1885 hangings at Battleford

On November 27, 1885, eight Indigenous men were executed by hanging at Battleford in what is now Saskatchewan, Canada, following convictions for murders connected to the North-West Rebellion of 1885. Six of the men were convicted in connection with the Frog Lake Massacre, and two were convicted for murders committed during the Looting of Battleford. These killings occurred outside the direct military combat of the rebellion itself.

The Frog Lake Massacre began before dawn on April 2, 1885, when a party of Cree warriors captured Indian Agent Thomas Trueman Quinn at his home. Quinn, described as having treated the Cree with harshness and arrogance and having kept them near starvation, refused to relocate with the warriors and was shot dead by a man known as Wandering Spirit. In the panic that followed, eight other settler prisoners were killed. Hudson's Bay Company employee William Bleasdell Cameron, who later wrote an account of the events, was present and had his life spared; he later testified against Wandering Spirit and others at trial.

After the rebellion ended with the capture of Batoche, participants were arrested and brought to Battleford for trial before Stipendiary Magistrate Charles Rouleau. Wandering Spirit pleaded guilty on September 22, 1885, and was sentenced to hang. Rouleau also presided over the trials of five other men connected to Frog Lake and two men connected to the Looting of Battleford, sentencing all to death. Rouleau was himself a Battleford resident who suffered significant property loss during the looting, including the burning of his house, and was reported by the Saskatchewan Herald to have said that "every Indian and Half-breed and rebel" brought before him after the rebellion would be sent to the gallows "if possible." A formal complaint (a "memorial") was sent to the Department of Justice alleging Rouleau was too personally involved to judge impartially, but his rulings were not overturned. The Cree-speaking defendants were not provided with translation during the trials. Rouleau also sentenced three other men — convicted in separate matters, including the killing of a woman feared to have become a wehtigo and the killing of an NWMP officer — to death, but those three sentences were later commuted.

The eight men executed on November 27, 1885, were Kah-Paypamahchukways (Wandering Spirit), Pah Pah-Me-Kee-Sick (Round the Sky), Manchoose (Bad Arrow), Kit-Ahwah-Ke-Ni (Miserable Man), Nahpase (Iron Body), A-Pis-Chas-Koos (Little Bear), Itka (Crooked Leg), and Waywahnitch (Man Without Blood). Witness accounts state the men went to the scaffold singing war songs, though one account notes Wandering Spirit instead hummed a song to his wife. Students from the Battleford Industrial School were brought to witness the hangings as a "warning." The men were buried in a mass grave near the fort that went unmarked until it was rediscovered by students in 1972; the site has since been marked with a headstone and interpretive panel, and is remembered annually with a ceremony around National Indigenous Peoples Day.