When Rudy Wiebe interviewed Sittichinli for his 2011 book River of Stone, he wrote he was the only participant in the manhunt who was still alive.[3]
Wiebe wrote that Sittichinli and his wife had been married for 67 years, and that 12 of their 14 children had predeceased them.[3]
Cynthia Chambers Erasmus offered Sittichinli's testimony before the Berger Commission as an example of a key speech pattern of First Nations elders, in a journal article entitled "Ways with Stories: Listening to the Stories Aboriginal People Tell".[4] She spent two pages deconstructing Sittichinli's testimony.
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Cynthia Chambers Erasmus (March 1989). "Ways with Stories: Listening to the Stories Aboriginal People Tell". Language Arts. 66 (3): 269–271. JSTOR41411738. One of the thousand, the testimony of Lazarus Sittichinli, exemplifies much of the discourse style of the aboriginal witnesses to these hearings. Rather than employing a rational, impersonal style of argumentation, Lazarus persuades his audience by demonstration. He leads his listeners through a series of personal experiences which constitute the bulk of the testimony and illustrate his unstated point. When personal experiences are an important source of knowledge, stories about those experiences are an important means of persuasion. Thus for aboriginal speakers such as Lazarus, stories are an important way of establishing who they are, what they know, and why the audience should heed their words.
