north america still doesn’t love native people: senseless murders go unpunished

By Arielle Gray, AFROPUNK Contributor

Nothing much has changed in 2018. Trump still hasn’t been impeached, the country is in the midst of being rocked by yet another mass shooting and North America still doesn’t give a damn about it’s Native population.

Last week, Raymond Cormier was exonerated of all charges in the 2014  murder of Canadian Native woman Tina Fontaine. Tina was only 15 at the time of her death. Similar to the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown trials, the media slandered Tina Fontaine’s name after her death, using headlines to suggest drugs and alcohol led Tina to her demise.  Despite eye witness testimonies and a supposedly recorded confession, the Canadian court system found Cormier not guilty of Tina’s murder. The trial lasted three weeks and only recently did American news outlets pick up the story behind the hashtags #JusticeForTinaFontaine and #JusticeforColten.  Cormier’s exoneration came only a week after Gerald Stanley was also found not guilty in the death of Native man Colten Boushie, who was shot in the back of the head at close range. Stanley claimed the murder was “an accident”. Both trials featured predominantly white juries, a scenario we all know too well. We’ve seen what happens when white juries are the difference between a conviction and exoneration. Multitudes of people in Canada have poured out in the streets protesting the acquitals of the suspects in both murder cases- racism they say, is a live and well in Canada as evident by these trials.

Somehow, a perception of Canada as the United States’ more “benevolent” northern sibling has pervaded our social dialogue but that perception is far removed from the truth. First Nation Peoples, across all borders, suffer at the hands of systemic and chronic institutionalized racism. Canada only just adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Native Peoples in 2016, almost 10 years after the declaration was first introduced. The declaration addresses the disenfranchisement of First Nation peoples and establishes a “universal framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of the indigenous peoples of the world”. In 2007, when the declaration was adopted by 144 other countries in the General Assembly, only four nations voted against adopting it– Canada, Australia, New Zealand and of course the United States. All countries have long histories of systemically ripping away Native land, forcibly removing Native children for “reformation” and let’s not forget, genocide.

According to the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, First Nation peoples make up about 19% of federal prisoners, while their number among the general population is only about 3%. Between 1997 and 2000, they were ten times more likely to be accused of homicide than non-aboriginal people. We see similar numbers here in the United States- proportionately, Native Americans in the U.S are still more likely to be killed by law enforcement than any other demographic. We know that black and Native peoples in the Americas are incarcerated at rates higher than any other race and we also know that Native women, mixed race women and black women, respectively, face the highest rates of sexual violence.

Last November, I wrote a piece about Nicki Minaj’s problematic sponsorship of an image of Pocahontas and how the sexualized image of the historical figure perpetuated a long history of sexual violence against Native Women. I received a lot of backlash for the piece, mainly from fellow Black Nicki Minaj fans defending her decision to not only post but keep up the image in question, even after the rap star was made aware by Native fans of why it was problematic. There was a surprising lack of empathy, considering how closely together the statistics of police violence and disenfranchisement tie the Native and Black communities in the Americas.

We have seen Standing Rock. We have now seen Tina Fontaine and Colten Boushie. We have seen how our systems place their heels on the back of brown and black bodies. In a time of selective blindness, we cannot afford to not see how our own behaviours may be problematic and harmful to other POC. We already know that the Americas don’t care about our bodies. Which is why it falls to us to care for eachother. The most important task in caring is listening and supporting, in whichever ways we can.

If you would like to donate to Tina Fontaine’s family, you can do so here. A petition for a retrial of Gerald Stanley in the death of Colten Boushie is available here– it still needs over 20,000 to hit its mark.