PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "On the third evening, the gathering screened an Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network documentary about Dolff’s murder and the sisters’ struggle. The documentary, “A Life Sentence,” by John Murray and Holly Moore, reminds viewers of the racial tensions that were simmering in rural Saskatchewan in the early 1990s when the sisters were arrested. Three white community members had been killed by Indigenous people in the months before Dolff’s murder. The two sisters watched, Odelia in Mama-Rose’s arms and Nerissa close to Rhonda. On the screen, advocates said they believed the RCMP wanted to charge an adult for the crime to appease the white community. The film described how the sisters were pursued, unlawfully held and questioned for the crime instead of the young cousin. “He wanted to sleep with my sister,” Odelia’s voice rang out from the screen in the dark. “I did everything. I stabbed him, and I beat him up,” their cousin said. Words that should have saved them. “He was a fierce man.” “They were held for some three or four days at the police station without a lawyer present,” said the sisters’ defence lawyer, James Lockyer. “You read that sort of thing in a Grisham novel.” Lockyer is a founding director of Innocence Canada, which advocates for the wrongly convicted. He has been involved in several high-profile cases, including those of Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard and Steven Truscott. “There is no doubt in my mind that the fact that they are Indigenous is counted against them,” he said. The screen piled injustice upon injustice. “Nobody vouched for these girls,” said Jolene Johnson, a private investigator who volunteered her time on the sisters’ case. “There was reasonable doubt all over the place.”
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STORY: "30 years in jail for a murder they say they didn’t commit. These sisters’ first trip together was harder than either could have imagined," by Reporter Katharine Lake Berz, special to the Toronto Star, published on August 19, 2023. (Katharine Lake Berz is a frequent contributor to the Toronto Star. Her work focuses on national and international issues and their impact on individuals.)
SUB-HEADING: "Quewezance sisters and Indigenous elders invited the Star on parts of a journey laden with emotion and also risk."
PREFACE: "The Quewezance family and Indigenous elders invited the Star to accompany them on parts of their healing journey and shared their feelings through multiple interviews, phone calls and texts. They held out hope for 30 years that Canadians would hear their story and say they hope now that disclosing their anguish and resolve will prompt the release of unjustly imprisoned Indigenous women. Warning: The following story contains details that will disturb some readers.
GIST: "COWICHAN VALLEY, B.C.—She had waited a lifetime to dip her feet in the ocean.
Now Odelia Quewezance would not wait one minute longer.
She changed into borrowed clothes, squeezed her daughter, Kursten, and rushed toward the beach.
With one hand on Kursten and the other reaching for the water, the 51-year-old splashed into the chilly Salish Sea. A crab scurried sideways on the shore, and Odelia shrieked with fear and delight.
“I can’t believe we made it,” she shouted.
While Odelia splashed in the water, her sister, Nerissa, 48, was sitting quietly in the shade with a cigarette, listening to the piping whistles of eagles overhead. She didn’t want to tell anyone how special this time was for her. She feared if she did, someone might take it away.
“I am working to control my anxiety,” she said stoically from behind her dark glasses, holding her chihuahua, Choco, in her arms. “I am just trying to hold myself together.”
Odelia and Nerissa have both spent more than half their lives in prison. In March, the sisters were released on bail after serving 30 years for a 1993 murder. It’s a crime that someone else has admitted to committing, while the sisters have maintained their innocence.
It’s impossible to know what will happen next, as justice officials review a case that the sisters’ supporters have for years characterized as a miscarriage of justice.
But for now, with questions about their future still swirling, the sisters were two days into an intense search for healing in Canada’s most western wilderness — and their first family vacation.
Indigenous elder Rose Henry, 65, had invited the sisters to an eight-day Q’ushintul Peacemakers Gathering and Ancestors Walk in Vancouver Island’s Cowichan Valley.
Rose — whom the sisters call Mama — hoped the retreat’s four days of stories, songs and rituals, followed by a four-day, 100-kilometre sacred pilgrimage, would ease the sisters’ trauma.
The sisters had embraced the invitation. Odelia said she longed to deepen her relationship with Nerissa and her three daughters, whom she had not seen for most of their lives.
Odelia and her longtime partner, Jay Koch, conceived Hayley, 24, and 16-year-old twins Kursten and Katelyn while she was in custody, and the girls had grown up with Jay in Rhein, Sask., hours or days away from Odelia’s varying prisons.
