Aboriginal offenders.

Posted By: Charles Davison

Much has been written about the alarmingly high numbers of aboriginal Canadians who spend time in our jails and penitentiaries. Hundreds of thousands of pages of texts, court decisions, reports and inquiries have been published about why so many indigenous Canadians end up in custody, and what happens to them once they are there. In this article I will try to provide an overview of at least some aspects of this situation and what has led us to where we now find ourselves, as a society and country.

Canadians like to think of themselves as a fair and open-minded people but in recent years we have been forced to face a darker part of our past. In short, as much as we would like to think otherwise, the ugly truth is that Canada has historically been a racist country. More than one non-white minority has experienced this at different times, but none has suffered the brunt of Canadian racism for as long as our aboriginal citizens. This has taken both official and unofficial forms. Over many decades both before and especially after Confederation, many laws were enacted which amounted to a regime of official racism. Various Parliamentary enactments prohibited traditional practices of aboriginal persons, denied them basic rights, forced many onto reserves, and generally, sought to wipe out all remnants of their cultures and languages in an effort to assimilate them into mainstream society. Unofficially, governments, their officers, and individual Canadians adopted and practiced racist views and actions in many ways.

Sadly, Canadian courts were no different. Judges, prosecutors, police and defence lawyers were all the products of their times. These were the institutions and officials whose role it was to enforce the racist laws enacted by elected representatives (though it must be noted that aboriginal Canadians did not help to choose these representatives, as one form of the racism to which they were subjected was the denial of the right to vote, until the 1960s). Even laws which seemed to apply to everyone equally were often applied more harshly against aboriginal persons. For many years, for example, young indigenous first-offenders were imprisoned for crimes which, had they been white and from "nice middle class homes", would have resulted in probation, a fine or some other much more lenient sentence. And this is not a practice which ended 50 or 60 years ago. As a criminal defence lawyer I still see criminal records for...