His last image of Neil, angry and scared, looking at him out the back window as the cruiser headed south down Confederation, was never far from Jason's mind as he talked with Jarvis. Like most natives living in Saskatoon, Jason had heard about “starlight tours”, stories about Saskatoon police driving natives out of town and forcing them to walk back. He wondered if that's how Neil had gotten to the industrial area where he had died.
Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild, released in January of 2019, is the revised and updated version of a book originally published in 2005. I can't speak to just how necessary these revisions might be for the original text (although there were a couple of very interesting facts in the new epilogue), but anything that keeps this horrifying story of racism, abuse, and the stonewalling of a corrupt police force in the public discourse is vital and welcome in today's Canada. Thoroughly researched and squarely reported, I found this account to be equally engrossing and mortifying: Just how can this happen here? Deserves to be read widely.
On November 24, 1990, seventeen-year-old Neil Stonechild was out partying in Saskatoon, on what many described as the coldest night of the year. Separated from his friend Jason Roy, Neil was last seen alive in the back seat of a police cruiser – wearing handcuffs, bleeding from the nose, and screaming “They're going to kill me” – only to be discovered a few days later, frozen to death in a field at the city limits. After a perfunctory police investigation – what's one more drunk Indian succumbing to misadventure? – the Stonechild case was officially closed; but it never closed for the friends and family who knew that Neil would never have been walking out there in such thin clothing by his own volition.
In January of 2000, Indigenous man Darrell Night survived being dumped in the freezing cold at Saskatoon's city limits by police officers, and after eventually being convinced to come forward with his story, local media made the connection between Night's indisputable account and two recent freezing deaths of other Indigenous men. When the link was made back to Stonechild's death a decade earlier, the Saskatoon Police Services found themselves at the center of an external investigation by the RCMP.
One native man had brought the terror of the “starlight tour”, long considered urban folklore outside the native community, to the public's attention for the first time. The photos of Lawrence Wegner's frozen body lying face down on the snow-covered prairie sped instantly across wire services to media all over the world. Saskatoon achieved instant notoriety as the little Canadian city where police dumped native people like human trash.
The story that follows of the years-long investigation, interviews, and official Commission of Inquiry make for heartbreaking reading: at every turn, it would seem that the police officers involved either failed in their duties to serve and protect (when they weren't outright harming Indigenous peoples), and when the narrative reaches the commission stage, the courtroom drama is as enthralling as any work of fiction – but with so much more at stake with the loss of actual human lives and the offences to the dignity of Neil Stonechild's mother, family, and friends. The big blue wall in Saskatoon wasn't going to go down without a fight.
Was it going to be as simple as that, Worme thought to himself as he listened. Just a matter of saying that Neil was GOA on November 24, to deny any knowledge about the boy's disappearance and death and to say they could not remember associating the discovery of his body with the call to Snowberry Downs? Worme felt his anger and cynicism build as he thought through the strange mathematics in a commission of inquiry that made denying and forgetting add up to nothing happened.
I understand that authors Susanne Reber and Robert Renaud wrote Starlight Tour from a certain point-of-view: although no one can actually prove that Neil Stonechild was dumped at the city limits, where he later froze to death, by Constables Brad Senger and Larry Hartwig, the preponderance of evidence suggests that that's exactly what happened; the Commissioner of the Inquiry, The Honourable Mr. Justice David H. Wright, concluded as much in his findings, and the authors present this narrative from that perspective. I find that to be a fair viewpoint, and although the officers never faced criminal proceedings for their actions, I agree with the assessment of Neil Stonechild's mother, Stella Stonechild Bignell: “They'll have to pay eventually, they will. Whoever did this. We all have to answer to one God – they're going to have to die, too, one day. When you answer to God, you can't take a lawyer with you. No lawyers where they're going.” May it be so.