She hoped this trip would help her get to know them and become the mother they desperately need.
“It’s so unfair,” Odelia said, her eyes misty in the ocean breeze. “My girls have suffered so much.”
Mama-Rose herself was familiar with institutionalized suffering.
She was a child of Tla’amin Nation residential school survivors and was once labelled “mentally retarded” by doctors and isolated for years in a hospital ward.
But as the trip unfolded, not even she could have known how deeply the women’s pain would haunt them, how vulnerable they would feel outside the walls of their cells, and how one of them would almost lose her way in the struggle to recover.
The Quewezance sisters were 18 and 21 when they were sentenced in 1994 for the killing of Joseph Dolff near their home in Keeseekoose First Nation, a Saulteau Nation in rural Saskatchewan, even though a younger cousin said that he — not the sisters — had killed the 70-year-old after he gave them booze and pestered them for sex.
Dolff, a former maintenance worker at the Keeseekoose high school, was known to “take kids to his place on weekends, get them drunk and molest them,” Laverne Kakaway, who attended the school with the sisters, told the Star during a March visit to unmarked graves at the First Nation’s former residential school sites.
The cousin, who was 14 at the time, confessed at his trial that he killed Dolff after the older man took him into a bedroom.
He admitted stabbing Dolff 17 times, strangling him with a phone cord and throwing a television set onto his head. Convicted of second-degree murder, the cousin, a minor, was sentenced to two years in prison. The sisters were also convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced for life.
Today, Odelia and Nerissa await the results of a Department of Justice review of their convictions that began in June 2022.
The sisters’ supporters have included the late David Milgaard, who spent 23 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, and Sen. Kim Pate, who wrote a report last year on unjustly incarcerated Indigenous women.
After a long campaign to free the sisters pending the review results, Odelia and Nerissa were released on bail on March 27.
For both, the release was a moment of pure joy.
But it left them at the threshold of a vastly different challenge: adapting to a world that had transformed during their absence.
They needed to learn about bus routes and bank cards, social media and supportive housing.
Between residential school and prison, the sisters had hardly any experience living independently.
They both said they were terrified at the prospect of re-entering a society with their criminal records as indelible stains on their identities.
“Our lives have been a living hell,” Odelia said, glancing down at rows of scars on her forearm, where had she hurt herself while in prison.
“I wanted to die sometimes.”
Nerissa’s arm has an almost identical line of scars: a dark coincidence of parallel horrors.
Odelia and Nerissa were once very close, surviving separation at residential schools, physical and sexual abuse and street life together.
But their relationship ruptured over three decades of segregation in prison. They were forbidden from speaking to each other even when they were housed in the same facility.
“Prison was like residential school,” Odelia said. “You are separated from your siblings and left to survive the abusers alone.”
Reunited after 30 years of separation in custody, these once-close daughters of an absent mother and a loving but alcoholic father now seem separated by a chasm of grief.
Nerissa is sturdy and strong, with thick cropped hair and steely eyes. She seldom speaks, weighing each word, holding her pain — and her anger — close. Odelia is tall and thin, with long black hair and eyes that often fill with tears. She speaks loudly and with emotion.
Nerissa had spent virtually all of her adult life alone or with other inmates. Odelia had survived a harrowing ordeal, too, but she had the long-term comfort of a loving partner who fought for her freedom and daughters who needed her.
Odelia had been a protective older sister when the two were growing up. She recalls taking beatings to protect Nerissa, and finding food for her when she was hungry. Nerissa’s jaunty confidence and affection had supported her in return.
“I took care of Nerissa when we were children,” Odelia said, “and now I don’t even know her.”
Their journey west to the retreat was tough from the start. Under the conditions of their release, the sisters needed special permission to leave home.
They were authorized to travel with Congress of Aboriginal Peoples Vice-Chief Kim Beaudin, 65, and his wife, Rhonda, 62, a retired social worker, as guardians.
The Beaudins, parents of 17 children and grandchildren, who once ran a group home, heard about the sisters’ case last year and opened their home to Nerissa after she was released.
“There was a lot of anxiety and a lot of getting to know each other,” Kim said of the early hours of the 2,000-kilometre trip to Cowichan Valley.
