Two young suspects arrested for four homicides on a Saskatchewan Indian Reserve

Saskatchewan RCMP arrested two suspects on February 18 concerning four homicides on the province’s Carry the Kettle Nakoda Indian Reserve.

On the morning of February 4, 2025, File Hills First Nations Police Service received a report of sudden deaths at a residence on the reserve. Officers immediately responded and located four deceased persons in the residence, two men and two women, all shot to death.

Mass murders on Indian Reserves are a tragic, albeit rare

Saskatchewan RCMP Major Crimes took charge of the investigation and are treating the deaths as homicides. Initial investigation suggested the residence may have been targeted, though few details were forthcoming.

The deceased victims were identified as 34-year-old Tracey Hotomani of Carry the Kettle Nakoda Reserve, 44-year-old Sheldon Quewezance of Zagime Anishinabek, 47-year-old Shauna Fay of Indian Head, and 51-year-old Terry Jack of Carry the Kettle Nakoda Reserve.

As a result of continued investigation, Saskatchewan RCMP Major Crimes located and arrested 18-year-old Darrius Racette in Yorkton, SK on February 18, 2025. A youth has also been arrested. His identity cannot be revealed as per the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

It is reasonable to assume that the four victims and two alleged assailants are indigenous people.

Racette appeared in Yorkton Provincial Court on February 20, 2025, and was remanded in custody until March 4 in Regina. The unnamed 15-year-old boy was in Regina Provincial Court on the same day, where he was remanded in custody until March 5.

Racette is facing four counts of first-degree murder, Section 235(1), Criminal Code regarding the deaths of the four deceased persons.

No other information about the murders or their motive has been made available.

Mass murders on Indian Reserves are a tragic, albeit rare, occurrence in what are often troubled and violence-ridden communities.

Though the RCMP did not provide a motive for the homicides

Many people can still remember the September 4, 2022, horrific announcement that police had found 10 dead and 18 wounded people on Saskatchewan’s James Smith Cree Indian Reserve, all victims of an indigenous man named Miles Sanderson. His rampage stands as one of Canada’s worst mass killings, certainly the worst ever to have taken place on a native reserve. In her last public statement before her death, Queen Elizabeth II said, “I mourn with all Canadians at this tragic time.”

Fewer people may recall that Ryan Howard Manoakeesick was accused of killing his common-law wife, their three young children and a female relative in a crime spree on Sunday, February 11, 2024. He was charged the next day with five counts of first-degree murder, according to Manitoba RCMP.

This was one of the biggest homicide cases in Manitoba in more than a decade.

The victims and suspects were all Indigenous, as confirmed by the RCMP and the Garden Hill Indian Reserve.

Though the RCMP did not provide a motive for the homicides at a February 12, 2024, news conference, Manoakeesick, who had been in foster care since the age of eight, had a history of addiction and mental health issues.

Cathy Merrick, the top indigenous leader in Manitoba given her position as grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, told a news conference, “It’s not our way as a people, it’s not our way in our culture and our language. Violence is something that we have learned as a people,” regarding the Ryan Howard Manoakeesick killings.

Where this was learned from will soon be bandied about by the usual activist suspects who will employ settler colonialism, cultural genocide, racism, the residential schools, and the foster care system as the main villains for the Carry the Kettle Nakoda Indian Reserve massacre.

Unwillingness to ascribe personal responsibility

If these young males have never been incarcerated in juvenile correction institutions, the criminal justice system may be exempt from explicit blame.

Still, every mass murder is both uniquely horrifying and equally puzzling. Despite many grim differences, they all prompt the same difficult questions. How did it happen? Why here? Could it have been prevented? Will such a thing happen again? The horror at Carry the Kettle Nakoda Indian Reserve will be no different.

In regard to the Sanderson murder spree, outspoken indigenous activist and Globe and Mail columnist Tanya Talaga argued it was “the social fallout of residential schools and racist policies such as the Indian Act” that explained the tragedy.

