Ipperwash Summer Series: Lack of resources doomed post-Ipperwash Ontario policing reform

September 6, 2020, will mark the 25th anniversary of the shooting death of unarmed protestor Anthony “Dudley” George by an Ontario Provincial Police sniper at Ipperwash Beach.  The Anishinabek News will feature an Ipperwash Summer Series to highlight the history, trauma, aftermath, and key recommendations from the 2007 Report of the Ipperwash Inquiry.  First Nations in Ontario understood that the Inquiry would not provide all of the answers or solutions, but would be a step forward in building a respectful government-to-government relationship.

For information on the 2007 Report of the Ipperwash Inquiry, please visit: http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/inquiries/ipperwash/closing_submissions/index.html

By Catherine Murton Stoehr

25 years after an unarmed First Nation man named Dudley George was shot and killed by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) at Ipperwash Park, the person who has done more than any other to help the OPP reform its Indigenous protocols offers a stark and brutal reflection on the current state of policing in Ontario.

“We’re still in the same position we were 25 years ago. Nothing has been done.”

George Couchie, a Nipissing First Nation member and a career police officer who served with the Anishinabek Police Service (APS), the North Bay Police Service, and the OPP, would not identify a single improvement in the OPP’s relationship with First Nations from then to now.

“It always comes back to: this is what we should be doing. We pay money for people to sit at a table to come up with recommendations that are never followed through.”

Starting in 1997, Couchie provided Indigenous cultural awareness training for the OPP, offering training sessions in spring and fall. The sessions were not mandatory but helpful for those generally interested or seeking promotion. In the wake of Ipperwash, Bill Blair asked Couchie to increase the number of courses to eight in the spring and eight in the fall. It was too much extra work for Couchie to do alone. Rather than increasing investment in the programme to get the work done, the plan was scaled back, a pattern that would repeat itself in Ontario policing many times from then to now.

“We did a lot of marching in the morning and night. The only time we’re going to march after this is for a fallen officer. We should be teaching our officers how to deal with people and how to speak to them… Training was about enforcement: black and white. When you got on the street, everything wasn’t black and white,” recalled Couchie when asked about OPP training.

Couchie remembers a culture of assimilation that kneecapped the nascent Indigenous policing program that eventually became the Anishinabek Police Service.

“You didn’t think you were being assimilated but you were. I tell young officers, ‘Be your own man.’  When I joined First Nations policing, they wanted Indigenous people in there, but once in, we became the uniform. When I left the OPP in 2005, they asked, ‘Have things changed?’ I said, ‘Let me ask you: Why did we bring in First Nations policing? So we’d have officers with understanding of community.  Have we lowered the rates of suicide, and break and enter, and incarceration in our communities?’”

Miskaankwad Dwayne Nashkawa, now Chief Executive Officer of Nipissing First Nation, spent years supporting the First Nation Policing agreement that led to the 1991 formation of the APS, on behalf of the Union of Ontario Indians. He picked up on the theme of a lack of support for Indigenous officers undermining their ability to effect meaningful system change.

Nashkawa remembers his Union of Ontario Indians mentors Peter Akewezie and Charles Cornelius laying out the principles for Indigenous Policing in Ontario.

“Their vision was peacekeeping. Not what we have now, which is an equivalent mirroring of what the OPP does. I have great respect for the frontline people working in the communities under challenging circumstances for many years.”

But as far as support particular to Indigenous officers goes, the “Anishinabek Police Services comes right out of the OPP and mainstream policing.” There was “no new skill building for that leadership group, they were all only Ontario Police College” trained.

Ignorance and Underfunding frustrate interventions.

There is a sense in which the OPP created a designated hiring stream for Indigenous officers, first Indigenous constables administered by the OPP, then the APS, hoping for a ‘twofer’: skilled officers with meaningful ties to Indigenous communities plus a lifetime’s worth of cultural and historical knowledge thrown in for free. However, George Couchie warned, “Don’t assume that just because [the young new officers] are Indigenous they know their history.”

