On 9 August 2016, when he was 22, Colten Boushie, a Cree man from the Red Pheasant First Nation was shot in the head by Gerald Stanley, a white farmer. Earlier this month, beneath a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in Battleford, Saskatchewan, in Canada’s prairies, an all-white jury in a court presided over by a white judge found Stanley not guilty of second-degree murder and also not guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

According to the Stanley family, Boushie and his friends were trying to rob their farm. After an altercation, Stanley fired three shots. The third hit Boushie in the back of the head and killed him. Stanley claimed that the point-blank shot to Boushie’s head was a “freak accident”, possibly the result of an unlikely mechanical failure known as hang fire, according to his defense.

That evening, a dozen law enforcement officers arrived at the home of Boushie’s mother, Debbie Baptiste. They told Baptiste that her son was “deceased”, accused her of drinking, and commenced an unwarranted search of her trailer. “My son was the victim,” Baptiste later told the Globe and Mail. “But I thought that we did something wrong.”

To reach its verdict, the jury revisited the events of that August day. But to understand what that verdict means, we must go back much further.



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The land where Boushie was slain is governed by Treaty Six which was negotiated between the Crown and the Cree and Assiniboine peoples from 1876 to 1898. The treaty was met with apprehension by many Indigenous leaders, including the Cree chief Wuttunee, who sent his younger brother, Red Pheasant – for whom the Red Pheasant First Nation is named – to sign in his stead.

“We want none of the Queen’s presents,” said Chief Big Bear, a Cree dissident at the time. “It was not given to us to have the rope about our necks.”

As settlers massacred the last buffalo, famine and disease spread among the defiant first peoples of the northern plains. Outspoken leaders like Big Bear had to sign so their people would not starve. When rations proved inadequate, the Indigenous turned to petty theft and prostitution to get by.

By the spring of 1885, many proud warriors had had enough. They turned on their overseers, and in the aftermath of the insurrection, the Crown hanged eight Cree men at Battleford, Saskatchewan. “The executions of the Indians ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs,” remarked the then prime minister, John MacDonald. The hanging remains the largest mass execution in Canadian history.

In 2016, 26% of Red Pheasant residents were unemployed versus just 6% for their broader census division, according to Statistics Canada. Median household income on the reserve was $25,000, compared with more than $75,000 in surrounding communities. More than half of Red Pheasant’s adult residents did not graduate high school. Maclean’s magazine named North Battleford, just across the North Saskatchewan river, the most dangerous place in Canada.

This is the landscape that Boushie, his girlfriend Kiora Wuttunee and their friends Eric Meechance, Belinda Jackson and Cassidy Whitstone set out from for a day of swimming and drinking on 9 August 2016.

On the way home, the group’s Ford Escape punctured a tire. At this point in their road trip, according to toxicology reports, Boushie had a blood alcohol content three times the legal driving limit and was so drunk that he was probably passed out in the backseat.

I can imagine the five friends now, riding on three wheels and a rim like characters cut straight from a Sherman Alexie novel, pulling on to the Stanley homestead and into danger.

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When I was 22, the age that Boushie was killed, I stumbled across Cree leader Harold Cardinal’s book The Unjust Society. Penned in 1969 as a rebuke to the then Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s campaign promise to deliver a “Just Society” for all Canadians, the book shook me. Its words could have been written today.

“The history of Canada’s Indians is a shameful chronicle of the white man’s disinterest, his deliberate trampling of Indian rights and his repeated betrayal of our trust,” wrote Cardinal. “[T]he native people of Canada look back on generations of accumulated frustration under conditions which can only be described as colonial, brutal and tyrannical, and look to the future with the gravest of doubts.”

Erasure and denial haunt the first peoples of Canada. Loved ones like Boushie, whose family nicknamed him “Coco”, who tended the ceremonial fire at community gatherings, are fit with a mask of criminality, their talents and ambitions displaced by a ghoulish caricature. Their lives are deemed dispensable. Their justice – our justice – is denied.

I know and love many Colten Boushies – fathers, uncles, cousins, nephews and friends who never got a fair shake. I’ve even been wrongfully accused of stealing a car in the backwaters of western Canada simply because of my race.

I am Colten Boushie. My people are Colten Boushie. And the uncomfortable truth is that Canada is the all-white jury that acquitted Stanley.

Canada starved Indigenous people until they signed treaties because there was no other option. Canada hanged eight of Boushie’s Cree forefathers in 1885. And Canada today is a wicked apartheid landscape that set a car of Red Pheasant daytrippers careening into the Stanley farm and the line of fire.

“The Indian has reached the end of an era,” wrote Cardinal of this unjust society half a century ago. “[W]e will not be silenced again, left behind to be absorbed conveniently into the wretched fringes of a society that institutionalizes wretchedness.”



While the fire that Coco kept spreads across this continent, let us pray that this wretched era is done at last.

Julian Brave NoiseCat is an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen in British Columbia



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