‘We are going to overcome this’: Cree nation counts cost on anniversary of mass killings
Cindy Ghostkeeper-Whitehead got the call in the early hours of 4 September. It was her best friend, and she needed help.
“She said: ‘My son got stabbed,’” said Ghostkeeper-Whitehead. “And I just jumped up.”
As she drove through the low morning light of James Smith Cree Nation, a First Nations community of about 2,000 people on the lush grasslands of the Saskatchewan prairies, she got a call from another friend, just as panicked and afraid.
Ghostkeeper-Whitehead, a volunteer crisis responder, changed course to pick up the second caller and together they drove to the clinic, a low beige building at the heart of the reserve. She saw neighbours scattered across the parking lot outside, many nursing stab wounds. Rotors spun on a red helicopter preparing to take injured people to intensive care units in Saskatoon.
She and her husband spent the day going door to door, offering help as the death toll became clear.
“We just kept hearing that these people were gone, and these people were gone, and these people were gone,” Ghostkeeper-Whitehead said. She never made it to her best friend’s house. Later, in the chaos of the day, they bumped into each other. “We just gave each other a hug.”
One year ago, James Smith Cree Nation became the centre of one of the worst killing sprees in Canadian history when Myles Sanderson murdered 10 people in his home community, starting with his brother, and stabbed more than a dozen others. He then fled to the nearby village of Weldon, where he killed a 79-year-old man on his porch.
After a province-wide manhunt,
Sanderson was arrested when police rammed his pickup truck during a highspeed chase down the province’s busiest highway. Shortly after he went into medical distress, reportedly owing to a drug overdose, and was pronounced dead in the same hospital where some of his victims were recovering.
Sanderson was a man with a long history of violence and substance abuse, according to his parole documents, yet his actions nevertheless are baffling. People here may never exactly know why he did what he did.
Now this Saskatchewan First Nation approaches the anniversary with apprehension, hope, and determination that their darkest day will not define them.
“We’re resilient in our own little way. That means we’re going to overcome this tragedy that happened on 4 September,” said James Smith Cree Nation band councillor Barry Sanderson, who is no direct relation to the killer.
On the fateful day, Barry Sanderson arrived at his sister’s house for their daily coffee to find her on the couch clutching wounds to her stomach.
His brother-in-law, Earl Burns, had also been attacked in his home, and died while pursuing Myles Sanderson in the yellow school bus he drove. A memorial marks the site where Burns was found dead at the wheel, featuring yellow flowers in the shape of a bus and a cross topped with one of Burns’s trucker caps.
Barry Sanderson still drives down that road every day to visit his sister as she recovers. He said he addressed grief, in part, by connecting with Cree culture. Recently the nation hosted a week of dances, feasts and celebrations, and Sanderson helped lead a horse dance,