Left for Dead in a Saskatchewan Winter

[dArKeR]

A Survivor's Story Exposes Police Abuse of Indigenous Canadians

ASKATOON, Saskatchewan -- Two white policemen picked up Darrell Night outside his uncle's apartment one January day before dawn. There had been a quarrel, and Night, who had been drinking, was shouting obscenities.


Night, a member of the Cree Nation, recalls thinking the cops were going to throw him in the drunk tank, but they drove straight out of town. They took him to an isolated spot three miles outside Saskatoon.

"Get the out of here, you Indian," he recalled one officer saying, and they slammed his face on the hood of the trunk, took off his handcuffs and left him standing alone on a riverbank.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5094-2003Nov21.html

[xchrom]

1. hmmm

we just can't give up hating the ''other''.
very scary.

[beevul]

2. Reading the whole.....

Story will nauseate most people. Its hard to believe this still happens in this day and age. No, not hard to believe, just saddening to believe.

[iverglas]

3. actually

This has been not-uncommon practice on the part of peace officers in parts of Western Canada. I'm afraid I don't have time to do the necessary searches just now, but the police involved in such a case in, I believe, Winnipeg were prosecuted for homicide.

Okay, a bit of a search.

Here's an article from Canadian Dimension, a "liberal"/left-wing monthly magazine that has been around for quite a while.

http://www.canadiandimension.mb.ca/v34/startour.htm

Lawrence Wegner and Rodney Naistus died on cold winter nights near the Queen Elizabeth Power Plant. Rodney Naistus' frozen, partially clad body was found January 29. Lawrence Wegner's body was found February 3. He was wearing a t-shirt, jeans and no shoes.

Darrell Knight survived, and was able, with the support of a sympathetic police officer, to pass on a complaint that led to the public exposure of these practices. His complaint rocked the institutions governing the police force, and all parts of the Saskatoon community. A special task force of 16 RCMP officers--the largest investigative unit it has deployed--was called in to investigate in the wake of pressure on the Saskatoon police force from community groups and organizations like the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations and the Saskatchewan Coalition Against Racism.

Two Saskatoon police are now suspended from police service and have been charged with assault and the unlawful confinement of Darrell Knight. Three other suspicious deaths are also being investigated. They involve Neil Stonechild, whose frozen body was found on November 24, 1990; Elton Dustyhorne, found frozen outside an apartment building on January 19, 2000; and D'Arcy Dean Ironchild, found dead by members of his family on February 19, 2000.

That's where it stood in August 2000.

Here's a transcript of a CBC radio documentary about the case/issue:

http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/thismorning/sites/news/carty_001103.html
(you can also click to listen, and there are links to other sources)

Hmm, the Post article refers to a trial, but I can't figure out the chronology. Ah, this CBC TV site gives the chronology of the case I'm thinking of:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/coldcase/

Four victims died: Dustyhorne, Wegner, Stonechild and Naistus, 1998-2000. Night, who survived the same treatment, complained to police. The officers who had left him outside the city were tried and convicted. Apparently there were inquests (which did not assign blame, to outraged response) but not charges in the other cases.

The situation has been highly publicized in Canada. In fact, it's just one aspect of the tragic circumstances in which many First Nations people still live, both in urban centres and in First Nations communities and on reserves.

A lot of efforts are being made to improve First Nations people's situations in various ways: recognition by the Supreme Court of treaty/aboriginal hunting and fishing rights (allowing for greater economic self-sufficiency); land claims settlements by federal and provincial governments (greater economic self-sufficiency also); self-government arrangements like the new territory of Nunavut, recently split off from the Northwest Territories (increased control over social policy, economic activity & development, land use, etc.).

Isolated northern communities like the perennially problematic Davis Inlet community, where the kids sniff gasoline and commit suicide, and impoverished and addiction-ridden inner-city communities like those in Winnipeg and Saskatoon, have what sometimes seem to be insoluble problems that unfortunately -- when they involve public drunkenness or spousal and child abuse, often sexual abuse, as they often do -- lead to extensive police involvement. Adjustments to the justice system to include things like "sentencing circles", and a more restorative-justice approach to social problems that become criminal, are included in those efforts.

The First Nations communities have unfortunately been dis-organized by things like the residential schools policy of the mid-20th century, which separated children from their families and communities and prohibited them from participating in their own culture in their own languages, creating a generation of adults with no community roots, no experience of being parented, and too often a childhood scarred by physical and sexual abuse themselves in those schools. Instead of being part of a family and community and culture, as all of us need to be, and part of the process of building those families and communities and culture, they became part of a cycle of abuse. Families don't have competent parents, communities don't have skilled leaders, and cultures have no cohesion.

The situation of the First Nations is Canada's worst social problem, and the Saskatoon police actions are just the most extreme end-of-the-line manifestations of it.

.

[happyslug]

4. Not unusual for vagrants (even white vagrants) in the US

About ten years ago, such a vagrant was picked up by a Suburban Pittsburgh Police department and drove to the municipal border, THAT suburban police force than picked him up and took him their border (This went on for 3-4 Police departments) finally the last Department took him to the edge of their town and told him to walk across a bridge to the next community, ½ way across the bridge he jumped into the creek below (he subsequently died).

The subsequent law suit was settled and I did not hear of the settlement but Police moving vagrants out of their town occurs in the US even to non-minority vagrants.

My point is this is less an Indian problem than a class problem, i.e. "We do not want any poor people in our town". During the late 1600s most New England Towns had signs and laws prohibiting "Indians" from coming into their towns. This was NOT do to racism, but an anti poor person law. Under Puritan religious doctrine if any poor was in your town the town had to take care of them. Since the poor of late 1600s New England were almost all Indians, the signs prohibiting Indians into the towns was to avoid having to put them on the town list of poor people.

Thus much Anti-Indian "actions" is in reality anti-poor not Anti-Indian actions.

[Wonk]

6. re: J J Harper (the case you were thinking of)

I just googled this up, for anyone who is interested in learning more about it.

http://www.winnipeg.cbc.ca/indepth/20030304harper.html

Iirc, the officer involved in that shooting killed himself a few years later, too. A sad story all around, really.

[MountainLaurel]

5. Kick

Because these stories need to be heard.

:nuke: