Posted: Dec 17, 2020 2:01 PM CT | Last Updated: December 17, 2020
(From left) Eva Taysup, Calinda Waterhen and Shelley Napope were all victims of John Crawford, who died this week at Regional Psychiatric Centre.(CBC Archive)
It was the early 1990s and First Nations women were going missing on Saskatoon's west side.
The kind of women, Saskatoon Indigenous affairs columnist Doug Cuthand says, who were not a high priority for police.
"These were women that were marginalized inside the Aboriginal community itself. To him, they were expendable," Cuthand, who is a member of the Little Pine First Nation, said in an interview.
"A lot of them were just unfortunate, lost souls ... this just stunk of racism, right from the very beginning. The police force hadn't taken it seriously. They just let it kind of be, dismissing women, marginal women."