The Beaudins, Nerissa, Odelia and Odelia’s 16-year-old twins, Katelyn and Kursten, piled into a borrowed Dodge Caravan, Choco nestling on Nerissa’s knees. Jay, who cares for his disabled brother, and 24-year-old daughter Haley, who juggles two jobs, were unable to join the trip.
Kim and Rhonda didn’t know exactly where they were heading, never having visited Vancouver Island. And amid squabbling in the van, there were times it didn’t look like they would make it.
Somewhere in the unforgiving Great Plains, Katelyn decided to go home.
The teen was stressed by the packed van and homesick for her father. She had never been apart from him. Jay drove 24 hours straight to collect her in Calgary.
Odelia was devastated, crying as the plains whipping past the van’s windows turned into foothills and then mountains. She prayed, she said, that the rest of her family would make it to the coast.
“Only the Creator knows if this sadness is part of my journey,” she texted.
A day later, difficult conversations exploded in the parking lot of a Super 8 on the Trans-Canada near Salmon Arm, B.C. Odelia and Nerissa’s words became so fierce that a passing truck driver called police.
“That was not how it happened!” was all Kim heard Odelia shouting before the police arrived.
But what caused the sisters to lash out in anger only the two of them know. They did not want to speak about the night of the violent death that had forever changed their lives.
The police at Salmon Arm laid no charges and the trip continued, the van still loaded with tension and hope.
When the group finally reached Vancouver Island, the two sisters at last had their chance to meet the sea.
About 60 elders and Indigenous participants had come to the spiritual gathering from across North America. They welcomed the sisters as family, but the two women were raw and frightened.
Neither sister was comfortable outdoors. Both had spent most of their first weeks of freedom alone in their bedrooms, as they had done for 30 years.'
“I don’t even feel safe sitting in the living room with Jay,” Odelia said. “I like to stay on my bed.”
And for all the coastal beauty of trees, mountains and sea, even nature did not seem welcoming. Odelia’s pale face burned crimson after just minutes in the afternoon sun.
“I don’t know anything about skin care or sunscreen,” she said. “I am afraid to go into a drugstore.”
And Nerissa’s skin flared painfully from insect bites. Her sandals rubbed the skin on her delicate feet raw. But she pushed away all offers of help.
“I am fine,” she said, again and again. “Leave me alone.”
The retreat campsite was a hidden sanctuary nestled under ancient red cedars. A murmur of conversation hummed between the cluster of shelters, vegetable gardens and barnyard animals, the soft beating of a drum providing a rhythm.
But the sisters were not used to new people, places or demands on their time. They struggled to adjust.
Odelia seemed willing to seize every opportunity to heal even though she had difficulty sleeping and eating. She joined a sweat lodge ceremony, where the intense heat of fired stones burned her tender eyelids. She made cedar adornments, with new friend Rainbow Eyes, bringing her closer to the West Coast trees of life. And she learned to skilfully play a Coast Salish rattle — meant for moments of reflection on traditional walkabouts.
“She is gifted,” said elder Qwiyahulthw.
Nerissa kept mostly to herself but was the first to clear the tables after meals and to stroke the local dogs who gathered at her feet. She spent hours resting on her bed in the family’s tent, sharing her feelings with friends online. She appeared at ease riding in a powerboat at high speed on an afternoon trip away from the sanctuary, even though she admitted she was terrified.
During healing ceremonies a canvas fluttering with pride and unity flags sheltered a sacred circle from the sun. Many participants wore ceremonial dress — ribbons, feathers and woven cedar hats. Others wore T-shirts with reminders of the present:
“Colonial no more.” “Be kind.” “Every child matters.”
Odelia spoke about her hopes and hurts, clutching an eagle feather that bestowed speakers a duty to be truthful. But Nerissa bristled at the suggestion that she share her spiritual struggle for justice with the group in the first two days of the retreat.
“Why should I share my story? What do I get out of that?” she shouted and stomped back to the family’s tent.
On the third evening, the gathering screened an Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network documentary about Dolff’s murder and the sisters’ struggle.
The documentary, “A Life Sentence,” by John Murray and Holly Moore, reminds viewers of the racial tensions that were simmering in rural Saskatchewan in the early 1990s when the sisters were arrested. Three white community members had been killed by Indigenous people in the months before Dolff’s murder.
