombie-Britannique (1933-1973). Elle a de plus en plus ciblé les femmes autochtones. La stérilisation forcée des femmes autochtones s'est effectuée aussi bien à l'intérieur qu'à l'extérieur du cadre législatif de l'époque, et dans des hôpitaux indiens gérés par le gouvernement fédéral. Cette pratique s'est perpétuée jusqu'au 21 e siècle. Près de 100 femmes autochtones ont déclaré avoir été forcées à accepter d'être stérilisées entre les années 1970 et 2018, souvent alors qu'elles étaient dans un état vulnérable associé à une grossesse ou à un accouchement. ( Voir aussi Stérilisation des femmes autochtones au Canada.)

Indigenous Women and Politics

While many Indigenous women share goals for the advancement of their people, their voices are often ignored by the Indigenous leadership and male-dominated political organizations. During the Canadian Constitution talks of 1992, the independent national Native Women's Association of Canada was not granted a seat to take part in the talks with the federal government, provincial premiers and the four major Indigenous organizations.

Other Indigenous women's organizations formed as dependent adjuncts to the national and regional bodies including the Métis National Council of Women (now Women of the Métis Nation) and the Saskatchewan Indian Women's Association (now the Saskatchewan First Nations' Women's Commission). There are many small grassroots-oriented regional and local women's groups which receive little funding and therefore have difficulty operating in and serving Indigenous communities.

In 2012, there were 111 women chiefs out of 633 First Nations across Canada. Although the percentage of female Indigenous chiefs in 2012 was only 17.5 per cent, this was slightly higher than the percentage of female mayors of Canadian cities. Some of the earliest high-profile Indigenous women include: Rosemarie Kuptana, president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Mary Simon of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and Wendy Grant-John, the first woman to be elected Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief for British Columbia.

Women in Leadership Roles

A growing number of Indigenous women have held leadership roles in regional and national political organizations. Nellie Cournoyea, a Northwest Territories MLA, became the first female premier of a Canadian territory (1991-95), and Ethel Blondin-Andrew was a Member of Parliament until 2006. Elected as a Conservative MP for Nunavut in 2008, Leona Aglukkaq became the first Inuk to be sworn into the Federal Cabinet when she was appointed Minister of Health. Aglukkaq stepped down from that post in 2012 to become the Chair of the (eight-nation) Arctic Council. Shelly Glover, a Manitoba Métis, was first elected in 2008 to represent Saint Boniface as an MP, and is the first policewoman in Canadian Parliamentary history. In 2013, she was appointed Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages. In 2019, Mumilaaq Qaqqaq, Inuk Member of Parliament, became, at age 25, Nunavut's youngest MP in history, and the first from the New Democratic Party (NDP) since Nunavut became a territory in 1999.

Additionally, many Indigenous women today are leading the way in the area of healing the wounds of colonization, as they grapple with the issues of residential schools, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, abuse and violence, and drug, alcohol and other addictions. (See also Indigenous Feminisms in Canada.)

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First Nations, Métis and Inuit women (collectively referred to as Indigenous women) face many socio-economic issues today because of the effects of coloniz...

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Abusive Policing and Failures in Protection of Indigenous Women and Girls in Northern British Columbia, Canada

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Abusive Policing and Failures in Protection of Indigenous Women and Girls in Northern British Columbia, Canada

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On December 5, 2012, a man walking his dog found the murdered body of 16-year-old Summer Star (C.J.) Fowler in a ravine near the British Columbia (BC) town of Kamloops. The Gitanmaax teenager from Hazelton in northern BC, remembered as a sweet girl with a beautiful smile by her family, had been visiting friends a few days previously and was just hours away from taking a bus back home when she disappeared and was ultimately killed in circumstances still under investigation by police. Speaking at a news conference, her father said, "We would just like to stop this violence ... We want some answers and we don't want this case to be another they stick under the rug."

C.J. Fowler is just one of several hundred indigenous women and girls who have been murdered or gone missing across Canada over the last several decades. By the time government funding for data collection on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls ended in 2010, the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) had documented 582 such cases nationally. Many happened between the 1960s and the 1990s, but 39 percent occurred after 2000, or about 20 a year. If women and girls in the general Canadian population had gone missing or been murdered at the same rate, NWAC estimates the country would have lost 18,000 Canadian women and girls since the late 1970s.

The province of British Columbia has been particularly badly affected by violence against indigenous women and girls and by the failure of Canadian law enforcement authorities to deal with the phenomenon. Cutting through the small communities policed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in northern BC is the Highway of Tears, a 724-kilometer stretch of road which has become infamous for the dozens of women and girls who have gone missing or been murdered in its vicinity.

The high rates of violence against indigenous women and girls have drawn widespread expressions of concern from national and international human rights authorities, which have repeatedly called for Canada to address the problem. But these calls for action have not produced sufficient change and indigenous women and girls continue to go missing or be murdered in unacceptably large numbers.

The failure of law enforcement authorities to deal effectively with the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in Canada is just one element of the dysfunctional relationship between the Canadian police and indigenous communities. This report addresses the relationship between the RCMP and indigenous women and girls in northern BC and documents not only how indigenous women and girls are under-protected by the police but also how some have been the objects of outright police abuse. The report further documents the shortcomings of available oversight mechanisms designed to provide accountability for police misconduct and failure to protect.

In ten towns across the north, Human Rights Watch documented RCMP violations of the rights of indigenous women and girls: young girls pepper-sprayed and Tasered; a 12-year-old girl attacked by a police dog; a 17-year-old punched repeatedly by an officer who had been called to help her; women strip-searched by male officers; and women injured due to excessive force used during arrest.

Human Rights Watch heard disturbing allegations of rape and sexual assault by RCMP officers, including from a woman who described how in July 2012 police officers took her outside of town, raped her, and threatened to kill her if she told anyone. Human Rights Watch strongly urges an independent civilian-led investigation of these allegations with the aim of achieving criminal accountability for the alleged crimes. Human Rights Watch would eagerly cooperate with such an investigation to the extent we are able to without compromising the safety and privacy of victims.

For many indigenous women and girls interviewed for this report, abuses and other indignities visited on them by the police have come to define their relationship with law enforcement. At times the physical abuse was accompanied by verbal racist or sexist abuse. Concerns about police harassment led some women - including respected community leaders - to limit their time in public places where they might come into contact with officers. The situations documented in this report - such as a girl restrained with handcuffs tight enough to break her skin, detainees who had food thrown at them in their cells, a detainee whose need for medical treatment was ignored - raise serious concerns about tactics used in policing of indigenous communities in BC and about the police's regard for the wellbeing and dignity of indigenous women and girls.

Incidents of police abuse of indigenous women and girls are compounded by the widely perceived failure of the police to protect women and girls from violence. Not surprisingly, indigenous women and girls report having little faith that police forces responsible for mistreatment and abuse can offer them protection when they face violence in the wider community. As a community service provider told Human Rights Watch, "The most apparent thing to me is the lack of safety women feel. A lot of women, especially First Nations women we see, never feel safe approaching the RCMP because of the injustices they've experienced...The system is really failing women."

One aspect of this is the apparent apathy of police towards the disappearances and murders of indigenous women and girls that has been such a persistent and well publicized stain on Canada's human rights record. Less well-publicized but equally pernicious have been the shortcomings of the police in their response to domestic violence.

The RCMP has instituted progressive policies addressing violence in domestic relationships, but it appears the police do not apply those policies consistently when policing in indigenous communities. According to survivors of domestic violence and the community service providers who work with them, indigenous women and girls often do not get the protection afforded by these polices. Women who call the police for help may find themselves blamed for the abuse, are at times shamed for alcohol or substance use, and risk arrest for actions taken in self-defense. Similarly, despite policies requiring active investigation of all reports of missing persons, some family members and service providers who had made calls to police to report missing persons said the police failed to promptly investigate the reports.

When they experience abuse at the hands of the police or when the police fail to provide adequate protection, women and girls have limited recourse. They can lodge a complaint with the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP, but the process is time consuming and the investigation of the complaint will likely fall to the RCMP itself or an external police force. Fear of retaliation from police runs high in the north, and the apparent lack of genuine accountability for police abuse adds to long-standing tensions between the police and indigenous communities. The title of this report "Those Who Take Us Away," is a literal translation of the word for police in Carrier, the language of a number of indigenous communities in northern BC.

The Independent Investigations Office (IIO), a recently established provincial mechanism for civilian investigation of police misconduct, offers some promise, but most complaints will fall outside the office's mandate, which is limited to incidents involving death or certain serious bodily injuries. The exclusion of rape and sexual abuse from this definition represents an unacceptable discriminatory omission on the part of the provincial legislature. It sends a loud message that assaults on women are not important.

Canada has strong legal protections around violence against women and the federal and provincial governments have made some attempts to address murders and disappearances of indigenous women through studies, taskforces, and limited funding initiatives. However, the persistence of the violence indicates a need for deeper, coordinated interventions to address the systemic nature of the problem.

To the government of Canada:

Establish a national commission of inquiry into the murders and disappearances of indigenous women and girls before the end 0f 2013; ensure the inquiry's terms of reference are developed with leadership from affected communities and that they include the examination of the current and historical relationship between the police and indigenous women and girls, including incidents of serious police misconduct, and the systemic socio-economic marginalization of indigenous women and girls that predispose them to high levels of violence;

With leadership from indigenous communities, develop and implement a national action plan to address violence against indigenous women and girls that addresses the structural roots of the violence as well as the accountability and coordination of government bodies charged with preventing and responding to violence;

Establish independent civilian investigations of reported incidents of serious police misconduct, including incidents of rape and other sexual assault, in all jurisdictions;

Cooperate with the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women's inquiry into the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, including by granting permission for a site visit, and provide similar cooperation to other international human rights bodies that may seek to engage the government on these issues;

Ratify the American Convention on Human Rights and the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women (Convention of Belém do Pará).

To the provincial government of British Columbia:

Ensure that a public inquiry takes place into the violence experienced by indigenous women and girls in northern British Columbia. The inquiry could be part of a national commission of inquiry or a standalone inquiry for the province. The inquiry should include both the murders and disappearances of indigenous women and girls along Highway 16 and police abuse of indigenous women and girls. The inquiry's terms of reference should be defined in cooperation with indigenous communities, and adequate financial and victim supports for non-government community participation and interests should proportionately equal those provided for government and police;

Expand the mandate of the Independent Investigations Office to include authority to investigate allegations of sexual assault by police;

Provide adequate shelters and social services for victims of violence, including in rural areas and with specific culturally-sensitive services;

Renew the commitment to implementing the recommendations of the 2006 Highway of Tears Symposium, updated, as necessary, in cooperation with northern indigenous communities;

Expand non-incarceration options for publicly intoxicated individuals, including sobering centers where medical personnel can provide appropriate care.

