Settler silencing and the killing of Colten Boushie: naturalizing colonialism in the trial of Gerald Stanley

Abstract

ABSTRACT A particularly egregious example of settler injustice was the murder of a young nehiyaw man named Colten Boushie in August, 2016, shot in the head by a white farmer named Gerald Stanley. An all-white jury in Saskatchewan acquitted Stanley in February 2018, touching off demonstrations across the country. This article contextualizes the Stanley trial within settler colonial history, and argues that the trial and its aftermath provide a window into the ways settler colonialism tries to silence Indigenous peoples. Divided into four parts, the article first explores the concept of settler silencing, while the second looks at the context of settler colonialism in with a focus on Treaty 6 lands in Saskatchewan, and how the Treaty has been silenced for over a century. I then move to a detailed engagement with the killing of Colten Boushie and the trial which followed. I draw liberally on the trial transcript, demonstrating various techniques used to silence Indigenous peoples while confining speech and the articulation of what constitutes the norm to a handful of non-Indigenous legal professionals. I focus here on multiple examples of how settler silencing works in practice, before in the final part make several conclusions.