Inflamed emotions divide province
A look back at the crimes that divided a province
The rhetoric had a ring of familiarity.
It was perhaps more vitriolic and unrestrained in a social media age of disconnect and anonymity. But the firestorm that raged online and on coffee row when Biggar-area farmer Gerald Stanley was charged with murder in the shooting death of 22-year-old Colten Boushie was not unheard of in this province. It has happened before in cases with names that were once as familiar in Saskatchewan as Boushie and Stanley, those like Nerland, LaChance, Dove, and George. What was unique this time was that even Premier Brad Wall felt the need to ask for calm in the wake of what he called “racist and hate-filled” comments — which, in turn, fuelled a second volley of anger on Twitter and Facebook.
Hundreds of cases pass through Saskatchewan’s courts every day without commentary and with few observers. Then there’s a crime or trial that divides along lines of race and class, of advantage and marginalization, and tensions that simmer softly for years below the surface boil and erupt.
They spark protests, rallies, vigils, petitions and demands for inquiries. They ignite debate on the internet, call-in shows, letters to the editor, and on the courthouse steps, fuelling local and national newscasts and headlines, academic studies, documentaries and books.
University of Regina professor James McNinch spoke of one such case at a public lecture in 2007.
“It was like I was seeing my home province in a new way,” he told the gathering. “It seemed like the face of Saskatchewan was being revealed in a new way, because we have such a homesteader, howdy, Roughrider kind of image.
“And yet this was sort of the dark side coming out,” he said.
The case on which McNinch focused began in 2001 with a then 12-year-old girl in small-town Saskatchewan. Eight years later, she was a young woman standing
We are still a long way from being a tolerant society. We believe majority culture does not understand the extent of the impact of racism on those who are its victims.
1993 REPORT FROM PUBLIC INQUIRY CHAIRED BY JUSTICE TED HUGHES
with supporters, pressing for an inquiry, in front of the Saskatchewan Legislative Building. “This isn’t easy for me but I believe in the importance for myself and for other First Nation children,” she told reporters.
The girl, whose name is protected by a court-ordered publication ban, was the victim in a sexual assault case that unfolded and unravelled in the Saskatchewan courts for seven gruelling years, through four separate trials and three different appeals that, as on that day in 2009, often spawned rallies and controversy at each step.
Three white men from the Tisdale area met the 12-year-old, who had run away from home that night, as she sat on the steps of a bar in Chelan in September 2001. Testifying a half-dozen times, she accused the trio of getting her drunk and taking advantage of her sexually on a country road after she accepted a ride home. In a case that hinged on issues of consent, the girl agreed she had lied about her age — then the legal age of consent was 14 — but denied she was a willing participant in any sexual activity. After all the trials and appeals that reached up to the Supreme Court, only Dean Trevor Edmondson was convicted, receiving a house arrest sentence that further inflamed emotions. “Race relations are taking a beating … Saskatchewan gets another black eye and redneck image,” wrote Indigenous columnist Doug Cuthand at the time.
Just two months before the girl and the men crossed paths, an acquittal in a different case prompted a grieving mother to tell a Regina news conference she felt as though, “It sets a precedent for a Caucasian person to come in … and kill an aboriginal. And it’s OK.”
An altercation that began with some smashed vehicle windows on March 19, 2000 at a resort near Carlyle escalated to a group of partygoers confronting the two vandals. One witness heard racial slurs shouted by a group of white men as they charged up a hill toward the victim and his cousin. William Kakakaway, a 22-year-old member of the White Bear First Nation, died when he was hit in the head with a tire iron, hurled from some four to six metres away. The man who had thrown it said he was defending himself from an assailant brandishing a bat. The jury at the trial in Estevan acquitted him of murder. While a band councillor denounced a “racist climate” in the area, the man’s lawyer denied race played any role in the confrontation but agreed it did in the fallout immediately after the death. As tensions rose, a white teen threatened Kakakaway’s family, an Indigenous man vandalized police vehicles, and threatening posters appeared in the area.
Several years earlier, what McNinch called the “dark side” of this province was sharply brought into focus by the image of an angry Carney Nerland, sporting a brown shirt with a swastika-emblazoned arm band as he pointed a gun and spewed about “native birth control.” The pictures of Nerland, a member of the Saskatchewan branch of an Aryan Nation group, were captured as he attended a neo-Nazi gathering in Alberta, four months before he killed Leo LaChance in Prince Albert.
On Jan. 28, 1991, Nerland was drinking with two friends, who worked in provincial corrections, inside the pawnshop he owned when LaChance, a 43-year-old trapper from the Big River First Nations, entered. Nerland fired an assault rifle twice into the floor, then, after LaChance exited, fired again through the shop door. The Cree man, who was on the other side of that door, was hit in the back. As he lay dying, LaChance told an officer who arrived on scene that there’d been no argument, and the victim surmised the shooting must have been an accident.
Nerland — who while awaiting his day in court said he deserved a medal and had “done you all a favour” for killing the First Nations man — pleaded guilty as charged to manslaughter and received a four-year prison sentence. The Crown said there was insufficient evidence to prove an intention to kill, necessary for a murder charge. But many Indigenous leaders deemed it an obvious hate crime, demanding an inquiry. The controversy deepened when it became apparent in the midst of the inquiry that Nerland was likely an RCMP informant.