To the Royal Canadian Mounted Police:

Collect and make publicly available (as ethically appropriate) accurate and comprehensive, disaggregated data that includes an ethnicity variable on violence against indigenous women and girls in cooperation with indigenous community organizations and the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR); the development of NCMPUR should be part of a national RCMP strategy for the elimination of violence against indigenous women and girls that ensures consistency in data collection, immediate reporting, and access to information by police, coroners, and medical examiners;

Expand training for police officers to counter racism and sexism in the treatment of indigenous women and girls in custody and to improve police response to violence against women and girls within indigenous communities; such training should be developed through collaboration between indigenous and human rights organizations, the Canadian Police College, and the Department of Public Safety Canada; and focus specifically on Canada's colonial history that has predisposed indigenous women to suffer from gross levels of violence and on human rights norms, including women's and girls' rights to live free from violence and discrimination and be treated with dignity and respect in custody;

Ensure that properly trained officers are stationed at detachments in the north for a sufficient amount of time to develop strong relationships with the local community;

Eliminate searches and monitoring of women and girls by male police officers in all but extraordinary circumstances and require documentation and supervisor and commander review of any such searches; prohibit cross-gender strip searches under any circumstances;

Prohibit the use of conducted energy weapons (Tasers) on youth and re-examine the rules for the use of police dogs and pepper spray on youth with a view to limiting their use to extraordinary circumstances that are then documented and subject to supervisor and commander review; all RCMP and municipal police policy on conducted energy weapons, police dogs and pepper spray should be made publicly accessible;

Enforce existing rules mandating that parents or guardians be contacted immediately in the case of their child's arrest and that youth not be detained in cells with adults or children of the opposite sex;

Consider, in consultation with indigenous communities in northern British Columbia, changing the criteria for cases to be investigated by the E-PANA task force to include a greater number of the murders and disappearances of women in the north;

Develop a timeline for NCMPUR to complete and implement specialized and standardized protocols for police response when indigenous women and girls are reported missing or found murdered; these protocols should be part of the national RCMP strategy and be made in cooperation with indigenous organizations; protocols should include:

Oversight, accountability mechanisms that track a police investigation of a missing or murdered indigenous women or girl from the time such an incident is reported;

Clear, publicly available communication standards for informing family and the general community about the progress of an investigation as it proceeds, and what they can or are expected to do to contribute to an investigation during its different phases;

Goals to involve an Aboriginal liaison officer in all cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls to work with affected families and the police;

Goals to review police response to missing and murdered indigenous women and girl cases at regular intervals to compile and make public a report on best practices and lessons learned that can then contribute to more successful police investigations and community response in the future.

To the UN Human Rights Council:

Raise the issue of violence against indigenous women and girls in Canada as part of the United Nations Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review;

Encourage Canada to launch a national inquiry into the murders and disappearances of indigenous women and girls.

Human Rights Watch undertook the research on which this report is based after Justice for Girls (JFG), a Vancouver-based organization advocating for the rights of girls in British Columbia, submitted a briefing paper to Human Rights Watch in November 2011 describing human rights violations against indigenous teen girls in northern British Columbia. In collaboration with JFG, Human Rights Watch conducted five weeks of field research in British Columbia in July and August 2012, most of which was spent traversing Highway 16 from Prince George to Prince Rupert, and Highway 97 between Prince George and Williams Lake. The Carrier Sekani Tribal Council passed a resolution welcoming Human Rights Watch into the territory and supporting the research. Human Rights Watch attended the annual general meeting of the Carrier Sekani and spoke with community members about police treatment of girls and women, and the murders and disappearances along Highway 16.

In total Human Rights Watch conducted 87 interviews for this report. We spoke with 42 indigenous women and 8 indigenous girls, ranging in age from 15 to late 60s, in the communities we visited. The interviews were arranged with the assistance and coordination of advocates, organizations, and local community members who connected us to individuals they believed to have information pertinent to police treatment of indigenous women and girls. Human Rights Watch also interviewed19 community service providers, including staff at domestic violence transition houses and homeless shelters, and youth outreach workers; community leaders; and family members of victims of violence or police mistreatment. In addition, we spoke with seven current and former officers of the "E" Division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in three interviews arranged through unofficial channels.

Human Rights Watch researchers were assisted by two indigenous leaders and women's rights experts: Mavis Erickson and Sharon McIvor. Erickson is an attorney, former Elected Tribal Chief of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council (CSTC), and representative for the CSTC on issues related to missing and murdered indigenous women. She is a Nadleh Whut'en band member and a citizen of Nak'azdii near Fort St James. McIvor is an attorney, co-founder of the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, and an instructor at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology. She is a Lower Nicola Band member and brought a ground-breaking constitutional challenge to sex-discrimination in the Indian Act in McIvor v. Canada.

The individual women, girls, and family members interviewed for this report were fully informed about the nature and purpose of our research and how we would use the information they provided. Human Rights Watch obtained verbal consent for each of the interviews. No incentives were provided to individuals in exchange for their interviews. The majority of the interviews were conducted in private with only the researcher and a single interviewee present, but in a number of cases interviewees chose to speak with family members or advocates present. Four of the interviews were conducted by phone; the rest were in-person. The interviews with individual women and girls were open-ended discussions of the experiences the women, girls, and family members had had with the police and what, if any, recommendations they had for improvements in policing. Care was taken to ensure that interviews about past traumatic events did not further traumatize interviewees, and where appropriate, Human Rights Watch offered interviewees referrals to local organizations providing counseling and other services.

In several towns we visited, women and girls who expressed interest in meeting and talking to Human Rights Watch later withdrew their request to be interviewed. They cited fear of exposure and potential retaliation from police as inhibiting factors. Community service providers noted that the fear of exposure is particularly acute in the small towns of the north where police and community members would be likely to identify a person by a few details of their story. Consequently, Human Rights Watch has not identified the precise location of interviews, and where necessary we have also redacted details from victim and witness accounts in order to reduce the risk that they will be identified. We have also used pseudonyms for all victims and family members interviewed. Nonetheless, certain accounts in this report that have previously received public attention may be recognizable, a possibility which was discussed with the women and girls involved as part of their full and informed consent to their participation in the research. The names of community service providers and others have also been withheld where their relationship with police would otherwise have prevented them from speaking freely.

Due to concern for the privacy and security of interviewees, Human Rights Watch did not inform the RCMP of our intention to conduct the research in advance or approach detachments for interviews during the field research. In September 2012, Human Rights Watch wrote to the RCMP to advise the national headquarters and the "E" Division in British Columbia of our research and to solicit the police force's input to a series of questions raised by the research. The RCMP responded in November 2012 with answers to our questions and associated policy documents. Human Rights Watch reviewed those materials and they have been taken into account in the report's analysis. Human Rights Watch did not include details of particular incidents in its letter on September 2012 due to the deep seated fear of retaliation on the part of victims if they were identifiable to those accused of perpetrating the abuses. Human Rights Watch is committed to pursuing the issues raised by this report with authorities and to addressing particular situations of concern with British Columbia's Independent Investigations Office (IIO) to the extent we are able to without compromising the safety and privacy of victims.

We have also communicated with the British Columbia (BC) Minister of Justice and Attorney General Shirley Bond and IIO Director Richard Rosenthal regarding the limitations of the mandate of the IIO.

Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop, and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions, and legal systems.

¾Martinez Cobo, Special Rapporteur of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, United Nations Commission on Human Rights

This report primarily uses the term "indigenous" to refer to the women and girls interviewed for this report. We recognize, however, that other terms, such as "First Nations" and "Aboriginal" are commonly used in British Columbia and Canada. We also recognize that there are many unique identities and cultures within the indigenous communities of British Columbia which are not captured by a single term. We have chosen to use "indigenous" because it is the terminology used by the United Nations and applicable human rights standards.

In order to ensure accuracy, we have not changed the terms used by interviewees and in source material. For example, we refer to the number of Aboriginal women and girls in Canada, because that is the term used by Statistics Canada in the study cited. For ease of reference we include the following definitions of relevant terms, excerpted from a glossary provided by the government of Saskatchewan:

Aboriginal: The term "Aboriginal" is appropriate when referring to matters that affect First Nations (Indian) and Métis peoples. The word is most appropriately used as an adjective (e.g., Aboriginal person).

Aboriginal Peoples: Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes three groups of Aboriginal peoples -- Indians, Métis and Inuit peoples.

Band: As defined by the Indian Act, a Band is a body of Indians for whose common use and benefit lands have been set aside or monies held by the Government of Canada or declared by the Governor in Council to be a Band. Today, many Bands prefer to be known as First Nations.

First Nation(s): A term that came into common usage in the 1970s to replace the word "Indian". Although the term First Nation is widely used, no legal definition of it exists. The term has also been adopted to replace the word "Band" in the naming of communities.

Indian: The term "Indian" is narrowly defined by the Indian Act. Indian peoples are one of three groups of people recognized as one of Canada's Aboriginal peoples in the Constitution Act, 1982. There are three legal definitions that apply to Indians in Canada: Status Indians, Non-status Indians and Treaty Indians.

Inuit: An Aboriginal people in northern Canada, who live above the tree line in the Northwest Territories, and in Nunavut, Northern Quebec and Labrador. The word means "people" in the Inuit language - Inuktitut. The singular of Inuit is Inuk.

Métis: The term refers to Aboriginal people of mixed First Nation and European ancestry who identify themselves as Métis people, as distinct from First Nations people, Inuit or non-Aboriginal people. The Métis have a unique culture that draws on their diverse ancestral origins, such as Scottish, French, Ojibway and Cree.

Native: A term used to refer generally to Aboriginal peoples. The term "Aboriginal person" is preferred to "native."

Non-status Indian: An Indian person who is not registered as an Indian under the Indian Act. This may be because his or her ancestors were never registered, or because he or she lost Indian status under former provisions of the Indian Act. Bill C-31 in 1985 has restored Indian status to those who lost it through marriage.

Status Indian (Registered Indian): Refers to an Indian person who is registered (or entitled to be registered) under the Indian Act. The Act sets out the requirements for determining who is a status Indian.

Reserve: Land set aside by the federal government for the use and occupancy of an Indian group or Band. Legal title rests with the Crown in right of Canada.

Treaty Indian: A person affiliated with a First Nation that has signed, or whose ancestors signed, a treaty with the Crown and who now receives land rights and entitlements as prescribed in a treaty.

