Chapter 7 Clearing the Plains Continues Settler Justice and the “Accidental” Murder of Colten Boushie

A Review of the Known Facts of Boushie’s Murder

One hot summer’s day near the town of Biggar, Saskatchewan, Colten Boushie, Kiora Wuttunee, Belinda Jackson, Cassidy Cross-Whitstone, and Eric Meechance had been swimming, drinking a range of alcoholic drinks, and generally enjoying themselves at the Maymont River. At some point, they drove away from the river. When their vehicle got a flat tire, the group drove to a nearby farm to seek assistance. They drove their 2003 Ford Escape up a long gravel driveway, and Meechance got out and attempted to ride an ATV on the property. This is when they encountered a white farmer named Gerald Stanley. At Stanley’s trial, he and his son Sheldon alleged that they were under the impression that the five Indigenous people were there to steal and acted according to this assumption. The son smashed the car’s windshield with a hammer while his father kicked in the rear signal light. The smashed windshield made it difficult to see out of the vehicle, and the Escape subsequently crashed into another SUV as the group started to drive away. At this point, both Stanleys went to secure firearms for themselves. Cross-Whitstone got out of the Escape, while Boushie, Kiora Wuttunee, and Belinda Jackson remained inside (Feist 2018). Stanley fired what he described as two warning shots from his Soviet-made Tokarev pistol into the air, ostensibly to scare the youth away.

Stanley claims that he stood next to the vehicle, held the gun in his right hand and reached through the driver’s side window and tried to turn off the Escape’s ignition with his left hand. This was when the gun supposedly discharged accidentally into the head of Colten Boushie, who was in the front seat. During the trial, the defence claimed that the gun had discharged without Stanley pulling the trigger, an extremely rare situation known as “hang fire.” The hang fire defence is extremely weak, given that Stanley claimed that the hang fire in his case must have lasted at least several minutes—hang fires only occur at most one or two seconds after the trigger is pulled and usually happen after a delay of milliseconds (Feist 2018).

Rather than detaining only Stanley, who was sitting drinking coffee after the shooting, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police chose to see Boushie’s friends as potential criminals as well and bundled them into awaiting police cruisers. Some were held overnight and induced to make statements under very difficult conditions, including being deprived of sleep. After the shooting, the RCMP circulated a press release stating that three of Boushie’s companions were taken into police custody as part of a theft investigation. Bobby Cameron, chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, noted that the wording of the press release provided “just enough prejudicial information for the average reader to draw their own conclusions that the shooting was somehow justified” (Friesen 2018).

The RCMP also chose to treat Boushie’s mother, Debbie Baptiste, with callous disrespect, as if she were a criminal, when they arrived to inform her of her son’s death. The RCMP officers involved later alleged that they had been tipped off that “an armed person might have been in a trailer matching the description of the one Baptiste lived in” (Warick 2018). They pulled into the yard and surrounded the trailer in which the family was living. Some of the officers scanned the area, their weapons drawn. Baptiste and her son William went to the door, and the officers asked Baptiste whether she was Colten’s mother. When she said that she was, they abruptly told her, “He’s deceased.” Crying in anguish, she was led back into the trailer by the officers, who did not ask permission to enter. Some began searching the home using flashlights, while another asked her whether she was drunk. As Baptiste recounted: “He said, ‘Ma’am, was you drinking?’ And I said ‘No.’ And then he smelled my breath.” Precisely who or what they were searching for was not revealed, although the officers claimed that they were looking for one of Colton’s companions (Friesen 2018). In 2021, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police issued a highly critical report, concluding that the RCMP acted with “such insensitivity” that their treatment of Debbie Baptiste “amounted to a prima facie case of discrimination.” While the National Police Foundation, the union that represents rank-and-file members of the RCMP, refused to acknowledge wrongdoing, the Saskatchewan branch of the RCMP did release a statement after the report, admitting that systemic racism existed and needed to be stopped (Austen 2021).

This systemic racism was evident in the jury selection process at the outset of Stanley’s trial, which began near the end of January 2018. At the time, the Canadian legal system allowed both Crown and defence attorneys to use peremptory challenges to exclude prospective jurors, without having to explain the cause. Stanley’s defence used this option to exclude five prospective jurors who looked as it they might be Indigenous, leaving only non-Indigenous individuals to determine Stanley’s guilt or innocence. The Crown prosecutor could have attempted to offset the situation by requesting that a limit be placed on the number of such challenges and could also have asked that prospective jurors be vetted for racial bias (Hill 2018). But no such effort was made.

