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Sleeping Wear The lack of concrete evidence against Murray Foreman, who was acquitted on Wednesday, was spelt out to the jury at the outset, crown prosecutor Russel Collins saying it was not "a CSI [Crime Scene Investigation] case".The farm dogs, known to bark at strangers, were silent on the morning of the murder. A dog psychologist, called by the defence, said this could have occurred only if the shooter was known to the dogs. The Crown said Mr Foreman, with 30 years' hunting experience, was able to sneak up to the farm undetected.The jury heard of Mr Foreman's penchant for hunting barefoot and in a police re-enactment an officer wearing socks was able to approach the house without alerting the dogs.Critical to the killer's escape was the time between Mr Nicholas being shot and his body being found.Shots were heard just before 6.30am. Mr Nicholas' son Oliver and his wife Angelina heard the shots from their house, which is about 400 metres from the home of Jack and his wife Agnes.Mr Nicholas would frequently shoot rabbits and the crack of a rifle in the morning was not uncommon on the farm. But Angelina, fearing something was wrong, called Agnes at exactly 6.30am.Agnes, who was in bed, assumed it was Jack shooting goats or rabbits. She remained in bed. Close to 7am she noticed sheep in her garden. Going to see if the gate was open, she found her husband's body near the gate. She fetched a duvet to put over him, then called Oliver, who drove to the house. At first they thought Jack had had an accident, but they couldn't find a gun.At 7.08am Agnes dialled 111.The 35 to 40 minutes that elapsed before the discovery of the body was enough time for the killer to leave the Puketitiri area before the Lowe Corporation rescue helicopter made its way from Hastings, its crew looking for suspicious vehicles on the way.Two spent .308 cartridges were found at the foot of a power pole 40 metres from Mr Nicholas' body. The court heard from an ESR scientist who said three shots were fired. One hit Mr Nicholas in the arm, probably causing him to fall and crouch behind a narrow fence post. One missed, and the third was a fatal shot to the chest.In the next weeks, then months, then years, rumours swirled around the region. Most centred on the dogs not barking and there being no tracks, and most concluded the killer had to be Oliver.The victim's son was an early suspect, police finding it particularly suspicious that he moved cattle within two hours of seeing his father's body.But after extensive talks to farmers, police concluded that Oliver's actions were not unusual. It was a harsh winter and the welfare of cattle comes first when your living is made from the land - a point reiterated by neighbours when giving evidence. Most also went out to feed or move cattle after the murder, despite being warned by police there may be a gunman on the loose.Grieving would be no less sincere if delayed for an hour or two.Naturally, Foreman's lawyers focused on Oliver's actions, claiming he had not gone to move cattle, but to hide a firearm.The jury heard from Angelina that Oliver was at home with her when she rang Agnes about the shots.Police first spoke to Mr Foreman, who was then 47, in early September while speaking to all 418 hunting permit holders in Hawke's Bay. He told police he did not have a firearm. He said he had planned to go walking in the Kaweka area about the time of the murder but had not been able to after his car gearbox broke.He had been at his Haumoana home with partner Lyssa Whatarau and their nine-year-old son at the time of the murder. The story was corroborated by Ms Whatarau.He did tell police that he had had a run-in with the farmer "about 20 years ago", when he and a friend were confronted by a gun-waving Mr Nicholas upset at their camping on his farm.***Mr Foreman went off the radar till November, when police received an anonymous letter claiming Mr Foreman had been telling people he had the weapon that killed Mr Nicholas.The writer, Mr Foreman's friend, Antoinette Cuthill-Coutts, was identified by fingerprinting and she gave evidence at the trial. She said Mr Foreman had been given the gun by a friend and was "just a pawn in this whole tragedy".When police revisited Mr Foreman on November 24 he repeatedly denied owning any firearms. A search of his vehicle recovered .308 ammunition, however, and he recanted. He took police to his work locker at Ravensdown, where he kept a .308 Fabrica de Armas, and a .308 Bruno. A third rifle, a Remington model 7.08mm, was found at a friend's house in Haumoana.Mr Foreman was arrested the following March. He was convicted on three firearms charges and ordered to do 100 hours' community work. The sentencing judge commented on his long history of convictions involving firearms.Mr Foreman dropped off the radar again. There was nothing linking him to the murder. He, Ms Whatarau and their son moved to Gisborne, before returning to Haumoana in early 2006.Meanwhile, Mr Foreman's former neighbour Donna Kingi - by then living in Sydney, had contacted the Sensible Sentencing Trust to say she had information about the murder. The information was passed on to detectives, who flew over to interview her.Ms Kingi said her conscience was troubling her. She had heard Mr Foreman leave his house at 11pm on August 26, 2004, and had seen him arrive home some time after 6.45am the following day. He appeared "clammy", and was speaking quietly. He told her he thought he had just shot someone. When she said that either he had or he hadn't, he said: "No, girl. I think I have."In court Mr Foreman's defence said this conversation never took place.On March 26, 2006, Ms Kingi agreed to wear a police wire and to revisit Mr Foreman at Haumoana in an attempt to have him repeat his comments.Recordings of their conversations were played in court. Ms Kingi is heard urging Mr Foreman to confirm he told her he had shot a man. He says he "didn't do it", but does remember telling her he had to get rid of some guns.Police placed bugs in Mr Foreman and Ms Whatarau's house. Their conversations were also played in court. In one of these Ms Whatarau tells Mr Foreman she has been re-interviewed by the police and has been "caught out lying" about being with Mr Foreman on the night before the murder.By April 2006 police believed they had enough evidence to arrest Mr Foreman. He was arrested on April 18.The whereabouts of Mr Foreman at the time of the murder remains a mystery. He told police he was at home, he told Ms Whatarau he had been at work - though the court heard he had been on leave, and he told others he had been hunting on the Napier-Taihape Road.The jury heard from 122 witnesses during the five-week trial, but not a word from Mr Foreman, who chose not to give evidence.

