Regardless of crimes, man didn’t deserve to die in jail

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/03/2021 (1694 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I was young, there was a regular feature in the Winnipeg Free Press titled “Ten Most Wanted.”

There, for all to see, were 10 photographs of people sought by police for various serious crimes. They were all almost exclusively male, tattooed, and Indigenous. They were, frankly, scary-looking in their police mugshots.

Accompanying each photo was a litany of offences, and usually a small description of their brutality. Because of the overwhelming number of Indigenous male faces, it was impossible not to get the impression Indigenous men make some terrible people.

In those days, the Free Press went out of its way to describe these suspects as Indigenous — an admittedly obvious fact to anyone who knew the names of Indigenous families. (Nowadays though, media take pains not to label race, so you’ll find the occasional “Indigenous in appearance,” but not much else.)

It was like looking at a modern version of “wanted” posters from the Wild West. All that was missing — but definitively implied — were the words “dead or alive.”

I admit it: I wanted the authorities to find these alleged evildoers and make the world safe. Why else would you highlight them if not to say they are society’s enemy?

Such a list still exists today, curated and published by the Winnipeg Crime Stoppers program.

At the top of the most recent version, issued Feb. 26, was Dwayne Simard, who had breached bail conditions after serving a 32-month sentence for aggravated assault.

Simard fits all the criteria mentioned above, right down to the tattoos.

Police had been hunting Simard since mid-September 2019. On Feb. 27, they found him; arresting him in a house in the Daniel McIntyre neighbourhood and charging him for being “unlawfully at large.”

By March 1, he was dead while in custody at Stony Mountain Institution.

Simard, 37, was hardly an uncomplicated man. He was sought on several warrants, and hung out with those who could easily have joined him on the “wanted persons” list. (Police were seeking to arrest a friend Simard was found with, too.)

Simard hid in an attic for seven hours, and resisted arrest in what city police called a “standoff.”

Regardless of who he was and what he did, however, Simard didn’t deserve to die — especially while in custody.

Corrections officials won’t comment until a report is released months from now. However, Indigenous people dying in custody, while being arrested, and in the “care” of child welfare happens all the time.

The list of names is startling and recent.

Last month, for example, Will Ahmo, 45, died while in custody at Headingley Correctional Centre after an incident that involved corrections officers. The CBC reports in Ontario an average of two Indigenous people die in custody every year. There have been so many cases APTN Investigates premiered a multi-part series titled Death in Custody.

This issue is nothing new, according to the 1990 Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba.

In 1796, several North West Co. employees in Cumberland House suspected two Cree men as having killed one of their colleagues. They shot one while he “evaded arrest,” and then “bound the other and threw them beside the corpse in an attempt to win a confession.”

The second Cree man confessed and was hanged immediately. According to the AJI, “the two bodies were dragged outside the stockade and left as a lesson to others.”

On Friday, as if hanging him out for all to see, the City of Winnipeg still had Simard on the top of its most wanted list.

I didn’t know Simard, but I’m probably related to him. The Ojibwa side of my family are Simards from Manigotagan, near his home community of Sagkeeng. Still, I never met him, and my attempts to find his family landed only distant connections.

He is likely related to me in the same way as Ahmo, whom I wrote about last month: as a “cousin.”

In Anishinaabemowin, our traditional language, I would likely call them both nindoozhim: “nephew.”

This is the same word we use for “stepson,” by the way.

Neither was a nephew, stepson, or even a human being while in custody.

There, they were just wanted.

Now, dead. Not alive.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca