Lisa Monchalin et al. (2019 ) PDF

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Aggression and Violent Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aggviobeh

Homicide and Indigenous peoples in North America: A structural analysis ⁎

Lisa Monchalin a, , Olga Marquesb , Charles Reasons c , Prince Arorad a

Department of Criminology, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey Main 3881-14, 12666-72 Ave, Surrey, BC V3W 2M8, Canada Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, 2000 Simcoe St. N., Oshawa, ON L1G 0C5, Canada c Department of Law and Justice, Central Washington University, 400 E University Way, Ellensburg, WA 98926, United States d Peter A. Allard School of Law, 1822 East Mall, Allard Hall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada b

A RT IC L E IN FO

A B S T RA C T

Keywords: Indigenous peoples Homicide Structural violence Institutional violence Colonialism

Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States experience high levels of homicide and violence. In fact, the Indigenous homicide rate is the highest of any racial and ethnic group in either country. Of particular concern, is the amount of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. While violence has been subject to vast research in Canada and the United States, most of the literature focuses upon the micro factors. These types of explanations however, largely fail to provide the historical and structural framework for understanding violence affecting Indigenous peoples. For instance, the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls must not be separated from the structural embeddedness of colonialism and the impacts of patriarchy. While the history of colonialism is usually evoked within the literature to provide context, this paper argues that colonialism is not only a contextual factor to situate individual violence, but rather that the embeddedness of colonialism within the political, economic, and social organization, or structure of society, leads to the continued precarity of Indigenous people to violence and victimization – particularly homicide.

1. Introduction The experiences of Indigenous peoples 1 in Canada have been punctuated by racism, invisibility and marginalization, inequality, environmental degradation, and social and economic exclusion. However, these visible instances of state violence against Indigenous peoples are often not regarded as such, but rather as unfortunate accidental oversights, or individual failings. These modern vestiges of colonialism are seen in cases such as: the September 2008 death of Brian Sinclair, a 34year old Indigenous man from Winnipeg who died in a hospital emergency department after a 34-hour wait, of a treatable bladder infection caused by a blocked catheter. He was referred to the hospital by his local clinic. When he arrived at the hospital he checked in with a triage

aid, but an inquest into his death found that he never formally entered into the triage system. As his condition worsened, staff never asked if he was waiting for care. Rather they assumed he was intoxicated and ‘sleeping it off’, or just needed a warm place to sleep. Or, the ‘error’ that occurred in September 2009, when Health Canada sent dozens of body bags to the Wasagamack First Nation and God's River First Nation in Manitoba – some of the hardest hit by the H1N1 flu pandemic, in response to their request for assistance in community organizing and funding for medicine. While the response to both these instances was one of apologizing and promises of change, in 2016, the situation for Indigenous peoples in Canada was not ameliorated. Dubbed the Indigenous youth suicide crisis, 2016 saw dozens of Indigenous people – many of them children –

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Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (L. Monchalin), [email protected] (O. Marques), [email protected] (C. Reasons). 1 The term Indigenous is used throughout this paper to refer to original peoples in North America and their descendants. As explained by Younging (2018), this term is a collective term to refer to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada, but has also been used to refer to Indigenous peoples worldwide. For instance, the United Nations used this term when they published the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is also a term that has been slowly replacing “Aboriginal” in many contexts in Canada (Younging, 2018). However, it must be noted that terms such as “Aboriginal” or “Indigenous” are all encompassing labels, which is problematic due to the fact that there are many different nations of people throughout North America, with a vast array of different languages, cultures, and traditions—who are not all one in the same (Monchalin, 2016). In certain instances the term “Indian,” is used in relation to speaking about the Indian Act, or when citing data that uses the terms American Indian and Alaska Native. In addition to the inaccuracy of being a term that assumes sameness, “Indian,” it is also a misnomer as it stems from lost explorers who inaccurately described and wrote about people they ignorantly assumed to have so-called “found.” The term “Indian” can be considered derogatory due to these reasons, but also because governments have used this term “throughout many racist documents, policies, and acts” (Monchalin, 2016, p. 3). Thus, when this term is used it is within the context of government legislation, data, or when naming certain reservations that include the term in their name. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2019.01.011 Received 15 September 2017; Received in revised form 9 November 2018; Accepted 30 January 2019