The trial lasted two weeks. On 9 February, after deliberating for a total of fifteen hours, the jury came back with a verdict of not guilty, acquitting Stanley both of second-degree murder and of manslaughter (Craig 2018; see also Canadian Press 2018a). Unsurprisingly, the verdict provoked outrage among most Indigenous peoples and their supporters, although it was applauded by the Stanley family and many settler farmers. There was considerable talk in the media about the possibility that the Crown would appeal the decision, but early in March 2018 it announced that there would be no appeal. As Saskatchewan senior prosecutor Anthony Gerein explained, under Canadian law the Crown can only appeal in the event of “legal errors in the course of the trial,” but none of the lawyers and legal experts that the prosecution consulted were able to find just cause for an appeal (quoted in Canadian Press 2018b).

The trial’s aftermath was extremely polarized. Most Indigenous peoples and their supporters lamented that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The federal government expressed at least rhetorical support. There were vigils and rallies throughout the country. I was able to attend one in Guelph, where I work, and another in my hometown of Regina, where my sister and I participated in a rally at the provincial courthouse, which was followed by a round dance that blocked off one of the city’s main thoroughfares. In contrast, many white farmers argued that Stanley had done the right thing. Saskatchewan was inundated with anti-Indigenous social media posts, as settlers reacted against claims that racism was to blame for Stanley’s actions. Facebook groups such as Farmers with Firearms pledged support for Stanley and the armed defence of farms, to the point where the RCMP tried to persuade farmers not to resort to vigilante behaviour. In 2017, the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities passed a resolution promoting the rights of farmers to defend their property in an American style “stand your ground” initiative (Friesen 2018). On a private RCMP Facebook page following the trial, one poster had written: “Too bad the kid died but he got what he deserved. How many of us work on or near reserves and are getting fed up with the race card being used every time someone gets caught breaking the law?” (Tunney 2018). Crowdfunding for the Stanley defence fund reached six figures, with many farmers pledging they would have and would still do what Stanley had done in the same circumstances.

The context of settler anger and a lack of understanding was palpable on social media, and that is what led to an article I published in The Conversation on 11 February 2018, in which I provided additional context relevant to the murder. As I noted there:

Much was made about Boushie and his friends having had too much to drink on the day he was killed. The concept of “drunken Indians stealing” from white settlers also goes back to the early days of colonization. In 1868 federal laws prohibited Indigenous peoples from purchasing or consuming alcohol. Under the Indian Act, even possessing alcohol was illegal. This was only formally changed by an amendment in 1985. (Moss and Gardner-O’Toole 1991, under “Liquor Offences”; see also Indian Act, RSC 1985, c. I-5, s. 81.1)

I went on to quote from Sherene Razack’s Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (2015), in which she observes that settler societies are deeply invested in the “disappearing” of Indigenous peoples. “It is a process,” she writes, “that involves marking (materially and symbolically) the Indigenous body as one that is not up to the challenge of modern life, a condition that leaves the settler as legitimate heir to the land” (Razack 2015, 193). As I further noted, myths of the inevitability of Indigenous disappearance allow settlers to evade responsibility for the negative impacts of colonization, since they are there only to promote Western civilization and law, while Indigenous peoples are “dying due to an inherent incapacity to survive modern life” (Razack 2015, 193).

Article Analysis

Within a day or two of its publication in The Conversation, syndicated copies of my article appeared in a variety of other online news and opinion outlets. I was surprised by its large readership and the polarized views it generated: over 1,500 comments altogether came from readers in these multiple outlets. Many of these reactions to the trial and to my subsequent article epitomize what scholar Robin DiAngelo calls “white fragility,” a defensive reaction to “race-based stress” that causes white people to feel threatened, even by liberal calls for an end to discrimination (DiAngelo 2011, 54). As DiAngelo observes, “In the dominant position, whites are almost always racially comfortable and thus have developed unchallenged expectations to remain so.” When faced by situations that challenge this comfort, they therefore tend to “blame the person or event that triggered the discomfort” (60)—a defensive response to avoid confronting their own racism. As she points out, “Whites often confuse comfort with safety,” which allows them to complain about threats to their safety rather than to examine the discomfort they feel at the prospect of losing their position of privilege (61).

