Starlight Tour, book looks at Saskatoon Police-Native People

[Stormy Police Relations]

Starlight Tour, book looks at Saskatoon Police and Stormy Relations With Native Peoples . . .

Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild, published by Random House Canada

by Susanne Reber and Robert Renaud

The discovery of seventeen-year-old Neil Stonechild's frozen body outside Saskatoon spurred an indefatigable mother to seek justice in the face of indifferent officials, destroyed police files, and institutionalized racism.

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Starlight Tour
The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild
Written by Susanne Reber and Robert Renaud

Publisher: Random House Canada
Format: Hardcover, 448 pages

ABOUT THIS BOOK

A teen’s suspicious death, a shocking police cover-up and a mother’s search for the truth.

In 1990, on a November night that hit –28 degrees Celsius, seventeen-year-old Neil Stonechild disappeared only blocks from his mother’s home. His frozen body was found three days later, eight kilometres from where he was last seen in downtown Saskatoon. The police investigation was cursory — no one seemed to wonder about the abrasions on his wrists or the scrapes on his face, or the fact that he was missing a shoe. Neil was drunk and out walking, the police believed, and had died by misadventure. His mother, Stella Bignell, tried her best to push for answers, but no one in authority wanted to listen to a native woman whose sons had often been in trouble with the law.

But Stella did not give up, and neither did the only witness, sixteen-year-old Jason Roy, who had seen Neil, beaten and bleeding, in the back of a Saskatoon police cruiser the night he disappeared. Starlight Tour recounts their struggle for justice in the face of indifferent officials, destroyed police files and institutionalized racism. In the decade following Neil’s death, rumours persisted that police sometimes drove natives beyond the edge of town and abandoned them. But it was only in January 2000, when two more men were found frozen to death, that the truth about Neil Stonechild’s fate began to emerge. A third man, Darrell Night, survived his “starlight tour,” and lived to tell the tale. And soon one of the country’s most prominent aboriginal lawyers, Donald Worme, was on the case.

With exclusive co-operation from the Stonechild family, Worme, and other key players, and information not yet revealed in the press coverage, The Starlight Tour is an engrossing and damning portrait of rogue cops, racism, obstruction of justice and justice denied, not only to a boy and his mother but to the entire country’s native community.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Rob Renaud is the Regional Director of CBC Radio Ottawa and Susanne Reber is Executive Producer, Investigations, CBC News. They worked together for over seven years leading CBC National Radio News and have won a number of awards for investigative journalism. They have been researching the Neil Stonechild case for three years.

Read an excerpt from this book . . .
http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/displ ... ew=excerpt

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REVIEW

Freezing out denial

Written by Will Robbins
for The Sheaf student newspaper
University of Saskatchewan
www.thesheaf.com

Thursday, 01 December 2005

New book takes another look at Saskatoon’s stormy relations between police and Native people

In late November of 1990, the Saskatoon Police Found the body of seventeen-year-old Neil Stonechild frozen to death, miles outside of Saskatoon, and miles from where he had last been seen. Initially dismissed as an accidental freezing death despite incongruous evidence such as the obvious trauma to Neil’s wrist and face and his missing shoe, the Stonechild case eventually resurfaced more than a decade later when the RCMP began an investigation into allegations that the Saskatoon Police routinely dropped Aboriginal people on the outskirts of town.

The practice – nicknamed ‘starlight tours’ – came under intense public scrutiny when Darrell Night, a Native Saskatonian, came forward with a complaint that he had been dropped off by police near the Queen Elizabeth power station early one morning in January of 2000, the same week that two Native men were found frozen to death in that area. Eventually, this RCMP investigation led to a full public inquiry into the Neil Stonechild case in the Fall of 2003, with Justice David Wright concluding that Neil had in fact been in police custody the last time he was seen alive, and further, that the Saskatoon Police investigation into his death was “superficial and totally inadequate”.

All of the events surrounding the Stonechild case have come to the fore again with the release of the new book, Starlight Tour, by CBC journalists Robert Renaud and Susanne Reber. Published by Random House this fall, Starlight Tour chronicles the events surrounding the Stonechild case, compiling hundreds of hours of interviews and research into a compelling narrative about the case, but also about the larger issues of race relations in Saskatoon between Native people and the Saskatoon Police Service.

The book, explained the authors in a recent interview with the Sheaf, is the result of years of work on the case sparked by personal interest in the story. “We started talking about this case and this whole idea of this kid being taken out into the middle of a field was a really haunting image,” said Reber. “Of course, in the light of also knowing about the freezing deaths in 2000 we thought ‘well, what the hell’s going on when people can actually dump other human beings on the edge of town like human trash?’ For us it was really something we wanted to find out about.”

Although the book is factually accurate, it doesn’t read like you might expect given it was written by two investigative journalists. Renaud explained they “wanted to situate the book in the genre of ‘literary journalism’, where the facts are accurate, and there are new facts in the book, but it actually reads like a novel. We wanted to make this a really intimate story that would get inside the lives of the people that were living it, what they were feeling and what they were having to cope with as they tried to get some justice and as Stella [Neil’s mother] tried to find out what happened to her son.”

Reber concurred. “We always wanted to approach it from the perspective of the family and the people around it. That was our entry point; that was what we were really interested to find out about.” Said Renaud, “Building it with the drama, the suspense, the character development, is I think one of the things that we’re proudest of. The trouble with straight journalism is that, I think to some extent we are becoming anaesthetised by statistics and hypothesis and arguments and this a way that’s actually true to the story, but delivers it in a real narrative that breathes. It allows people to ask their own questions and reach their own conclusions.”

When asked about the new facts found in the book, Reber explained having a comprehensive overview brought a new perspective to a case that had only received occasional spurts of media attention. “A lot of people have experienced this story in bits and spurts and with an event like this, people come swooping in, you’ve got a few days of national news coverage and headlines, and then everybody goes away again,” said Reber. “When you start to put things together it’s the cumulative effect, the fact that this happened hundreds of times, it happened over and over again.”

True to their word about attempting to be as comprehensive as possible, Reber and Renaud detail the connections between the freezing deaths of Lawrence Wegner and Neil Stonechild, as well as other reports like Darrell Night’s of surviving ‘starlight tours’, one going back as far as 1976. Robert explained that, “until very recently the Saskatoon police denied any kind of pattern to the drop-offs; of course Darrel Night walks out of a field and they say it’s an isolated incident. The book details a case that goes all the way back to 1976, where one officer took three aboriginal people, including a woman who was 8 months pregnant, out to the Queen Elizabeth power station and dropped them off. Now one of the questions rased in the book is how does this practice continue for so long, and in that case the officer was fined 200 dollars.”

Susanne jumps in with another unbelievable connector to this pattern from the book. “There is this satirical piece written in 1997 for the Star Phoenix [by Saskatoon police officer Brain Trainor], that is just stunning. When you read that last line in his piece, that’s supposed to be fictional—“one less guest for breakfast”—and you know it’s describing the exact same route down Spadina that Darrell Night took, well you know it’s when you hit people over and over with the repetition of these events, nobody’s ever done that before.”

When asked about whether the Stonechild inquiry, which was damning of the SPS, might have produced some progress with the problem of a lack of police oversight, Reaud responded, “I think one of the interesting possibilities that hasn’t really been looked at is one that has been used in Ireland, which is the idea of an oversight commission. We might need an independent body here to actually create new policy, to create new approaches, to create a new culture.”

After researching this case, both authors are certainly sceptical of the idea that internal police investigations are the way to go. “If you look at it, when Darrel Night came forward,” said Robert, “Chief Scott’s first impulse was to try to make it an internal investigation and within 36 hours Chris Axeworthy [Minister of Justice at the time] yanked it out of police hands and said, ‘the RCMP are going to look at this’. The result of that, frankly, is that one of the few, probably the only, investigation in book that actually is done with the kind of professionalism and thoroughness them one would hope you would undertake this with, is done by Jack Warner of the RCMP. I think that was a direct result of the investigation being taken away from the Saskatoon Police.”

As this project was a very personal undertaking for the authors, it stands to reason that their own personal histories played a role in the final narrative product. “I actually wasn’t born in Canada,” explained Reber. “I was born in Switzerland and I came to Canada in my early twenties and the early part of my career at the CBC I did a lot of foreign reporting and I think that has an effect on you. I covered some of the internationally important stories, the Berlin Wall coming down, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the ANC coming to power in South Africa. Often Canada is seen as a role model, we stand up for things and all that, and I guess I brought that perspective to this as a story. It always struck me as absolutely bizarre that you’d have this kind of thing happening in Canada, and nobody gives a shit. You sit there and you go, how can this be?”

Despite the detailed chronicling of dismissal, disregard, and incompetence that the Saskatoon Police Service served up to the Stonechild family (and the broader Saskatoon Aboriginal community), both Renaud and Reber are cautiously optimistic about future reformation of that strained relationship. Said Renuad, “Well, justice comes in different ways, and one of the reasons that Stella and Don [Worme, her lawyer] were happy about Justice Wright’s conclusions was that, when you haven’t been heard for 13 to 15 years, simply to feel like you’ve been heard, is justice.” He was also congratulatory on the work the inquiry did. “I think that Justice Wright ran an incredibly complicated inquiry in an impeccably fair way.”

Reber was also optimistic that there was change still to come in Saskatoon’s stormy race relations. “My example that I use is the police service,” she said. “When Hartwig and Senger [the officers who took Neil into custody] were fired, 50 percent of the officers signed a petition in support of them. However, the other 50 percent didn’t, which I think is just as telling. We tend to focus only on the 50 percent who are supporting this denial, but the other 50 percent in that police force who don’t have a voice, who aren’t getting heard, aren’t necessarily prepared to talk on the record to people like us because there is this feeling that perhaps the time isn’t right for them to come forward, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not willing to see some change.