© 2013 Human Rights Watch

Violence against Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada

The Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) collected data showing that nationally, between the 1960s and 2010, 582 Aboriginal women and girls went missing or were murdered in Canada. Data collected as of March 31, 2010, indicate that two-thirds of the cases logged were murders; one-fifth were disappearances; and the remainder were suspicious deaths or unknown. Some cases date back to the 1960s and 70s, but 39 percent occurred since 2000. NWAC's data indicates that the majority of the victims were under the age of 31 and many were mothers. According to NWAC's data, Aboriginal women are more likely to be killed by a stranger than non-Aboriginal women, and nearly half of the murders are unsolved. Amnesty International published a report on Canada's missing and murdered indigenous women in 2004 that, among other findings, concluded that "Despite assurances to the contrary, police in Canada have often failed to provide Indigenous women with an adequate standard of protection."

The collection of data about the levels of violence against indigenous women is essential for developing an effective response to the violence, but in 2010 the government stopped funding NWAC's data initiative on the murders and disappearances of indigenous women. The government is funding related initiatives as part of the "Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women strategy," as well as the NWAC "Evidence to Action" project, but it did not renew funding for the organization's statistical monitoring of cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. As a result, no comprehensive sex - and race - disaggregated data to track the numbers of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls since 2010 are available. The government contends that the responsibility for continued data collection will be assumed by the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) run by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The NCMPUR, according to the government, will include "one resource, linked to National Aboriginal Policing S ervices, to ensure a focus on the specific issue of missing Aboriginal persons." However, there is currently no precedent for the standardized collection of ethnicity data by police forces in Canada. Consequently, it is unclear going forward how the government and the public will have access to information comparable to what NWAC had provided about the number and circumstances of these cases.

Government studies have found that violence against indigenous women and girls is linked to broader, long-standing patterns of discrimination faced by indigenous women and girls in British Columbia and in Canada at large. Although a thorough discussion of these well documented patterns is beyond the scope of this report, it is important to note that the context in which indigenous women and girls are subjected to violence is one of structural discrimination linked to social and economic inequality, according to government and academic experts. In 2006, 35 percent of Aboriginal women over 25 had not completed high school, compared with 20 percent for non-Aboriginal women. When asked why she did not complete high school, nearly one in five women cited "pregnancy or to take care of children," according to the 2006 Aboriginal Peoples Survey. Also in 2006, 8 percent of Aboriginal girls aged 15 to 19 were parents, compared to 1.3 percent of non-Aboriginal girls in the same age bracket. In British Columbia, the Ministry of Children and Family Development reported that, while Aboriginal children constitute only 8 percent of the province's children, they were 52 percent of all children in government care in 2007-08.

Residential Schools

Residential school attendance, particularly when accompanied by physical and sexual abuse, has been linked to problems of alcoholism, drug abuse, powerlessness, dependency, low self-esteem, suicide, prostitution, gambling, homelessness, sexual abuse, violence, and, as this paper argues, missing and murdered women. Some Survivors and/or their descendants have been in conflict with the legal system, including the criminal justice system and the child welfare system.

Alcohol and substance use is a problem for indigenous communities in Canada, including in northern BC. Aboriginal youth are at two to six times greater risk for alcohol-related problems than non-Aboriginal youth, and the rate of death due to alcohol use in the Aboriginal population is double the rate in the general population. Many of the police abuses documented in this report occurred in the context of the policing of public intoxication. While public intoxication can give rise to legitimate safety concerns, especially when children are involved, it is no justification for mistreatment of individuals in custody. Furthermore while incarceration may not always be the most appropriate and effective way of dealing with the problem, in many parts of BC the authorities have failed to provide alternative remedies. A report by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) noted the lack of sobering centers in the north, finding that "the challenge for police of dealing with those who are drunk or high in public is a major issue across the north.... Police have become de facto medical practitioners across the north for people suffering from alcohol overdoses or acute drug intoxication."

The Shadow of Past Abuses

Beyond the legacy of the residential school system, to understand the relationship between the RCMP and indigenous girls and women in northern British Colombia today, it is important to acknowledge the impact that several historical policing failures have had on the lives of indigenous women and girls.

Judge Ramsay and the legacy of sexual exploitation in Prince George

At age 13, Celynn Cadieux became one of Ramsay's victims. She died in April 2007 at the age of 22. Her father Bob Sandbach told Human Rights Watch that police officers were involved in the sexual exploitation of his daughter:

We were sitting in the car driving to Rock Creek, going to church, she was starting to cry. The only way I can explain it is if your child came to you and said the neighbor's kid took her favorite toy. She is sobbing - the sincerity in her body told me exactly what she said happened... For sexual favors [the police] would stop her on the road and put their hands down her pants saying they were searching her [for drugs] ... She was 18, 17.

Long after the Ramsay case came to light, reports continue to circulate in Prince George about connections linking the law enforcement and legal establishments with use of children in sex work and other forms of child sexual exploitation. An indigenous woman who had spent a lot of her youth in group homes for children in the custody of child welfare services told Human Rights Watch that four or five years ago she went with a girl from a group home to that girl's court appearance:

My "sister" worked in the shacks [as a prostitute]. I was waiting for her for 45 minutes to say goodbye to people at the courthouse. I asked, "How do you know these people?" "They're my regulars," she said. Judges, lawyers, police... She killed herself a month before her 19th birthday.

Earlier Incidents of Police Abuse

In the course of our research into the current relationship between police and indigenous communities in British Columbia, Human Rights Watch spoke to several women whose alleged experience of abuse at the hands of the police dated back decades, but who were still waiting for their cases to be taken seriously so they could see justice. The scarring of their experiences and determination to seek redress has not waned as the decades have passed. For example, Human Rights Watch interviewed Georgia I. who wants British Columbia's attorney general, in whose department the IIO is based, to provide justice for her rape almost 40 years ago:

When I was 16 I was raped by a police officer and became pregnant. I got an abortion because otherwise I would have done it to myself with a coat hanger.... I was working for a police officer who had a pizza joint. Some of his young officers would come in to eat and one night one offered me a ride home. That was the first time he raped me. The second time he caught me. I didn't ask for a ride, but he got me.... I'm looking at filing an application to the Attorney General about the rape. He [the perpetrator] is still on the force ... how many other young girls has he hurt, as he hurt me....

Likewise in a series of incidents in 1990 and 1991, Elaine H. said she was harassed by one police officer and then by a second officer. She described the daily harassment of the first:

At the time I was a single aboriginal woman from here. I was freshly divorced.... I hadn't dated in 11 years. I went out to a pub with a friend. A gentleman came up trying to be really cute and I said, "I'm sorry, I'm not ready to meet anyone. I'm not interested in male companionship." He was a police officer and he stalked me for a year and a half. He would park outside of my house or pull up next to my car. He'd pull me over anytime.... It got so bad I couldn't go to the grocery store because he'd park behind my car ... if I was at the bank, he'd park behind my car ... if I was at the video store ... anywhere my vehicle went ... this man would pull behind me ... he phoned me on my birthday to tell me he was leaving town and to apologize for being a nuisance, as he would call it, I said ... a nuisance ... you stalked me, I became a mom who couldn't even come out of my house because I was too scared to come out....

Elaine H. reported the stalking to the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP, but they were dismissive of her complaint and failed to take remedial action.

Human Rights Watch researchers were struck when carrying out this research by the high levels of fear of police among the women interviewed, levels of fear that Human Rights Watch normally finds in communities in post-conflict or post-transition countries such as Iraq where security forces have played an integral role in state abuses and enforcement of authoritarian policies. The palpable fear of the police was accompanied with a notable matter of fact manner when mentioning mistreatment by police, reflecting a normalized expectation that if one was an indigenous woman or girl police mistreatment is to be anticipated.

Missing and Murdered Women in BC and the Highway of Tears

The Native Women's Association of Canada documented 160 cases of indigenous women and girls who went missing or were murdered in British Columbia between the 1960s and 2010, significantly more than any other province or territory in Canada. The province also had the highest unsolved rate of murders of indigenous women and girls. The 724-kilometer stretch of Highway 16 that runs through small rural towns between Prince George and Prince Rupert has come to be called the Highway of Tears, because of the murders and disappearances that have occurred in its vicinity. Since 1969, dozens of women and girls - perhaps more than 40 - have gone missing or been murdered in close proximity to three highways in northern and central BC (Highways 16, 97, and 5). The RCMP includes 18 murders and disappearances in its roster of Highway of Tears cases. However, indigenous community estimates have always been higher than the numbers maintained by the RCMP due, in large part, to the RCMP's requirement for the disappearance or murder to have happened within a mile of Highway 16, 97, or 5 to be included in its E-PANA project, a special task force formed to investigate unsolved cases related to the Highway of Tears. A 2006 report by several indigenous groups about the Highway of Tears referenced community activities in memory of 32 victims. Later estimates have topped 40. Media reports highlight the fact that a number of the victims were hitchhiking at the time of their disappearance, but circumstances in other cases have varied. Indigenous women are disproportionately represented among the missing and murdered. Of the 18 Highway of Tears victims identified by the RCMP, 10 are indigenous.

Investigations

Human Rights Watch did not conduct a case-by-case review of the Highway of Tears murders and disappearances. We interviewed family members of several victims and community members familiar with the cases (including some that are not on official Highway of Tears lists). We also reviewed media reports about the investigations of cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in order to identify persistent problems in police response. Family members reported their experiences with the police, telling us that they felt the investigating officers were biased against the victims because they were indigenous women and girls. As indicated above, this distrust has roots in experiences of discrimination and neglect that stretch back decades. One woman whose sister was murdered in the late 1960s told Human Rights Watch that "[the police] assumed because she was Indian that she went out drunk and went out and asked for it. She had a tampon and they played it up that she used this for birth control.... Why not treat everyone's case the same way?"

The sister of another young woman who went missing and was ultimately found murdered in the 1990s, said that discriminatory police assumptions misdirected the focus of the search:

The police said, "Oh, she probably just needed a break from you guys. She probably just ran away." We tried to say that this was out of character, that she could leave any time she wanted and say where she was going. So they never believed us. They had my mom on this wild goose chase. She thought she was going to go to Vancouver because they put it into her head that she might be there. We would have looked local. That really threw things off, instead of looking in our own hometown where she was [found murdered].

Accountability

Unless we have accountability there will be no justice, no closure, no equality.

