Indian Posse

The Indian Posse (IP) is an Aboriginal street gang active in Western Canada based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It is one of the largest street gangs in Canada.

Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC) has designated the IP as being a member of indigenous-based organized crime (IBOC). CISC asserts that the Indian Posse, in addition to engaging in marijuana cultivation, auto theft, illegal firearms activities, gambling, and drug trafficking, also supports and facilitates criminal activities for the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and Asian-based networks. As a father, Richard Wolfe Sr, was only irregularly involved in raising his sons, and was last seen by them in 1988. Richard Wolfe Sr. ended up living on the streets. Creeley's father was the chief of the Okanese First Nation reservation in Saskatchewan and he was a highly respected World War II veteran. But his life fell apart due to his alcoholism, and he regularly beat his wife and children. Creeley attended a residential school from the age of 6 onward and was raped by her teacher, causing her to engage in heavy drinking from the age of 12 onward.

Creeley lived on welfare, but spent so much money on alcohol and drugs that her sons were usually hungry. To feed themselves, the Wolfe brothers started stealing, smashing the windows of cars to steal whatever money happened to be in the car in order to buy food, leading to frequent arrests. By the age of 10, Danny Wolfe was already an accomplished shop-lifter and stole his first automobile. The Wolfe brothers grew up in the "howling chaos of the North End" of Winnipeg where the people live in a Third World level of poverty and where arson, shootings, heavy drinking on the streets, prostitution and drug abuse were daily occurrences. The journalist Jon Friesen wrote about the Wolfe brothers: "By the time they were about ten or eleven years old, Danny and Richard were quite accustomed to raising themselves. They had no regard for conventional rules or morality. They saw themselves as survivors and were prepared to do whatever it took to make it". The Indian Posse uses slogans such as "Red Till Dead" and "Fuck Canada, this land is our people". The Manitoba Warriors and the spin-off group, the Alberta Warriors, reflecting their origins in the prisons tended to be more organized than the Indian Posse and to have stronger ties to other organized crime groups such as the Hell Angels. The Canadian criminologist Mark Totten wrote that many of the teenagers who work for the Indian Posse are sometimes pressured into joining, giving the case of a 12-year girl named Susan whose father was Cree while her mother was white. The exterior of the house where Susan lived in was spry-painted in red paint with insulting statements such as "Skank lives here" and "Susan is a slut!". Totten interviewed her, and Susan stated in her interview that she started selling drugs for the Indian Posse following the spray-painting of her mother's house, saying she had been given an ultimatum to either start selling drugs or be gang-raped. Totten interviewed another former Indian Posse member, a 24-year-old man named Charlie who at the time of the interview was homeless and dying of AIDS, which he contracted via the shared use of needles to inject drugs while he was in prison. In his interview, Charlie stated that he was placed "in care" while he was 10, which caused him to try to escape numerous times. When he was 11 years old, he finally escaped and ended up living homeless in Winnipeg. To support himself, Charlie started to steal and after his release from one of his prison terms, he joined the Indian Posse when he met several gang members whom he had known while he was in prison. Charlie stated that he wanted to sell cocaine and methamphetamine for the Indian Posse because it would allow him to make enough income to afford an apartment. Charlie endured the "minutes of pain", which allowed him to enter the gang; when he asked about going to hospital given his injuries caused by the beating, he was told to snort cocaine instead to deal with the pain. Totten wrote that "lost" young men such as Charlie were very typical of the Indian Posse members.