In an article written in the aftermath of the Stanley verdict, Métis scholar Brenda Macdougall (2018) described a new social environment in which narratives that had been promoted for decades by white male settlers were being displaced by more inclusive and authentic histories of settler colonialism. The erosion of these old discourses—among them “the historical myth of settlement, which tells us that hardy pioneers made productive use of unoccupied, unused, and unencumbered lands,” specifically by becoming farmers—has undermined the presumption of white supremacy. “No longer enjoying the special status of their parents and grandparents,” Macdougall writes, white settlers “regard themselves as losing rights in a system that once invested in them power and authority by virtue of their skin colour.” This shift in social consciousness has created the racial discomfort that gives rise to expressions of white fragility, such as racist rage and the overall sense of white victimization on display in some of the comments on my article.

That Saskatchewan had serious problems with anti-Indigenous racism was well known before the trial (see, for example, MBC News 2016; Levasseur 2014). In my article, I sought to engage with some of the contemporary manifestations of this racism. Many of the comments on the article were steeped in anti-Indigenous racism, which extended to attacks on me for taking a stance critical of settler colonialism. I was encouraged by Indigenous friends and colleagues to make something of this situation, and on this basis I decided to conduct a content analysis of the views of a selected subset of readers, in all likelihood primarily settler Canadians, on Indigenous issues during what is purported to be an age of reconciliation. The themes, with illustrative examples, are discussed below. Also included in this analysis are comments of an overtly racist nature that had been deleted by the moderator of The Conversation, although I was kindly given access to them later on. My goal here is to highlight several key themes in public discourse around Indigenous peoples. Even though Canada has been widely portrayed as ready for reconciliation with Indigenous people, the definition of what reconciliation means is highly contested. As John Borrows (2017, 33) points out, “reconciliation” can sometimes be a euphemism for Indigenous peoples reconciling themselves to colonialism and assimilating fully into settler society.

As the readership of the article began to grow within the first four days of publication, I reached out to Mark Mitchell, one of my doctoral students at the time. He downloaded all of the comments from the various online sources and pasted them into a single Word document, which ran to over 700 pages (12-point Times New Roman, 1.5 spaced). I supplied a list of themes I had observed in the first week of reading through all of the comments. Mark read all of the comments, and added, changed, and deleted key themes as appropriate. The greatest number of comments were posted on The Tyee (1,148), followed by the National Post (102 comments), with smaller numbers of comments on The Conversation (56), the Edmonton Journal (14), and iPolitics (20).1 The majority of comments were negative, although there were some strongly positive ones as well. Overall, the comments suggested to me divisions in perception about Indigenous-settler issues, at least among readers of the major online news sources in Canada.

I thought the responses to my article were, in many ways, predictable. Concerns had already been widely voiced about the racist and otherwise disrespectful comments that so often appeared at the end of news articles about Indigenous topics, to the point that some media outlets had done away with comments sections entirely (see Rice 2017). At the end of November 2015, even the CBC felt obliged to temporarily close down the comments sections on Indigenous news stories. As the then director of digital news explained, the CBC had noticed that “these stories draw a disproportionate number of comments that cross the line and violate our guidelines.” He went on to say that “some comments are clearly hateful and vitriolic, some are simply ignorant. And some appear to be hate disguised as ignorance (i.e., racist sentiments expressed in benign language)” (Fenlon 2015).

In our analysis, Mark and I noted a mixture of both overt and far more indirect and cryptic forms of anti-Indigenous racism. Many of the comments we classified conformed to what Anishinaabe scholar and activist Hayden King (2017b) describes as a “depravity narrative” in media reporting. In this narrative, the focus falls on Indigenous peoples as a collective problem for settler society: the origins of Indigenous unhappiness and unrest are traced to “the community’s own anger or dysfunction” but seldom to “the structural conditions of ongoing colonialism” (King 2017b).