¾Family member of a Highway of Tears victim

The resignation of Robyn Gervais, the inquiry's first appointed independent counsel for indigenous interests, over the lack of attention to indigenous communities' concerns - including the entrenched discrimination, poverty, and economic and social inequalities that contribute to indigenous women's exposure to violence - further undermined the inquiry's legitimacy. Gervais told Human Rights Watch:

We need a national inquiry that really looks at the issue of why are so many indigenous women going missing. We could hear strategies from different provinces, hear from First Nations around Canada about what will work in their communities. We could address the RCMP. Something like the truth and reconciliation commission around residential schools, in a format that would work for communities - meetings, not like a trial - to look at different needs of the communities. Transport and hitchhiking may be problems in one community but not in another.

Policing in British Columbia

The "E" Division has been heavily criticized for its policing practices by civil liberties advocates and others. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association conducted a series of workshops in communities across northern and rural BC and released a report in 2011 identifying problems in policing, including poor treatment of aboriginal people, inadequate police accountability, inadequate holding cells in police facilities, and a lack of de-escalation skills among officers for resolving confrontations with members of the public with a minimum use of force. Human Rights Watch saw evidence of the persistence of all these problems while researching this report.

Police Complaint Mechanisms

In British Columbia, three bodies with varying jurisdiction handle complaints of police misconduct. First, the provincial Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner addresses complaints against police officers belonging to members of municipal police forces.

Second, the national Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP (CPC) has jurisdiction over complaints against RCMP members. Since our research took place in areas policed by the RCMP, the CPC would be the option available to the women and girls interviewed for this report. The CPC's role is primarily to monitor the processing of complaints by the RCMP. The main investigative authority resides with the RCMP and the RCMP ultimately determines what remedial action will be taken. When a complaint is received, the RCMP arranges for an investigation according to its procedures (outlined below) and reports back to the complainant. If the complainant is not satisfied, the CPC reviews the RCMP's report and if they find it unsatisfactory, they can investigate the complaint themselves, ask the RCMP to investigate further, hold a public hearing, or review the complaint without further investigation. After taking whichever step is chosen, the CPC prepares an interim report for the RCMP Commissioner who then informs the CPC what actions, if any, will be taken. That result is included in a final report by the CPC, which marks the end of the process.

The Canadian authorities need urgently to address this omission if they are to ensure accountability for the worst cases of officer misconduct. The legislation creating the office provided for a potentially broader mandate, stating that reporting to the IIO would be required when a police officer "may have contravened a prescribed provision of the Criminal Code or a prescribed provision of another federal or provincial enactment."

However, no regulation exists prescribing the particular provisions, which means that portion of the act is not operational. Minister of Justice and Attorney General Shirley Bond has indicated that the government "will wait until the IIO has been in operation for a sufficient period of time to assess its workload and capacity before deciding whether to expand the IIO's mandate through regulations. Prior to January 1, 2015, a special committee of the Legislative Assembly will review the general operations of the IIO and make recommendations as it sees appropriate."

The following chapter presents qualitative data about police abuse gathered by Human Rights Watch in 10 towns in northern British Columbia, from Prince George to Prince Rupert and as far south as Williams Lake. Human Rights Watch does not contend that this information proves a pattern of routine systematic abuse, but when such incidents take place in the context of an already deeply fractured relationship with the police they have a particularly harmful, negative impact. Some of the accounts of harm done to women and girls by police appear to be the result of poor policing tactics, over aggressive policing, and insensitivity to the welfare and vulnerability of the victims. Others however, such as the alleged sexual assaults of women by members of the police, are deliberate criminal acts and could only be perpetrated by the particular officers in the expectation that they will never have to answer for their crimes.

Obstacles to documenting police abuse include victims' fear of retaliation by police and fear of public exposure, particularly in small towns where victims who provide information may be easily identified. While the testimonies that Human Rights Watch gathered do not establish the prevalence of abuse, they do, together with other studies, raise serious concerns about police practices, police misconduct, and mistrust of police, all of which impact the safety of indigenous women and girls.

Indigenous Girls and Women in the Criminal Justice System

In British Columbia, as in Canada as a whole, disproportionate numbers of indigenous youth, and indigenous girls in particular, come into conflict with the criminal justice system. According to Statistics Canada, in British Columbia Aboriginal girls, although 8 percent of the overall girl population, make up 54 percent of girls held in pretrial custody, 50 percent of girls sentenced to custody, and 48 percent girls on probation.

Harriet J., a victim service provider in another town, observed that police routinely incarcerate indigenous girls for intoxication if they are found to have consumed alcohol and are in need of transportation home (a particular challenge in northern communities with almost no public transportation), while white girls in the same situation are likely to be driven home by the police. While it is appropriate for police to intervene when children are intoxicated in public because they are in a vulnerable state, the insistence on incarceration with respect to indigenous girls appears to reflect a discriminatory approach.

Stark as they are, the statistics on the disproportionate numbers of indigenous women in sentenced custody fail to capture the full extent of the problem. Not included in these numbers is the regular temporary detention of women in the "drunk tank" who are not charged. In community after community visited by Human Rights Watch, women, girls, advocates, and service providers reported that the police appeared to target indigenous people for public intoxication arrests. In some reported incidents, the police abused their discretion by detaining people who were not intoxicated.

One indigenous woman, Jennifer R., told Human Rights Watch:

Three years ago we were coming home from fireworks. I was with my hubby [then boyfriend]. There were these cops picking on these native guys and girls and they were just throwing them around. They were yanking them around. One would go to walk away, saying, "I'm going home," and they'd pull her back. Another said, "Yeah, sure, I've had some drinks. I'm just trying to make my way home." The officers just talked over them... I've known [those girls] since I was a little girl. I know they are good girls...I felt for them. I know that they are fragile people.

I piped up - I should have listened to my boyfriend, but I knew them. I said, "Let me take them home with me. I'm sober, I don't do drugs." But they ended up taking me too. They held me to the next day (from 11:30 p.m. to 8am). It was cold. And I hadn't eaten and I was so hungry. Didn't give me any food. Just told me to shut up. Only thing she gave me was a cup for water. It just so happened to be me and my boyfriend's first date. Our first date and we went to the drunk tank and we weren't even drunk. They threatened to keep us over the weekend - said something about "fucking natives."

Community service providers decried the reliance on jailing as a means of addressing public intoxication in communities plagued by high alcoholism rates linked to decades of trauma. "The former [head of the local police detachment] would just pick up intoxicated individuals and throw them in the drunk tank," said one provider who had seen the "drunk tank" become a revolving door. "What is going to happen down the road?" The aggressive policing of public intoxication also breeds hostility and creates more occasions for outrage to boil over into violent confrontation. When survivors of the residential school system have interactions with police related to their alcohol use, those interactions may be particularly fraught given the abuse they have suffered by authorities.

Providers lamented that police did not have more knowledge of First Nations history, including residential schools, so that they could see individual behavior and current community problems in context. A lack of appreciation for the context was linked both to over-policing as well as to police misconduct. "When we talk about the RCMP and police brutality [against First Nations women], there is a lack of knowledge of the bigger picture," said one social service provider in northern British Columbia working with the homeless and domestic violence survivors. "Why is she there? She's there because our system has failed her. She may be there just coping."

Abusive Policing Tactics

Excessive Use of Force against Girls

Human Rights Watch documented eight incidents in which police physically assaulted or used questionable force against girls under the age of 18. In four of those cases, the girls themselves described the events to us; in the others, our information came from eye witnesses or from parents or service providers with knowledge of the events. The incidents occurred in seven different communities in the north, and four of the eight occurred in 2012. In two of the cases, the police injured girls who they had been called in to protect.

17-year-old girl assaulted by an officer in the back of a police car, 2011

Sophie B. reported to Human Rights Watch that she was walking through a field from a friend's house when she heard people screaming, and shortly after found herself being chased by gang members. Passing a woman on a balcony she asked her to call the police before she hid behind a fence. More than four police cars came, with at least two police officers in each car. "The cops came. They lifted me up and threw me to the ground... they put my arms behind my back and slammed me on the ground," Sophie said. Sophie's mother, Kathryn S., whom she had called earlier because of the gang, arrived at the area soon after. She told Human Rights Watch, "When I got there [Sophie] was laying down on the ground. I noticed she was in a panic attack. When she saw I was there, she calmed down. But the police officer wouldn't let me take her. That got her upset. They said she was violent because she was kicking around and intoxicated." The police officers then picked Sophie up and dragged her to the back of a police car.

Sophie told Human Rights Watch:

I was yelling at them saying: "I was the one who called for help. Why are you guys chasing me?" And they didn't say anything else... They roughed me up. They handcuffed me and put me in the back of the police car and would not allow my mother to come see me... One of them came up and said [through the police car window], "Keep kicking and see what happens." ... He punched me in the face more than six times. Half of his body was in the police car. Both my mom and sister saw him punch me. Then my mom came over and saw my face swollen up. I said, "Look what they did to me!" My mom said, "It's going to be okay."

But her mother was not sure it was all going to be okay. Following the beating Sophie endured while handcuffed in the back of the police car, the police took Sophie back to city cells for the night. "All that night I couldn't sleep wondering what was going to happen to her. I kept looking at the clock, counting the hours," she recalled. At city cells, male officers pulled the elastics out of Sophie's hair when they brought her in. She remembered that one said, "Stupid Indian," and that another laughed at her. The next day the family picked her up from jail and they went straight to the hospital. Young Sophie's face was swollen and there were cuts all over her gums and cheek from the impact of the punches hitting her face and shredding the inside of her mouth against the braces on her teeth. "I was walking around with a bandana over my face," she told Human Rights Watch. "It was pretty bad... My face was so bad that they let me go at my job at [a restaurant.]"The family filed a complaint and the RCMP detachment initially retaliated by filing charges against Sophie B. for assaulting an officer. The charges were later dropped and, following an investigation by an external police force, the officer was charged with criminal assault. Those charges are currently pending.

A 15-year-old girl's arm broken by police officer during response to domestic violence call, 2012

I will never forget that day. It's the worst thing I ever did. I wish I didn't call [the police].

Lena G., British Columbia, July 2012

Lena G. called the police and asked for their help in the spring of 2012 when it seemed that an argument was out of control between her 15-year-old daughter, Emily G., and Emily's 22-year-old boyfriend who had a history of abusive behavior. Police had previously been called regarding incidents in which Emily's adult boyfriend-the father of her infant daughter who had been committing statutory rape by having a sexual relationship with Emily-had strangled and assaulted her. On this occasion, Lena told the operator that her daughter had said that she would rather die than live in her mother's house, but Lena specifically told the operator that she believed this was a teenage expression of frustration rather than a genuine indication of suicidal feeling. By the time the police responded to the call, the argument had settled down, and Emily and her boyfriend were sitting on opposite sides of the room. Emily described how the situation escalated:

One of the cops saw me and asked what was happening. I said it had calmed down. I was calm. The cop asked if I was taking anything. I guess he saw [my baby's] medicine on the ground. After [telling him no], I told him that I'm really mad, angry, and stuff and I needed to go for a walk. I went to get my purse and he told me to get my jacket so he could bring me outside. He said he was going to take me to mental health. I told him in a raised voice that I didn't need a jacket. I guess I raised my voice.

