A jaywalking incident escalated Sunday morning when Vancouver Police officers tackled, kicked, tasered and arrested former UBC football player Jamiel Moore-Williams on the Granville Strip.

Officers from the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) confronted Moore-Williams early Sunday morning for a jaywalking violation. At the start of a video provided to CTV News, the 22-year-old is seen protesting to two police officers. He claims that the officers targeted and stopped him because he was black.

Gina Starblanket is an Assistant Professor with a joint position in the Native Studies Department and the Women’s and Gender Studies program at the University of Manitoba. She is Cree/Saulteaux and a member of the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Treaty 4 territory in Saskatchewan.

Dallas Hunt is a full-time Lecturer in the Native Studies Department at the University of Manitoba. He is Cree and a member of Wapisewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta.

During his opening statements in the trial of Gerald Stanley, the Saskatchewan farmer who on Friday was found not guilty in the murder of young Cree man Colten Boushie, defence lawyer Scott Spencer told the jury that, “For farm people, your yard is your castle. That’s part of the story here.” In the days that followed, some of the media coverage of the trial focused on the question of whether the notion of “defending one’s castle” justifies the use of force resulting in injury or death to those who enter spaces they are seen as not belonging to.

Yet missing from the coverage, and absent in much of the discussion surrounding the trial, are the ways in which this sequence of events is intimately tied to the histories and present-day settlement of the country currently called Canada.