They Got What They Deserved

In the National Post, 70 of the comments were negative, with 4 neutral, and 19 positive. Blaming the victim was a common tactic amongst readers, dismissing the notion that “generational abuse, centuries of mistreatment” were to blame and instead presenting them as “stupid drunk trouble seeking kids wanting to feed their addictions.” The author of a comment posted in iPolitics chose to blame Boushie for his own murder, stating: “If you don’t want to be shot by a farmer, don’t stumble onto his property, at night, drunk, wreck one of his vehicles, try to steal another of his vehicles and for god’s sake don’t ignore a couple of warning shots.” That Boushie had remained in the vehicle the entire time was conveniently ignored. The idea that Boushie deserved his fate was an undertone in many comments, especially one in NOW Toronto magazine: “His friends were drunk and driving. They had a rifle which they discharged and were trying to steal cars. . . . Maybe other indigenous people will remember Boushie’s fate and be smarter about things in the future.”

Many of the responses reflect racist, anti-Indigenous stereotypes, which have a long pedigree in Canadian settler life. Settler anger is aroused when these taken-for-granted stereotypes are brought to light, questioned, and challenged. For those unaccustomed to examining their own positionality, which they assume to be universal and normal, being called out for racism can be discomforting. It can be a source of fragility and defensiveness. Regina-based settler educator Carol Schick (2014, 95) charted a rise in what she called settler resentment, the product of a range of factors and “complex social discourses fuelled by loss of jobs, immigration, general insecurity, fear of crime, and nostalgia for ‘the good old days.’ Anxiety over and disruption to ‘how we do things’ call for a re-affirmation and re-narration of cultural and social identities.” She notes how this “re-narration of formerly established, especially white, communities finds its expression through the disavowal of the other.” We can to some extent understand the racism on display in these comments as an attempt to re-establish a sense of settler security by deflecting anxiety onto Indigenous peoples as the source of threats that originate elsewhere.

The decades old racist stereotype of Indigenous peoples as alcoholics was evident in the comments, despite the fact that there is no genetic predisposition for any group to consume alcohol to excess. Instead, there is a scientific consensus that social conditions are responsible for alcohol abuse in most communities, whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous (CBC News 2014). Additionally, a pertinent study relying on 2009 Health Canada data reported “that FN people report lower alcohol consumption rates in the past twelve months (65.6%) as compared to the general Canadian population (79.3%)” (Spillane et al. 2015). Nevertheless, stereotypes persist and become the basis for disingenuously blaming Indigenous peoples for crimes perpetrated by settlers.

One writer of a comment posted in The Tyee rejected any need to display respect for Boushie, declaring: “He wasn’t behaving in a manner to merit respect, he didn’t give respect to others, but suddenly, we have to show respect because he is no longer breathing? A drunken punk is a drunken punk is a drunken punk.” Other comments in The Tyee continued the same theme: “The deceased brought the whole episode onto himself. Mr. Stanley and his family were working on their farm, looking for no confrontations.” And another: “One cannot in perpetuity, continually play the culture victim card in order to deny accountability.” Or: “Don’t show up on someone’s property with a bunch of guys and a loaded firearm with intent to do harm. That’s the lesson to be learned.”

In fact, Boushie and his friends had no loaded firearm, nor is there any evidence to suggest that they intended harm—unlike Stanley, who fits the description well. Nor did Stanley’s defence lawyer ever claim that the shooting was justified or in self-defence: the argument was that the shooting was accidental. All the same, the idea that these Indigenous youths were to blame was a central theme that surfaced in many of the comments. That Boushie was a victim of Stanley’s violence was firmly rejected: “What a bunch of bull-crap! . . . enough of this poor hard-done-to Indians . . . time for them to take responsibility for their own actions . . . time for them to look after themselves and their families instead of waiting for the ‘gov’t’ to do everything for them.” And from another reader along similar lines: “Whose fault is it that more indians [sic] aren’t lawyers or join the RCMP? No one but their own. Time to take some responsibility.”

What these commentators ignored was the fact that, through no “fault” of their own, racism has resulted in the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from many settler-dominated professions, an obstacle that has nothing to do with a lack of Indigenous talent or ability. Billie Allan has identified serious problems of interpersonal racism directed by settlers against Indigenous peoples, manifest in “discriminatory treatment in employment or educational settings or in relational contact that occurs in day-to-day interactions . . . ranging in severity from being ignored, to poor treatment, to more overt and severe forms such as name-calling and physical or sexual violence” (Allan 2015, 5). Settler myths of a colour-blind society and a level playing field disguise the reality that even if Indigenous peoples want to abide by the settler rules of the game, they still face significant hurdles to achieving the same successes.

Indigenous Peoples as Primitive

The racist belief that Indigenous peoples were technologically backward and hence better off under colonial rule surfaced repeatedly in the comments. One reader of The Conversation excused the excesses of settler colonialism on the basis that “civilization” was preferable to what came before:

When a proto-industrial civilization moves into land occupied by Stone Age tribes (that’s not an insult, it is the simple truth of the thing), there will be dislocations and troubles even when intentions are good. But really, how many Indians honestly wish they could go back to living in skin tents over the winter, going for 10 months without a bath, never seeing hot water in your life except in cooking, and expecting to live to be maybe 30 for women and 45 for men? I suspect very few.

Such views appear to echo a fully discredited evolutionist model implicit in Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard’s much contested Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation (2008), published by one of Canada’s leading university presses. Underlying their (what I would call a racist) argument is the idea that, at the time of contact, Indigenous peoples were so primitive—“either in a paleolithic or neolithic stage”—in comparison to Europeans, “who had already experienced thousands of years of civilization” (12), that they were ill-equipped to transition into a modernity (11, 12). Embracing an evolutionist paradigm now largely abandoned, the authors assert that “a number of neolithic cultural features, including undisciplined work habits, tribal forms of political identification, animistic beliefs, and difficulties in developing the capacity for abstract reasoning, persist despite hundred years of contact” (13). These “obsolete cultural features,” the authors claim, have been responsible for a “developmental gap” that has inhibited the “integration” of many Indigenous groups into “the Canadian social dynamic” (13).

Such arguments dovetail well with opinions expressed by media tycoon Conrad Black, founder of the National Post, according to whom Indigenous peoples “had a Stone Age culture” and were mostly “nomads, clothed in hides and skins, living in tents, surviving on fish and game, and usually at war, which included the torture to gruesome death of prisoners from other tribes and nations, including women and children” (Black 2015). Black concludes that “even the First Nations should be grateful that the Europeans came here.” Although Black may be an especially egregious example, such discourse is woefully common among settler commentators who feel unfairly held responsible for the purported problems of Indigenous peoples.

The reality is, of course, very different. Over the course of millennia, Indigenous peoples developed complex and sophisticated cultures and systems of governance, as well as trade networks and military alliances. As Hayden King has underscored, they maintained diplomatic protocols and practices that involved the exchange of gifts, ceremonies such as pipe smoking, and the negotiation of treaties, and they kept records of these diplomatic activities in “pictographs, birchbark scrolls, petroglyphs, masks, totem poles, beadwork, wampum belts and many volumes of text” (2017a). They also amassed extensive scientific knowledge of plants and animals, waterways, landforms, climatic systems, and so on. Yet a great many settler Canadians simply refuse to learn and understand these facts, apparently preferring the comfort and ease of familiar stereotypes. These stereotypes, which deny the inherent and demonstrable capacities of Indigenous peoples to govern themselves and to self-determine their own futures, have been used—and continue to be used—to legitimate colonization and the theft of Indigenous lands.

Media Double Standards and Political Correctness

Closely tied into these themes is the notion that double standards exist. In this view, Indigenous peoples are given far more latitude than white people for their actions. Commentary on my article in the Windsor Star featured a discussion of double standards, with one writer complaining about so-called “Liberal media using race as a tool to sell more papers.” The author of another comment noted that “when it’s an indian on indian crime NOBODY does anything but make excuses for them. Not to mention [that] indians don’t serve their time in jails but serve them on the reservations. Funny how they don’t have to follow the same laws as Canadians or serve their time like the rest of Canadians. But they constantly demand special treatment and criticize the justice system they have no respect for everytime [sic] they don’t get their own way.” A reader of The Tyee likewise pointed to double standards: “Now if the farmer had been a FN person there would be no big story here. The only reason this is receiving the attention it is getting is because the farmer is white. So just because of the color of his skin people are claiming he was a racist who deliberately murdered a FN man.”

