[C0LLETTE]

[B]Indigenous Lives[/B

The police officer who shot and killed Chantel Moore during a so-called wellness check in Edmundston, N.B., wasn’t wearing a body camera, so it’s likely that many details of the encounter that left the 26-year-old Indigenous woman dead will never be known. Police say Ms. Moore, a member of Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation in British Columbia, was brandishing a knife; Ms. Moore’s family say she was a slight, non-violent person, and that she was shot five times at close range.

But we do know that Indigenous women live particularly imperilled lives in this country, and that the police are too often part of the danger rather than a protection from it. We also know, that more than one-third of people fatally shot by the RCMP in the past ten years were Indigenous. We know that an Indigenous person is 10 times as likely to be shot dead by police as a white person in this country.

We know that the history of Indigenous women’s relationship with police, stewed in centuries of racism and sexism, has been marred by sexual misconduct, exploitation and a fatal lack of attention to the real dangers threatening them. This has been well documented, over and over again, But while the reports are being written and the press conferences held, nothing much actually changes to keep Indigenous women safe. So when Ms. Moore’s six-year-old daughter Gracie told one of her relatives that she doesn’t want to die like her mother, that’s not a child’s wild fantasy. That’s a calculation about the threats she may face one day as an Indigenous woman in this country."

Globe and Mail June 26, 2020

This is the story of indigenous lives since the 'White Man" got here,,,even before the African slavers added to the misery.