The two sisters watched, Odelia in Mama-Rose’s arms and Nerissa close to Rhonda. On the screen, advocates said they believed the RCMP wanted to charge an adult for the crime to appease the white community. The film described how the sisters were pursued, unlawfully held and questioned for the crime instead of the young cousin.
“He wanted to sleep with my sister,” Odelia’s voice rang out from the screen in the dark.
“I did everything. I stabbed him, and I beat him up,” their cousin said. Words that should have saved them. “He was a fierce man.”
“They were held for some three or four days at the police station without a lawyer present,” said the sisters’ defence lawyer, James Lockyer.
“You read that sort of thing in a Grisham novel.”
Lockyer is a founding director of Innocence Canada, which advocates for the wrongly convicted. He has been involved in several high-profile cases, including those of Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard and Steven Truscott.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the fact that they are Indigenous is counted against them,” he said.
The screen piled injustice upon injustice.
“Nobody vouched for these girls,” said Jolene Johnson, a private investigator who volunteered her time on the sisters’ case. “There was reasonable doubt all over the place.”
Nerissa had not seen the documentary before. She was not in it. When it was filmed in 2020, she had been in Vancouver, on the run after escaping from Edmonton’s Institution for Women.
On this night, she watched coolly while many in the audience wept.
But something changed as the documentary re-enacted the night of Dolff’s death.
When the screen darkened, she rose abruptly amid the buzzing murmur of the crowd and marched to the front of the room.
“What you have is precious. You need to cherish it — the good and the bad,” she told the astonished sea of faces before her, tears running down her face.
She spoke about her difficulty trying to heal and get to know her sister after so many years in prison. The sisters embraced as voices from the audience rang out with cries of emotion and prayers of support.
“I am lucky to have a sister,” Nerissa said, her eyes meeting Odelia’s with unwavering confidence.
At the next morning’s closing ceremony, as Odelia and Kursten teased each other about the arduous 100-kilometre trek that lay ahead, Kim and Rhonda spoke in whispers, worrying about the van trip home.
Nerissa was even more quiet than usual. But she sat, back straight, behind the family at the afternoon’s sacred pipe ceremony. There, the participants promised to uphold the vows they had made during the retreat, amid the scents of sacred tobacco and sage.
The forecast for the 100-kilometre pilgrimage looked dry. But clouds descended from over the Pacific, bringing strong winds, cold and shadow. That meant trouble for walkers who would be hiking rough terrain and sleeping outside for the first time.
And the tension between the sisters that had blown up periodically throughout the gathering returned in force.
“I love everything about this experience, except my sister’s behaviour,” Odelia said of Nerissa’s withdrawn and sometime gruff demeanour.
“I feel so ashamed,” she said of their quarrels.
“Why do we have to be like this? Why is our life so hard?”
Later that night, Nerissa exploded. She said she wanted only to be away from her family and her memories. She begged to quit the wilderness camp, which had not upheld its promise to console her.
She lashed out at Kim when he said leaving could violate her court conditions and send her back to prison.
She begged onlookers to call the police to take her back to prison. At least in prison she could stop fighting and avoid the reminders of the life she missed.
She refused to join the walk.
Odelia and Kursten were shaken by the intensity of the emotional storm. They slept little that night but set off at dawn to join the hikers.
Mama-Rose said Odelia lacked the physical strength of her ancestors. Her limbs had not recovered from the paralysis of incarceration, addictions and grief.
But Mama-Rose said she had confidence that Odelia would push on and conquer the unforgiving T’Sou-ke trail with sacred prayers from elders and her daughter Kursten by her side.
Kursten seemed to draw out vitality in her mother. The poised teenager is strong and independent, like Nerissa, while her twin, Katelyn, is gentle and reflective like Odelia.
Odelia and Kursten triumphed over the demands of the trail. They hiked 13 steep kilometres over streams, rocks and fallen trees to the pilgrimage’s campsite.
When they arrived, a black bear stood waiting at the meeting place. Many saw it as an omen: a symbol of their strength.
But as the bear lumbered away, Odelia’s strength seemed to leave her, too. She felt aches throughout her body from her little sleep and hike through the forest. She broke down sobbing and begged to go home.
As Odelia wept, Nerissa lay in a hospital emergency room.
Kim had returned to their cabin just in time to save her from herself.
It wasn’t that Nerissa wanted to die, she said later. It was that she didn’t want to live in limbo any longer.
