LONG JOURNEY TOWARD PEACE
A victim of hopelessness, Carleen McDonald’s name will be listed among 1,181 missing or murdered aboriginal women as her sister — and a nation tangled in tragedy — seek healing
AKWESASNE, N.Y. The search for Carleen McDonald ended on a brisk October morning.
A deer hunter happened upon her body in the woods behind her parents’ home. She’d been dead for seven weeks.
Cheryl McDonald remembers how desperate they had been. She spent hours walking through the reeds on the outskirts of Akwesasne, restlessly scanning the field for some trace of her big sister.
She hoped to find a path in the grass, a set of footprints, anything. As she tracked across the muddy soil, she kept thinking of what Carleen said the day she disappeared.
“She told one of my sisters, ‘Think of me when you smell sweet grass,’” Cheryl said. “I know she was planning her end. She was trying to give us signs, and when my mom said she was missing, we knew she was laying out there, somewhere out there. We looked where the sweet grass was. In Akwesasne, it grows wherever there’s water.”
In the beginning, the search party was exhaustive: Mohawk police patrolled the Akwesasne marshes on foot while the Sûreté du Québec buzzed overhead in a helicopter. Canine units also scoured the territory.
After three days, the group dwindled to neighbours, friends and family. Time wore on and the McDonalds despaired. They visited seers and fortune tellers for a sign from beyond. But that only seemed to heighten tensions.
The end came as they were nearing their breaking point.
“The night after they took her out of the woods, it started snowing,” Cheryl said. “We were exhausted, my sisters had missed work and left their families to find Carleen. Our husbands needed us, our children needed us, we couldn’t have gone on for much longer. We needed some sort of closure.”
The hunter found Carleen in the forest bed next to an empty bottle of rum. She was 25 years old.
When they recovered her body, the medical examiner said she probably drank the rum, then fell into a deep sleep and died of exposure.
Just before Carleen crept out of her parents’ house and into the night on Sept. 4, 1988, she leaned over her four-year-old daughter’s bed and soothed her. It was one of the child’s earliest memories.
Two days after she disappeared, her family rummaged through her things looking for a hint that might lead them to Carleen. They found a letter stuffed in an envelope.
It was a suicide note. In death, Carleen became part of a troubling Canadian narrative: one of the many young aboriginal women whose lives were cut short by violence.
Between 1980 and 2012, 1,181 aboriginal women disappeared or were murdered, according to the RCMP. Aboriginal women are six times more likely to die from homicide than non-aboriginal women, according to Statistics Canada.
Carleen’s death might not have been a homicide but her story will be recorded alongside hundreds of others this fall at the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women and Girls. Cheryl will testify at the public inquiry.
The $53-million inquiry will engrave these women’s stories into Canadian history but it will also look at why so many indigenous women are affected by violence and how that trauma ripples through their communities.
Like many of the aboriginal women who died violently these past four decades, Carleen was a casualty of domestic abuse. The abuse isolated her from her children, her sisters, her community and herself.
She sought comfort in the numbing effects of alcohol.
In speaking out about her big sister’s death, Cheryl has been embraced by a community that spans dozens of indigenous territories and cuts across generations to link families throughout Canada.
Before the inquiry was mandated by the Trudeau government in 2015, the families of Canada’s missing and murdered aboriginal women found solace with each other.
“The people who have gone through this, they carried this pain alone for a very long time,” said Mary Hannaburg, a board member of Quebec Native Women, one of the early proponents of a public inquiry. “But then they began to realize they weren’t alone, that there were so many others just like them. They formed a bond through this national tragedy.
“Now it’s time for the whole country to listen. There might not always be an answer, we might not always figure out why this happens, but there can be healing and there can be closure.” Growing up, the four McDonald sisters navigated between worlds.
They were raised in upstate New York but spent summers with their Mohawk relatives in Kanesatake, near Montreal. They lived on Onondaga territory but attended school off-reserve, among the white children in Lafayette, N.Y.
Cheryl’s father, a Korean War veteran, was an ironworker. He plied his trade on bridges and office buildings near the family home. Her mom took odd jobs cleaning homes in nearby Syracuse.
At Lafayette High School, Carleen earned a reputation as a prankster.
