Cindy Ghostkeeper-Whitehead got the call in the early hours of 4 September. It was her best friend, and she needed help.
“She said: ‘My son got stabbed,’” said Ghostkeeper-Whitehead. “And I just jumped up.”
As she drove through the low morning light of James Smith Cree Nation, a First Nations community of about 2,000 people on the lush grasslands of the Saskatchewan prairies, she got a call from another friend, just as panicked and afraid.
Ghostkeeper-Whitehead, a volunteer crisis responder, changed course to pick up the second caller and together they drove to the clinic, a low beige building at the heart of the reserve. She saw neighbours scattered across the parking lot outside, many nursing stab wounds. Rotors spun on a red helicopter preparing to take injured people to intensive care units in Saskatoon.
She and her husband spent the day going door to door, offering help as the death toll became clear.
“We just kept hearing that these people were gone, and these people were gone, and these people were gone,” Ghostkeeper-Whitehead said. She never made it to her best friend’s house. Later, in the chaos of the day, they bumped into each other. “We just gave each other a hug.”
One year ago, James Smith Cree Nation became the centre of one of the worst killing sprees in Canadian history when Myles Sanderson murdered 10 people in his home community, starting with his brother, and stabbed more than a dozen others. He then fled to the nearby village of Weldon, where he killed a 79-year-old man on his porch.
After a province-wide manhunt, Sanderson was arrested when police rammed his pickup truck during a high-speed chase down the province’s busiest highway. Shortly after he went into medical distress, reportedly owing to a drug overdose, and was pronounced dead in the same hospital where some of his victims were recovering.
Sanderson was a man with a long history of violence and substance abuse, according to his parole documents, yet his actions nevertheless are baffling. People here may never exactly know why he did what he did.
Now this Saskatchewan First Nation approaches the anniversary with apprehension, hope, and determination that their darkest day will not define them.
“We’re resilient in our own little way. That means we’re going to overcome this tragedy that happened on 4 September,” said James Smith Cree Nation band councillor Barry Sanderson, who is no direct relation to the killer.
On the fateful day, Barry Sanderson arrived at his sister’s house for their daily coffee to find her on the couch clutching wounds to her stomach.
His brother-in-law, Earl Burns, had also been attacked in his home, and died while pursuing Myles Sanderson in the yellow school bus he drove. A memorial marks the site where Burns was found dead at the wheel, featuring yellow flowers in the shape of a bus and a cross topped with one of Burns’s trucker caps.
Barry Sanderson still drives down that road every day to visit his sister as she recovers. He said he addressed grief, in part, by connecting with Cree culture. Recently the nation hosted a week of dances, feasts and celebrations, and Sanderson helped lead a horse dance, where riders gallop clockwise around a tipi to dancing, drums and whistles. Sanderson said such healing ceremonies helped bring a grieving community together.
“We need to have something for the people to look forward to, to have that security again as a community,” he said. “We have to heal ourselves before we can heal one another.”
Many people here are still on edge. A security team now patrols the reserve 24 hours a day, watching for trouble from pickup trucks. There is an 11pm curfew for young people, and residents are advised to lock their doors.
Barry Sanderson said the nation had asked the provincial and federal governments to fund that security team long before the events of 4 September. “We’ve been crying wolf for many years,” he said. “Then bang, the wolf came into our henhouse.”
James Smith Cree Nation is a tight-knit, proud community. Most residents share a handful of last names. But Eddie Head, the nation’s director of justice, said the reserve was menaced by a small number of drug dealers.
Head, who was Myles Sanderson’s uncle, said the justice system had failed his community. Indigenous people are grossly overrepresented in Saskatchewan’s prison system: they account for less than 20% of the general population but more than 75% of the adult provincial prison population.
Head said people released on parole – as Myles Sanderson was – return from prison even more entrenched in gang life and substance use. “The person that went in there for criminal activity is more criminalised when they come out,” he said.
The new security team has helped some people feel more at ease, but its powers are limited. The members cannot arrest people, do not carry firearms and cannot refer people in distress to mental health services.
What they can do is lock down the reserve, Head said, while they wait for police to arrive – something they have done multiple times in the past year. Just weeks ago, they blocked access to the reserve after Myles Sanderson’s half-brother assaulted a member of the security team and threatened to harm others in the community. He was arrested, but people felt shaken.
Ivor Wayne Burns, an elder, says colonisation is at the root of the nation’s struggles. For generations, Indigenous children in Canada were forcibly separated from their parents and sent to residential schools run by churches that explicitly aimed to strip them of their culture. Many children were abused in those schools, the last of which did not close until the mid-1990s.
Burns’s sister Gloria, a crisis worker, was killed by Myles Sanderson as she tried to help his victims. After the murders, Burns and his brother Darryl called on people to embrace traditional Cree teachings and to crack down on the drug trade. One day he received a warning that drug dealers were coming for his family.
He now has a pump shotgun by his front door. “If they’re going to come, I’m ready,” he said, fighting back tears. “They took my sister. They’re not going to take another one of my family.”
He said connecting with Cree culture, language and customs was key to the nation’s future. “We won’t give up,” he added. “We’ll keep going. I have grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I’ve got to pave the road for them to live in a good world.”
Head said the nation wanted to transform policing and public safety, in part by creating its own police force – something relatively rare in Canada, where First Nations-led police forces have historically had piecemeal funding agreements that have made recruitment and staffing difficult.
The federal government has promised legislation that would designate First Nations police forces an essential service, something Head believed would also guarantee better, more consistent funding. The previous federal minister of public safety aimed to pass that bill last year, but it has yet to be introduced in Canadian parliament.
The provincial government of Saskatchewan has also passed a bill allowing First Nations to enforce their own bylaws and laws through fines, a significant step towards fuller autonomy over public safety.
Head envisions a new justice system that would prioritize rehabilitation over punishment. The federal government has promised tens of millions for a new wellness centre at James Smith, which Head said would allow people to access mental health services close to home.
“We have to break that cycle” of violence and trauma in the community, Head said.
Darryl Burns said he was watching government promises closely. “Our history says that a lot of the time, what the government says and what the government does are two different things,” he said. But he is cautiously optimistic. “We’re gaining. But I’m an impatient man. I want things to happen fast. I want people to heal. I want youth to have a good vision for their future.”
Ghostkeeper-Whitehead said people in her community rise to the occasion in times of need. After the attacks, residents opened their doors to mourners, cooked mountains of food for feasts and hunted for wood to burn the sacred fires the Cree light when a loved one dies. She remains convinced, she said, that there were “more good people than hurt people”.
The nation has planned a powwow for the three days leading up to the anniversary – a celebration of song, dancing, drumming and prayer for a better future.
“If we can uplift everyone, maybe we can defeat our fears,” said Barry Sanderson. “Maybe we can go back to unlocking our doors.”