She didn’t understand why 13 long months had gone by without results since federal Justice Minister David Lametti ordered the investigation into her conviction.
She didn’t understand why she had spent her entire adult life in custody.
She didn’t understand why so many generations of Indigenous people have been made to suffer such agony.
“It’s damn hard,” she said later.
Kim and Rhonda left the gathering with Nerissa in search of help. But Nerissa was dismissed after asking for psychiatric help at a local hospital.
“Promise you won’t try to hurt yourself again,” the nurse demanded before sending her away without medication or counselling.
Later at a hotel, the receptionist told her “We don’t take dogs,” as she glanced at the tiny support dog in the woman’s arms.
Still, the next evening, Nerissa was able to join Odelia (whose legs were too sore to hike that day) and the other drummers welcoming the walkers as they completed their daily climb. Both women wanted to fly straight home, Nerissa stoic and Odelia crying and phoning Jay for help until her phone battery died.
But Mama-Rose asked them not to leave.
“They need to learn that they are strong enough to live through their pain,” she told the others.
“The elders will surround them and keep them safe. But they need to know they are warriors and can help themselves.”
By the next morning the voyagers basked peacefully in the support of their fellow walkers, who had sung and prayed with them into the night.
“I am feeling much stronger … like the woman I want to be,” said Odelia.
“Now, I don’t want to leave,” said Nerissa, sturdier in the group’s embrace.
Kursten cradled a painted drum given to her by an elder.
But Kim and Rhonda were growing more and more worried that the family’s sanctuary might be fleeting.
After the intensity of the previous day, they decided it would be best for Nerissa to go home right away. They woke the family the next morning at dawn to catch the first ferry from Duke Point to Vancouver.
In Vancouver, new bonds and triumphs were tested again.
City friends beckoned Nerissa back to streets where she had lived during her brief period of freedom years earlier. She pleaded and the family agreed to stop for a short visit in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
There Nerissa disappeared.
And she did not answer her phone.
Panic set in. Odelia and the elders wondered if Nerissa did not want to be found.
Kursten prayed for her aunt’s return, offering tobacco to the ocean. Odelia just held onto Kursten.
“I held my daughter close, worried that she would be disappeared, too,” Odelia said, wise to the dangers for Indigenous women on those streets.
At last a message reached Nerissa. It was the right one. The message said many things in a few simple words: Your family needs you.
She was important, Mama-Rose told her over the phone. She was loved. Rhonda, Kim and Mama-Rose might not understand her grief, but they had become family.
Together with Odelia and Jay, they would stand by her. They would fight. They would not give up hope that she would one day live free and unfettered from her past.
Back at their homes in Saskatchewan, the sisters ran through the events of the trip in their heads, remembering everything, the good and the bad.
In Saskatoon, Nerissa walked away from the Beaudins’ home in the cool evening air. She worried about her empty wallet and how to make ends meet. Would she ever have the strength to look for a job? What work could she do? Who would hire her?
Four hours away in Rhein, Odelia’s heart raced as she unpacked her bags. The joy of reuniting with Jay and Katelyn had ebbed into stress about what would come next.
She wanted to prepare to get her driver’s licence, attend her support groups and visit the Saulteau chief. But first she would curl up on her bed and close her eyes.
“I hope you will remember there are always good people,” Mama-Rose had told her.
“The people at the ceremonies who heard your story and felt your pain came from all over the country. They will take your message of hope back to their people.”
But the week of healing was but a stitch in the sister’s gaping wounds. Mama-Rose says they still need to be cradled through their long wait for justice.
As do all the other Indigenous women who still wake each morning with concrete injustice standing cold around them, women whose stories should be told and whose futures should be changed.
“Wish we could visit again,” texted Nerissa.
“We are going to make it,” texted Odelia.
“Maybe something will finally change.”
Katharine Lake Berz is a frequent contributor to the Toronto Star. Her work focuses on national and international issues and their impact on individuals. www.lakeberz.com
If you are thinking of suicide or know someone who is, there is help. Resources are available online at www.crisisservicescanada.ca or you can connect to the national suicide prevention helpline at 1-833-456-4566, or the Kids Help Phone at 1-800-668-6868.
The Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line is available 24-hours a day for anyone experiencing pain or distress as a result of a residential school experience. Support is available at 1-866-925-4419.
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
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