One afternoon, in a bit of mischief gone awry, Carleen accidentally locked herself in her own locker. “We heard a pounding noise in the hallway and the teacher ran out of the classroom to see what it was,” Cheryl said. “Sure enough, it was her, she was hiding in her locker waiting to jump out at her friends. But somebody saw the locker door open and just shut it.
“She was funny, rambunctious, but she was tough, too. She was stronger than me. She used to wrestle with me to toughen me up. She was such a tomboy. She made me strong, too.”
Carleen was 15 when she met her future husband. He was 25 and fresh out of the United States Army.
Cheryl likes to say her sister fell in love with his good side: kindhearted, charming and educated. He’d also trained as a millwright and seemed like the kind of man who could provide for a family.
But there was a dark a side to him as well.
“As hard as we had it growing up, it was worse for him,” said Cheryl, who asked that his name not be published out of respect for her family. “His family was evicted from the Onondaga (aboriginal) territory because his mother was white. He came back into town as a teenager and his own cousins jumped him.”
Carleen gave birth to the couple’s first child, a boy, when she was 16. The couple eventually rented a place in Syracuse and Carleen’s parents moved back to Akwesasne.
Cheryl says she started to notice things get bad after her nephew was born.
“When the baby had a bruise, it was, ‘Babies fall. It happens.’ It was overlooked,” Cheryl said. “And then I remember (her second child), another baby, she’s crying in her crib and my sister won’t tend to her . ... He wouldn’t let her go to the baby. He said, ‘That baby is spoiled.’
“When I had children of my own, I wouldn’t leave them (at Carleen’s),” she said. “Her kid is playing outside, something happens, this kid is terrified, running through the house, and it’s not a predator chasing them, it’s their father, chasing them into a closet. They were terrified of that man.
The people who have gone through this, they carried this pain alone for a very long time. But then they began to realize they weren’t alone, that there were so many others just like them. They formed a bond through this national tragedy.
“He was in the army, my husband was in the army, my father was, a lot of our men have this pain that they bring home. And who’s around them? Us, their children, their wives, their siblings, their friends. Everybody knows and nobody knows. That’s the thing about domestic violence.”
Cheryl remembers trying to be stern with her sister, begging her to leave her husband and forge a new, safer home for the children.
“I’ve learned people will take a little bit of love even if the rest is bad, they’ll still cling to that love,” Cheryl said. “My sister met him when she was just a child. He was all she ever knew. I imagine the thought of living without him was scary.”
Though there are few comprehensive studies comparing rates of domestic violence among aboriginal and non-aboriginal families, the available data suggest a significant imbalance. A Statistics Canada 1999 survey found that 25 per cent of aboriginal women reported experiencing violence from a current or former partner — that’s about three times higher than in non-aboriginal communities. There isn’t one explanation that accounts for this statistical gap, but a 2003 report by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation points to multiple factors.
The residential school experience — which saw tens of thousands of indigenous children taken from their families, beaten and molested in state-run schools — instilled a pattern of abuse in thousands of families across Canada. Often that violence was handed down through generations.
The report outlines the “wholeness of aboriginal history,” wherein the federal government, using the threat of military violence, subjected entire territories to cruel and unfair treatment. This brutality was replicated within the communities themselves.
Both Carleen and her partner’s families had, to some degree, experienced this pattern of violence.
“Violence is often a response to trauma, it can be passed down across generations,” said Hannaburg, who also works as a therapist at the Kanesatake Health Centre. “People turn that violence against their spouses, their children and, in many cases, they turn that violence against themselves.
“Part of the work of the public inquiry will be to try to break that cycle. I don’t know if this inquiry can do that but it has to try if things are going to get better.”
As Carleen’s life continued to unravel, the sisters drifted apart.
Cheryl moved north to Kanesatake and started her own family. Carleen separated from her husband in 1988 and took the kids to her parents’ house in Akwesasne. He stayed in Syracuse. Later, she found out her husband had fallen in love with another woman.
On the last day anyone saw her alive, Carleen began dropping hints that something was amiss. She called Cheryl’s house looking for her two other sisters.
“She asked me how my husband and the kids were doing but I sort of rushed her off the phone,” Cheryl said. “We weren’t getting along at that point. My big sister could be so loving, but there was also a lot of anger there, too. I regret that that was our last conversation. It haunted me for a long time.”