The officer who had been talking to [my boyfriend], Constable [Name], told me to calm down. He stopped me by stepping front of me. He was holding the curtain open between the part of the room where I was and where [my boyfriend] was. He had his finger in my face in front of my eyes. I was yelling and telling him to fuck off. He just barely touched my face and I pushed it away. I barely moved his finger. He grabbed my arm and pushed me up against the wall. He pulled my arm way back and pushed it so I was up on my tip toes and that was when my arm broke... He let go and the cuffed arm fell with the cuff and then I felt all the pain. I yelled, "What did you do to my arm?" three times. He handed the cuff over to the other cop and he held it while we walked out.

After some discussion among the officers, an ambulance was called to take Emily to the hospital where an x-ray showed that her arm was broken. Later she had to travel with her family to another city for surgery on her arm. "When we left every single bump on the road was like killing me," Emily said.

Although Emily and Lena reported that police made no mention of concern for her mental state at the hospital, the RCMP subsequently told the press that the officers responded to a suicidal teenager and arrested her under the Mental Health Act as well as for assaulting an officer. An external police investigation into the incident is underway.

A 12-year-old girl injured in attack by police dog, 2012

Police arrested Mary H. after an incident in May 2012 in which she reportedly sprayed someone with bear mace at a fair. Her mother, Rachel H., who was present during Mary's police interview, told Human Rights Watch about the incidents surrounding the arrest, during which Mary was wounded by a police dog:

I'm a mother of five. She's my youngest. She's had some trouble - run-ins with the police over the last year or two [for theft, mischief, non-violent offenses] ... She just turned 13, she was 12 at the time...With this incident, it seems that the police knew who they were looking for - they knew she was 12. They had to have talked to the people she allegedly assaulted, [who] knew her older sister... The officers knew that the bear mace had been used on the victims. She said she had thrown it away when she was running.

She fled the scene and was hiding. She saw the cops with the dogs coming. She shouted, "I'm only 12 years old." The cops didn't give her an opportunity to give herself up. They didn't warn her that they were going to let the dog loose. The compound she was in was behind a locked fence. They had to use a bolt cutter. She was hiding inside a wooden box. She saw a handler with a ball cap. The dog jumped into the box. The officer looked into the box. The box fell over. The dog was on top of her and started to attack her leg... The photos show punctures from the dog's teeth. Her leg was so swollen. It was more than just a dog bite, it was an attack... She couldn't walk or even hop because of the pressure ... She had to stay on the couch for a week and had to go to the hospital to have the bandages changed... the scars are going to be there (on her upper left leg) forever.

According to Rachel, the police failed to immediately inform her that her daughter had been arrested, as required by law. After arresting Mary at about 11:30 p.m., the police transported her to the hospital where she requested the officers call her mother. They did not call her mother until she was transported to the jail around 2 a.m.

Additional Cases

In addition to the incidents described above, Human Rights Watch learned of other cases of the use of force against girls. They include:

In April 2012 police officers detaining a 13-year-old, applied the handcuffs "so tight it was peeling the skin off her hand," according to a witness.

In July 2012 police hit Grace F.,a slight 16-year-old, on the back of the head and on both of her legs with a baton, after she and a friend had a verbal confrontation with a couple of officers.

In 2010, police pepper sprayed the then 14-year-old Hayley A. after a verbal confrontation with officers escalated. Hayley A. had yelled at police officers from the back of a car that had been pulled over during a traffic stop. After they pepper sprayed her in response, Hayley A said, "I couldn't breathe and I couldn't open my eyes."

Use of Tasers

Police use of Tasers - electroshock weapons, frequently referred to as conducted energy weapons - which are considered firearms pursuant to regulations under the Criminal Code of Canada, in response to low level threats has drawn substantial criticism in recent years. Public Safety Canada guidelines state that use of a conducted energy weapon on a young child should be avoided. However, the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP has documented extensive police use of Tasers on teenagers, with 194 recorded uses on youth aged 13 to 17 between 2002 and 2009. In 2009, 8.3 percent of reports of the use of conducted energy weapons involved female youths. The analysis did not disaggregate by ethnicity.

Following an investigation into the death of man Tasered at Vancouver International Airport in 2007, the RCMP reported that, among other steps, it was emphasizing de-escalation in training and that its April 2010 policy on conducted energy weapons clarified they may only be used in situations in which a subject is causing bodily harm or when it is reasonably believed the subject will cause bodily harm imminently.

Despite this a representative of an advocacy group who facilitated a meeting among indigenous girls, ages 12 to 15, reported that two of the girls said they had been Tasered in separate incidents between 2009 and 2011 when each was about 12.

Cross-Gender Searches

Human Rights Watch interviews confirm that cross-gender searches take place, although it is unclear whether this is due to female staffing shortages or if the absence of female guards is used as a pretext in some situations. In either case, reports of irregular, inappropriate searches of women by male officers point to the need to correct this policy "hiccup."

Police picked up Jan K. during an altercation in 2010 and took her to the "drunk tank." She told Human Rights Watch that at the police station two male cops took her to a room that appeared to be a janitor's closet where there were no cameras visible. They told her to remove her clothes except for undergarments. Afterwards they gave back the clothes but said she could either have her sweater or a t-shirt but not both.

Conditions in City Cells

Community service providers said that women transferred to city cells for trial, among whom indigenous women are disproportionately represented, can be held four to five days without access to washing facilities. "That's a lot of abuse, especially when they're on their cycle [menstruating]," said one provider. "[They] wear the same clothes that length of time so they are not ready to go to court to defend themselves...You're a mess when you go into court and they're in the same cells as the drunk tank so you could get into a fight with a drunk and then you have more charges."

Fights in city cells take place and women reported a failure on the part of guards to intervene.:

One night a week ago I ended up in the drunk tank... This lady attacked me in the same cell. There were three of us. She was talking something about her boyfriend and must have thought I said something and came and attacked me. She grabbed me by my hair and pounded me against the cement and I stopped her and then she kicked me and started dragging me around by my hair. And they didn't do anything. They have cameras there. The night guard didn't even come to see what was going on. It was loud. There was screaming... I yelled for help. Guess no cops were there and the night guard never did a thing.

Women reported that they were placed in the cells after suffering injuries and were not provided with medical attention. Anna T. was "jumped" in May 2012 and knocked unconscious with a beer bottle. When the police responded, they took her to the city cells rather than the hospital. She told Human Rights Watch:

I woke up in cells, I'm covered in blood... A cop came over and said, "[Anna], you've been assaulted. We don't know what happened. You got verbal with one of the officers so we detained you." They let me out at 5 a.m. and said, "We'll give you a ride to the hospital." They let me out the door and then just shut it. I waited five minutes and no one came. My nose was broken. I had two black eyes. My hair was balled up in blood... If you have an injured woman, take her to the hospital.

Sexual and Physical Abuse by Police

Rape and Sexual Assault

In 5 of the 10 towns Human Rights Watch visited in the north, we heard allegations of rape or sexual assault by police officers. Human Rights Watch was struck by the level of fear on the part of women we met to talk about sexual abuse inflicted by police officers. Even though Human Rights Watch conducted outreach to women and girls through trusted service providers with long histories of working in these communities, on several occasions, women who initially expressed interest in talking with Human Rights Watch about their experiences of police sexual abuse later declined to speak or did not appear for interviews. Fear of retaliation, a frequent reason why women and girls do not report police abuse in general, is compounded by fear of stigma and feelings of shame in cases of sexual abuse. As a consequence, it was very difficult to gather first-hand testimony to support the allegations we heard.

However, in one town, Human Rights Watch met Gabriella P., a homeless woman, who reported that in July 2012 she had been taken to a remote location outside of the town and raped by four police officers whose names she knew but would not provide. "I feel so dirty," Gabriella said through tears, the first time she spoke with Human Rights Watch. "They threatened that if I told anybody they would take me out to the mountains and kill me and make it look like an accident." Gabriella said that she had been raped by police in similar circumstances on previous occasions. Human Rights Watch was able to find and photograph the remote location, which is inaccessible by public transportation, that Gabriella described. In a brief second meeting with her almost a week later, Gabriella reviewed the photographs and reacted with visible fear and distress. Pointing to details in the photographs, she further explained that the officers had made her stand with her hands against the side of a building while she was being raped. Human Rights Watch is not publishing the photos or further details in order to protect her identity.

In addition, in the second meeting, Gabriella said that she had been raped by police again two days earlier in a different location outside of town and that the officers had taken her underwear after she was assaulted. Human Rights Watch was unable to ask for further details about this rape because Gabriella abruptly ended the conversation out of fear of being seen talking to the Human Rights Watch researcher.

A community worker in the town said that she keeps packages of underwear for women living on the streets because other women have reported to her that they have been sexually assaulted by police and had their underwear confiscated. These allegations are deeply disturbing and demand action. Respecting Gabriella's wishes that an individual complaint to authorities not be made on her behalf, Human Rights Watch coordinated with a community worker to ensure that Gabriella had housing through friends and family that would limit her risk of further abuse. However, the lack of faith that victims have in the safety and effectiveness of current complaint processes, coupled with the exclusion of rape and sexual assault from the mandate of the new BC Independent Investigations Office, leaves victims of egregious abuse without a place to turn. As it stands, it also limits the options that human rights groups have to take these matters to the authorities, including in situations that raise concerns about ongoing abuse. Due to victims' fears of retaliation, Human Rights Watch did not alert authorities to the details of these allegations. Human Right Watch strongly urges an independent civilian-led investigation of these allegations with the aim of achieving criminal accountability for the alleged crimes. Human Rights Watch would eagerly cooperate with such an investigation to the extent we are able to without compromising the safety and privacy of victims.

Another allegation of police rape and sexual assault involving multiple officers is in the public record. A civil suit filed in August 2012 alleges that in the city of Prince George in August 2010, members of the RCMP took a woman they had arrested to a basement where they physical and sexually abused her. The civil complaint alleges that in the basement of a private house, the woman was:

i)Forcibly confined in the basement against her will;

ii)Repeatedly struck, punched, and kicked while verbally denigrated and threatened with the death and disappearance from her family;

iii)Forcibly stripped to a state of nakedness, sexually assaulted and sodomised.[150]

Human Rights Watch was also told of indigenous women and girls being sexually abused in city cells after passing out due to intoxication. In 2007, when Hannah J. was 25, police put her in city cells when she was intoxicated. She woke up to find herself naked from the waist down:

I remember [two male officers] putting me in the cells and I passed out. I woke up with my pants and panties off. I asked the lady guard if I could look at the cameras. She asked why. She didn't let me look at the tape.... My pants were in the cell beside me. My panties weren't there... I felt funny, wet down there [pointing to between her legs]. I just went home and cried... Why did this happen to me? Why didn't they just leave me on the street?