Printed Sweater Back when she was a fashion-design student, Suzette Soloman had a moment of cultural inspiration. The Haida, Scottish, and Lebanese designer sewed a Native sun symbol onto the front of a dress. “The Green Millennium” was the theme of the fashion show she designed the dress for, at Kwantlen University College. Students were instructed to take recycled garments and create new clothes out of them. In other words, this wasn’t the usual place to display marketable gear.“After the show, people kept coming up to me and they wanted to buy the dress,” Soloman told the Georgia Straight at her studio across from Oppenheimer Park. “I was blown away. I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe I’ve got something here.’ ”That was five years ago. Since then, Soloman has graduated, built a business called Gwaii Urban Wear (www.gwaiiwear.com/ ), and launched a line of funky, First Nations–inspired casual clothing for the fall 2008 season. L’Oréal Fashion Week picked up on her promise and included her line in Toronto in March. Coast Salish–Kwakiutl designer Pam Baker has taken Soloman under her haute couture wing. And the Tale’awtxw Aboriginal Capital Corporation, which supports aboriginal businesses in the Coast Salish territories, gave her a loan with a 40-percent grant portion.With so much out-of-the-woodwork support, Soloman wants to know why more First Nations youth aren’t designing First Nations–themed lines. She was, as far as she knows, the first Native student to take fashion design and technology at Kwantlen. (The school’s name means “tireless runner” in Halkomelem.)“I couldn’t believe it [the market] hadn’t been tapped yet,” she said. “There’s so much potential.…To me, it’s a no-brainer. It’s an easy sell.”Soloman is one of just a few First Nations clothing designers in the province. Haida designer Dorothy Grant, who sells under her own name; Baker, whose collection is called Touch of Culture; and Cree-French designer Denise Brillon of Artifaax are among the handful that have made it onto the radar.Stylistically speaking, Soloman’s collection falls between Artifaax’s screen-printed hoodies and leather cuffs, and Grant’s and Baker’s couture. A signature piece is her dark denim miniskirt with Haida-style frogs in running stitch on the pockets. She’s also releasing a knee-length jersey-knit dress made of burgundy viscose and spandex, with eagles on two hip pockets. Already, she said, the Hudson’s Bay Company has expressed interest in carrying her line.While Soloman is full of promise, the mainstreaming of aboriginal style has a dark history in this province. The Cowichan sweater tells the story well, according to Sylvia Olsen, who lives in the Tsartlip First Nation community near Victoria. The sweater is a lifelong love of hers, providing the subject for her master’s thesis, a National Film Board documentary, a children’s book (Yetsa’s Sweater), and a book she is writing on the sweater’s history. Olsen is nonaboriginal but married a Salish man, and her children are fifth-generation Cowichan knitters.“Starting in midcentury, before the polar fleece was around, they were the outerwear of the West Coast,” she told the Straight in a phone interview from Ottawa. The bulky-knit, undyed, grey-wool sweaters with two bands of repeating patterns had their fashion heyday, she found, from the 1950s to the 1970s. The sweaters became so popular internationally that they were replicated by companies as far away as New Zealand, Olsen said. Their popularity was a compliment, she noted, but practically speaking it meant foreign-made sweaters were selling alongside authentic sweaters in local stores. For the Salish, it led to the registering of a certification mark for the sweaters, signifying the fact that a true Cowichan sweater has no seams, is made from hand-spun wool, and is knitted by a Coast Salish person. Despite such specific guidelines, the trademark failed to protect the sweaters from copiers, Olsen said. The process also created an unexpected result.“Cowichan sweaters became etched in historical stone,” she said. “They did not follow fashion.”Nonaboriginal designers evolved them, though. Calvin Klein, Olsen recalled, made a beautiful Cowichan-inspired sweater out of silk and mohair. Last year, the Gap made a line of stylish Cowichan-looking sweaters. So did Vancouver-based retailer Aritzia, whose sweaters are closer-fitting than the originals, and are wildly popular. None of those tributes have directly benefited “real” Cowichan knitters, though.What can designers and consumers learn from the Cowichan experience? Olsen suggests that young First Nations designers must push traditional designs forward to keep them relevant—just as Soloman is doing. And fusion is essential, she said.In recent years, moccasins, mukluks, parkas, the traditional Métis fringed leather jacket, and other “traditional” First Nations items have been replicated by non-Native manufacturers. To Soloman, this is a tragedy.“I don’t agree with it at all,” she said. “Why do white people think they can take our culture away from us and make money on it? It’s the one thing we have that we’re proud of.”Through her collection, Soloman is doing her part. And undoubtedly, when Gwaii Urban Wear releases its collection this fall, it will be a coup in a new era of authentic First Nations design in Canada.

