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Just Another Indian: A Serial Killer and Canada's Indifference

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Warren Goulding reports, and partially analyzes, the serial killer Michael Crawford, and his numerous Native, female victims. He contends that Canadians' ignorance of and indifference to this tragedy is a sign of racism.

This book will make one think deeply about voices from the bottom. This book states that young, Native women from broken homes and who sometimes prostituted themselves are basically ignored by their nation when they are savagely murdered by a white man. The killer had killed before, yet he was given a light sentence. The lack of media coverage meant that residents of that Canadian state and First Nations people couldn't protect themselves and be on the lookout. The killer sought Native prostitutes because white prostitutes may have been undercover policewomen and the police rarely hired Native women. The slowness with which the Mounties sought this man may have led to more deaths and abuse of Native women.

This book sheds a bleek light on Canada. In Michael Moore's documentary, he portrays Canada as peaceful and racially harmonious. Books by Canadian authors such as David Murray or Daniel Coleman have suggested that racism exists up North. However, this book suggests that horrendous crimes do too and that racism is systematic just as in the United States. I am a bit worried that my fellow Americans will read this text and say, "Now see! That's why having capital punishment is good for the United States!"

The author does a great job in tying race, class, and geography together in this book. However, he woefully left misogyny out of the picture. In his last chapter, he noted that Canadian, white, middle-class, female murder victims got the attention of the press, but these low-income, Native women did not. Of course, it's racism. However, the white victims were deemed "virtuous women" following acceptable female scripts, whereas Crawford's victims did not. Plus, Crawford's male sex and his victim's status as women is a sign of woman-hating at its worse. Goulding suggests things may have been different if Canada had more Native journalists. Still, this book proves that Canada needs more Native police and he says little about that scarcity.

Goulding's chapters started off non-linearly. He describes the controversy and then goes into flashback. After awhile, the chapter titles give the chapters away. Each chapter has a quote from someone later cited and it's very unnecessary, but perhaps a sign that the author is a journalist and many articles do that. The book has a boring cover. It's funny that "just" is in red, rather than "Indian" as colonists referred to themselves as "white" and Natives as "red." A more striking cover would surely have attracted more readers. The court narrative is highly boring. Reading page after page of "the lawyer asked X and the person on the stand said Y." was mind-numbing.

I am not very familiar with the true crime format, but I am sure this book is as good as any other example in the genre. This was an enlightening, though often simplistic, work.

This is an excellent book about how Canada does not care that aboriginal women are being killed or kidnapped. This is why Amnesty International cited Canada for their failure to even look for over 400 Native women who go missing. These murders are horrific but so few people have heard of them. This book brings them to light.