The fissiparous structure of the Indian Posse with the gang being in more ways more of a brand that united otherwise disparate cells made the Indian Posse especially prone to factionalism and in-fighting. One Indian Posse member stated: "It's not an organized crew at all". On 26 September 2003, an Indian Posse gang member, Gene Malcom, was shot in the back by a fellow Indian Posse member in a dispute over the profits from drug sales. Malcom's shooting, which had been ordered by Danny Wolfe, led to a faction of the Indian Posse, Clarence "Shrimpy" Williams to leave the gang to found a new gang called the Cash Money Brothers. Williams was the most successful Indian Posse drug dealer and his unwillingness to share the profits led to him and his followers leaving. One Indian Posse member stated: "It was all about money. Shrimpy was the making the most money and whoever was making the most money at that time had to give their 10 percent, give back to the kitty, back to the bank". The leader of the anti-Williams faction, Brad Maytwayashing, was jealous that Williams made $50, 000 per week in drug sales and demanded a larger cut of the profits than what Williams was prepared to give. On 4 October 2003, a group of Indian Posse members from Edmonton arrived in Winnipeg with the intention of killing Williams. The Winnipeg police arrested them on their way to kill Williams with two sawed-off shotguns in their possession. Maytwayashing in turn became unpopular within the Indian Posse and on 13 April 2004 was badly beaten at the Remand Centre in Winnipeg in an assault led by another Indian Posse member Raymond Armstrong. Armstrong reached out to shake Maywayashing's hand and then punched him in the face, joined by several other Indian Posse members who beat him with broom handles fashioned into sticks.

In 2005, the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada reported that the Indian Posse had moved into Edmonton and Fort McMurray, where it was active selling drugs. Residents of the Samson Cree Nation reservation in Alberta blamed the Indian Posse for a drive-by shooting in April 2008 that left an innocent by-stander, the toddler Asia Saddleback, wounded when she was hit by a stray bullet. In 2008, Sidney Letandre, one of the Indian Posse's leaders attempted to leave the gang as he was a father and did not want to go to prison again.

In 2010, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) reported that the Indian Posse had moved into northern Ontario, the rural areas in the interior of British Columbia and the Far North of Canada. Bruce had attempting to persuade drug dealers working for the Indian Posse to instead starting working for the MOB Squad, which led to him being beaten to death. In 2017, an IP member in Saskatoon, Kyle Landon Neapetung, was convicted of torturing with a blowtorch another man, Brenden Peters, for five days in March 2016. In 2018, an IP member, Elwood Terry Poorman, was charged with a murder in Port Coquitlam, suggesting that the Indian Posse had reached the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. In 2019, Max Waddell of the Winnipeg Police Service blamed gang violence for the high murder in Winnipeg, saying that rivalries between First Nations gangs such as the Indian Posse, the Native Syndicate, and the Manitoba Warriors along with black gangs as the Mad Cowz were a major issue.

Brad Peequaquat, a member of the Saskatchewan's Yellow Quill First Nation, was recruited into an Indian Posse chapter with his brother Sherman, remembering: "They seemed to be young guys just like us. I just thought it'd be fun. We all joined.... They promised us this fast, easy life, but it wasn't. They were living off of us, and we were getting sick of everything." Sherman Peequaquat recalled that joining the IP: "The violence escalated, the stabbings and everything." The Crown Attorney who prosecuted Gladue said of the killing: "It’s just the fact that they’re rival gangs that recognized ‘you’re wearing red, I’m wearing black, therefore I don’t like you,’ and just an immediate combative position and response to that visual of ‘you’re wearing a different colour than me, we have a problem now."

The end of the Wolfe brothers On 20 September 2007, Danny Wolfe was involved in a verbal dispute in a bar in Fort Qu'Appelle with Bernard Percy Pascal, a member of the rival Native Syndicate. Later the same night, Wolfe broke into Pascal's house and started shooting everybody he saw. In November 2013, to prevent him from returning to prison, a couple gave him a home in their basement and attempted to help him turn his life around. On the night of 6 April 2014, Wolfe raped the woman and then attacked the man with a baseball bat after the man heard his wife screaming. In March 2015, he pleaded guilty to one count of rape and one count of assault with a deadly weapon. Owing to the dangers of attacks from rival gang members and for being a rapist, Wolfe was held in solitary confinement, causing him to suffer from severe depression, which contributed to his death from a heart-attack at the age of 40 on 27 May 2016.