#424 Maggie Freleng with Odelia and Nerissa Quewezance

On February twenty fifth, nineteen ninety three, police were called to a house in a remote area in Saskatchewan, Canada. They arrived to a horrific and bloody scene. Seventy year old Joseph Dolph was lying face down on his bedroom floor dead. He had been beaten and stabbed multiple times. The house was in shambles and there had obviously been a violent struggle that morning. O'delia and Nerissa Cusance and

These were two young Indigenous women trying to cope with police officers. White police officers, all male.

The interrogations were not recorded, and after days of questioning, both women signed statements admitting to taking part in the killing, and.

On the basis of those unrecorded statements that the police alleged they gave. After a trial before a jud John, of course, not surprisingly in all white jury, they were convicted the following year.

From LoVa for good this is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today Odelia and Narissa Cusance o'dellia, Narissa Cusants are sisters born two years apart and members of the Salto First Nation. They grew up on the Keiscous Reserve in Saskatchewan, Canada, along with an older brother and three other sisters.

And growing up in Kiscoose. We all were called the village kids. We lived in a village.

This is Odelia, the older of the two, born in nineteen seventy two.

Me and Narissa did not have our mother involved in our life, but our father was involved in till the day he passed. He was always there for us.

I never actually knew my mother, but my dad was. He was the best thing for me.

And that's Narissa. The sisters have always been close and both girls adored their father.

He was.

He was quite a big man. I guess he's six footy three.

He was.

He's really into sports. He's a hockey player himself, a basketball player, and he used to be coached on a team on a reserve. I mean, we didn't have nothing to eat or no power, you know, as long as he was there, and that's that's what mattered to me.

He did his best. He wasn't perfect. Nobody's perfect.

Life for the girls growing up was rough, Canada's Indigenous populations have long faced systemic racism, poverty, violence, and substance addiction were rampant on the reserve where they lived.

Seeing people relatives trying to commit suicide, being babysat while our father trusted someone, and then having a relative commit suicide shoot himself.

And we were.

Little kids getting put.

In a pat and you know it's we had a tough life.

But the cues On siblings looked out for each other. Odelia especially tried to protect her younger sisters.

I love my sisters, and I remember times where we did go hungry. We always used to tell each other to stay, you know, be strong, be strong.

Sometimes times it was tough.

Like generations of family members before them, Odelia and Nourissa were sent away to residential schools at a very young age, like.

My dad couldn't raise all of us kids on his own, And then we were sent to our grandparents and then to the residential schools. We went to the Bread Boarding School, and and there's one called Maraval Boarding School that we went to on Cows's first nation. You know, we were as saying it was only eight and I don't even know, I was so young when I went, and all I remember is loneliness.

Canada's Indian residential school system, as it was called, was established in the eighteen seventies with the goal of assimilating indigenous children into white society. The schools were run by Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. For children like Odelia Nourissa, who had grown up surrounded by extended family and tribal elders on the reserve, being dropped into a Christian school education system was total culture shock.

They take away your esteemed, they take away everything because it's like it's an institution and you know, all a bunch of young kids that are you know, were just children being being told to get up at certain time in the morning, going to church, going doing all this stuff.

In your kid students were forced to sing and pray in Latin while their own cultural and spiritual beliefs were stifled or beaten out of them. For those who didn't conform, punishment was swift and harsh.

And I remember though, like one time wanting to go to the bathroom and you know, I got put in the middle of the dorm hat to nail for hours. You know, as a child I used to, you know, like eight seven years old, wanting to wishing to die.

That's terrible. Well who do you turn to, you know? But we survived it. We survived it.

Many survivors of the resident school system recall being severely beaten and repeatedly sexually assaulted by supervisors and then nearissa.

I think I've read that you actually you have like a spine problem with your back because of what happened to you at residential school.

Yeah, from trauma from my body is not wasn't quite developed, so my bones are kind of whatever.

And that's from being attacked at the school, from being beaten, like.

Every blows to my body. It wasn't formed or I guess. I remember even as a child, I used to wonder why God was so mean? Now took a kid.

The last of these schools was closed in nineteen ninety six, but not before generations of Indigenous children had been permanently scarred, both physically and emotionally by their treatment. This arguably contributed to the system disenfranchisement of Indigenous people in Canada, creating a highly vulnerable population.

How old were y'all when you left the school and how did you get out?

Of there.

My mother passed died when I was fourteen, and I think I don't know how fifteen when I left boarding school.

Ohdelia dropped out of school and moved to Edmonton to live with family.

There.

She continued to try to look out for her little sister, but Nourissa was still having a hard time at school, and she'd been getting into trouble with the law starting at age thirteen.

What did you go to prison for the first time?

First time was I was the young a founder me for a stolen vehicle and that's where it escalated. There was nothing violence. I never had any violence on my record this till my adult charge.

Her time spent in prison started Noriissa on the road to alcohol and hard drugs at a young age.

I never was introduced that till I went to prison. Like sure, I used to smoke to odd joints once in a while, but like take the odd pill. You know, I became an addict in prison.

By nineteen ninety three, O'delia was twenty one and Norissa was eighteen. They had both moved back to the Keyscous Reserve and were living with their sisters Orlina and her husband and kids. Their fifteen year old cousin, Jason Kashane, lived across the road. On the night of February twenty fourth, nineteen ninety three, Jason stole fifteen tablets of the drug Restoral from his grandma. He Odelia, and Norissa all took

He picked them up brought them to his fairly remote home in Comsuck, Saskatchewan. I fact was very remote, and provided them with beer and whiskey. This is James Lockyer, I'm Innocents Canada's Council for the Cuzan's Sisters, Adealer of Nursa.

With the restaurant already in their systems, the sisters became more and more inebriated. Later, they would have a hard time remembering everything that occurred that night. Jason later testified that Dolf and Odelia left to go get beer. When they returned, they all continued drinking, finishing off a large bottle of whiskey Dolf provided, and it seemed he had an agenda.

And during the course of the evening, Dolf tried to persuade Adelia.

And Nerissa to have sex with him.

They refused and it led to some dispute between them.

Around one o'clock in the morning, they persuaded Dolf to drive them all home, and.

On the way home, Dolf realized that he had three hundred dollars missing from his wallet, and he decided to turn around and go back home.

Back at the house, Dolf accused the three of stealing the money from him. They denied it, and an argument ensued. The next day, the police were called to Joseph Dolf's home. When they entered, they found the place completely trashed, with furniture turned over and talcum powder sprinkled all around. Dolf's body was face down in the bedroom. He'd been stabbed over a dozen times in the chest, abdomen, back, and left arm. A knife was still in his stomach and

They quickly ascertained that the two Cusant's sisters and Jason hab been at his house that night.

They were all three arrested.

That morning. O'delia, Nourissa, and Jason were taken to the Kamsack Police Detachment by the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The sisters were stripped to their underwear and placed in concrete cells with only raincoats to wear. Later, they were given sweatpants and sweatshirts. Both women spoke with lawyers who told the police that their clients were not to be questioned. The next day, the Justice of the Peace ordered that the cis be remanded to the nearest jail. This was Friday.

However, the police ignored that order and kept them until the following Tuesday in the police detachment, so that they were a matter of eight steps from numerous all white, all male police officers in the Camsack detachment in Canada, If you want to hold someone for more than twenty four hours in police custody, you have to get judicial authorization. And they were held in the cells there for a

Meanwhile, their cousin, Jason, was also being questioned, and on the very first day.

Jason confessed to the homicide, and his confession was recorded on tape, a tape recording that somehow was not available. When it came to the questioning of Nourissa and Adelia to being the one who did the.

Stabbings, the sisters were told that Jason had confessed to the murder and that he implicated them as well, which was later found not to be true. The two were questioned repeatedly by the RCMP over the next four days.

They have memory being extremely scared, of course, and frightened around all these men. These what to them were big, burly white men, continually bringing them out of the cells and questioning them again, and putting them back in and questioning them again.

Over day after day. They had no lawyers, and the police knew what they wanted, They knew what they were doing. They had to.

Get these two girls to say things that somehow tied them into mister Dolph's murder. The police alleged that they gave verbal statements not recorded that slowly but surely amounted to more incriminating statements. So as I say, they got ad Elia to admit one stab wound out of more than forty, how did they get.

The girls to confess to this?

There's no doubt there was intimidating taxics used. These were two young Indigenous women trying to cope with police officers, white police officers.

All male.

More than that, they were both victims of the residential school system. They were highly vulnerable individuals. Well never really know exactly what happened because none of it was recorded, they had no lawyers. It was made clearer than what they wanted to hear. The policeman wrote out what they

Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. You can listen to this and all the Lover for Good podcasts one week early and ad free by subscribing to LoVa for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Adelia and Nourissa testified at their trials. The trouble is that they had it made clear to them that it was not in their interest to try and challenge the versions of events given by the RCMP officers in front of the jury, because if they did, they'd be disbelieved.

After the years they'd spent at residential schools, the girls were conditioned to succumb to authority and believed no one would help them.

They were told to stay in line as to how they were treated by the police, who of course testified that they treated them well, etc. Etc. For those five days, even though they shouldn't have been in the police station for four of them, and no one really seemed to see much wrong without a trial.

Certainly the trial judge didn't.

Her name was Justice Gunn was her name. So they tried to fall into step, you might say, with what the RCMP officers said. Not entirely, but they did their best to so that they're claim that they had not been involved in mister Dolph's murder will be.

More likely believed.

And this was classic for those times that Indigenous people were told by their own lawyers that you know, if it's your word against the police, no one's going to believe you.

So for people in the US who don't know about the systemic abuses of Indigenous people in Canada, can you describe that a little bit.

Well, it's not unlike your country.

It's very much a colonial history where we colonize the original peoples are part of the continent, and you did the same in your part of the continent. The RCMP has in the past and still to this day, engages in systemic racism towards Indigenous peoples. That's acknowledged publicly, i might say, with some reluctance, but nevertheless acknowledged. The case of Adelia and Urus are just smacks of this. Here

Okay, So going back to the trial, o'delia and Narisso were tried in the Court of Queen's Benson, Yorkton before Madame Justice Ellen Gunn, And as you said earlier, it was an all white jury, and we've heard how the sisters were basically forced to incriminate themselves at trial, But what did their lawyers present in defense.

Their defense was that the two women were both drunk at the time and therefore their responsibility meant they should only be convicted of manslaughter. It was like a sort of a semi surrender defense.

So they didn't bring up a foss confession.

No, they did not.

Jason was called by the Crown as a witness, and indeed when he testified at trial, he implicated himself and said that he was the one who had stabbed mister Doff.

At trial, Jason told a more complete story of what happened that night. Jason said, once they all returned to the house, Joseph Dolph went looking for his missing money. They all got into an altercation and Narissa hit Dolf on the head with a porcelain ornament, which broke in a tea kettle. O'dela hit him with a whiskey bottle. Jason punched Dolf, who was going after Narissa, then followed him into the bedroom and choked him with a telephone cord.

He'd already pleaded guilty to the crime. He was a fifteen year old, so he pleaded guilty under the Young Offender's Act and received a sentence of five years. So the real killer was in for five years, and at his age, he shouldn't.

Have been in for longer than that. I would hasten to add.

Was he asked directly if the girls did and did he say no or was he just not yes?

Okay? And he said no, they did not.

Yes, he said he's the winner stabbed them.

Wow.

So even though they were not implicated at the trial by him, they're still convicted. Yes, on February fourth, nineteen ninety four, Odelia and Narissa were convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in ten years. While she was incarcerated, Odela stayed connected with her partner, Jay, whom she'd known since she was eighteen.

In two thousand and one, she gave birth to their daughter and six years later twin girls.

My oldest daughter, Hayley, she lived in prison for two years with me.

What was that like living with your daughter in prison?

I was just grateful she was there with me.

Yes, it was like, you know, but do you know what my daughter today, she's very outspoken, and she had a lot of Auntie and Cook Coombs in there to take care of her, you know, like she was allowed to be a child in there.

Were there other were there other women with kids?

Yeah?

Wow?

And so once your daughters, you know, left prison and were older, who were they living with And what was that like to try and parent from behind bars?

My daughters they were living with their father and he took care of them and he brought them to visit me. I read a couple months.

I talked on a phone with them a lot.

How do you do being a dad?

I think he did pretty good.

Kind of spoiled their girls, but in a good way though.

While in prison, Odelia also earned her ged, completed a number of programs, and worked in the library, horticulture, kitchen, and daycare. She grew to be respected as a leader by both prisoners and staff. Norissa earned a degree in adult education from the University of Saskatoon while at the Edmonton Institution for Women, the first incarcerated person to graduate from the university and attend her own convocation. She also earned a degree in animal welfare and worked as a

As of February twenty fourth, two thousand and three, they were eligible for Pearl.

They didn't get it, and when they did.

Release them a couple of times they imposed these onerous conditions on them, which not surprisingly, they violated. So in twenty twenty abyve the time David Milgard came to me. They both served more than they were actually by then. That's served twenty eight years of their sentences.

In James, can you explain who David Milgard is and how he became involved in this case.

David was a person who had spent twenty three years in prison in Canada for a great murder he did not commit, and ever since his exoneration, continued to advocate for the wrongly convicted and Nourissa and Adelia Cusance approached him in I think in the summer of twenty twenty, and David then asked me if I would take on their case?

So, why did you believe in their innocence? What convinced you of that?

Taking into account the whole systemic racism involved in this, it wasn't a hard one. Once I had a chance to read the trial transcripts, the case to me stank when I saw that they had been held in custody in the police station for five days. That that in itself did it for me. I'd never heard of such a thing, never.

And so what was your strategy for getting them out?

Adelia and Nurissa had had their appeals dismissed in nineteen ninety five, a year after their convictions four paragraph judgment of the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, which kind of shows you how much attention was given to their case. The

So you did that in twenty twenty two, and then what did you present to the minister.

We gave a whole list of reasons as to why these convictions constitutedious charriage of justice. We pointed out that Canada's treatment of Indigenous peoples and this case was a classic abuse of Indigenous peoples, especially women. We talked about the impacts of systemic discrimination on the two of them in the investigation.

And so to this day, does Jason still maintain that o'delia and Nurissa were not involved.

Yes, I've met Jason a couple of times. Of course, he's now in his mid forties. He's had a pretty difficult life since and bears besides the guilt of stabbing mister Dolph, for the guilt of having implicated Nurisa and Adelia by what he did. But yes, he maintains they had nothing to do with it, and his statement to that effect, which he put in writing, enabled us to bring a release application for them until the Minister made his final decision.

And I'm glad to say that on March.

Twenty seventh of twenty twenty three, more than thirty years after their original arrests and imprisonment, they were released on bail and they're both presently on bail.

The situation these two women found themselves in is unfortunately not unusual. According to Canada's Office of the Congressional Investigator, over fifty percent of incarcerated women in Canada are Indigenous. Indigenous people are historically more likely to be arrested for serious crimes, are rarely tried by their peers, and are

Does the law in Canada seem to be more understanding now of the plight of Indigenous folks and what they have gone through and suffered, you know, particularly like o'dellia Narissa winding up in a situation like this because of the systemic abuse.

To some extent, the answer is yes. Having said that, we have a huge problem in Canada because the Indigenous percentages in the prisons are going up and up and up year by year by year. The denials of parole for the Indigenous are going up and up and up. The number of Indigenous being found to be dangerous offenders and subject to life sentences are going up and up

Wrong, right.

You know, parole here is pretty awful as well. How is it in Canada? Why is it so bad if you're Indigenous?

Because they don't release you. That's the SATs. I mean, there are many reasons for this.

But a very simple part of a systemic discrimination is they have ah whole system whereby they assess what they call the criminogenic factors of the individual, the likelihood that they will re offend if released, and the assessments are conducted according to the thinking and customs of the white man, not the thinking, customs and cultures of the Indigenous, and it's been proved very clearly that that means that the Indigenous are always overassessed in terms of the likelihood of

Even though Odelia and Narissa were released in March, they have not been exonerated of Joseph Dolf's murder. They're still living under parole conditions while they await ministerial review, hoping for the decision that would finally allow them to live fully free.

For me and my sister at this time, like I know, all I have is to wait and is waked and wait.

Odelia is now back at home with Jay and their twin daughters. Nourissa is living with a good friend, an advocate, Kim Bowden and his wife Rhonda.

He's the Congress of Amagual People of Canada Vice president and yeah, he's myself is I just love him and Rohnda. No, he's a great man, and I usually have a hard time trusting man.

After nearly three decades in prison, both sisters, now fifty one and forty nine, are doing their best to adjust to life outside of prison walls while on parole.

But for myself it's a real it's different because I'm so institutionalized that I'm used to everything coming. Like if I had to go see the doctor, I just had to go across across the road and or go get groceries just across the hallway. Maybe so, and now here it's it's hard to do. I kind of I've only ridden on a bus once since I've been out here. I have really bad anxiety, and I noticed that I get really irritable and stuff like that, so I don't really like being around people.

I understand that you were You were in a prison with a lot of people for a long time.

How about you, Adelia, what kinds of things that you're a mom?

What's that like.

It's been a challenge because I've been away from them for so much many years. So it's rekindling with my daughters and getting to know them.

And you know, there's there's a lot of resentments, you know, and I feel them like I we have a good relationship, like I try to be my best fights my girls and you know, give them what they want.

But it's hard. It's hard to.

Be honest, you know what.

I feel useless.

Sometimes I feel like I, you know, so went down institutionalize.

I don't know what to do on my own. Sometimes I want to do things, make things different. I'm still hopeful about, you know, my future. But like I said, it's it's hard. It's a struggle when you.

Just yeah, like great, now I'm starting to get getting getting out of my bedroom as I'm so used to being in a room.

Yeah, that's what I do too. I spend a lot of room time. I do a lot of sull time.

Still, yeah, yeah, I understand that. I hear that from a lot of people who have been inside. It's it's it's scary.

Yeah.

I always tell myself, you're okay, you're safe. Now, You're okay. It's going to be okay.

I always tell myself that my younger solf.

Of Delia and Nerissa have found strength in going to conferences, meeting other axonnarees and telling their story.

I want to help people and I want to be an advocate for women and children.

I remember when I was younger, when I was in jail, like even before I went to BC, I used to say, one day, I'm going to climb that mountain, you know, And that's what it meant for me. It is like, you know, one day I'm going to get there to the top, you know.

So where is the top of that mountain for you?

Well, I'm there already.

Just as they did when they were children, the Q Zone sisters are still looking out for each other, and as they continued to fight for their innocence, both of them credit their own faith as it was taught to them by their elders, with keeping them strong.

I follow my traditional native spirituality, so I pray, we call the Creator, So I do a lot of prayers in offering tobacco, and I teach my daughters so.

Prayer is powerful. That's all we have when you're in prison is prayer.

And prayer is powerful because I know Nobody's greater than that creator.

In twenty twenty, more than fifty unmarked graves were discovered on the grounds of two residential schools near the Keyscus Reserve for Pelly and Saint Philip's. Investigation is ongoing into who those children were, how they died, and how many more graves are yet to be discovered. Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence organizations and go to the links in the