Aboriginal Justice, the Media, and the Symbolic Management of Aboriginal/Euro-Canadian Relations

Abstract

In 1992 the government of British Columbia launched a public inquiry to investigate persistent allegations that Aboriginal people in the central interior of the province were being subjected to racial prejudice and unfair treatment by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the provincial justice system. Over a six-month period the Cariboo Chilcotin justice inquiry held hearings in ten of the fifteen Tsilhqot’in, Carrier, and Secwepemc reserve communities of the region. Aboriginal people brought forth almost two hundred incidents of complaint, including allegations of police assaults in jail cells, inadequate responses to calls for help, abuses of police authority, and poor representation by lawyers. The commission’s final report concluded that problems of racial prejudice, discrimination, and cultural incompatibility were widespread between Aboriginal people and the justice system.\nThe Cariboo Chilcotin justice inquiry is one of the more recent of a series of public inquiries, hearings, task forces, and royal commissions in the last decade examining the relationship between Aboriginal people and the Canadian justice system. The highly publicized cases of the wrongful incarceration of Mi’kmaq Donald Marshal, the shooting death of Manitoba Native leader J. J. Harper, and the murder of Helen Betty Osborne in La Pas, Manitoba, along with the more recent shooting by an RCMP officer of Connie Jacobs and her young son in their home on an Alberta reserve, have drawn much public attention to the complex ways in which factors of racism, poverty, gender, culture, and history are implicated in the difficulties that Aboriginal people across Canada continue to experience in their dealings with Canadian justice.

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