Blood in the Snow: Belligerent Drunk Gets Starlight Tour to Highest Power in the Land

One starry winter night, you stumble down the walk, drunk, in a city on the Saskatchewan prairies. The cops pick you up; drive you to the edge of town; and dump you off. Rubber tires recede, crunching on bitter snow. The wind howls, stalking and taunting its prey. You are miles from anywhere with no shoes and no coat. Your body wobbles forward like a freight train stumbling towards some distant land. As you fall, you look up, searching for a beacon in the night. Death comes, slowly. Blackness falls into dawn. Red sirens buried beneath a frosty white blanket of snow.

Prelude to a Death

On January 28, 2000, under a starlit Saskatoon sky, a Cree man, Darrell Night, is picked up by two white police officers for being “drunk and disorderly” outside his uncle’s place on the West side. It is late and minus 20 C. Instead of booking him in at the station, they drive him to an isolated spot three miles outside of town, and dump him:

“Get the fuck out, you fuckin’ Indian.”

“I’ll freeze out here,” Night yelled. “What’s wrong with you guys?”

A voice echoed in the cold: “That’s your fucking problem.”

As they drive away, Night hears their racial slurs echo in the frozen air. No muss, no fuss, no paper work (or so these cops thought).

Night survives to tell his harrowing tale. He lumbers to the Queen Elizabeth Power Station and luckily crosses paths with a security guard as he pounds on a door. Night gets home safely in a cab. However, two other indigenous men, Rodney Naistus and Lawrence Wagner, dumped near the same spot, are not so lucky. Their frozen corpses are found just a few days later. The horrific discoveries set off a storm of public rage that leads to a large-scale RCMP investigation and an inquiry that cracks open the icy underbelly of racism in the Saskatoon Police force.

“SCENE ONE:

blood on the snow

The hunger that comes with Winter craving for distant warmth that is fresh, green and of fragrance. The sound of ice crush with each step both rough and cold. Vapors and mist from fresh blood trails off in the stiff air.

Music: Rattle—begin with steady beat and crescendos on the fourth beat for a momentary pause to then being a repeated cycle.

Lights: Blinding white.”  – James Luna, Excerpt from An Indian Artist Sees (P. 52)

Written in response to blood on the snow, an installation created by Vancouver-based Anishnabe (Ojibwa) artist, Rebecca Belmore, Luna arouses the rituals of nature (and mourning) in the aftermath of a brutal slaughter. A blanket of white snow, marred with a staining of red, makes haunting parallels between historical and contemporary atrocities. In 1890, the United States cavalry massacred 300 Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, after which, a sudden deep cold froze the bodies and blanketed them with snow. While honoring the men, women and children who died there, the bloodstained blanket and single chair is a cry of resistance to so many futile and violent deaths: the missing and murdered women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (The Named and the Unnamed) and five First Nation’s men, frozen to death on desecrated land.

Frozen Ghosts in the Night

On a miserably cold morning on January 29th, Pat Lorjé, a member of Saskatchewan’s legislative assembly, went for her morning run. She took her usual route through an industrial park, within sight of the Queen Elizabeth Power Station. At the top of a slope, she pauses briefly, spotting a man on the edge of the road gazing down. He yells and motions her over. She sees what looks like a rolled-up carpet, but in actuality, is a native male in his mid-twenties, naked from the waist up. His eyes are partially open; a strand of frozen saliva hangs, suspended from his lips.

As they wait, the pair scans over the scene. Once the police arrive, Lorjé says it looks like “the body was dumped here.” The officers disagree. To Lorjé’s eyes, however, the tracks indicate that the young man had “circled, fallen down, gotten up, and fallen down again.” The corpse, covered in tattoos, helps identify him as Rodney (Steven) Naistus, a twenty-five-year-old member of the Onion Lake Reserve near Lloydminster, Saskatchewan.

Five days later, another frozen body. Railway workers discover a corpse lying in a shallow depression 200 metres south of the power station. The night before, 30-year old Lawrence Wegner, was injecting drugs before staggering outside an apartment, causing a disturbance. According to eyewitnesses, he was wearing a T-shirt, jeans and wool socks. Shortly after midnight, another eyewitness saw him outside of St. Paul’s Hospital. The police put him into the back of a squad car and drove away.

