Note: This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article.
The decision by an all-white jury, presided over by a white judge, to acquit the killer of Colten Boushie, a young Indigenous man from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, is a severe test of the settler-based Canadian legal system.
It's nice that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged "the grief and sorrow the Boushie family is feeling tonight," while "sending love to them." But it's time to step things up including an overhaul of how juries are selected, an inquiry to ensure that Indigenous victims are not treated as criminals and a deep investigation into embedded racism within the police forces and the courts.
Those of us who are settlers must take responsibility for our institutions and stand with Indigenous peoples to ensure they can implement their own justice systems. Clearly ours are working all too well, but in destructive ways.
Media accounts provide a good overview of how Boushie's friends were held and interrogated by RCMP in August 2016, who then released a statement intimating that his friends might have been thieves. Boushie's friend Belinda Jackson, taken into police custody before she provided a statement, did not sleep or eat for 19 hours. Boushie's mother, Debbie Baptiste, was told to "get herself together" after being informed her son had been killed.
Is it normal for police to tell you that your son is dead, imply you have a drinking problem and then search your home for clues? It seems so in Saskatchewan. The police acted as if they were an army of occupation in someone else's home.
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