By Tia Dafnos
For 150 years, the RCMP and its predecessor, the North West Mounted Police, has played a central role in imposing colonial ‘order,’ enabling settler access to land and resources while displacing Indigenous peoples from their lands and suppressing resistance.
In the wake of Indian Residential School lawsuits, the Kanesatake resistance, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), the Ontario Provincial Police killing of Dudley George at Ipperwash, Ipperwash Inquiry, and the massive RCMP operation at Ts’peten (Gustafsen Lake), the force identified Indigenous communities as a “strategic priority” in 2003.
This “priority” emphasizes provision of “culturally competent” services to “build relationships and partnerships” with Indigenous communities. In part this has translated into units, policies, and resources dedicated to monitoring and responding to “grievances” and conflicts involving Indigenous people and communities.
The “Measured Approach”
One of the Ipperwash Inquiry outcomes was recognition that Indigenous “conflicts” are distinct from others because they are embedded in the colonial relationship with the settler state. This was reflected in recommendations such as the need for improved communication, use of negotiators and First Nations officers as mediators, and the addressing of this unique context in police training and enforcement strategies.
While the RCMP have used conflict negotiators and Indigenous liaison officers during demonstrations and other actions since the early 1990s, the 2007 AFN National Day of Action (NDA) was a key event that led to creation of policy and normalization of divisional and national level coordination across the RCMP and with government.
In 2011, practices adopted for the NDA were formally incorporated in a section of the RCMP Operational Manual titled “Aboriginal Protests and Occupations.” This policy is modeled on the OPP’s “Framework for Police Preparedness for Indigenous Critical Incidents.” The policy explicitly describes the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights and Charter guarantees of rights associated with protest. According to the policy, RCMP members should use a measured response and “attempt to negotiate the conflict before taking enforcement action.”
This is consistent with the measured response approach for public order events adopted by the RCMP in the early 2000s amid intense scrutiny of its responses – and those of other police forces – to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’ activism. Measured response emphasizes preemptively building relationships with those involved in a (potential) conflict and negotiation before any enforcement action. Specially-trained liaison officers play a key role in this process. This is the first step in an enforcement continuum. This potential for escalation of enforcement – in many cases, there is a likelihood of escalation because of an injunction – hangs as significant leverage in ‘negotiations.’
Intelligence gathering as part of measuring the approach
At the same time, the “Aboriginal Protests and Occupations” policy describes the measured approach as requiring “accurate and timely intelligence” as a “basis for the management of aboriginal demonstration or protest.”
Both the RCAP and Ipperwash recommendations have been used to explain the dedication of intelligence resources to monitoring Indigenous communities.
The Aboriginal Joint Intelligence Group (JIG) was created in 2007 within the National Security Criminal Investigations section. Its mandate was to gather information and produce intelligence about “grievances pertaining to land claims, treaty disputes, environmental issues, economic and sovereignty disputes, internal conflict and social issues” associated with Indigenous communities that could lead to “civil disobedience and unrest.” Of particular interest were situations that could impact critical infrastructures and “energy sector development.” Notably, the JIG was described as addressing the RCMP’s strategic prioritization of Indigenous communities by providing “insight and historical knowledge” about communities and underlying issues to inform police decision-making.
This knowledge was shared through weekly “Aboriginal Community Public Safety Situation Reports” and three annual strategic threat assessments on “Communities of Concern.” By 2009, these reports were being shared with approximately 450 law enforcement, government, and private energy sector “partners.”
The JIG disbanded in 2010, but similar monitoring activities continued at the divisional levels. In 2014-2015, the RCMP’s Contract and Aboriginal Policing section and National Intelligence Coordinating Centre (NICC) conducted Project Sitka, which collected intelligence from the divisions. In addition to monitoring “aboriginal-based protests”, project Sitka was a threat assessment of groups and people “willing and capable of utilizing unlawful tactics” in the context of “Aboriginal public order events.” Both the RCAP and Ipperwash Inquiry were referenced as justification for project Sitka to fill a “need to examine Aboriginal protest as a separate and distinctive form of protest.” The NICC sought updates to Project Sitka in November 2016, shortly before the federal government affirmed support for the Transmountain expansion and Line 3 pipelines.
Making policing “culturally” sensitive
Operationally, in British Columbia, the RCMP’s E-Division created a “Community and Aboriginal Conflict Management Team” in 2007 to “assist Districts and Detachments to prevent, de-escalate and manage First Nation or any other community conflict requiring police intervention.” The Team’s mandate was to focus on people and groups involved in “complex multi-party disputes involving cultural, historical, political, and economic factors often leading to protest actions” such as road and rail blockades, fishery and forestry protests, and occupations. While introduced for the NDA, the intent was to make it permanent. Today, we see a version of this in the Community-Industry Relations Group (C-IRG).
Referencing the RCAP and Ipperwash inquiry recommendations as justification, the use of “culturally competent” trained officers and liaisons, along with coordinated command and intelligence, is now a norm of policing Indigenous peoples’ resistance to threats to land and self-determination; these practices are encapsulated by E-Division’s C-IRG, which is currently subject to lawsuits and a Civilian Review Response Group (CIRG) inquiry.