attempt suicide in Attawapiskat First Nation in Ontario. Six Indigenous girls committed suicide in Saskatchewan in the same year. In early 2017, two 12-year old girls committed suicide in northern Ontario's Wapekeka First Nation. Communities have called for assistance for support and aid to address gaps in mental health care services. In 2016, a report released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives titled Shameful Neglect, found that 60% of First Nation children on reserve live in poverty, and overall, Indigenous children in Canada are more than two times more likely to live in poverty than non-Indigenous children (MacDonald & Wilson, 2016). A report titled Glass Half Empty? (David Suzuki Foundation, 2017) noted that despite an influx of funding, the current federal government has not yet been able to adequately address the drinking water crisis in First Nation communities. In 2017, 44 First Nation communities in Ontario still do not have access to clean and safe drinking water. Residents of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, which straddles Ontario and Manitoba, for instance, has not had potable water in 19 years. Four hundred of the 618 First Nations communities in Canada have had some issue with water between 2004 and 2014. These realities, as well as dilapidated housing, deteriorating infrastructure, mediocre educational systems, rampant unemployment, and the subsequent negative health effects, has led to many commentators referring to Indigenous peoples living in ‘Third World’ conditions within a first world country. These realities are the legacy of the violence ushered in by colonialism, and which has been instrumental in the structural violence expressed and experienced by Indigenous peoples in Canada within both the public and private sphere to this day. While the examples above draw from Canada, this is not to render invisible similar experiences of Indigenous peoples in the United States. A United Nations (2010) report titled State of the World's Indigenous Peoples highlights that in the United States, for instance, Indigenous peoples are 600 times more likely to contract tuberculosis and 62% more likely to commit suicide than the general population. The nature and consequences of these lived realities are visible in all aspects of the social, familial, economic, and political life of Indigenous peoples, and it is no more evident than the alarming rates of violent victimization and homicide perpetrated against Indigenous peoples in both countries. In both Canada and the United States, the language of genocide has been evoked to explain and describe the historic attempts at extermination and the current treatment of Indigenous peoples. Nowhere is the marking of Indigenous bodies for violent victimization and death more salient than the current crisis of missing and murdered women experienced in both Canada and the United States. In some reservations in the U.S., Indigenous women are murdered at a rate ten times more than the national average (Pember, 2016). In Canada, community pressure on the federal government pushed them to launch a national investigative inquiry. Although Indigenous peoples and communities in the U.S have been raising this issue, there has been little action taken by the government until recently with the U.S Senate approval of Savanna's Act, which is legislation aimed to gather data on missing and murdered Indigenous women. This slow government action, and current crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls is tied to the structural conditions and lived material realities that upend the lives of Indigenous peoples, rendering them disposable, unworthy, precarious, and even responsibilized to violent victimization and homicide experienced at the individual level. In this paper, we argue that homicide of Indigenous peoples is a manifestation of structural violence. Rather than theorizations that render the crime of homicide as one that is simply between individuals, we suggest that the connection of the socio-historical context of structural violence and the institutional manners through which this violence is manifest, explains the material deprivations experienced by, and the tacit devaluation of, Indigenous bodies, marking them for death. That is, we suggest that the high rates of homicide of Indigenous persons must be situated within, and understood through, the logic of settler colonialism, Continuing from early processes of colonization,

violence is entrenched as an active instrument of settler power and rule, one that is reverberated when examining cases of Indigenous homicide by white perpetrators (Razack, 2000). In order to articulate a structural understanding of homicide that Indigenous persons experience, this paper reinscribes understandings of the racialization of homicide statistics, the tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada and the United States, and institutionalized violence through the lens and legacy of colonialism. 2. Connecting structural violence to the legacy of colonialism The history of colonialism, the legacy of trauma, and the structural violence underlying the theft of land, death by disease, attempted genocide, racism, inequality of income, disparities in wealth, dilapidated housing, mediocre education, rampant unemployment, homelessness, and poor health indicators, among others, serve to provide the conditions in which the extant victimization experienced by Indigenous peoples goes largely unnoticed. When rendered visible, such victimization is attributed to individual failings, rather than as the outcome of social structure. In addition, institutional violence levied by the criminal justice system, the continued attempted destruction of Indigenous cultures (e.g., languages, spirituality, family structures, governance), as well as the colonial laws and policies that circumscribe relations with Indigenous peoples needs to be situated as part of the larger structure of violence that upend the lives of Indigenous peoples. It is the embeddedness of institutionalized violence, which normalizes the violence and victimization experienced by Indigenous peoples, rendering it as a ‘common sense’ consequence of individualized decision-making, and Indigenous peoples as ‘unworthy victims’, in the broader collective consciousness. While there exists extant research linking social structure with homicide (see Pridemore, 2002); the literature connecting structural violence as inherited by systems of colonialism to the interpersonal crime of homicide is emerging, particularly when applied to the Indigenous context. Farmer, Nizeye, Stulac, and Keshavjee (2006) define structural violence as the: social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm's way … the arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the [social], political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people (typically, not those responsible for perpetuating such inequalities) (p. 1686, italics in original). Structural violence is exerted systematically and indirectly through “extreme and relative poverty, social inequalities ranging from racism to gender inequality, and the more spectacular forms of violence that are uncontestedly human rights abuses” (Farmer, 2005, p. 8), by those who support, and benefit from, an inequitable social order. As Pedersen, Malcoe, and Pulkingham (2013) outline, “colonialism is indisputably a form of structural violence that is deeply interwoven in the social, political, and economic fabric of society” (p. 1036). The excusing of perpetrators, and the implicit and/or explicit blaming of victims for not avoiding violence, is evidence of how the violent characteristics of colonialism have been inherited and continually manifest (Pedersen et al., 2013). In particular, settler colonialism, whereby settlers come to permanently occupy land which is not their own—is inherently violent—as its central function is the removal of peoples from their land by any means. Settlers build up their institutions through the spreading of their false narratives that argue that Indigenous peoples have no forms of governance, nor any political or social organization. Colonial institutions are established specifically to eliminate and assimilate original peoples. A central institution utilized are police forces, such as the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) in Canada, which later became the still existing police force of today, The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). As Monaghan (2013) writes, the “NWMP exemplified the

