The RCMP’s history with Canada’s Indigenous peoples has long been recognized as a source of trauma and outrage.

RCMP officers were often the face of the government policy — described by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin as an attempt at “cultural genocide” — to remove Indigenous children from their parents. More than 150,000 were taken to residential schools, where many were abused and forbidden to speak their language or maintain their culture.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Mounties shot Inuit-owned dogs on what is now Nunavut’s Baffin Island. Hunters saw their livelihoods, and part of their cultural identity, slaughtered.

In 2004, then RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli issued a formal apology for the role his force played in the disgraceful residential school policy. “The RCMP is committed to working with Aboriginal people to continue the healing process,” he said at the time. “Your communities deserve better choices and better chances. Knowing the past, we must all turn to the future and build a brighter future for all our children.”

That still hasn’t happened for many, and Bernard Naulalik’s experience stands as an all too tragic illustration of that.

An investigation published in the Star earlier this month, by Iqaluit-based freelance reporter Thomas Rohner, revealed graphic video evidence of Naulalik being beaten by RCMP officers on three separate occasions.

Each time — once in 2014 and twice in 2016 — blows from punches, knees and boots rained down on Naulalik as he was being held in an Iqaluit jail cell. In one instance, Naulalik’s blood ended up smearing the cell’s floor; in another, an officer pepper sprayed him in the face at close range after he was battered and pinned down; in the third melee, Naulalik lost a tooth and had two others chipped.

Naulalik, a 27-year-old who has had numerous run-ins with the law, filed a complaint after the first beating and came to believe that he was then targeted for speaking out.

In 2015, Nunavut’s legal aid agency counted 30 instances where Inuit claimed they were injured during arrest or detention by Mounties. “Instances of excessive force by the RCMP ... appear to be on the rise in Nunavut,” legal aid warned in a report to the RCMP at the time.

The RCMP passed Naulalik’s initial complaint to the Ottawa police for investigation, which absolved the RCMP officers and blamed Naulalik for being “aggressive.”

Police investigating police naturally stirs public skepticism and erodes confidence in the outcome. And yet, when Naulalik complained about the other two beatings in 2016, it was the Calgary police that were called in to investigate.

In Ontario, an independent oversight agency investigates — and can lay charges — when police officers are involved in cases where someone is seriously injured, dies or alleges sexual assault. But the RCMP is not overseen by a body with anything approaching the requirements or powers of the Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit.

It’s covered by the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP, an independent federal agency that generally only gets involved after the RCMP first investigates the complaint, and then only if it’s not satisfied with the findings. It’s a largely toothless agency — its sternest measure the ability to hold a public inquiry into a complaint and publicly criticize the RCMP. In Naulalik’s case, it hasn’t even done that.

Naulalik filed complaints for the 2016 beatings with the commission, but his case has so far been left in the hands of the Mounties and the Calgary police.

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Keeping these investigations within the police family isn’t good enough anywhere in Canada. And it’s a particularly terrible idea in communities with deep historical reasons to be skeptical of law enforcement officers.

If the healing Zaccardelli promised nearly a decade and a half ago is to be taken seriously, serious complaints about the RCMP should at the very least be investigated by a civilian agency with the power to lay charges against rogue Mounties.

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