Gerald Stanley's Storying Violence, Questions And Answers

1. During the trial, Gerald Stanley’s lawyer claimed that the trial was not “a referendum on race”. In what ways does Storying Violence provide a response to this assertion?

Storying Violence: Storying Violence: Unravelling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial provides an opposing response to the claim of Stanley’s lawyer, Scott Spencer, that the trial was not a “referendum on race”. Firstly, they discuss how white settlers in the Prairies often possessed a sentiment of superiority and entitlement over Indigenous people based on their race. In the first chapter, Starblanket and Hunt demonstrate that Canadian officials advertised the Prairies as “a castle” where white men could cultivate their land. This endowment of power to white settlers

The major question that the court attempted to determine was whether Stanley’s “conduct with the gun was a marked departure from the level of care that ‘a reasonable person’ would have exercised in ‘the same circumstances.’” One major discrepancy in answering this question is determining how credible it was for the Indigenous youth to enter Stanley’s farm. On the one hand, the court framed “reason” through the settler colonial lens in respecting property endowed to Stanley by the Canadian government. Therefore, they saw Stanley as reasonable because it was the Indigenous people who drove onto his land. Contrary to these beliefs, Indigenous people understand “reason” as respecting land rights established in Treaty 6, which designated Stanley’s farm as being in Red Pheasant territory. Indeed, Starblanket and Hunt argue that if the court saw the guidelines of Treaty 6 as being “a stronger frame of reference”, the court would not “tolerate the violence” that Stanley perpetrated. Consequently, the Stanley trial’s aim in determining if Stanley had “reasonable conduct” revealed major asymmetries in what land rights the government should

At the start of the book, Starblanket and Hunt provide vast amounts of historical context to ensure that audiences understand how white settlers in the Prairies, such as Gerald Stanley, felt they had large amounts of power. For example, they take note of the immigration campaigns advocated by Canadian government officials which instilled ideas of masculine pride and superiority in white settlers. Similarly, the two authors also provide extensive explanations of contested land in the Prairie regions of Canada, such as the dissolution of treaties and the growth of property laws, which created the racist environment that ultimately led to Stanley feeling he could shoot at Indigenous people on his farm. Overall, Starblanket and Hunt’s book, Storying Violence, did not just summarize a singular case of an unjust crime against an innocent Indigenous young man. The two authors used the killing of Colton Boushie as background to explain how certain settler-colonial narratives and stereotypes present in the Prairie region of Canada created perpetual forms of racism. More importantly, the authors allude to the fact that these tendencies will continually affect Indigenous peoples unless there are profound