'A long moment of stunned silence': Rosanna Deerchild on telling a crowd Gerald Stanley was found not guilty

I was standing on the side of the stage at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa watching trailblazing music maker Willy Mitchell sing. 

He sang, Big Policeman, a song about how, at 15 years old, he was shot in the head by a police officer over a string of Christmas lights. I stood backstage listening, feeling grateful he was here to sing this song. 

Then my cell went off and I glanced down at it.

It was a good friend telling me about another young man.

As I read I shook with anger and heartbreak. Hot tears rolled down my face as I went on social media and read pain-filled status after status.

'I couldn't let this pass'

As a professional I am trained to put emotion aside because "the show must go on." But I couldn't let this pass.
Not after Willy's song. Not while I stood in the nation's capital. Not in front of this audience of relatives and settlers.

I walked on the stage with tears in my eyes, my hands shook, my voice cracked, and I told the audience about that young man, Colten Boushie. 

How this young man did not survive what Willy had survived. That he was killed with a bullet to the back of his head and that the shooter — Gerald Stanley, a Saskatchewan farmer — had been found not guilty by a jury of his peers.

• CBC NEWS: 'He took my heart': Colten Boushie's father remembers kind, goofy son

There was a stunned silence that went on for a long time. 

Then an anguished shout of "No" from one woman. Then "No justice." 

I asked the audience for a moment of silence for Colten, his family, for all of us.

And for that moment everyone in that room knew what being Indigenous in Canada means.​