Periodically on Thursdays, we present a significant excerpt, usually from a recently published book or journal article. In every case the proper permissions have been obtained. If you are a publisher who would like to participate in this feature, please let us know via the site’s contact form.
INDIGENOUS JUSTICE: True Cases by Judges, Lawyers & Law Enforcement Officers
Publisher: Durvile & UpRoute Books, 2023
Editors: Lorene Shyba and Raymond Yakeleya
Foreword: Chief Justice Shannon Smallwood, NWT
Release Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-990735-26-4 (pbk) | 978-1-990735-28-8 (audio) | 978-1-990735-27-1 (epub)
Page Count: 288 Pages
Regular Price: 35.00 $
Excerpt: “Justice in Hazelton: One Family, Two Murder Trials, a Hundred Years Apart” By Joseph Saulnier. Pg. 147. [Footnotes omitted]
A hundred years ago, an Indigenous trapper went on trial for the murder of two men near Hazelton, British Columbia. He had been at a tavern when a burly packer named Alex MacIntosh insulted him. The two drunk men fought, and the trapper lost. He left the tavern, threatening to return and “fix” MacIntosh. The next morning, MacIntosh and another man, Max LeClair, were found dead, shot off their horses from behind. When the police went to arrest the trapper, they found he had already fled.
What followed was the longest manhunt in British Columbia’s history.
Thirteen years later, the trapper finally surrendered to police. He was a Gitxsan man from the isolated Kispiox/Hazelton area of northern BC. But he was put on trial at the New Westminster courthouse, near busy Vancouver, over 1,200 kilometres to the south. The manhunt was well known and the trial was front-page news. Witnesses testified about the trapper threatening MacIntosh. Others said that the trapper had confessed.
The all-white jury deliberated for only 15 minutes.
Then they acquitted him.
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