Open Collections

Van Camp, Cassie

University of British Columbia

Indigenous women in Canada experience highly disproportionate rates of police violence in comparison to non-Indigenous women. The police service in Canada has historically been rooted in deeply colonial, violent and patriarchal values. In the late nineteenth century, the North West Mounted Police (NWMP), now known as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), was created with the intent to provide surveillance over Indigenous communities and to displace Indigenous peoples from their land. Indigenous women in Canada experience significantly higher rates of victimization than any other population. They experience violence at a rate 3.5 times higher than their non-Indigenous counterparts, and are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than any other women in Canada, and 16 times more likely than white women. This study asks why Indigenous women in British Columbia experience higher rates of police violence than non-Indigenous women and explores how this is related to the structural violence that is enacted upon Indigenous women through Canadian policing practices. Through a critical analysis of police oversight bodies, media representations of Indigenous women and Access to Information Requests (ATI), the thesis aims to identify how structural violence is inflicted upon Indigenous women through various institutions such as the media and the police service. Additionally, this thesis explores barriers to accessing and producing knowledge about violence against Indigenous women, which are erected by university ethics review boards or institutional review boards (IRBs) and Access to Information mechanisms. The findings of this research point to a historically broken relationship between Indigenous women and the police and reveals that current Canadian policies practices continue to perpetuate oppressive and colonial structural and physical violence toward Indigenous women. Collectively, these findings suggest the need for a singular oversight body that is responsible for overseeing all investigations and reports of misconduct, in addition to a national database that tracks incidents of police violence and misconduct. The final recommendation is for the creation of a new provincial police service in British Columbia.

Text

2022-09-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/82678

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/