RIS ID
20939
Abstract
Yvonne Johnson’s life narrative, written over a six-year period in collaboration with Rudy Wiebe, tells the story of how Johnson came to be the only First Nations woman in Canada serving a life-twenty-five sentence for first degree murder. Stolen Life: Journey of a Cree Woman (1998) relates the circumstances of Johnson’s involvement with three others – Dwayne Wenger, Ernest Jensen and Shirley Anne Salmon – in the killing of Leonard Charles Skwarok in Wetaskiwin, Alberta, in 1989. In a night of excessive drinking, the two men and two women participated in the confinement, beating, sexual abuse, strangulation and killing of Leonard Skwarok, a man they barely knew, but whom they believed to have molested children and who, Johnson feared, was a threat to her own young children. The murder is brutal. Of the four, Johnson is found guilty of first degree murder, while the others received lesser sentences.
Publication Details
Jacklin, M, 'What I have done, what was done to me: confession and testimony in stolen life: journey of a cree woman', Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 29(1), 2007, p 19-33.