Indigeous Women’s Commission to advise P.A. Police – Eagle Feather News

August 24, 2017

Velma Buffalo knows where her distrust of police officers was formed.

She was a youth living on Wahpeton Dakota Nation when RCMP officers showed up at her home.

“They threatened my mother to take us away whether she wanted it or not. The school-aged children were going to be brought to residential school. The children under school age were going to be apprehended and put into homes. And they said that my mother was going to be incarcerated,” Buffalo recalls.

That first impression was hard to shake, and it bred a distrust and fear of police that grew deeper later in life when she was stopped and ticketed by police in Saskatoon on two separate occasions for “no reason, because the judge tossed out the tickets that I received.”