Hazel Miron: Reimagining detention practice for indigenous peoples

In this episode of Perspectives, we are delighted to share an interview with Hazel Miron, Senior Investigator with Canada’s Office of the Correctional Investigator.

During a career spanning three decades, Hazel has worked both within detention facilities and now as a detention monitor.

Hazel is a proud Cree woman and a member of the Sucker Creek First Nation. She uses her indigenous knowledge and culture to connect with and support indigenous women and men deprived of liberty. 

She is also a strong advocate for reforming detention policies and approaches to better reflect the needs and experiences of indigenous peoples.

Transcript

Luce Ahouangnimon

Hello and welcome to Perspectives, the APT’s podcast which explores contemporary issues related to torture prevention and dignity in detention.

I’m Luce Ahouangnimon, APT’s Senior Advisor for Detention and Mobilization. And today we are delighted to share an interview with Hazel Miron, Senior Investigator with Canada’s Office of the Correctional Investigator.

During a career spanning three decades, Hazel has worked both within detention facilities and now as a detention monitor.

Hazel is a proud Cree woman and a member of the Sucker Creek First Nation. She uses her indigenous knowledge and culture to connect with and support indigenous women and men deprived of liberty. She is also a strong advocate for reforming detention policies and approaches to better reflect the needs and experiences of indigenous peoples.

We began the interview by asking Hazel to reflect on her extraordinary career and how it started.

Hazel Miron

I wanted to go into law, initially, because of having witnessed a lot of disparity among indigenous peoples. So I thought it would be good to get a law degree and I always believe that knowing the law would help. However, while I was going to University of Alberta in Edmonton, I saw an ad in a paper advertising for a primary worker in Edmonton with the new Creating Choices initiative.

So I applied and I was one of 28 that was selected out of over 500 applicants to work toward creating choices for women offenders. And with Creating Choices, the recommendations were coming directly from the women that were housed in Prison for Women in Kingston, which is now closed obviously, but they were housing women in that penitentiary with the men. And of course that led to an investigation of that specific site when there was an illegal strip search done on a woman in Kingston Penitentiary. So as a result of that, Creating Choices came to be.

I was one of the 28. There was almost half indigenous primary workers, along with other ethnicities and non-indigenous primary workers. One of the things that was odd, in my opinion, was that we didn't have a law background. We didn't come from a prison background, we all came with life experience. We came with our cultural knowledge.

So when we learned the philosophy of Creating Choices, we went in there wanting to help and give an alternative to women and to be there with them to make these choices to have a better life when they left the facility and the institutions. So the only gear we had in terms of helping these women was our verbal skills, and dynamic security. And that, for me, has made all the difference in helping women that were incarcerated.

So I was really happy to be part of that initiative. During this time, as an indigenous person, it was difficult to move up in the ranks, but I did, I persevered. I was a primary worker CX-2 correctional officer on the ground, doing security and doing checks and everything, and really creating a relationship with the women because we had small case loads that we were in charge of. So to me, that made a difference in how we were able to get to know our women on our caseload. We knew what was bothering them, we knew their behaviours. So by knowing their behaviours, we were able to better stop them from self-harming. We were better able to stop them from hurting others. We were better able to stop them when they were in crisis.

And on the indigenous side, they were very happy to see people that looked like them. We understood where they were coming from, we understood the culture and that made the difference as well in terms of how we worked with the women. And while working with these women, I felt that there was something missing in my life in terms of my culture. So when I became a Correctional Officer 3, I was offered a position at the Healing Lodge in Obema, in Edmonton.

The healing lodge, it's a minimum facility. There are two healing types of healing lodges in Canada, both have an indigenous perspective and they're supposed to employ indigenous people. They have Elders there, they have programming, they have ceremonies, they have sweat lodges there, and so it's very immersed in the indigenous culture.

So I went because I wanted to know more about my culture. I wanted to gain more cultural knowledge. I wanted to know what I was talking about when I was talking about culture. I wasn't fully immersed in it when I was growing up, but I knew the language. And so going to a healing lodge, for me, fulfilled something that I was missing in terms of my culture. 

I learned about the ceremonies. I spent time with the Elders. I spent time with the community. And so I gained a lot of knowledge while I was there for 10 years. I really focused on trying to instil self-respect to the inmates. And now it was a male facility, of course, but then I went back to the Prison For Women there at EIFW. And I went back and did a four-month acting opportunity again. 