Another reader, writing in The Conversation, saw Indigenous peoples as “being treated as the first among equals and shown every favor.” While conceding the existence of a small minority of racists in the country, the reader stated, “A bigger group are the professional victimists who make their living whipping up division even as they pretend to do the opposite. Most of them are white.” This comment invokes yet another well-known trope—that white liberal academics advance their careers and make money by claiming that Indigenous peoples are victims, as doing so gains them moral capital that can be in turn used to advance their preferred political agendas. The tactic illustrates what could be called the “virtue-signalling” argument, most commonly deployed by those on the right “to cast aspersions on opponents as an alternative to rebutting their arguments” (Shariatmadari 2016).

The All-White Jury

Reactions were extremely negative to the term “all-white jury” and likewise negative to suggestions that race played a role in the verdict, even though research indicates clearly that representation on juries matters.2 One comment, posted in The Tyee, managed to demean both Indigenous peoples and women: “for those who cry out for enforced indigenous representation . . . isn’t that racism in reverse? Are we now to pick jurors BECAUSE of their skin colour as we now pick cabinet members by their reproductive organs?” Another defended white people as incapable of bias, while at the same time denigrating the spiritual practices of Indigenous peoples:

It is extremely offensive to assume that in 2018, “white” people are incapable of making an unbiased decision regarding an aboriginal offender. I am also offended by having to stand around while animistic “prayers” are offered with smudging or spirit cleansing rituals at public government-funded events. Token acknowledgements of events taking place on unsurrendered whatever territory are also offensive. This land belongs to all of us equally.

There seem to be echoes here of the federal government’s White Paper of 1969, a “travesty of justice,” in the words of Harold Cardinal ([1969] 1999, 107), with its assimilationist agenda cloaked in the rhetoric of “equality.” In this view, “equality” is understood to mean sameness: Indigenous people are in no way deserving of special consideration—an attitude visible in this writer’s fervent support of the myth that everyone should be treated equally, no matter what their historical and cultural circumstances, and outright rejection of the notion that those who were here first have a prior claim to their land. The idea that white people could be biased because of the privilege attached to their skin colour is dismissed as an insult. We also see here a resentment of the ways that Indigenous tradition and ceremony are becoming a more significant part of mainstream Canadian life. Such comments echo earlier beliefs that the best future for Indigenous peoples lay in total assimilation into settler society—that their cultures were too “primitive” to be worth saving.

Don’t Call Me a Settler

Some respondents also took particular issue with the term “settler.” Many readers of the National Post took offence to the term, which one described as a “racist and pejorative,” while another called it “an insulting, derisive, racist turn of phrase. . . . Engineered to be inflammatory and disparaging. Calculated to incite an angry response.” As the latter insisted, “Implicit within the very word is the notion that some of us have more right to be here than others. I reject that notion. We are all settlers. Some of us got here earlier than others, that’s all.” In other words, even Indigenous people are settlers who apparently arrived on Turtle Island from somewhere else. This is an oddly expansive understanding of the term. Another adopted a more restrictive definition, according to which settlers no longer exist: “While we still have ‘immigrants,’ we haven’t had ‘settlers’ in more than a century. Present your case within the context of the present. None of the 36 million people living in Canada stole land from a Native (in fact, the notion of European settlers ‘stealing’ land from the Natives is asinine to begin with).”

The author of a comment in The Conversation also expressed disapproval of the term, arguing forcefully: “I am a Canadian. I’m not a ‘settler.’ I was born and raised in this country as was my parents and their parents. I refuse to be labeled as ‘Settler’ in my own country. I am as much of a Canadian as any Aboriginal person. If I tried to go back to Europe where my ancestors hailed from and claimed my ‘rights,’ I’d be laughed right back onto the plane.” The respondent further asked: “Why should aboriginal persons have greater rights then [sic] someone born and raised in this country? Hint: They shouldn’t! I have nothing to atone for or apologize for where aboriginal people are concerned.”

