First Nations' Justice : Nation-to-Nation Reconciliation

"Okimaw Ohci [Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, Saskatchewan] contains both single and family residential units, as offenders may have their children stay with them. Each unit has a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchenette with an eating area and a living room."
"The focal point is the spiritual lodge where teachings, ceremonies and workshops with elders take place. A personal life plan is created for each Aboriginal offender outlining what she needs emotionally, physically and spiritually to help with her rehabilitation."
"Programs help offenders build the strength they need to make essential changes in their lives." "Programs address vocational training, family and children, Aboriginal language and nature."
"The women learn how to live independently by cooking, doing laundry, cleaning and doing outdoor maintenance chores."
Correctional Service Canada website

"She's in an [A]boriginal healing lodge in Saskatchewan living it up in minimum medium security. Open concept living..."
"How do people such as TM [Terri-Lynne McClintic] get more rights and privileges and lessened security? From maximum security to a healing lodge?"
Rodney Stafford, Victoria Stafford's father

"We will be renting buses which will leave from Tillsonburg and Woodstock, Ontario, and going to the Parliament to peacefully protest the reduced security levels being given to the worst of the worst, including one of Tori Stafford's killers, Terri-Lynne McClintic."
Cara Adeline Voisin, organizer, protest, Parliament Hill

"It just really made me feel sick. If anybody is going to have cement walls and no privileges, it should be (McClintic)", said Cara Voisin who used Facebook to organize a protest scheduled for November 2 to take place in Ottawa in front of the Parliament buildings. A protest against the reduced security levels thought appropriate for justice to prevail after the coldblooded murder of an eight-year-old little girl who had been abducted, beaten, tortured and raped before her slaughter. When news of the transfer of the young woman with Aboriginal background was made public, the public reacted with shock.

Yet Canada's Public Safety Minister, Ralph Goodale, is on record as stating that in his considered opinion this is an entirely appropriate situation, to reprieve an unrepentantly vicious murderer from her life sentence in a maximum security installation to soft living in a women's Aboriginal healing lodge. There is nothing to heal in a soul as bleak and black at this woman's. Who coolly took the hand of a trusting child, to lead her to a horrible death, who was deliberately, icily unresponsive as the child begged her, at the place where she was murdered, to help her.

Terri-Lynne McClintic (left), Victoria (Tori) Stafford (right)

On April 9, 2009, Victoria Stafford began the first day of the rest of her life. Her mother had agreed that her older brother would no longer escort her home after school. She was old enough to make her own way back home from Oliver Stephens Public School in Woodstock by herself. Her brother Daryn would continue to return other young children home after school to their parents. Victoria hadn't got very far when, as parents picking up their own children noted, a young woman took her hand and walked off with the child. That woman was familiar to Victoria who had seen her about .

Captured on closed-circuit video, that woman walked Victoria over to a parked car where her boyfriend was waiting, and they drove off with the eight-year-old, making a number of stops before their final destination. One, where Michael Rafferty, who planned to rape Victoria, stopped at a cash machine, another where Terri-Lynne McClintic stopped to buy plastic garbage bags and a hammer. Not only was the child's rape premeditated and carefully planned but so too was her murder. Both abductors would be tried for first-degree murder and both were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Before Victoria suffered the blunt force trauma to her cranium that killed her after repeated hammer blows, she had suffered other violent assaults that left her chest impacted by a pounding that lacerated her liver and broke her ribs. The rape came later. And so did the relentless hammering of her head. Now, one of her murderers has been placed in an institutional setting that offers spiritual and cultural 'training' along with 'independent living' and attractive living quarters as appropriate punishment for an atrocity she was wholeheartedly committed to.

"We were all upset by this move. Seems to be an easier path for her", remarked one of Victoria's grandmothers after she had been notified of the move to the lodge for her grandchild's murderer. It seems, from the description provided by Correctional Service Canada on its website, that Aboriginal women who go afoul of the law are exposed to values very similar to those provided to Aboriginal children who were lodged in the residential school system, that Aboriginals abhor as the source of all the ills that befall them, their inability to obey the law, to stop killing one another, to adapt to social norms rejecting alcohol and drugs and neglecting their children.

At the trial where Terri-Lynne McClintic's lawyers defended her, evidence was presented by the prosecution outlining McClintic's violent fantasies and inclination to maim, torture and kill people. While at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario, she had assaulted another inmate whom she stomped, punched and kicked, regretting that if the opportunity had been greater she would have had the chance to commit infinitely greater physical damage to her victim.

“Ladies and gentlemen, at the end of the trial you are going to consider what Michael Rafferty and Terri-Lynne McClintic did individually and what they did together to bring about the kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of Victoria Elizabeth Stafford. In the end, it is not necessary or essential that you determine exactly who did what. Which of the two delivered the hammer blows to the skull or who inflicted the trauma to Tori’s body, that lacerated her liver, broke her ribs."
“Deciding that is not your task. Your task will be to decide whether they acted together when they picked up Tori and took her away from her school, whether they acted together when they took Tori to Guelph, whether they acted together when (they went) to the Home Depot and bought the garbage bags and the hammer, whether they acted together when they took Tori to an isolated location where all of her clothing was removed other than her T-shirt, whether they acted together to bring about sexual assault on Tori, whether they acted together when Tori was killed, when she was placed in a garbage bag, and when heavy rocks were placed on top of her."
Prosecution at trial of McClintic and Rafferty, March 2012

Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, Maple Creek, Saskatchewan