I believe that women and men need to be treated differently. They need to be treated in a humane manner. And I knew that treating them in this way worked because I did it. I've seen the difference. We were un-uniformed. We were not steeped in security. So that to me made a real big difference in the management of the women inmates or women detainees, and the male detainees.

In doing my job now, I see a lot of people making decisions on other ethnicities and indigenous peoples, and there's no one at that decision-making table that is indigenous or from another ethnic group. So it's other people, in another point of view, that are making decisions and making choices for these people. So that has to change, for sure, big time.

Luce Ahouangnimon

What are the challenges you face in this work, especially as a woman manager, maybe also as an indigenous woman manager?

Hazel Mirron

For me, I don't really see a difference between women and men monitors. There might be a little bit of tension in terms of security, but I find they're very well managed when you go to the institution, so I've never really been fearful of going to an institution. I get a little hesitant sometimes when I do go to the institutions as a woman monitor. I'm very mindful that today somebody could be very mean to me in terms of racism. I'm always prepared in how I'm going to respond to something like that.

One thing I will say though as a woman monitor is that, when I'm trying to bring issues and ideas to the forefront, I feel it's exhausting when we always have to give a historical perspective of indigenous ways of knowing and being, and how better indigenous people should be treated. I find we always have to give a historical narrative to the audience, and it's exhausting.

But thankfully I have my experience, so I have a lot of things to draw from when I'm making very sound decisions or if I'm making recommendations, it's coming from a place of experience.

When there are decisions discussed for indigenous issues, I really feel strongly that there has to be indigenous representation. Who better than to bring forward these issues than a person that looks the same as these people we're talking about in the institutions. That for me is key.  

Luce Ahouangnimon

How does being an indigenous woman influence how you approach your work and engage with detainees?

Hazel Miron

Being an indigenous woman in this field, it doesn't influence my decisions, it doesn't influence how I'm going to treat Indigenous people or the non-indigenous people. I look at them all fairly.

But with being indigenous, I'm able to share with the women some of my own experiences. And I do that without oversharing. I know what to share, I know what is helpful and I can pick from my experience, something that may have happened in my life to show them that I'm human, that I am someone that had challenges as well. And I always encourage them to embrace their indigeneity, to embrace themselves as women.

So with that, given my cultural credentials, I can say, "Do you know what? I know." So when I tell them ‘I know’, it puts them at ease and better able to share what they're going through because I have an understanding of their lived experience, their ways of knowing, their ways of being, their connection to their family, and their relatives, and their kinship ties and all those wonderful things that they have. 

And  knowing my culture as an indigenous woman, I think I'm able to engage them because I share openly about my cultural knowledge. I share openly about the white world knowledge, my credentials in the white world and in the Indigenous world. So I'm better able to talk to them from a different vantage point. So that's really made the difference for me in my role as a woman monitor, and a woman indigenous monitor. 

Luce Ahouangnimon

Thank you so much, Hazel. And that leads us to our last question, which is also related. What successes have you seen? And what gives you hope?

Hazel Miron

I'm very hopeful when I see more indigenous staff, when I've had an opportunity to come across a correctional manager who was indigenous. I was really happy to feel the same passion and drive that she had as I did to make a difference for indigenous people. I had an opportunity to sit with an indigenous assistant warden intervention and an assistant warden of operations. There was two of them at a high-level position, and an indigenous senior investigator. The three of us were talking and you could feel the teamwork, you could feel the sincerity and the desire to really help indigenous people while incarcerated.

I think having Elders in the institution is paramount. One of the things that I'm hearing through my work is that we're getting a shortage of Elders. So I'm hoping that we can find more Elders because the institutions really need their assistance. It makes a big difference for not only indigenous detainees, but for the non-indigenous detainees as well.

Luce Ahouangnimon

Hazel Miron is Senior Investigator with Canada’s Office of the Correctional Investigator.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Perspectives. We’ll be back soon with another episode.

And if you have an idea for us to cover on Perspectives, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us via email on apt@apt.ch. Or find us on our social media: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Thanks for listening and we look forward to your company next time.

Thanks for listening and we look forward to your company next time.