How? Comics - Starlight Tours

Title: The Starlight Tours 1 and The Starlight Tours 2

The Starlight Tours were hate crimes perpetrated by the Saskatoon police force against First Nations people. These repeated crimes have been documented as far back as the 1970s in the city of Saskatoon.

As I understand it, the practice was to drive an Indigenous person out of town on a frigidly cold night and to leave them there, often poorly clothed, to find their way back. This act resulted in the deaths of at least three individuals and has succeeded in deepening the trauma and distrust between Indigenous peoples and law enforcement.

Racism becomes particularly scary when units of violence and power like the police department use that violence and power to practice racism.

Rodney Naistus

Lawrence Wegner

Neil Stonechilde

These were all men that died at the hands of this horrific treatment. Left cold and alone to die.

Sadness, grief, despair, pain, and hopelessness really landed while I worked on these covers.

In my Imagine… covers for the Starlight Tours, I envisioned two different realities.

In one of them, Justice is served in the form of the original “punishment.”

The violence of humanity is persistent and epic in scale. How then do we deal with all our pain? For myself, art has been a vehicle in which to place the pain, grief, and anger. Here it can exist as a totem for the violence.

Ultimately, it is drawn to spark conversation about these topics. What is justice?

The other Imagine… cover for the Starlight Tours explores an option like kindness. If the police officers had been kind to these men, no such deaths would have happened.

By the same token, these atrocities, with much work around the traumas associated, with much support to encourage a different outcome could eventually be met with kindness and forgiveness by those affected.

Sometimes, with kindness, we can move forward despite the awful things that have happened.