His own father was forced to attend a residential school and Couchie himself did not know that until later in life. Absent dedicated funds to recover, build, and teach Indigenous policing protocols meant the Indigenous officers were ill-equipped to stem the tide of systemic anti-Indigenous attitudes and practices in the service.

According to Nashkawa, the Union of Ontario Indian’s vision of Indigenous policing “was lost through the 90s because it became a game of get more resources and it was always on the cusp of being cancelled.”

“It was a scramble to build a service and preserve it at the same time.”

Nashkawa recalled the very first APS Chief Glen Banning being arrested for getting kickbacks on police cruiser supply contracts.

“It went from something with great aspirations to a complete mess by year 2000 and has limped along since then.”

He noted a promising recent development at the highest level with the appointment of current Chief Mark Lesage, an officer who “came up through the ranks and is always willing to listen.”

If his words sound blunt, Nashkawa’s analysis is anything but, a “systems thinker” Nashkawa knows that the only way to correct the situation is to spend real time reviewing and planning and rebuilding, but no Indigenous organizations, least of all the APS, are granted that.

“There are so many things, that unless you’ve worked in the communities, that aren’t obvious. The APS have struggled for 30 years to be adequately resourced. Everything is a battle and everyone is about surviving. When you are in survival mode you aren’t building capacity or evaluating, you’re lurching from one situation to another,” expressed Nashkawa. “The North Bay Police department has an entire machine underneath it: civilian people, accounting, administrators, planning expertise. First Nations don’t have any of that support. If the APS has some money to build a detachment, who will be the project manager? There is no administrative architecture to take it on.  They are given a million-dollar grant: here’s the money, you guys figure it out. It becomes another problem for the chief of police.”

The weight of that burden and its consequences came home to Nashkawa at a recent meeting to discuss the ongoing process of implementing Indigenous laws in the communities, a process toward which Nashkawa and others in Nipissing First Nation have devoted many hours across many years. Dave Whitlow, the Deputy Chief of the Anishinabek Police Service, casually dismissed Nipissing’s new laws, telling the group that only provincial and federal laws would be enforced and any officer attempting to enforce Nipissing Gichi-Naaknigewin would be putting themselves in jeopardy.

“The leadership of the police service, supposedly serving our nation, is not willing to support our self-determination.”

Even the road to meaningful change, which so many find prohibitively ambitious to contemplate sounds measured, practical and inviting when Nashkawa describes it.

“Everyone is good at problem identification. But we need to really dig into the problems and use our analysis to inform our strategies. We never get to the meat of things. We go from problem to solution but people are so frustrated they don’t want to take the time and we can’t get to the substantive issues that will make the force more resilient.”

At first blush, George Couchie’s sombre evaluation of improvements in policing in Indigenous communities appears at odds with his many years of successes within the OPP. His public talks are full of stories of officers who credit him with helping them improve their skills. But the problem wasn’t having cultural awareness training.  The problem was not having a full-time OPP Indigenous policy analyst and a full-time OPP Indigenous legal expert and Indigenous trainers at the Police College and support staff and line item budgets for all of them.

Few would dispute the importance of cultural awareness training, to system change. However, being a relatively inexpensive, in terms of both money and surrender of colonial control, aspect of the hard work of decolonization cultural awareness training presents a unique problem. Like an eddy in a river, it can sidetrack travellers, pretending to be the goal of the journey rather than an essential step along the way. Why would Canadian police forces, social service bodies, universities, or even government ministries undertake the kind of wide-ranging forensic audits that Nashkawa and others are calling for to identify and root out anti-Indigenous colonial systems operating in their groups’ culture, training processes, communications protocols, hiring practices, and review and discipline mechanisms, if they are pretty sure they can pass off sitting in an Indigenous ceremony and regular land acknowledgements as basically the same thing?

Catherine Murton Stoehr is a non-Indigenous writer and historian living on Nbissing land.