symbolic and material expansion of settler colonial authority into the North-West” (p. 126). They were immediately tasked with controlling Indigenous populations, imposing colonial authority, and ensuring Indigenous submission to colonial rule (Monaghan, 2013; Nettelbeck & Smandych, 2010). Narratives were rapidly spread by the colonists through literature and discourse which constructed Indigenous peoples as “savage Indians” in need of control, while the police are depicted as “noble policemen” who are protecting society from this so-called “threat” (Monaghan, 2013, p. 126). A primary argument said to deal with this “threat” is the use of law-and-order. This was written throughout many early accounts by almost exclusively white Anglo males claiming that instituting this law-and-order was out of their benevolence in their “saving” of Indigenous peoples from their so-called “savagery” (Furniss, 1997; Hildebrandt, 2008). This declared need for law-and-order in order to help “save” Indigenous peoples was then used as a justification for “use of force and physical violence” against Indigenous peoples (Hildebrandt, 2008, p. 32; Furniss, 1997). Thus, colonial violence has been built directly into the structure of societal institutions, and notably within a central tool used by the colonial state to advance colonialism—the police. Using violence against Indigenous peoples for the advancement of colonialism remains at the core of their purpose. As such, the legacies from the early colonizers live on, as they are the foundation of their existence, and deeply embedded within the core of their structures. As a result of interest in understanding the racialized, gendered, and classed context in which criminality and violence occurs, there has also been criminological interest in exploring the effects of institutional violence. In one major contribution to literature on violence committed by individual youth, Farrington, Loeber, and Stouthamer-Loeber (2003) concluded that African American boys are more violent due to a number of identifiable risk factors. These include: lack of guilt, low achievement, high incidence of ADHD, corporal punishment by mothers, being in ‘bad’ neighbourhoods, familial instability, absent fathers, and parental anxiety/depression. However, these individual risk factors are situated within a broader social context in which violence committed (whether actual or anticipated) by a Black person is perceived to be more serious, Black people themselves are envisioned as more dangerous, and where these beliefs manifest as racism towards them during all aspects of the criminal justice system – from over-policing, over-arrest, and over-incarceration. The latter shows the connection between individual violence and racialized institutional practices (institutional violence). There are a number of variables associated with homicide in Western countries. As Miethe and Regoeczi (2004) generalize: “Homicide offenders are disproportionately male, young, minority and live in economically disadvantaged areas. This holds for England, Canada and other Western countries” (p. 8). However, as research on racialization and racism in the criminal justice system have found, it is not race per se that is a predictor of victimization or criminalization, but rather the intersection between class, culture, and the history of racialization. Although “the racial logic of slavery and settler colonialism takes different forms and are not reducible to one another,” and “anti-Blackness and settler colonialism rest on somewhat different foundations” (Maynard, 2017, p. 11), there are parallels between the two that can serve to illustrate the relationship between precarity to victimization and histories of racism (King, 2016; Maynard, 2017). While public appeals to high rates of black-perpetrated crime and black-on-black violence are commonly evoked to eschew societal complicity, for instance, there is a long-standing history of slavery and racial oppression that serves to contextualize as well as situate such violence. This is reflected in Black people occupying one of the lowest socio-economic position and disparate geographic spaces in the United States (Reasons, Conley, & Debro, 2002) – both of which are predictors of victimization and criminality. Likewise, as will be shown below, in both Canada and the United States, Indigenous peoples occupy high rates of homicide, but they too have long-documented histories of oppression and

inequality, as reflected by the current deprivation of their lived realities both on- and off- reserve (Reasons, 2008). Thus, it is not about being Black – or being Indigenous – per se, that tells us something about propensity towards homicide as either victims or perpetrators, but rather what being Black or Indigenous means within the structural fabric of society. That is, “[d]espite differing racial logics, the living legacy of slavery and the ongoing practice of settler colonialism at times result in similar forms of repression. Black and Indigenous peoples experience grossly disproportionate incarceration, susceptibility to police violence, poverty and targeted child welfare removal” (Maynard, 2017, p.12). There are numerous ways in which colonialism has, and continues to shape, the lived realities of Indigenous people in Canada and the United States. One of these, are the exceedingly high rates of homicide of Indigenous peoples in these countries, compared to the nonIndigenous population. 3. Homicide of Indigenous peoples: rates, distribution, and characteristics The extent and severity of violence against Indigenous peoples is well-documented by researchers, governments, humanitarian organizations, and Indigenous advocates themselves. While overall murder rates have declined – 5.3 per 100,000 in 2016, versus 9.8 murders per 100,000 people in 1991 – the United States have long been a leader in murder rates among Western nations. There have been numerous academic studies documenting the United States' high rates of homicid...