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What I Have Done, What Was Done To Me: Confession And Testimony In Stolen Life: Journey Of A Cree Woman, Michael Jacklin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

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 …