A representative of an advocacy organization recounted a similar incident in another town reported by a young woman who had been between 13 and 15 years old when it happened to her between 2006 and 2008. The young woman said that it had happened when she had been brought to the cells while she was intoxicated. She described attempting to pull down her shirt to cover herself after regaining consciousness to find that she had nothing on her bottom half and was being watched by a male guard.

Physical Abuse of Women

Human Rights Watch received 15 reports of police physically mistreating women in cells and on the street in the communities we visited in the north. The reports ranged from routine rough handling during arrest to an outright beating in cells. Abuse and mistreatment occurred at all stages of the women's interaction with the police, including when they were arrested, while they were in custody and upon their release. Eleven women told us directly about physical abuse and additional information was taken from eye witnesses and community service providers.

Abuse During Arrest

Rough treatment during arrest at times results in injuries beyond bruises. In 2006, an ex-boyfriend of Dina A. called the police and on his own admission falsely accused her of being violent towards him. Officers arrived on the reserve, found Dina, took her into custody but did not tell her why. "A cop handcuffed one wrist and banged it against the bun wagon... [He] put me in handcuffs and put me in the back and took me to the station." They kept her at the station for 8 to 12 hours, a portion of which was spent with a woman who "was shouting and violent and enraged." They refused Dina's requests to be separated from the woman, as well as her request that they take her to the hospital for an x-ray. "I had to walk up there myself after I was released (about a kilometer walk). The x-ray showed that the smaller bone was broken and the bigger bone was fractured. I had to have a cast for eight weeks." When Dina complained, the police took eight months to investigate and concluded that the other woman in the cell had broken her wrist, even though Dina told them the woman had not touched her.

Abuse While in Custody

Women also reported aggressive treatment after the arrest, during the process of being searched and physically placed into holding cells. Joy I. described how her experience in 2011 went beyond a routine search:

I was in a fight and getting beat up. [The police] picked me up. They tore my sweater off and jeans off in the holding cell. There were three or four of them - men - a female guard was watching. I tried to sit up and they pepper sprayed me twice. They kept pushing me down and tearing my clothes off. I was all dressed up before I went in there. They ripped off my jeans and put them in a bag.

She was left without her jeans, but with her underwear, that night. They released her the next morning without charges, and did not allow her to put her jeans back on. "The next day I had to walk back to my brother's like that - no pants; clothes in bag."

In Anna T.'s case, the police told her that they were going to beat her before putting her in cells in early 2012. Anna had called the police because a friend was being beaten by her boyfriend. Intoxicated and angry because the police had failed to come out on another occasion, Anna spit on one of the officers when the police arrived. They took her into custody and brought her to the police holding cells. Anna explained to Human Rights Watch what happened:

"Here's your choice, [Anna], you either get charged with assaulting an officer or you take the beating," [said one of the officers.] Stupid me I said, "I'll take the beating." She grabbed me, slammed me up on the wall and I hit my head. Then she slammed me on the ground. A male cop drove his knee into my back while she stripped earrings out of my ears and elastics out of my hair. "Have you had enough?" "Yes, I've had enough. I'm sorry."

Women and Girls' Lack of Confidence in Police Protection

What would they do to me if I need to call the cops? Police officers - you're supposed to look up to them. I needed help and they didn't help me. We've been having gang people come to our house. Who do we call? It's just pretty sad. We've got nobody to go to for help.

¾Sophie B., who was assaulted by a police officer when he responded to a distress call

Police abuse undermines women and girls' safety far beyond the direct physical consequences of any physical mistreatment. The impact is felt in the reticence of indigenous women and girls to call the police for help when they fear or have experienced violence. The problem is not limited to those who have experienced police abuse directly. According to a youth service provider, addressing the exploitation of girls by other youth in co-ed programs run by some organizations has been challenging because the girls do not trust the RCMP enough to report. The possibility of abuse in cells also inhibits some community members from turning to the police when they see youth in a compromised position. One woman whose sister was raped by a police officer decades ago and who since has received periodic reports of police rape from others told Human Rights Watch:

Every time we see drunk kids stumbling around the streets it's hard to know whether to let them stay on the street vulnerable to what can happen on the street or to call the RCMP, given my brother's and my sister's experiences. I remember all the things that have happened. What do you do? Leave them vulnerable to perverts on the street or call the RCMP and risk that they could be abused sexually or physically?

Police Response to Disappearances and Murders

This concern was echoed by others. According to a community provider of services to domestic violence survivors, the reaction of the police to missing person reports depends on the officer and whether the missing person is a repeat criminal offender or known to the criminal justice system. The community service provider told Human Rights Watch about reporting a woman missing in 2011 who had previous contact with the criminal justice system:

We reported a young aboriginal woman missing this past fall and it took three weeks before they even started to look for her. The police officer called and asked questions about her after three weeks. There was no explanation of why he'd taken that long. But all of a sudden he needed this and this. I thought: "Why am I doing your job for you?"

Police Response to Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault

Several service providers told Human Rights Watch that RCMP officers responded dismissively to calls from indigenous women out of apparent frustration with seeing women remain in violent relationships. They complained that the abuse was taken less seriously when the police had responded repeatedly to a particular household, and that officers lacked an appreciation for the financial and other barriers that make it difficult for women to leave abusive men.

[My sister and I] got into my cousin's vehicle [which she was driving] - she was begging me to go for a ride. My cousin's boyfriend was there and he said to her, "Hey, you know how we were talking about suicide? Why don't we do it now with these two bitches in the car?" I buckled my sister's seatbelt in fast... He reached over and grabbed the wheel and turned us into the ditch... [After the crash,] my sister dragged me out of the vehicle. We went to the house of people we know and called a cab and went to the hospital. I was in and out of consciousness for 4 to 5 hours. I had a head injury - 24 stitches on the side of the head. I lost so much blood. They had to give me two and a half pints of blood...

The next day I went to the police to report in the morning. There were three cops standing there. I said I'm here to give my report about the accident I was in last night because when [the police] came to the hospital they only asked about who was driving and whose vehicle it was. The police officer was just like, "You guys were intoxicated." They didn't even want to listen to me.

When investigations do occur, victim-blaming by police officers is a problem. One service provider told Human Rights Watch:

I had a woman about two years ago who decided to report to the RCMP - very rare. I have worked with many women sexually assaulted and only a handful go forward with charges. She was made to feel that she was to blame. "Why had you been drinking with him?" I had to work triple time to work through her natural feelings of guilt... You have a system of authority that puts the blame on the victim.

Cara D., a 17-year-old victim of attempted rape in 2012, reported the crime to the police and became the subject of scrutiny. After an initial visit by a female officer who took pictures of bruises on her leg and arm, Cara received a succession of visits from male officers questioning her story:

The cops came to the house to talk about it at all hours... earlier than 6 a.m.... Different cops, same questions. They were all male and you could tell they didn't believe me. They acted like they wanted to leave. "Are you lying to us?" They basically said I might have to do a lie detector test, but it didn't happen. They took [the perpetrator] in for questioning and he refused to make a statement. They let him go. There was a two-month investigation and they dropped all the charges. The guy had charges of sexual assault before but it was still not enough for them to not drop the charges... What was I supposed to do - let him rape me so you would have evidence?

The man who attacked Cara was originally charged with attempted rape but the charges were later dropped and temporary restrictions which had been imposed on his movements were lifted. However no one told Cara. "I found out that he got off because I saw him out," she said.

As noted in the background section of this report, most complaints of police misconduct are investigated by police themselves. RCMP policy calls for complaints of misconduct to be investigated by an independent provincial body or, failing that, an external non-RCMP police department. If neither of those is available, another RCMP detachment will investigate, or as a last resort, the detachment at issue will conduct an internal investigation.

Although a civilian complaints commission monitors the processing of public complaints against the RCMP and external police teams investigate the more serious allegations, the practice only provides an independent civilian accountability mechanism for a small portion of the complaints of police misconduct. Some hope that British Columbia's new civilian Independent Investigations Office will end impunity for police abuses in the province. But, as discussed, the limitations of the office's mandate mean that it holds little promise of justice for victims of sexual assault. Recourse for many complaints will be limited to the existing complaint mechanisms.

Five women and girls we interviewed filed complaints about RCMP officer misconduct, including physical assault and sexual harassment. Two of the complaints were being investigated by external, non-RCMP police forces at the time of the interview. Responses to the other complaints raise concerns about all the different types of investigative mechanisms. Dina A., whose wrist was broken by an officer during her arrest in 2006, made a complaint that was investigated by the local detachment. The investigation took more than eight months and the detachment did not question any witnesses at the scene of the arrest, instead blaming another woman held in city cells that night.

As noted above, in Sophie B.'s case, an officer was eventually put on trial for assault following an investigation by an external police department. However, before that happened the detachment to which the officer belonged launched its own investigation and laid assault charges against the girl who had filed the complaint. The charges were later dropped.

I have not seen the complaint process go forward. We have suggested that to people before. People don't trust that. Where's that going to go? There's great mistrust in that. No feeling of safety in doing that. When you don't have that sense of safety, I wouldn't want to come forward and complain. Who do you go to then?

Elaine H. told Human Rights Watch that her local police told her to take her complaint about the officer who was stalking her to the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP:

Well, there really aren't any systems in place because I phoned the police department, who then said, sorry this is happening to you, you need to call the police complaints center, so I called them and wrote several letters... On the phone the woman asked for a description. "Well I'm five feet eight inches, 130 pounds, I've got dark hair. I'm told I'm pretty attractive." The response was: "No wonder why this is happening."

A year and a half later the officer was transferred, but it was not clear whether her complaint had triggered the transfer. Shortly after that, a second police officer began harassing her but she did not bother to make a complaint because after the response to the earlier situation "it seemed pointless to make a complaint."

