Gerald Stanley acquittal yet another guilty verdict for Canada
With the acquittal of Gerald Stanley, Colten Boushie has joined the shamefully long list of Indigenous lives taken with impunity in Canada.
Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man, was shot by Stanley at point-blank range in the back of his head after Boushie and his friends drove onto Stanley’s farm with a flat tire.
Only 3 per cent of homicide cases in Canada end with acquittals, according to recent Statistics Canada data. And yet, a jury comprised entirely of non-Indigenous Canadians managed to find Stanley not-guilty, not only of second-degree murder, but of manslaughter too — apparently believing Stanley’s far-fetched excuse that his handgun accidentally fired into Boushie’s head, even though an expert witness testified that the gun was not malfunctioning.
Since the exoneration of Stanley, many commentators have described Canada’s criminal justice system as “broken.” But the system isn’t “broken;” it was built this way.
“Think about everything that First Nations people have survived in this country: the taking of our land, the taking of our children, residential schools, the current criminal justice system,” wrote Mohawk legal scholar Patricia Monture-Angus. “How was all of this delivered? The answer is simple: through the law.”
In 2015, another all-white jury acquitted Bradley Barton for killing Cindy Gladue, a Cree woman who died from an 11-centimetre-long wound in her vagina that Barton admitted he inflicted.
The acquittal followed a trial process in which Gladue was so dehumanized that she was repeatedly referred to as a “prostitute” and “native girl” instead of by her name, and her vagina was displayed as evidence in the courtroom. (The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether a retrial is necessary.)
As I write this, a jury is deliberating whether to acquit or convict Raymond Cormier, accused of murdering 15-year-old Anishinaabe girl Tina Fontaine; Gladue and Fontaine are two of 4,000 Indigenous women murdered or missing in Canada.
Indigenous communities are simultaneously under-protected and over-criminalized. According to criminal law professor Kent Roach, Indigenous people are more likely to be wrongfully convicted, and less likely to have wrongful convictions remedied.
Canada has been constructed on the devaluation of Indigenous lives. This is how European settlers rationalized the treatment of Turtle Island as terra nullius (“nobody’s land”): by pretending that Indigenous peoples were too “savage” to be considered fully human, allowing Europeans to commit inhumane acts of savagery against them.
Mi’kmaq lawyer Pamela Palmater estimates that colonial policies and practices — including deliberate infection, forced sterilization, and mass starvation — have killed as many as two million Indigenous people in Canada. And Indigenous people continue to die from Canadian negligence and racism.
A 2015 Statistics Canada report found that Indigenous people are twice as likely as non-Indigenous people to suffer preventable deaths.
For example, the epidemic of child suicides in Pikangikum First Nation has been so severe that it prompted a 2011study by the chief coroner of Ontario. It concluded that young people in Pikangikum are “hopeless” and “desperate” because they are denied “basic necessities of life,” like food, water, education, and housing.
According to analysis by criminologist Scot Wortley, Indigenous people are six times more likely than white people to be killed or injured by police in Ontario. Cases of Indigenous people dying after being shot, beaten, or dumped in remote areas in the dead of winter and left to freeze by Canadian police are legion.
At Grassy Narrows First Nation, the Ontario government concealed evidence of industrial mercury contamination for almost three decades, while 90 per cent of residents showed signs of mercury poisoning and babies were being born with brain cancer.
In the wake of Stanley’s exculpation, many Canadians have opined that Boushie “got what he deserved” for daring to trespass on Stanley’s farm — forgetting that settlers were only permitted to farm there in the first place because Indigenous nations made treaties agreeing to share, but not surrender, the land. More than 3,000 people have donated to a GoFundMe campaign for Stanley, raising more than $210,000 in just 10 days.
But the oppression of Indigenous peoples is not sustained solely by such flagrant displays of individual racism. It is also perpetuated by Canadian political leaders, who may express grief for homicide victims like Boushie, yet continue to forcibly dispossess Indigenous nations to build pipelines and dams.
And it is perpetuated by all of us who are non-Indigenous Canadians, when we treat Canada as “our home and native land,” while routinely turning a blind eye to the ongoing violence involved in making that home on stolen Indigenous land.
Donations to support Colten Boushie’s family can be made here.