This unwillingness to ascribe personal responsibility was echoed by Chief Wilton Littlechild, a former Conservative MP and commissioner with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In an interview with the CBC, Littlechild said, “If you look at what’s behind each individual’s life choices … I’m sure you can trace it back to residential school history. If their parents didn’t go … there’s still that intergenerational trauma after for those that didn’t go.”

Winnipeg Free Press columnist and University of Manitoba professor Niigaan Sinclair went even further, arguing that native trauma (a word he used ten times in his short op-ed) caused by the rest of the country was the source of the murders. “All [Indigenous people] are residential school survivors in one shape or another, whether it be experiencing that nightmarish system first hand or intergenerationally…Too many times, this turns to violence,” Sinclair wrote.

Any notion of individual responsibility on Sanderson’s part was waved away in favour of systemic arguments casting blame on the rest of society

All three elite indigenous voices sought to indict Canada’s allegedly racist and genocidal past – and especially the Indian Residential School system--as the true guilty party in the James Smith Cree Nation killings. Any notion of individual responsibility on Sanderson’s part was waved away in favour of systemic arguments casting blame on the rest of society.

This is not a new line of thinking. The notion that indigenous Canadians should be treated differently – in general, more leniently – than offenders of other races for historical reasons has become firmly embedded in Canada’s justice system under the Gladue principle of criminal jurisprudence. In effect, they are considered victims as much as lawbreakers. And the overrepresentation of indigenous people in Canada’s prisons is seen as conclusive evidence that much more must be done in this regard.

Given their age, Gladue sentencing is sure to be employed if the two youths are found guilty of the Carry the Kettle Nakoda Indian Reserve killings.

Still, the reductionistic explanations of mass murders on reserves employed by these three activists are simplistic in the extreme, even though they are habitually offered for every indigenous adversity or pathology.

Factual evidence tells a different story. The Indian Residential Schools were established to overcome the adversities on the reserves generated by the colonial experience. That included poverty, the loss of traditional livelihood practices, high disease rates, orphanhood and child neglect, abandonment, and abuse. These tragic features continue to this day. But both the Indian Act and the boarding schools are embedded in the overarching issue of British colonialism, which brought a swift end to lethal combat between bands and tribes in which slaughters like this one had been commonplace for millennia.

The pseudo-psychology of Sinclair and the others has no historical support. It also denies basic human agency among indigenous people — the right to determine their fate on their own terms — a racist assertion if there ever was one. If it were true, such mass murders would be common occurrences on and off Canada’s reserves.

In short, aboriginals are rarely the perpetrators or victims of homicide

They are certainly not. In 2016, for example, police reported 142 aboriginal victims of homicide, or .009% of the indigenous population, representing 8.5 per 100,000 people, albeit several times higher than the overall Canadian proportion, but still among the lowest murder rates in the world.

Moreover, from a global perspective, there is no connection between national homicide rates — including mass murders — and a history of colonialism.

In short, aboriginals are rarely the perpetrators or victims of homicide: the three mass murders described here, like similar ones around the world, are anomalies begging for an explanation they may never get.

As for the role of Indian Residential Schools, there is not a single authenticated case of murder at any school during their 113-year government-supported history. Nor is the incomplete literature dealing with the traumatic effects of boarding school attendance methodologically sound enough to either show or explain any connection to violent behaviour among former students or their descendants, as was carefully shown in a review by distinguished University of Calgary scholar Tom Flanagan.

Dr. Flanagan’s findings highlight the lack of data on the exact causes of homicide in Canada, except for specific cases or causes. Police reported in 1996 that 38 percent of homicide victims consumed alcohol or drugs or both at the time of the offence. The pattern has remained consistent since 1991, when this information was first collected.

Contrary to the prevailing activist narrative, why people impulsively commit murder is poorly understood by scientists. Still, it is likely related to a neurological inability to control feelings of anger as they interact with those around them, especially under the influence of alcohol or drugs. For mass murderers, the trigger sometimes arises from personal disappointment and failure that results in a combination of profound hopelessness and deep-seated resentment.

Only time will tell whether this or other explanations help explain the four tragic murders on the Carry the Kettle Nakoda Indian Reserve.