Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Acknowledgments:
Thanks to Chris Andersen and Judith Garber, University of Alberta, for their helpful comments on the earlier version of this paper, and thanks to Patrick R. Wolsey for his editing assistance. Thanks to my anonymous reviewers of this article for the journal for their insightful comments and critique.
The police practice of taking [intoxicated] Aboriginals out of town and leaving them even ha[s] its own moniker, "Starlight Tours," used by both the police service and the Aboriginal community.
(Green, 2006: 507)
Introduction
On November 24, 1990, in Saskatoon, two Cree youths, Neil Stonechild and Jason Roy, both 17, went to a party for a night of drinking and playing cards. At the time, Stonechild was in breach of probation orders, having run away from his group home following release from juvenile detention for a robbery. Wanting to enjoy one last weekend of freedom, he planned to turn himself in the next day and had promised his mother and group home counselor he would do so (Reber and Renaud, 2005: 42). As the evening progressed, Stonechild and Roy went for a walk to a neighbourhood 7-Eleven and Snowberry Downs, a nearby apartment complex, to find Stonechild's ex-girlfriend. After unsuccessful attempts at getting into the building, the boys left. Following a disagreement, Stonechild and Roy were separated for a short time until Roy saw Stonechild in the back of a Saskatoon Police Service (SPS hereafter) cruiser, bloody and screaming that the police were going to kill him (Reber and Renaud, 2005: 39). That was the last Jason Roy saw of his friend. Stonechild's family reported him missing, but the SPS dismissed their claims, citing Stonechild's breach of probation to explain his disappearance.
On November 29, 1990, an industrial worker chanced upon Stonechild's frozen body on the outskirts of Saskatoon. His battered corpse was found in a remote industrial area, without a winter coat and only one shoe on. In the preliminary police report, the attending officers surmised Stonechild had walked to the location in a drunken state and frozen to death. Neither the officers dispatched to the scene nor the coroner took any precautions to preserve possible evidence, stepping all over the snow and surrounding tracks (Reber and Renaud, 2005:...