When Darrel Night hears about the two men, he comes forward to tell his story. Fearful that no one will believe him, Night identifies two veteran police officers, Ken Munson and Dan Hatchen, as the men who dumped him. The officers admit to dropping Night off on the outskirts of town, but they claim to have left him within walking distance of his sister’s place. This is a disturbing defense. If Night was drunk and belligerent, as they claim, then why not book him into the drunk tank or ensure his safe return home? Why would a cop drop a drunk person “near” his home in the deathly cold of a late winter’s night? The officers, charged with assault and forcible confinement, were only convicted of the latter charge. They receive 8-months at the Saskatoon Correctional Centre.

Two Worlds Collide

Just beyond the residential areas, on the southwest end of the city, is the spot where the infamous starlight tours end – an alleged dumping ground for drunk and unruly “Indians.” While the area is now haunted by the ghosts of a sordid past, it is likely that these practices are not exclusive to Saskatoon. No matter where you live in Canada, Police relations with First Nations are at best strained and at worst quite hostile or volatile.

Night’s account of his survival transfixes Saskatoon and opens a window to the darker side of the city’s police force that is imposing its own death penalty on the wind-whipped prairie. Over the years, there were always rumors of the police drop offs, but there was no proof until Night made it home alive. While Lawrence Wegner and Rodney Naistus’ deaths continue to go unanswered, the Saskatoon Police Chief at the time, Dave Scott, insisted that Night’s case was an isolated incident – and that there was no connection between Night’s experience and the two frozen corpses.

By 2003, the new Saskatoon Police Chief, Russell Sabo, discloses an historical precedent for the starlight tours. He points to the case of an officer, disciplined in 1976, for taking a native woman to the outskirts of the city and leaving her in the cold. Sabo’s sobering public confession increases the intensity of the spotlight on the besieged Saskatoon Police force. In fact, it reveals a startling pattern of racist practices as a way to deal with ‘drunk’ or ‘unruly’ aboriginal citizens. You might argue that these activities are a form of harassment that police have engaged in for centuries; but on the Saskatchewan prairies, in the dead of winter, these games are not only criminal, but also racist and deadly. Had Night not come forward, the starlight tours might have continued as an icy urban myth.

The police are now skimming on thin ice. A public inquiry into other freezing deaths inflames the racial divides. In a news clip from the documentary, Two Worlds Colliding by Tasha Hubbard, an angry young woman verbally attacks Night’s mother with an onslaught of racial slurs (21:23). The film takes viewers on a haunting journey through the “freezing deaths” and the schism that exists between a fearful, mistrustful First Nation community and a police force that must face its most horrific secret.

In his book, Police Corruption (2009), Maurice Punch talks about the difference between the ‘bad apples’, ‘rotten barrels’, and ‘rotten orchards’ of police corruption. The concept of bad apples describes the abusive or inappropriate ways that police officers may behave. The starlight tour is a perfect example of bad apples in policing. Even worse, though, is the systematic racism and genocidal practices that are at the core of the starlight tours. It reflects on Punch’s theory of the “Dirty Harry” phenomenon where some members of the police use an aggressive or hateful approach to target a specific group. In Saskatoon, Dirty Harry rears his ugly head in a pattern of perfidious rides that lead to frozen deaths.

Blood on the Snow

Although Night survived his ordeal, the freezing deaths of both Rodney Naistus and Lawrence Wegner remain unsolved. The families and the public want answers. A large RCMP task force is set up to investigate. The lack of trust in police motivates the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations to bring in one of their own, Oliver Williams, a retired RCMP officer with 24-years’ experience. As the investigation digs deeper, the evidence of two other suspicious deaths hit the spotlight. Lloyd Dustyhorn and D’Arcy Dean Ironchild had both been in police custody and later wound up frozen to death. The RCMP decide to blow open the door of racial brutality in the police force by resurrecting the decade-old, freezing death of 17-year old Neil Stonechild. Was he, too, a victim of foul play?

Inquests do not determine guilt or innocence, but to establish where and when a death occurred and the medical cause of death. They are open to the public. A six-member jury looks at the evidence, and makes recommendations on how to prevent similar deaths.

The Inquiry revealed some shocking truths – some well hidden, others, gaping and festering wounds. A column written in The Saskatoon Sun in 1997 is evidence in the Inquiry. In June of that year, a local police constable named Brian Trainor writes a “fictional” narrative titled, Beligerent Drunk Gets Ride to Highest Power in the Land. The piece is a thinly veiled account of the starlight tours, and apparently, a portrait of life on the beat. In the narrative, a pair of cops, dubbed ‘Hawk and Gumby’ (for real?), pick up a drunk outside the Salvation Army. They decide to take him for a drive. Here is part of his narrative:

“An uneasy silence had overcome the man in the back. Sensing that this wasn’t the way home, the drunk began to demand he be taken to the “highest power of the land.

