Fred Quilt, a leader of the Tsilhqot'in First Nation suffers severe abdominal injuries allegedly caused by Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers; he dies two days later.
The Fred Quilt inquiries were two coroner's inquests into the November 1971 death of Fred Quilt, an elder of the Tsilhqot'in First Nation in the Chilcotin Country region of the west-central British Columbia Interior. Members of Quilt's family alleged that he died days after being beaten by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) constables. The inquest juries found no wrongdoing on the part of the RCMP. A group of activists formed the Fred Quilt Committee, which raised money for Quilt's family, later attempted to press criminal charges against the RCMP. The two constables were exonerated in 1977 by Quilt's widow's deathbed confession that she had caused Quilt's fatal injury and had orchestrated false testimony by herself and other witnesses.
The Tsilhqotʼin or Chilcotin ("People of the river", chil-KOH-tin; also spelled Chilcotin, Tsilhqutʼin, Tŝinlhqotʼin, Chilkhodin, Tsilkótin, Tsilkotin) are a North American tribal government of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group that live in what is now known as British Columbia, Canada. They are the most southern of the Athabaskan-speaking Indigenous peoples in British Columbia.
For more information about the 2014 landmark court case that established Indigenous land title for the Tsilhqot'in Nation and demanded that colonial provinces engage in meaningful and prior consultation before engaging in extractive industries on Tsilhqot'in lands, see Tsilhqot'in Nation v British Columbia.