When Cheryl got the call that her sister was missing, she says she could feel something terrible in the pit of her stomach.
“I think I knew then that Carleen was gone,” she said. When the police finally recovered Carleen’s remains, her husband broke down. “I remember he was crying and he said, ‘If I could just get her back, I would fix everything, I would make everything better,’ ” Cheryl said. “That’s when I really began to feel empathy for him. It was his loss, too. He suffered too. There was a good man in there somewhere.”
They buried Carleen on a hill at the confluence of three nations. She was laid to rest in Akwesasne, on a plot of land that rolls into the St. Lawrence River. Her grave overlooks a pair of green islands that bulge from the Canadian side of the water.
To the Mohawk people who lived and died in this valley before it was split into countries, states and provinces, it will always be home.
Cheryl clutches a heart-shaped wreath as she walks toward her sister’s grave on a muggy August afternoon. She hangs it upon the wooden cross, leans down and whispers something into the ground.
It hasn’t always been easy for Cheryl to come back to this place.
“I grew up in the Iroquois Longhouse tradition, where, when someone died, you got 10 days to mourn and you stopped crying after that,” she said. “That’s what I did. I worked on my career, my kids, my marriage. My husband found sobriety and I kept pushing myself forward.”
The grief ate away at her over the years. She watched as a national tragedy unfolded.
“I kept hearing stories just like Carleen’s,” she said. “Stories about aboriginal girls and women that disappeared. Of sisters and daughters and mothers who were killed like they were nothing. It took me a long a time to admit to myself that Carleen was part of something a lot bigger.”
Then, in the spring of 2015, Cheryl had a breakthrough. She left her job at the Assembly of First Nations and, for the first time since Carleen died, she spoke up.
“That’s when the healing started,” she said. “I shared Carleen’s story during a vigil at Cabot Square and there was no looking back.”
A few months later, Cheryl travelled to Winnipeg with another sister for the Roundtable on Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women and Girls. They began meeting people who shared their pain, strangers who were willing to unburden themselves in hopes of finding peace.
It was in this safe place that Cheryl learned to cry again.
“I remember going to the traditional healers and breaking down,” she said. “I shed so many tears it dehydrated me. I fell to my knees, I cried and wailed until there was nothing left inside of me.”
Delbert Sampson was one of the first healers to work with Cheryl. He credits his spirituality with helping him get sober and move on from the abuse he suffered at residential school.
To him, the residential school crisis mirrors the situation with Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous women.
“I was lost for years, I was an alcoholic into my 40s, I needed something to make me feel whole again,” said Sampson, who hails from the Shuswap Nation in British Columbia. “These families are lost too. A lot of them have carried this pain for an entire lifetime. And a lot of them are finding help from traditional healing, from sharing and listening and expressing themselves. That’s when they can let go and give themselves permission to heal.”
Carleen’s death cut deep into the McDonald family. It has strained some relationships among the surviving siblings and there are some questions about Carleen’s final days that will never be answered.
There will always be traces of guilt, feelings of culpability and questions about how, if one or two things had been different, Carleen might still be alive.
For years rumours about her death possibly being a homicide persisted and the McDonalds will always wonder if the police and government could have done more to find Carleen.
Cheryl says her sister’s children have grown up to become loving parents and they’re all on their own path toward a better future. She knows Carleen would be proud.
Cheryl wipes a tear and drives out of the graveyard.
“I’m going to buy her a tombstone soon,” she says, referring to the wooden cross planted above Carleen’s grave. “It’ll be nice. She deserves it, her kids deserve it.”
By the time she parks her truck next to the river, Cheryl’s mood has brightened considerably. She wanders toward the water, where a group of children are swimming under a willow tree.
She doesn’t know any of the kids, but Cheryl immediately assumes the role of a fun aunt, warning the children to be careful as they climb the tree but then encouraging them to leap from its branches into the water.
In a few hours she’ll attend a play about missing and murdered aboriginal women. One of the actresses will start to tear up as she thanks Cheryl for attending the production. Cheryl will tell her sister’s painful story in front of a packed audience.
But for now Cheryl can live in the moment. She seems at peace.
“Things get better, there is healing. There was a time where I didn’t think that was possible.”
I remember going to the traditional healers and breaking down. I shed so many tears it dehydrated me. I fell to my knees.