A measure of hope a decade after senseless death, injustice

I’m a few hundred kilometres from the farm near Biggar, Sask. — the place where 22-year old Colten Boushie from Cree Red Pheasant First Nation was shot and killed by farmer Gerald Stanley precisely 10 years ago.

“You need to remind people about the 10-year anniversary,” a nearby, rural school principal tells me at the education conference I just finished speaking at.

“That death is a wound that continues to bleed in all of us,” a principal from Regina adds. “I hear about it from our students all the time.”

On Aug. 9, 2016, Boushie’s death entered the Canadian consciousness, representing what then-Saskatoon mayor Charlie Clark declared “a defining moment for this community and this country.”

The circumstances are well-documented, so I’ll just briefly recount the event.

After experiencing a flat tire on their car, Boushie and four of his friends arrived at a farmhouse owned by Stanley in late afternoon.

After a confrontation in which one of Boushie’s friends allegedly tried to steal an ATV vehicle, Stanley grabbed his TT-30 handgun and fired two shots in the air.

Stanley then approached the car Boushie was in and the gun went off, shooting the young man in the head and killing him instantly.

Stanley claimed it was a “hang-fire” incident — when a gun malfunctions and goes off unexpectedly. Experts later disputed this claim.

Later, a jury — every single potential Indigenous candidate was “peremptory challenged” and rejected by Stanley’s lawyer — accepted his argument and acquitted him on the charge of second-degree murder.

There is history and other facts in the case, of course — and well-documented shoddy work, evidence collection and racially problematic actions by RCMP officers — but the message of the Stanley case was clear: when it comes to the value of Indigenous lives versus Canadian rights, property and “freedoms,” the latter will win out.

I had been sitting with my family when we had heard the verdict. I remember a silence coming over all of us. My father, normally a hopeful person, swore. My mother stopped eating.

A long silence was interrupted when my cell rang about a half-hour after Stanley’s acquittal and kept ringing.

“This is a night when you want to give up hope,” I told reporters asking for a comment. “This is a night when you think, ‘What’s the point of it? What’s the point of trying to change a country that doesn’t want to change?’”

I stand by those comments.

Stanley wasn’t defending anything by killing Boushie, who was sitting in an immobile car. The claim of an “accidental” firing of a gun is irrelevant. In virtually any case of death, if someone carries a gun into any situation they are responsible for what it does.

That is, I suppose, unless the person killed is a young Indigenous man.

What I have slightly changed my opinion on is hope.

“That death is a wound that continues to bleed in all of us.”

Colten Boushie’s name is being remembered a decade after his death. Stanley, meanwhile, couldn’t find a publisher willing to let him “tell his side” in 2018.

The impact of Boushie’s death and the trial has been studied in multiple ways.

Many books have been written on the subject. The best, in my opinion, is Storying Violence: Unravelling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial by Indigenous scholars Gina Starblanket and Dallas Hunt. And there is the excellent documentary Nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up, directed by Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard (still available on streaming platforms).

The injustice of the trial led the federal government in 2019 to reform the criminal justice system and abolish peremptory challenges to prevent race-based jury exclusion. The Supreme Court later agreed that change was constitutional.

The RCMP was impacted by the case, with internal reports admitting there was poor handling of evidence, treatment of Indigenous witnesses and communication with Boushie’s family, along with an acknowledgement of the need for more training and accountability.

Boushie’s death and the trial had an immense impact on other Canadians, many of whom learned about the injustice Indigenous communities know all too well for the first time.

And it served to galvanize tens of thousands of young Indigenous people who vowed never to sit idly by and let it happen again.

After writing multiple social media posts on the Stanley trial a decade ago, I was asked to write a column on the subject for the Free Press.

The newspaper hired me a few weeks later.

Indigenous peoples who grew up in the time of Colten Boushie’s death will never forget the sacrifice of a young Cree man few knew, but will always be impacted by.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca