Sending Josephine Home

Josephine Pelletier was shot to death by Calgary police in May. Her life and death shed light on the complicated interplay between colonialism, incarceration, and police brutality. This is her story.

- Sara Birrell

On May 17, 2018, Calgary Police surrounded a home in Penbrooke Meadows. Two people – a man and a woman – unknown to the owners, had barricaded themselves inside the empty basement suite. After an hour-long stakeout, police entered the home. When they came out, the man was critically injured, and the woman was dead. For nearly a month the dead woman’s name was not released. It was the third fatal shooting by Calgary Police Service (CPS) officers that year.

Her name was Josephine Shelly Lynn Pelletier. She was Cree and Saulteaux, and she was 33 years old.

GROWING UP

Josephine – her friends called her Jojo – was born on February 25, 1985, in Regina, the third of five children. Her mother, Donna, struggled with drug addiction. She tells me over the phone that Josephine “barely knew” her father, a violent alcoholic who was in and out of jail for most of Josephine’s life. “She did struggle,” Donna says. “There was sexual assault. There was everything.”

Court records and Josephine’s testimony confirm a traumatic childhood. At a 2011 hearing where she was deemed a long-term offender – only the second woman in Saskatchewan to be declared as such – the court was told that Josephine was sexually abused by the brother of her stepfather, starting when she was three years old. He was never charged and the abuse continued until Josephine was 11.

Donna’s own childhood was filled with violence. “We were abused,” she says about the years between ages three and about 10, when she and her nine siblings were removed from their Regina home and sent to live with their grandparents on Muskowekwan reserve, outside of Regina, Saskatchewan. “It wasn’t until my older sister was 17 that she got us put back with our mom,” Donna recalls.