Braid: Jon Wells' death hangs like shroud over Truth and Reconciliation Day

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A dark shadow hovered over Truth and Reconciliation Day in Calgary on Monday.

The fine words and grand promises did nothing whatever for Jon Wells, a Blood Tribe man who died after an altercation with police less than two weeks ago.

In the Carriage House hotel lobby at 1 a.m. on Sept. 17, Wells was unarmed as he faced police. He repeated, “I don’t want to die.”

He was Tasered, tackled, punched in the head, placed face down in a mask and injected, according to a statement from the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team.

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Three officers involved are still on the job, doing non-police work pending investigation.

This case is genuinely tragic. The poor man’s worst fear came true. But the use of police force against Indigenous people is by no means unusual.

Community leaders say the entire Canadian policing system owes a general, national apology.

Apologies are easy, though. They don’t mean much when such incidents continue.

Two other Alberta cases show how Indigenous people can be accosted in the blink of an eye, for no apparent reason except being who they are.

On March 10, 2020, Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and his wife were in the parking lot outside a Fort McMurray casino.

Their vehicle apparently had an expired plate. An RCMP officer approached. Adam asked what was wrong, as he had the right to do. A second officer arrived and brutally tackled Adam.

In a citizen video of the incident, Adam could be heard crying, “Why the f— do you people do this to us?”

Adam suffered an ugly black eye and cuts across his face. As seems typical in these cases, he was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.

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Those charges were later dropped. The only assault, it appeared, came from the police. A later lawsuit from Adams was settled out of court.

Brian Beresh, Adam’s lawyer in the case, said: “It appears to me there is no other motivation for this police misconduct other than racism.”

Another striking case came up in Edmonton last week when two police officers were charged with assault on Max Bird, an Indigenous man.

Bird had trained as a first responder. When he saw cars in a ditch after an accident on Oct. 14, 2023, he rushed on foot to see if he could help.

He saw there were no people in the cars. Then he and a police officer across the road spotted each other. He waved, and the officer drove to him across an overpass.

As Bird told the Edmonton Journal, he explained that he was a first responder trying to help.

“They just commenced Tasing me … and when they stopped Tasing me they started beating me up, physically.”

Predictably, Bird was charged with obstruction. This was later dropped, and two of the three officers involved were charged.

Defence lawyer Beresh, who represents many Indigenous people, says his observation over many years is that police violence against Indigenous people is a serious, endemic problem.

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“In some circumstances, the authorities take the arrest as a licence to humiliate, degrade and physically and emotionally assault suspects, when the use of the force is hardly ever justified.”

These cases became public. Many more don’t. Deep mistrust of police runs through Indigenous life across Alberta.

To many of them, Truth and Reconciliation Day is just a holiday for others (as the granddad of Indigenous Albertans, I can say this with authority).

This is deeply damaging not just to the Indigenous community, but to the many good cops who try to make things right. Misuse of force makes people suspicious of any police violence, even when it’s justified.

City councils, police commissions and police forces across Canada have the power to make this stop. They must, if reconciliation is to have any meaning at all.

Don Braid’s columns appear regularly in the Herald

X: @DonBraid

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