Good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity.
Dä̀nnchʼe. My name is Doris Bill. I'm a former chief of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation. I served for nine years, from 2014 to 2023.
Kwanlin Dün is a self-governing first nation with over 1,000 citizens. Shortly after I was elected, our community was deeply shaken by the murder of an indigenous woman. On the heels of this, an elderly man was also murdered. Neither individual was a citizen of Kwanlin Dün, but their deaths had a devastating impact on our community nonetheless.
Living in the heart of Whitehorse has its challenges. At the time, most of the crime in Kwanlin Dün was not committed by our citizens, but as I previously stated, these events threw our community into a full-blown crisis. Women were sleeping with baseball bats by their beds. Elders were afraid to go out for walks. We had entire families sleeping in their basement because they were terrified. Citizens told us it was not a safe place to live.
We knew we had to do something, so we started by talking to our citizens about safety in our community. Our citizens told us they felt safer when there was somebody out there watching. Despite having the main RCMP detachment less than a mile away, they still felt unsafe and unprotected. Citizens feared calling the police or didn't trust that they would get justice. Some remembered the days when they were dragged to residential schools by the RCMP. They just did not like the western system of justice.
Using the information citizens gave us, combined with real-time statistics from the RCMP, bylaw and emergency services, the community safety officers, or CSO, program was created, becoming the eyes and ears of the community. The program is proactive, preventative, culturally appropriate and trauma-informed. It was built from the ground up, not from the top down. It is consistent with the TRC, the MMIWG action plan and the Yukon's MMIWG2S+ strategy.
The CSO program has saved lives. It has saved women from situations that could have turned out very badly. The CSO officers have the ability to respond early and de-escalate situations before they turn into a crisis. The program helps to rebuild the truth between the community and the RCMP. The CSOs are not focused on surveillance, enforcement or punishment. In our case, the CSO program is the conduit to all other agencies.
I believe the mainstream justice system needs to create the space for community-born safety initiatives like the community safety officers program. In the Yukon, we have circle sentencing and other forms of traditional justice initiatives developed by first nations people. If these initiatives were not in place, I believe incarceration rates of first nation people would be much higher.
While the CSO program has been successful, it has been without stable, equitable or legislative support. The funding and policy structures of the federal or territorial governments are not built for first nation approaches.
You will hear from the House of Wolf later on about the structure, what that structure could look like and how we can finally make safety equitable, accountable and, most of all, built by us. In the spirit of our agreements, we urge you to walk with us in this journey to bring back safety and trust to our communities.
I'm going to leave it there. I understand I only have five minutes.