Three in four homicide victims in Saskatchewan in 2021 were Indigenous people, Statistics Canada data shows. For its homicide data, Statistics Canada classifies someone as Indigenous if they are First Nations, Métis, Inuit or have "an Indigenous identity where the Indigenous group is not known to police."
Indigenous people accounted for 17 per cent of the province's population in 2021, census data shows.
Police in Saskatchewan reported 70 homicides last year, a provincial record and an increase of six from the previous year.
Braden Herman was one of the 53 Indigenous homicide victims in Saskatchewan last year — the most in Canada and the most reported by police in Saskatchewan since at least 2014.
Alberta police reported 41 Indigenous homicide victims last year, the second most in Canada, data shows.
Experts told CBC News that differences in service delivery, such as policing, in rural and urban areas may have played a part in the numbers. But the disproportionate amount of Indigenous people killed is not a new issue, they said, and the deaths are tied to the lasting impacts of colonialism and poverty.
"Based on the treatment of Indigenous people over hundreds of years, we should [not] be surprised that this is happening," said Hilary Peterson, a lawyer who lectures on criminal law and youth crime at the University of Saskatchewan. She is a citizen of the Métis Nation—Saskatchewan.
"This is a consequence of mistreatment."
The link between colonialism, systemic racism and poverty has been made in multiple inquiries and commissions examining the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in the justice system and other issues, such as missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
The report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, released in 1996, stated that these factors have made Indigenous people "poor beyond poverty."
"Poverty creates a lot of social despair — and where there is poverty, there is crime," said John Hansen, a University of Saskatchewan associate professor of sociology, whose focus is on Indigenous justice, and crime and society. He is a member of the Opaskweyak Cree Nation in Manitoba.
Indigenous people were pushed to reserves that did not have the same resources as non-Indigenous communities, such as clean drinking water. The federal Indian Act created laws that, among other things, were designed to keep Indigenous people and their communities at a certain economic level to maintain their Indigenous status on paper.
In 2021, Indigenous people in Saskatchewan — particularly those living on reserve — made significantly less income on average than non-Indigenous people, and a disproportionate number of Indigenous people lived in homes that were overcrowded and in need of repairs, census data shows.
Survivors of systemic assimilation, such as residential schools, were taught to disassociate from their culture, Hansen said. Many were taken from their homes by RCMP officers and brought to the institutions, and many were abused by teachers if they expressed their culture.