This shared perception of settlers as people who have been unjustly blamed and whose own “rights” have been devalued is indicative of the white fragility that marked many of the responses. Clearly, these individuals regard the term “settler” as derogatory and therefore seek to repudiate it. Yet this reaction is founded on a very incomplete understanding of the term. “Settler” is not fundamentally intended to accuse but rather to identify one side of a colonial relationship that persists into the present. As Emma Battell Lowman and Adam Barker (2015, 2) argue, the term “settler” asks Canadians to recognize unequal power relations and to acknowledge that settler comfort has been “forged through violence and displacement of Indigenous communities and nations.” The point is not to make settlers feel guilty but instead to encourage a sense of responsibility and accountability for what the settler state has done to Indigenous peoples and an understanding of the ways in which settler Canadians have benefited from “the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous peoples” while simultaneously denying that reality (Lowman and Barker 2015, 13–14, 16). This call to recognition and responsibility can, however, threaten the settler sense of self-entitlement, thus provoking defensive reactions, such as those illustrated above, that seek to restore and sustain a position of privilege.

Another common approach in these comments was to justify the present by recontextualizing it in far broader terms, most often in relation to the past. One writer appealed to the very origin of the species: “No one’s ancestors are from anywhere but East Africa. Everyone is a settler.” According to this reasoning, Indigenous peoples cannot claim special rights because they, too, are settlers. Another argued that Indigenous people have no right to complain that someone stole their land because they have done the same to others: “North American Indians fought over land just like everyone everywhere, and tribes were displaced and exterminated by other tribes just like everywhere else. We can never find the True Owner of any piece of land by trying to find who was the first person to ever step on it. I’m a settler, the Indians are settlers, the Syrian refugees are settlers and so is everyone else.” Somewhat paradoxically, having claimed that everyone is a settler, this same writer went on to declare that “I was born here. I am a native of Canada, I have no other home and I do not consider myself second class based on racial-historical grievances.” In this writer’s view, the only sensible approach is to recognize that “everyone’s country was stolen from someone else a hundred times” and otherwise leave settler institutions intact. Given that we “cannot repair history, the only thing we can do that works, is to go forward as equal citizens.”

Because everyone is a settler and everyone is descended from perpetrators of violence, the argument goes, feeling guilty makes no sense. As the author of another comment argued: “I owe no one any apologies for things I did not do based on some unworkable notion of collective racial guilt. The past is behind us and cannot be repaired. Every last one of us have ancestors who have something to complain about.” In other words, everyone is equal because everyone has faced similar experiences, and no one is guilty because all this has been going on since the dawn of time.

Attacking the Author of the Article

My own professional status and positionality were also subject to criticism and appear to have been seen as part of a larger, politically correct social justice movement based on promoting Indigenous “favouritism” and identity politics. For example, one reader of the National Post commented: “Was this MacDonald goof just being the fall guy for trying to explain Junior’s opinion on this? No matter what the excuse he is a junk academic that should not be within a mile of our kids #firehisass.” (Presumably “Junior” is Justin Trudeau.) Another asked: “What is the message here? That property owners are hostage to anyone that comes onto their property with the intention of taking it, damaging it and harming the property owner, provided the perpetrator is indigenous? We have no right to defend ourselves, our families and our property if the bad guys are FN?”

Yet another National Post reader wrote: “Typical Liberal Arts graduate—third rate degree from second rate university with a major in pandering and a minor in magical thinking.” The reader went on to complain that my commentary on the acquittal of a white farmer in the murder of an Indigenous youth was among “the most racist articles I have ever read from the National Post!” He added, “Guy sounds like a zealot and a bigot,” concluding with the question: “Why is the NP giving a platform to this lying, racist, academic cuck?” Another reader ironically thanked the National Post for reprinting the piece, observing: “It’s important for the public to see the kind of racist, SJW [social justice warrior] identity politics indoctrination occurring at Canadian universities that is feeding the attitudes and actions we see in and from the federal Liberal cabinet/govt. Before it’s too late. Sunshine is a great disinfectant.”

Conclusions

Overall, the comments, grouped by theme, allow us to ascertain certain things about anti-Indigenous racist discourse in mainstream social media spaces:

• • Both whiteness and settler privilege have gone unproblematized for most of Canadian history. Settlers do not think of themselves as treaty partners, as uninvited occupants of someone else’s lands, as the beneficiaries of an exploitative relationship with Indigenous peoples, or even as being white rather than something else. Challenges to the idea of being just Canadian provoke fragility and a heightened sense of frustration, anxiety, defensiveness, and anger.
• • Anger is directed in part toward the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, which is alleged to be too soft on Indigenous peoples, and in part toward people who appear to be pandering to identity politics and political correctness. Left-oriented academics are also denounced for promoting Indigenous interests in order to claim the moral high ground and heighten their own public profile. The Trudeau government incurred the ire of many commentators for seeming to sell out to Indigenous interests.
• • Indigenous peoples continue to be marked by recurring racist and false stereotypes that portray them as alcoholics, as prone to criminal behaviour, as habitual liars, and as lazy freeloaders, living on government benefits while complaining about unfair treatment. These stereotypes are nothing new, but digital platforms and social media have allowed voices that reinforce them to be amplified and spread to mass audiences.

In the aftermath of the Stanley trial, certain revisions were made to the laws surrounding jury selection. In late March 2018, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau introduced Bill C-75, “An Act to Amend the Criminal Code, the Youth Criminal Justice Act and Other Acts and to Make Consequential Amendments to Other Acts,” with the aim of eliminating not only white settler bias but bias in all forms. As the government explained in a backgrounder, among other things the bill would abolish “peremptory challenges of jurors” and modify “the process of challenging a juror for cause and of judicial stand-by” (Canada, Department of Justice 2019, 15). The bill received royal assent in June 2019 and is now law (SC 2019, c. 25). Hopefully, these changes will put a stop to the racial bias evident in all-white juries of the sort that chose to acquit Stanley even of manslaughter. Boushie’s family and community are calling for more, however, including a return to traditional Indigenous justice practices (Di Donato 2021).

The comments posted in response to my criticism of Stanley’s acquittal demonstrate that, for many settlers, not only do Indigenous lives matter less than those of white people but even the right of whites to defend their personal property counts for more than the life of an Indigenous person. Far from suggesting any awareness of the egregious racism underlying such white supremacist attitudes, the comments were characterized by a pervasive sense of unfairness—the conviction that Indigenous peoples were the ungrateful recipients of unwarranted favouritism on the part of the state, the left-of-centre media, and much of the academic world.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the many people who helped me out with this chapter. First, Mark Mitchell performed an amazing job in downloading, triaging, and providing initial impressions and analysis of the 400-odd pages of comments generated by my article. I would also like to thank Sheryl Lightfoot, Gina Starblanket, Tasha Hubbard, Eleanore Sunchild, the late Elder Noel Starblanket, Rachael Janze, Brenda Dubois, Brian Budd, and Brenda Andersen. I trialled aspects of this chapter in presentations at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand, and at the University of Regina.

Notes

1. 1 Syndicated copies appeared on 12 or 13 February 2018, a day or two after my article was published in The Conversation. Most retained the original title (“‘Clearing the Plains’ Continues with the Acquittal of Gerald Stanley”), although The Tyee substituted “Colten Boushie and Settlers’ Justice: Verdict in Killing Shows Deeply Embedded Racism in Legal System and Society” (https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2018/02/13/Colten-Boushie-Settlers-Justice/), while NOW Toronto titled the article “Colten Boushie Murder Trial: This Is What Colonization Looks Like” (https://nowtoronto.com/news/colten-boushie-murder-trial-this-is-what-colonization-looks-like/). Some of these syndicated copies, including those published by the Edmonton Journal and the Windsor Star, are no longer available online. Others remain accessible, although the comments have usually been taken down. This is true of the two cited above, as well as those published by the National Post (https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/clearing-the-plains-continues-with-the-acquittal-of-gerald-stanley), iPolitics (https://www.ipolitics.ca/news/clearing-plains-continues-acquittal-gerald-stanley), and Global News (https://globalnews.ca/news/4019889/commentary-clearing-the-plains-continues-with-the-acquittal-of-gerald-stanley/). By way of an exception, the comments in The Tyee are still accessible—and their number has increased to over 1,300 since this analysis was conducted.

2. 2 A report released in 2021 by the Equal Justice Initiative, Race and the Jury: Illegal Discrimination in Jury Selection (https://eji.org/wp-content/uploads/2005/11/race-and-the-jury-digital.pdf), offers a good summary of the issue in the context of the United States. On the situation in Canada, see Nathan Afilalo, Jury Representation in Canada: Systemic Barriers and Biases in the “Conscience of the Community” (2018), a report of the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice (https://ciaj-icaj.ca/wp-content/uploads/page/2019/02/r83_preliminary-report_jury-representation-in-canada.pdf).

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