“We are still a long way from being a tolerant society,” said the 1993 report from the public inquiry, chaired by Justice Ted Hughes who would later become chief adjudicator in the resolution process for Indian residential school abuses. The report called the problem of intolerance a Canadian issue, not strictly local.
“We believe majority culture does not understand the extent of the impact of racism on those who are its victims,” it added.
In 1992, the same year the province appointed Hughes to lead the inquiry probing the handling of the Nerland case, two other homicides in the southern half of the province again brought racial tensions to the fore. This time, the victims were white, and their killers Indigenous. Dubbed the Good Samaritan cases at the time, they began on Aug. 15, 1992 when William Dove, 73, left his cottage at Round Lake to go help two young men and a teen from nearby Sakimay First Nation with flat tires on their car. He was beaten to death by David Myles Acoose, Corey Acoose, and a 16-year-old, who stole his vehicle and torched it. They pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Later that same year, John Sorgenson, like Dove, had been asked to lend a hand to those with car trouble, and ended up dying in what the province’s highest court called a “cold-blooded pitiless slaying.” The 41-year-old was attacked by five drunk men and teens, his body found near his burnt-out truck in the Kamsack area on Sept. 4, 1992. All five accused were convicted of murder at three separate jury trials.
Four years after the deaths of the two farmers, an 88-year-old Alvena-area farmer, who was white, shot and killed Leonard Paul John, 33, from the nearby One Arrow First Nation, north of Saskatoon, during a confrontation on the farm after a break-in. Finding the shooter acted in selfdefence and no likelihood of conviction, the Justice Department opted against charges — a decision which drew a swift response from the then-chief of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations. “If the roles were reversed ... would anybody believe that the Crown
There is two justice systems: one justice system for the white; one justice system for the Indian people. It’s all right for a white person to kill an Indian person.
CHIEF LINDSAY KAYE, Sakimay First Nation
would not prosecute?” Blaine Favel told the StarPhoenix.
All three cases revealed the, at times, uneasy relationship between First Nations and surrounding towns. But even within those reserves, there was outrage at the senseless violence and how it would affect the relationships between neighbours. Hector Badger, then chief of the Cote First Nation who counted Sorgenson among his friends, told the Leader-Post after the killing, “We’re shocked and hurt by what has happened ... An incident like this ruins everything we’ve been trying to do over the years.”
For some, manslaughter convictions in the Dove case became the counterpoint to critics three years later in a case reversing those roles, with an Indigenous victim and white accused. Pamela George, a low-income, single mother, was killed by two middle-class university students. Steven Kummerfield and Alexander Ternowetsky, then 20 and 19, had picked up George, who on occasion worked in the sex trade in downtown Regina. One of the pair had hidden in the trunk of the vehicle after finding another sex trade worker reluctant to get into a vehicle with the two, drunken men. The body of 28-year-old George was found on April 18, 1995 in a field near the Regina Airport. There were differing opinions by pathologists called by the Crown and defence as to whether or not she had died from exposure to the elements after being beaten and abandoned on the outskirts of the city or as a result of injuries sustained in the beating. Testimony by witnesses was peppered with allegations the men had used racist terms in later describing what had occurred to friends and in insults made when the first women wouldn’t get in their car. Their convictions for manslaughter attracted demonstrations on the steps of the courthouse and condemnation from activist groups representing women as well as the Indigenous community.
The day of the sentencing drew some 300 people to a rally at the Regina courthouse, where an irate Sakimay First Nation Chief Lindsay Kaye said, “There is two justice systems: one justice system for the white; one justice system for the Indian people. It’s all right for a white person to kill an Indian person.” Protests followed in cities across the country.
In a pre-social media era, the Leader-Post was inundated by an unprecedented number of letters to the editor, including those from women, both Indigenous and non, decrying the outcome.
Nine months later, allegations of racism rang out in the same Regina courtroom when a jury convicted two men of murdering Fotios Frank Barlas. The battered body of the 26-year-old owner of an Indian Head restaurant was found July 4, 1996, on the Little Black Bear First Nation, from which cousins Lyle and Wayne Bellegarde hailed. As some in the white community had pointed to the Dove case in response to the outcry over the Kummerfield-Ternowetsky case, those from the Indigenous community pointed to the case of the white men in condemning the murder verdicts and life sentence for the two Indigenous men. (A third accused, also Indigenous, was acquitted.) Bellegarde supporters blamed racism, shouting in the courtroom, “even before the trial started, you had them guilty.”
Whether some or all of the offences were racially motivated or not — each instance turning on unique and nuanced facts and law far more detailed than the above summaries, and perceptions and mindset that reach deeper than court transcripts — they unequivocally became racially charged. And the effects linger in distrust and suspicion within and between communities and peoples, the pressure left to build toward the next time.
After a senseless, triple murder at the start of this new millennium claimed both Indigenous and nonIndigenous lives at the hands of an enraged teen on a Fort Qu’Appellearea First Nation, Leader-Post columnist Murray Mandryk noted:
“There’s something even worse than the province’s racial divisions that such cases bring out. It’s the fact we’ve seldom been able to learn anything from this racial rancour.
“Under such circumstances, we seldom listen to each other,” he wrote in a column nearly two decades before Wall’s tweets calling on Saskatchewan people to rise above intolerance.
“Maybe the latest tragedies can be different,” wrote Mandryk after that deadly rampage in 2001.
“Perhaps if we listen to some very legitimate concerns being raised by both communities, something positive can come from this.”