The Responsibility to Address Violence against Women and Girls

Determining whether Canada has exercised due diligence in this context requires assessing the government's performance of a number of duties. Chief among these is the duty to investigate cases of violence against women and girls. An effective investigation, according to international human rights tribunal case law, is one capable of leading to the identification and punishment of those responsible. Police omission of basic steps like interviewing key witnesses or following up on tips limits the effectiveness of an investigation. International standards also apply to how authorities should treat victims and their families in the course of investigations. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has commented on the need for those involved to have access to information about the progress of an investigation and to be treated with respect by authorities. Young victims and witnesses are due particular attention and support appropriate to their age to avoid further trauma. Victim-blaming in particular can alienate people from the justice system and deprive them of redress for violence. The UN special rapporteur on violence against women recommends training of law enforcement personnel to sensitize them to the needs of women as one component of due diligence. Holding police officers to account for demonstrating that sensitivity and following through with effective investigations constitutes another complementary piece.

Broader prevention efforts are also required that address domestic and sexual violence. The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women calls on governments to "[d]evelop, in a comprehensive way, preventative approaches and all those measures of a legal, political, administrative and cultural nature that promote the protection of women against any form of violence, and ensure that the re-victimization of women does not occur because of laws insensitive to gender considerations, enforcement practices or other interventions." The Canadian government has made some efforts in this regard but has yet to develop a national action plan to address the high levels of violence against indigenous women and girls.

The Responsibility to Protect the Rights of Persons in Custody

The Responsibility to Address Discrimination

The disproportionate rates of violence against indigenous women and girls, as well as the socio-economic indicators and historical context that predispose those same women and girls to be at an increased risk for police abuse, call for an examination of the government's fulfillment of its duties to address discrimination.

The government has a responsibility to address any differential treatment of indigenous women and girls by law enforcement and the criminal justice system, especially when the over-policing of indigenous women and girls is linked to incidents of police abuse. In 2012, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern "at the disproportionately high rates of incarceration of Aboriginal people including Aboriginal women, in federal and provincial prisons across Canada" and recommended that the government "reinforce measures to prevent excessive use of incarceration of indigenous peoples."

Human Rights Watch would like to express our deep appreciation to the women and girls who came forward to speak with us for this report. We are also grateful to the family members, community service providers, police officers, and others who spoke with us. We would like to thank the indigenous communities of the north for their support and cooperation in our research and would particularly like to express our gratitude for the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council's resolution welcoming us onto the territory to conduct this research. We thank the RCMP for its response to our inquiry about the policies and practices that relate to its policing and protection of women and girls and for the ongoing dialogue about the issues raised in this report.

We would like to recognize the great contributions to the research made by Mavis Erickson, representative of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council; Annabel Webb and Asia Czapska of Justice for Girls; Sharon McIvor and Shelagh Day of the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action; and David Eby of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. In addition, we thank JFG, FAFIA, BCCLA, and the Native Women's Association of Canada for providing feedback on drafts of this report.

Human Rights Watch gratefully acknowledges the generous financial support of Donna and Gary Slaight, Kathryn Cottingham, Carol Gray, Nancy Hamm, The Joan and Clifford Hatch Foundation, Linda Haynes, Michelle Koerner, Nancy Lang, Trish McCain, and Sarah Milroy.

This report was written by Meghan Rhoad, women's rights researcher. It is based on research conducted by the author and Samer Muscati, women's rights researcher. Samer Muscati took the photographs in this report's photo essay. Lara Yeo, intern with the Women's Rights Division, provided extensive research and editing support. At Human Rights Watch, the report was reviewed by Liesl Gerntholtz, director of the Women's Rights Division; Samer Muscati; Elizabeth Calvin, senior advocate with the Children's Rights Division; Aisling Reidy, senior legal advisor; and Tom Porteous, Program director. Matthew Rullo, coordinator with the Women's Rights Division, and Camille Pendley, associate with the Women's Rights Division, assisted with final proofreading and formatting. Ivy Shen provided assistance with the photo essay. Layout and production were coordinated by Grace Choi, publications director; Fitzroy Hepkins, administrative manager; and Matthew Rullo. Jasmine Herlt, Canada director, and Kathryn Semogas, consultant, coordinated communications and advocacy outreach and strategy.

http://www.globaltvbc.com/national+chief+keeps+up+calls+for+inquiry+after+aboriginal+bc+teens+murder/6442768931/story.html (accessed December 17, 2012).

In 2009, the BC Court of Appeal ruled in McIvor v. Canada that section 6 of the Indian Act was unconstitutional and discriminatory under section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. McIvor v. Canada ( Registrar of Indian and Northern Affairs), 2009 BCCA 153, http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/CA/09/01/2009BCCA0153err2.htm (accessed December 18, 2012). This litigation resulted in 2010‑2011 court‑ordered legislative reform process that has made 45,000 indigenous women and their descendants newly eligible for status registration. Notwithstanding this ground‑breaking litigation victory, thousands more were left behind by the 2011 legislative amendments to the Indian Act. The case of McIvor v. Canada is the subject of an ongoing petition under the complaints protocol of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Sharon McIvor and Jacob Grismer, "Communication Submitted for Consideration under the first optional protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," November 24, 2010, http://povertyandhumanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/McIvorApplicantsPetition1.pdf (accessed December 18, 2012).

"Letter from Minister Nicholson and Minister Ambrose to the Native Women's Association of Canada," Status of Women Canada news release, November 24, 2010, http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/med/news-nouvelles/2010/1124-eng.html (accessed December 13, 2012); Native Women's Association of Canada, "Small Steps on a Long Journey," December 2011, www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/EGM12_NWAC.pdf (accessed December 13, 2012), p. 5; Native Women's Association of Canada, "Evidence to Action," undated, http://www.nwac.ca/programs/evidence-action (accessed December 13, 2012).

"Backgrounder A: Addressing the Issue of Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women," Department of Justice Canada news release, October 2012, http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/news-nouv/nr-cp/2010/doc_32564.html (accessed December 13, 2012); " Letter from Minister Nicholson and Minister Ambrose to the Native Women's Association of Canada," Status of Women Canada news release, http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/med/news-nouvelles/2010/1124-eng.html. The "National Police Support Centre for Missing Persons" noted in the Status of Women Canada news release refers to NCMPUR. (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, "Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children," February 23, 2012, http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cpcmec-ccpede/index-eng.htm (accessed January 30, 2013).) On January 31, 2013, the RCMP launched a website, www.canadasmissing.ca, to "engage the public in reporting tips and information related to ongoing cases." The new site contains a sampling of missing persons and unidentified remains cases from across Canada. (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, "RCMP Launches National Public Website for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains," January 31, 2013, http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/news-nouvelles/2013/01-31-ncmpur-cnpdrni-eng.htm (accessed February 4, 2013).)

Fiske, Jo-anne. "Political Status of Native Indian Women: Contradictory Implications of Canadian State Policy," in In the Days of Our Grandmothers, Mary-Ellen Kelm and Lorna Townsend, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 338; Government of Canada, House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women, "Interim Report Call into the Night: An Overview of Violence Against Aboriginal Women," March 2011, 40th Parl., 3rd sess., http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=5056509&Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=40&Ses=3 (accessed September 26, 2012), p. 10, 31.

Beverley Jacobs and Andrea Williams, "Legacy of Residential Schools: Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women," in Marlene Brant Castellano, Linda Archibald, and Mike DeGagné, eds., From Truth to Reconciliation Transforming the Legacy of Residential Schools (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2008), pp. 119-142; also available online, london.cmha.ca/download.php?docid=294 (accessed December 13, 2012), p. 126.

Among Aboriginal People in Canada," 2007, http://www.ahf.ca/downloads/addictive-behaviours.pdf (accessed January 1, 2013), pp. 25-26.

"RCMP's internal probe fizzled," The Vancouver Province, November 27, 2007, http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=601f98b1-eddd-43a0-9809-fd7e04f9a17a&sponsor (accessed December 18, 2012).

Jessica McDiarmid, "B.C. Highway of Tears: RCMP accused of not taking women's disappearances seriously," Toronto Star, December 28, 2012, http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1308261--b-c-highway-of-tears-rcmp-accused-of-not-taking-women-s-disappearances-seriously (accessed January 25, 2013); Wendy Leung, "B.C. Hitchhikers Left to 'Highway of Tears' Mercy," Women's eNews, November 18, 2007, http://womensenews.org/story/the-world/071118/bc-hitchhikers-left-highway-tears-mercy (accessed January 25, 2013).

Lori Culbert, "Thirty-nine years later, family of Highway of Tears victim Gale Weys hopes for answers," The Vancouver Sun, September 26, 2012, http://www.vancouversun.com/news/family+highway+tears+victim+gale+weys+appeals+tips/7303801/story.html (accessed December 13, 2012).

Ian Mulgrew, "MULGREW: Break with aboriginal community destroys inquiry's credibility," The Vancouver Sun, March 6, 2012, http://www.vancouversun.com/life/MULGREW+Break+with+aboriginal+community+destroys+inquiry+credibility/6262051/story.html (accessed December 13, 2012).

Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, "Complaint and Review Process Flowchart," December 7, 2012, http://www.cpc-cpp.gc.ca/cnt/srv/sta-norm/cp-pp-eng.aspx (accessed December 13, 2012). See also RCMP Act, RSC 1985, c. R-10, http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/R-10/ (accessed December 13, 2012). Parts VI and VII of the RCMP Act detail the duties of the CPC.

Bill 12 - 2011 Police (Independent Investigations Office) Amendment Act, was given Royal Assent on June 2, 2011 (Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, "Progress of Bills," October 3, 2011, http://www.leg.bc.ca/39th3rd/votes/progress-of-bills.htm (accessed December 13, 2012)). The duties of the IIO are now provided for in Part 7.1 of the BC Police Act.

See Paul Kennedy, "Bill C-42 fails to provide real accountability over the RCMP," iPolitics.ca, October 29, 2012, http://www.ipolitics.ca/2012/10/29/paul-kennedy-bill-c-42-fails-to-provide-real-accountability-over-the-rcmp/ (accessed December 18, 2012); Government of Canada, House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Minutes of Proceedings, 41 st Parl., 1 st Sess., Meeting No. 55, October 29, 2012, http://mppac.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Bill_C-42_MPPAC_Presentation_Committe_Oct_29_-2012.pdf (accessed December 18, 2012), p. 12.

Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, "Chair's Final Report After Commissioner's Notice - In-custody death of Mr. Robert Dziekanski, October 14, 2007, involving the use of a conducted energy weapon at the Vancouver International Airport," February 10, 2011, http://www.cpc-cpp.gc.ca/cnt/decision/pii-eip/dziekanski/facn-faac-eng.aspx (accessed October 23, 2012). See also, "Operational Manual - Conducted Energy Weapon," Royal Canadian Mounted Police, April 29, 2010, http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/ccaps-spcca/cew-ai/operations-17-7-eng.htm (accessed October 23, 2012). The change came in response to the Tasering of Robert Dziekanski, a man who was acting erratically in the international arrivals section of Vancouver International Airport, after what the Commission for Public Complaints described as "a very brief encounter." Shortly after he was Tasered, the man died in custody. The Commission concluded that the Taser was deployed prematurely and without appreciation for its nature as a weapon "[b]ecause the RCMP positions the CEW as an intermediate weapon and trains its members that it is appropriate to use the CEW in response to low levels of threat because it is a relatively less harmful means of controlling a subject..."(Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, Chair's Final Report After Commissioner's Notice - In-custody death of Mr. Robert Dziekanski, October 14, 2007, involving the use of a conducted energy weapon at the Vancouver International Airport, February 10, 2011, http://www.cpc-cpp.gc.ca/prr/rep/rev/chair-pre/dziekanski/facn-faac-eng.aspx (accessed October 23, 2012).) A provincial commission of inquiry also found that the use of force was unjustified.(Braidwood Commission of Inquiry, "Use of Taser on Robert Dziekanski not justified, says commissioner Thomas Braidwood," June 18, 2010, http://www.braidwoodinquiry.ca/whats_new/press_release_10-06-18.pdf#zoom=100 (accessed October 23, 2012).) The Braidwood Commission of Inquiry into the use of conducted energy weapons in British Columbia also concluded in 2009 that the threshold for use be revised from "active resistance" to the much higher standard of "causing bodily harm." Although this recommendation was made at the end of the first phase of the Braidwood Commission's Inquiry, which was supposed to exclude the RCMP, the Commissioner said that it would be incongruous for the recommendation not to apply in most of the province which is policed by the RCMP. (Braidwood Commission, "Commissioner's comments on phase one report of Braidwood Inquiry into Taser use in British Columbia," July 23, 2009, http://www.braidwoodinquiry.ca/whats_new/press_release_09-07-23.pdf#zoom=100 (accessed October 23, 2012).) In May 2012, the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia formed a special committee to monitor the implementation of the recommendations from the Braidwood Commission's phase one report (Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, "Special Committee to Inquire into the Use of Conducted Energy Weapons and to Audit Selected Police Complaints," Terms of Reference, December 3, 2012, https://www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/39thparl/session-4/rpa/5-39-4-41-2.htm (accessed October 23, 2012)). In addition, in April 2011, RCMP officers in Prince George, British Columbia, used a Taser on an 11-year-old indigenous boy after an altercation at a group home resulted in the stabbing of an adult employee. An investigation by an external police department found the officers acted appropriately, but no further details about the incident have been disclosed. The Commission of Public Complaints Against the RCMP and British Columbia's Representative for Children and Youth are conducting separate investigations into the incident. "RCMP Taser Case: No Charges For Using Device On 11-Year-Old B.C. Boy," The Canadian Press, September 15, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/09/15/no-charges-for-using-rcmp-taser-bc-boy_n_965098.html (accessed October 23, 2012).

See amongst others, the European Court of Human Rights' (ECHR) decisions in Kaya v. Turkey, judgment of 19 February 1998, (1998) Reports 1998-I, para. 107; Hugh Jordan v. the United Kingdom, judgment of 4 May 2001, no. 24746/94, ECHR 2001-III (extracts), para. 107; Finucane v. the United Kingdom, judgment of 1 July 2003, no. 29178/95, ECHR 2003-VIII, para. 69; Isayeva v. Russia, judgment of 24 February 2005, no. 57950/00, para. 212; Adali v. Turkey, judgment 31 March 2005, no. 38187/97, para. 223; all ECHR decisions available at http://www.echr.coe.int/ECHR/EN/Header/Case-Law/Decisions+and+judgments/HUDOC+database/.

UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, "Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 44 of the Convention Concluding Observations Canada," CRC/C/CAN/CO/3-4, October 5, 2012, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/crcs61.htm (accessed October 15, 2012), paras. 48 and 49(b); UN Committee against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment, "Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 19 of the Convention Concluding observations of the Committee against Torture Canada," CAT/C/CAN/CO/6, June 25, 2012, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/cats48.htm (accessed December 16, 2012), para. 20; UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, "Consideration of reports submitted by States parties under article 9 of the Convention Concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination," CERD/C/CAN/CO/19-20, March 9, 2012, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/cerds80.htm (accessed October 29, 2012), para. 17(b); UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review Canada, A/HRC/11/17*, (Eleventh Session, 2009), http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/UPR/Pages/CASession4.aspx (accessed September 21, 2012), paras. 86 (33), (35), and (36); UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, "Concluding observation of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women Canada," CEDAW/C/CAN/CO/7, November 7, 2008, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cedaw/docs/co/CEDAW-C-CAN-CO-7.pdf (accessed October 18, 2012), paras. 32 and 53; UN Human Rights Committee, "Consideration of reports submitted by states parties under article 40 of the Covenant Concluding observations of the Human Rights Committee Canada," CCPR/C/CAN/CO/5, April 20, 2006, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrc/hrcs85.htm (accessed October 22, 2012), para. 23.

Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46, s 271-273; UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) decision in V.L. v. Switzerland found that "sexual abuse [multiple rapes and other acts] by the police in this case constitutes torture even though it was perpetrated outside formal detention facilities," (CAT/C/37/D/262/2005, November 20, 2006, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/47975afd21.html (accessed December 16, 2012), para. 8.10); Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Raquel Martí de Mejía Case, Case 10.970, annual report 1995, OEA/Ser.L/V/II.91. Doc. 7. rev., endnotes, p. 9 (Report No. 5/96, Inter-Am.C.H.R., OEA/Ser.L/V/II.91 Doc. 7 (1996)), see http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/95eng/Peru10970.htm (accessed December 16, 2012), endnote 47; and UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Manfred Nowak, Promotion and Protection of all Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, including the Right to Development, Summary, A/HRC/7/3, January 15, 2008, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=103 (accessed December 16, 2012), para. 34.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted September 13, 2007, G.A. Res. 61/295, U.N. Doc. A/61/L.67 and Add.1 (2007), www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf (accessed January 30, 2013), art. 22(2).

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights , 19 December 1966,

993 3, Can. T.S. 1976 No. 46, 6 I.L.M. 360 (entered into force 3 January 1976) [ICESCR],

http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/a_cescr.htm (accessed December 19, 2012).

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On December 5, 2012, a man walking his dog found the murdered body of 16-year-old Summer Star (C.J.) Fowler in a ravine near the British Columbia (BC) town of Kamloops.

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'I was terrified, I thought I was going to die': Indigenous women speak out on police abuse, discrimination

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'I was terrified, I thought I was going to die': Indigenous women speak out on police abuse, discrimination

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As protests erupt across North America following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, Indigenous women are speaking out about discrimination and violence they have experienced by police in British Columbia, saying not enough is being done to address racism in the forces.

"They are very afraid of the police," says Cree lawyer Amber Prince, who represents a number of Vancouver Indigenous women who say they have been abused and discriminated against by police.

Prince won a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal case for Deborah Campbell, an Indigenous woman who was dragged at least 20 feet by a Vancouver police officer in 2016 when she tried to peacefully witness her son being arrested. He was later released without charges.

The tribunal ordered the VPD to pay Campbell $20,000 in compensation. It also ruled more training was needed to improve officer interactions with Indigenous people. Prince says that training has yet to be done, which she notes is apparent in recent Vancouver police interactions with Indigenous women.

"Since the decision, I have heard from women who say they were assaulted by police, that police have used excessive force against them, that they have been given bylaw tickets that appear to be baseless," Prince said.

'None of this should happen'

The Vancouver Police Department declined an interview with the CBC and refused to answer specific questions, but in a statement said officers already partake in training about the oppression of Indigenous people and take anti-bias and anti-racism training.

Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart - who is also the chair of the Vancouver Police Board - says he knows there are problems within the city's police service.

"None of this should happen," Stewart said.

He said while discrimination against Indigenous people is undeniable and needs to be rooted out, he added: "You can't conflate what is happening in the U.S. to what is happening in Canada, where you see massive investments in a militarized police."

Still, he agrees with Amber Prince and others who say the VPD desperately needs to improve its relations with Indigenous people.

"It's our job as a board to put the policies in place and make sure that everyone is treated equally and protected," he said.

He acknowledges that having more diverse officers and board members will ultimately help reduce racism in the police ranks, adding that training is on the way, once restrictions around COVID-19 are loosened.

"We have developed a new course with Reconciliation Canada, through the Justice Institute that all new recruits will go through," Stewart said.

He also mentioned that executives within the VPD would be provided with similar training but remained vague about the training of more senior officers.

The CBC has learned that the VPD's decision to work with Reconciliation Canada came after an incident in December where an Indigenous grandfather and his 12-year-old granddaughter were handcuffed outside a BMO branch after an employee suspected them of fraud. The pair was released with no charges.

'I tell my son to run from the police'

For some Indigenous women though, the forthcoming training provides little comfort.

Wendy Nahanee is a Squamish woman who works in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver as a program manager with the group Culture Saves Lives.

When she and her son were assaulted in what she calls a racially motivated attack, she says the Vancouver police didn't meet with her to take a report, failed to follow up, and she felt they disregarded her complaint.

But it's another incident from the '90s that instilled a life-long fear of police in her.

She was driving with friends from her reserve in North Vancouver to the Park Royal Mall when the West Vancouver police pulled her over for a traffic violation.

"One of the people in the back seat didn't have their seatbelt on, so they shuffled to put it on," Nahanee said.

That's when she said the officers became suspicious.

"They pulled me out of the car by my hair, threw me on the ground with a gun in my face asking what gang I was affiliated with," she said, noting she has never been involved with any gang.

"I was terrified, I thought I was going to die," she said from her current home in Vancouver.

West Vancouver Police say they can't confirm the specific incident, but admit there's a long way to go.

"We have an understanding that there's a long history and long-lasting effects on those who experienced the hardship and horrific events at the hands of police," said Constable Kevin Goodmurphy.

Nahanee understands all too well what he means by long-lasting affects.

"I tell my son to run from the police," she said.

"As a person of colour, you are a target ... everyone else is told to go to the police, they are here to protect you, but it's the exact opposite for Indigenous people."

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'I was terrified, I thought I was going to die': Indigenous women speak out on police abuse, discrimination | CBC News

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As protests erupt across North America following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, Indigenous women are speaking out about discrimination and violence they have experienced by police in British Columbia, saying not enough is being done to address racism in the forces.

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Violence against Indigenous women during COVID-19 sparks calls for MMIWG plan

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Violence against Indigenous women during COVID-19 sparks calls for MMIWG plan