Eve Tushnet
service journalism:
…So here’s a guy who deserves his own movie. In the early morning hours of Jan. 28, 2000, Darrell Night, a member of the Cree Nation, was picked up by two Saskatoon police officers (both white) after a drunken argument at his uncle’s apartment got a bit out of hand. Like any clear-thinking intoxicated person, he expected to be taken to the town drunk tank to sleep off his buzz. That didn’t happen. Instead, Night was driven three miles out of town, removed from the vehicle, had his head slammed against the hood, his handcuffs removed, and was told to walk back. He was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a denim jacket, and running shoes. In January. At night. In Canada.
Unsurprisingly, he assumed he was going to die. It wasn’t just a working knowledge of how the human body handles exposure to cold weather that led him to this conclusion, either. That police in Saskatoon would routinely take First Nation people picked up for being drunk and disorderly to the outskirts of town, often during the winter, and tell them to sober up on the walk home was common knowledge in the area. The act of doing that actually has a name. It’s called a “Midnight Blue Tour” or “Starlight Tour”, and that it was commonplace in Saskatoon was more like a legend at the time, but one based on the fact that, over the years, several First Nation people in Saskatoon turned up dead of hypothermia on the edge of town, for reasons that no one could ever really explain.
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