Ladies Office Wear In the pilot episode of Sex and the City, sex columnist/anthropologist Carrie Bradshaw posits, "Can women have sex like men?" A decade later, a film based on the series is hitting theaters, and the real question is, "Can women have movies like men?"Take a concept that's centered on four Manhattan women and their frank discussions of sex, love and relationships, and you're guaranteed a bevy of follow-up questions: How do these women afford their extravagant New York lives? Why do their worlds revolve around men? What does this say about women in our society?Because Sex and the City is first and foremost a show about women, mostly made for women (and their gay best friends), there's a lot more at stake. For instance, no one asked what Iron Man said about rich white men with a propensity for blowing stuff up. The series positioned itself as a show with something to say and, with a chance to overtake the box office, what's the message?Don't let the titillating title fool you; Sex and the City is a story about friendship. More than the men, more than the shoes and more than the drinks, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte put friends first. In a world with far too many Mean Girls, here's a group of women who rise above the cattiness that supposedly defines female friendships.Over the course of the show's six seasons and now the film, the ladies have been in love, they've been cheated on and one of them was even dumped via a Post-it note. The men who have come in and gone out of their lives were always B characters, and, inevitably, these men taught the women they could truly trust only each other. Charlotte, the series' strongest advocate of true love, once even went so far as to suggest to the group, "Maybe we could be each other's soul mates."On a show in which dating and mating are the driving forces, the ladies never even fought over a man.It's bigger than that, though, and, in fact, it's bigger than all the men (even Mr. Big himself). There are real issues in there beyond all the "Why didn't he call?" and "Where is this relationship going?"We've watched the ladies face the societal pressures that accompany singledom, the lingering questions after an abortion and the fear that comes with an HIV test. The girls took on these problems together, without judgment. The show never preached a specific message, but it laid out these situations so matter-of-factly that even in the highfalutin Manhattan setting, the emotion still felt real. The way these women unconditionally supported one another was a reminder to women everywhere not to forget who really matters.But the show speaks to the individual as well. Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte long have been thought of as hyperbolic representations of certain personality traits. Any "Which Sex and the City character are YOU?" quiz will tell you Samantha is the sexually liberated one, Miranda is cynical and career-driven, and Charlotte is the wide-eyed optimist and pseudo-slave to convention. Oftentimes it's believed Carrie is the most complete of the bunch, but her crippling dependency issues and all-around nagging neediness are reason enough to think she's a caricature as well.The exaggerated characters offer a glimpse into the many competing ideals women face. Carrie's indecisiveness, Samantha's longing for personal gratification, Miranda's ruthless desire for independence and Charlotte's wanting for the Better Homes and Gardens magazine ideal combine for a cocktail of emotions most women (and yes, also men) feel on some level.What some see as one of the show's fatal flaws — propagating these traditionally female stereotypes — is actually one its greatest strengths. Charlotte's quest for Prince Charming is just as valid as Miranda's opposition to being "saved" by a man. On the surface, it's a feminist conundrum. But to illustrate how these conflicting emotions can happily coexist — be it over brunch or in any woman's life — only serves to eliminate the guilt of simply feeling. It's about choice, if you will, and every woman should be empowered to feel comfortable with her choices no matter what they may be.That's not to say Sex and the City is a perfect bastion of the feminist ideal. Among all the feel-good, best-girlfriends moments is a heaping dose of rampant consumerism that smacks viewers over the head with all the subtlety of a Manolo Blahnik heel wedged in your eye socket. There's all the usual trappings of wear this and buy that (and be pretty and Caucasian) that have taken a toll on the show's ability to deliver profundity.However, considering how deeply entwined the characters are with the fashionable New York scene, all the designer-name-dropping feels almost like character development."Realism" is another criticism that has plagued the series, given the gals' fancy apartments and disproportionate lifestyle-to-perceived-income ratios. Of course, when you consider the series (which greatly departed from Candace Bushnell's original collection of columns on which Sex and the City was based) is fiction, there's really no other alternative but to shut your cosmo-hole and focus on the bigger picture.The answer to "Can women have movies like men?" currently is "No." As cultural consumers, we're still at a point where a potential summer blockbuster focusing on four aging gal pals is a bit of an oddity and thus attracts a fair amount of scrutiny.