The deep anger and frustration in Saskatchewan and beyond at the acquittal of Gerald Stanley, a white farmer, in the shooting death of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man from Red Pheasant First Nation, is an outcry that demands national attention.

The message being conveyed in protests across the country is not simply about the particulars of this case. Or about the perceived problems with the trial, though these cannot be easily dismissed. It is also about a well-founded crisis of confidence in a justice system that has persistently failed to guarantee Indigenous peoples a fair shake.

The facts of the case are by now well known. In August of 2016, Boushie and four of his friends drove onto Stanley’s property. One of them tried to start the farmer’s ATV, prompting a confrontation. Stanley fired two warning shots. With a hammer, he smashed the windshield of the car Boushie was in. Then he shot the young man, fatally, in the head.

The defence argued the shot was an accident, the result of a common gun glitch known as “hang fire.” Despite expert testimony casting doubt on this explanation, the jury found Stanley not guilty.

Much of the anger in the wake of the ruling has rightly focused on the fact that the jury was all-white. Surely a more representative jury, particularly in a racially charged case such as this, would have better served both the system of justice and trust in the process.

Yet the system is set up to exclude Indigenous jurors, a fact Stanley’s legal team exploited. The defence seems to have used so-called peremptory challenges, a controversial tool that allows lawyers to disqualify potential jurors without providing a reason, to nix anyone who appeared to be Indigenous.

In the United States, a country that knows well the costs of all-white juries deciding the fate of racial minorities, particularly in cases where race itself is at issue, the Supreme Court put strict limits on the use of peremptory challenges. In Canada, legal experts have long called for similar rules. Justice Murray Sinclair, for instance, argued in 1991 for an end to the practice. More than 20 years later, former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, in his report on the underrepresentation of Indigenous peoples on juries, again made the case.

Let us hope the Boushie case and its heated aftermath at last provide the impetus to limit the use of peremptory challenges, and inspire governments finally to pursue some of the other recommendations in Iacobucci’s report, including using government databases to expand the jury pool.

But the uproar over the verdict speaks to a deeper mistrust than can be addressed by more diverse juries alone. The jury problem is simply one symptom of a larger crisis in Indigenous justice, as Iacobucci concluded in his report. “Overrepresented in the prison population, First Nations peoples are significantly underrepresented, not just on juries,” he wrote, “but among all those who work in the administration of justice … whether as court officials, prosecutors, defence counsel, or judges.”

This is true across the country and not least in Saskatchewan. There, some 81 per cent of the provincial prison population is Indigenous, compared to just less than 2 per cent of the province’s judges.

It’s no wonder that report after report has found Indigenous people tend to mistrust Canada’s legal system, finding it “alien” or “foreign.” After all, this system, imposed along with the other instruments of colonialism, contributed to the uprooting of First Nations people from their languages, cultures and communities.

The legacy of this process has meant that Indigenous people are disproportionately likely to come into conflict with the law. And yet the law is still a colonial force, overwhelmingly white, largely ignorant of and insensitive to Indigenous realities. The justice system continues to shape the fate of Indigenous communities, yet it neither looks like them nor, in many cases, understands them.

We shouldn’t be surprised that so many Canadians doubt the Colten Boushie verdict, facts of the case aside. As long as the system remains biased, as it most clearly is, every verdict will be suspect. This is a tragedy for Indigenous peoples and for the country as a whole. As it is, the justice system cannot guarantee a fair outcome, promote healing, provide closure or build trust in the fairness of our institutions. That’s a crisis, both moral and democratic.

Over the weekend, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould tweeted that “as a country we can and must do better.” The prime minister and the ministers responsible for Indigenous affairs also expressed sympathy for Boushie’s family and those protesting the trial’s outcome. In response, some in the federal Conservative caucus and in the legal community complained that such interventions taint the legal process, potentially biasing future proceedings.

But none of these statements sought to relitigate the case or suggest the jury had got it wrong. Had our leaders instead simply sent their sympathies to the family, without acknowledging the real problems with our legal system this case has exposed, they would have served only to validate the view of the protesters that those in power are indifferent to Indigenous injustice.

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The words out of Ottawa seemed reassuringly to suggest that’s not the case. Now the government must prove it with action. It can end or limit peremptory challenges. It can take concrete steps to improve diversity on juries and on the bench. It can acknowledge that the crisis of Indigenous justice in courts and prisons is among the most brutal expressions of deeper social and economic injustices – and that governments must also address these.

How doubly tragic it would be if Canada did not learn the lessons of the understandable outrage over the case of Colten Boushie.