A few quick turns and the car came to an abrupt stop in front of the Queen Elizabeth Power Station. Climbing out and opening the rear door, Hawk yelled for the man to get out, advising him that this was the place he had asked to go to.

Quickly gathering his wits, the drunk scrambled out of the car and into the thickets along the riverbank, disappearing from view. “One less guest for breakfast.””

This 17-year old column shows a pattern of brutality inside the police force. It is despicable, and it’s racist. In fact, it seems almost gleeful in its self-indulgence, to revel in such an insidiousness practice as a way to punish, degrade and freeze the ‘unruly’ aboriginal men. Was it some kind of insiders’ joke or a white-washed message for encouraging police brutality? Whatever it was, the column paints a damning picture of a prairie police force rife with racial profiling, genocide, obstruction of justice and justice denied to its victims and to First Nation communities across Canada.

When Hell Freezes Over

The inquests into the deaths of Naistus and Wegner found the circumstances “inconclusive.” The report stated that hypothermia from prolonged exposure was the cause of death for Wegner, but “by what means: undetermined.” The jury recommended the development “of a standing order requiring police officers to record in their notebooks the names of individuals they take into their police vehicles for whatever reason.”

A jury decided that Lloyd Dustyhorn’s death was also was caused by hypothermia, and that D’Arcy Dean Ironchild, 33, died due to  an overdose of chloral hydrate, an old and rarely used drug.

The provincial government called for the Neil Stonechild Inquiry to begin in the autumn of 2003. The Commission looked at evidence and heard testimony from 64 witnesses over 43 days. In October 2004, they brought a final report to the table containing its findings and recommendations to the Minister of Justice and the Attorney General.

Neil Stonechild disappeared Nov. 24, 1990 — a bitterly cold evening. Five days later, two men constructing a fence in an industrial area of Saskatoon, found his body. They noticed the body of a person, frozen to death, lying face down in the snow. They called the police. When investigators arrived, they noticed that the victim was not properly dressed for such bone-chilling weather (-28C), and that one of the victim’s shoes was missing. An autopsy showed he died of hypothermia.

Police traced the footprints of the victim in a relatively straight line back to a gravel-covered parking lot a short distance away. The body of the deceased was removed from the scene and, other than a scant search of the field by the canine unit, the investigation of the crime scene ended. No one bothered to search the parking lot or the properties adjacent to the crime scene. No one tried to figure out how a boy wound up dead in a field in the middle of nowhere. The inquiry concluded the youth was in Constable Hartwig’s and Constable Senger’s patrol car the last night he was seen alive, and that injuries and marks on his body were likely caused by handcuffs.

While the report did not conclusively find that the former constables were responsible for dropping off Stonechild in the field where he died, they were cited for failing to follow proper procedures and for failing to tell the investigators that he had been in their custody. Despite their consistent denials that they had not seen Stonechild on the night he died (let alone confine or abandon him), the two officers lost their jobs within a day of the released report. In later years, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal would reject a bid by the officers and their association to overturn the findings. The court ruled that the commissioner did not exceed the scope of his authority by naming individuals, nor did he violate the Constitution by making findings of civil or criminal liability.

Neither officer has ever faced criminal charges in the matter.

The inquiry report condemned the Saskatoon Police Service for not conducting a proper investigation into Neil Stonechild’s tragic death. It said senior officers were defensive and attempted to protect their reputations to the detriment of the inquiry.

Winter Craving for Distant Warm

On a Cree Nation reserve about 90 minutes west of Saskatoon, Mary Wegner, the mother of Lawrence Wegner, still weeps. She remembers Stonechild, Naistus and Night. She folds into tears. She says Lawrence was wearing boots and an expensive jacket the night he disappeared.

“They took his jacket. Only they know what they did to him,” she says.

“What are we? Stones? Do we not suffer?”

In his book, Poetry of Mourning, Jahan Ramazini points to melancholic narratives that resist rather than console to discuss the modern elegies of poets like Langston Hughes or Sylvia Plath. The lynch mob poems of Hughes, closely tied to Belmore’s performative art, foreground the hopelessness and violence of mournful deaths left angry and unresolved. Such remembrances are not a refuge for consolation, but rather “resist” such brutal violations as a way to channel the anger by cracking open the festering wounds of racist and genocidal practices.

“SCENE SIX

Finis

Silence covers the audience …

Music: Water sounds

Lights: Light fade slow from previous scene … to black … hold for a five count and a flash of blinding light. – James Luna, Excerpt from An Indian Artist Sees (P. 54)

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