TV Reviews : A Scathing ‘Conspiracy’ of Canadian Racism

As counter-programming to the Olympics, CBS is airing a compelling two-part, fact-based Canadian miniseries about apathy and racism in a town that for years covered up a grisly murder. “Conspiracy of Silence” debuts Sunday at 9 p.m. and concludes Tuesday at 9 on Channels 2 and 8.

On a snow-bound night in Manitoba in 1971, four youths, high on booze and looking for sex, spot a 19-year-old Cree student walking alone. They throw her into their car, assault and brutally stab her dozens of times with a screwdriver and dump her naked body in a clump of snow outside of town.

As crucial as the details of that murder are, it’s not served up whole but chillingly dramatized in fragments throughout the four-hour show as backdrop to what the story is really about: racism against aboriginal Indians so pervasive that an entire town enters into a conspiracy of silence before the dam of complicity is finally broken by a dogged Canadian Mountie 16 years later.

Produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and based on the book “Conspiracy of Silence” by Lisa Priest, the plot centers on the most guilt-racked of the assailants, a reckless, hard-drinking kid from a staunch middle-class family (Michael Mahonen). He nervously blabs it all over town that he was with “the squaw” when she was killed, but because the victim is an Indian girl, nobody much cares.

The conclusion Tuesday picks up events in the 1980s, when a new constable in town batters through the ingrained racism, persuades two knowledgeable schoolmates to testify in court and tracks down the conspirators, who are now in their 30s and nominally respectable.

Under Francis Mankiewicz’s direction and a taut script by Suzette Couture, the show is a scathing depiction of racism in Canada--but with obvious relevance to the United States. The white characters in the little town remind you of too many Americans. They constantly make jokes and cracks about the second-class Indians (portrayed by the Nipissing Band of Obiways), who are treated on a par with blacks in the pre-civil rights South.