On June 21st, 2020, Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Allies are going to ascend, yes rise up, on City Hall in Toronto, Ontario, Canada between the hours of 2pmET and 4pmET for a peaceful protest against police brutality; all are invited to join in solidarity. RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki has faced many calls to resign, from grassroots movements to Canadian Senator. The inability for her to recognise the systemic racism within her own ranks is not only deplorable but simply intolerable for a person in her position to be ignorant to.
On Friday, Lucki back stepped and released a new statement saying “During some recent interviews, I shared that I struggled with the definition of systemic racism, while trying to highlight the great work done by the overwhelming majority of our employees, I did acknowledge that we, like others, have racism in our organisation, but I did not say definitively that systemic racism exists in the RCMP. I should have.”
The words “RCMP Rape Native Women/Kill Native Men” have been spray-painted at the base of the monument in Montreal, while colonial and confederate statues fall all over the world.
"Everyone is waking up from a sleep, it's a reckoning with the past," explains Debora Kayembe, a Congolese human rights lawyer who has lived in Belgium, as the statue of King Leopold II was defaced for his bloody colonial rule in CR Congo.
Protesters beheaded a statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston and another monument to the Italian explorer was pulled down in St. Paul, while cities elsewhere in the U.S. are taking down monuments to Confederate-era soldiers and leaders, among others.
In the U.K.,, a monument to Edward Colston, a 17th-Century British slave trader, was pushed into Bristol Harbour last week, and a statue of Sir Winston Churchill in Parliament Square in London was boarded up after protesters spray pained graffiti on it.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police force is founded on genocide and is antiquated in its existence, as the entire purpose was to remove Indigenous people from their lands by any means necessary in order for European settlement to advance.
The ongoing debate about whether racism exists in the RCMP is a distraction from the real life impact that racialized violence has on Indigenous peoples everyday. Racism, sexism and corruption exist in the RCMP, and have so for many decades. Those facts are not disputable. The numerous investigations, commissions, inquiries, individual civil actions, class action lawsuits, and horrifying statistics leave no doubt that the RCMP engage in regular acts of racial profiling, harassment, over-arrests, brutality, sexualized violence and killings of Indigenous peoples at grossly disproportionate rates. They also commit these same acts of racialized violence against our Black brothers and sisters. What makes matters worse is that the RCMP do so with a high degree of impunity. ~Pam Palmater
During a 17-year period, with there being only 3% to 4% of the population, Indigenous peoples represented 16% of those killed by police. In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the statistics jump to 55% and 63% respectively. In Quebec, Indigenous peoples are four times more likely to be killed by police than white people and 10 times more likely in Nova Scotia
Environmental activist Greta Thunberg has been witness to the brutality of the Royal Canadian Mounted police in their attack on Chief Allan Adam and has spoken out of how disturbing this is to see, and it is being documented everywhere live by thousands
Sha'tekayenton Andrew Brant