A community is looking for accountability after an Indigenous woman was struck and killed by a police officer driving through a Winnipeg homeless encampment on Monday.
Dozens of people gathered at a vigil Wednesday evening held at Fort Rouge Park in memory of Tammy Bateman.
Near the riverbank where Bateman was hit, a memorial displaying an orange shirt and framed in a square with a red ribbon laid on the ground. Some of those present, including Tammy’s sister, Lori Bateman, placed flower bouquets at the memorial.
Tammy Bateman was hit by a police officer, driving through the small riverside park on Monday night as police were taking a person back to a homeless encampment. The woman, who was in her 30s, died from her injuries in hospital.
“This shouldn’t have happened,” Barb Guimond, an independent advocate for homeless people who attended the vigil, told CBC News.
“These are people’s lives we’re dealing with and they matter, they’re human beings. We all bleed the same,” she said.
The advocate didn’t personally know Bateman but said after doing outreach work in Winnipeg streets, more resources are needed to prevent more people like Bateman from experiencing homelessness.
A sacred fire, lit during the ceremony, will be fed with fire over the next five days and nights, watched over by community members at the request of the Bateman’s family.
A group of women, standing by the memorial, played drums as the fire was lit on the vigil, one of them holding a sign reading: “No more stolen sisters. No more colonization. No more unprotected sisters.”
Morgan’s Warriors co-chair Melissa Robinson attended Wednesday’s vigil to support Bateman’s family, lighting candles as the night fell.
“When is this going to stop? The anger is there, the whole community is feeling it,” Robinson said. “We’re all very upset.”
Robinson said there has to be more mindfulness and respect when passing and moving around homeless encampments.
She said these sites, just like the one at Fort Rouge Park, have become the home for many, packed with their belongings, often not by choice.
“I wouldn’t want someone walking through my home … Why are the police allowed to come through and disrupt the way they did and take lives?” she said. “We need to do better.”
Calls for changes to IIU investigation
The Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba has assumed responsibility for the investigation.
But as the province’s police watchdog begins its investigations into Bateman’s death, Osamuska Iskwe, a ceremony sister at the vigil, told CBC News the IIU investigation should be attended in a different way.
“The [investigation] systems have continued to be designed in a colonial practice, so when the systems are being applied for Indigenous people, you’re colluding with colonization,” she said.
“That is not our ways, that is not our sovereign ways, that is not our treaty ways.”
Osamuska Iskwe said she would like to see the IIU investigation preceded by an Indigenous advisory council appointed to the province’s watchdog, with a composition of Indigenous employees as part of the investigation.
“It sounds like a document or a way of a word, but it’s not to us, that’s a ceremony with all kinds of teachings,” she said. “When it’s carried out that way, the outcomes are very different.”
Meanwhile she would also like to see an Indigenous-led, external audit report on the IIU’s investigation, following the calls of actions and justice made by the Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“It is time for those changes, it’s time for it to be done in that good way,” she said.