The relationship we currently have with the police is severely fractured, and the atrocities that are happening to indigenous women within police services across the country are, in my opinion, an epidemic requiring immediate attention from the policy-makers and the legislators so that those actions are stopped immediately.
I think police services in this country have made indigenous women disposable. The very fact that the police have it in their power to take the lives of indigenous women and young indigenous girls as well.... We have heard of police officers raping and impregnating young indigenous women, and we've heard stories at the national inquiry of indigenous women being stopped on the highway and raped by police officers.
In my opinion this system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from the bottom up, so that safe spaces for indigenous women are built in.
There is a model in, I believe, South America in which there are police stations run by police women only. These police stations don't look like police offices. They look like daycare centres. You walk in and the office is occupied by police officers, women who are dressed in street clothing, but there is a play area as well for children to be looked after and nurtured while the woman is in a safe place to tell her story about an incident of violence that happened to her.
We need to change the way we're thinking about policing and indigenous people in this country. The genocide must stop. You cannot imagine the colonial violence perpetuated by police in this country unless you have experienced it. Most folks who have privilege cannot fathom that this actually happens in the communities. As a child, I had to run away from police officers because they were going to take us, and they became known as “those who take us away”. That is certainly still the case today, almost 60 years from the day I first went into the residential school, so we must do this in a better way. As I say, let's dismantle and let's build from the ground up—