SILENT NO MORE
How do you tell the story of aboriginal women in Canada today? These young women take us to the front lines of a national crisis. Special eight-page standalone section.
WINNIPEG • “Do you worry for your safety — whether you may end up like Tina or Rinelle?”
A group of teenage girls — most of them strangers to one another — all raise their hands. “Do you trust the police?” Each girl shakes her head “No.” “How many of you have had loved ones disappear or get killed?”
They shoot quick glances at one another. Then, slowly, arms are raised: One, then two, finally about three-quarters of the room, signal to the others that they know this kind of pain.
At least half say someone in their family has been sexually abused. Some talk about what their own mothers endured. Every single girl says her grandparents suffered abuse at residential schools.
There are 12 girls in this classroom, all aboriginal students at Winnipeg’s Maples Collegiate Institute. They range from 15 to 19 — about the same age as Tina Fontaine, whose body was found wrapped in plastic in the Red River last summer, and Rinelle Harper, who survived a brutal assault and was left for dead on the banks of the Assiniboine River.
The group gathered at the end of a year of mounting outrage over murdered and missing indigenous women — an RCMP report last May logged 1,181 of them — and calls for a national inquiry. On the day the girls met up, Rinelle Harper added her voice to the cause at a speech before the Assembly of First Nations’ Special Chiefs Assembly in Winnipeg.
The issue remains in the spotlight: This weekend, there will be marches in cities across Canada to pay tribute to murdered aboriginal women. Later this month, there is a roundtable on the crisis in Ottawa.
But what’s too often missing from these discussions is what it’s like for young aboriginal women living in the shadow of the headlines. What it’s like to face grim statistics about your future: 54% of girls like you will be sexually assaulted, beaten, choked or threatened with a gun or a knife; four times more likely to be victims of a homicide.
The girls at Maples are chosen for a four-day workshop — a partnership between the National Post and the School of Communications, Media & Design at Toronto’s Centennial College — to help them share their point of view. Teachers at the school think they’ll get something out of a crash course on basic photography and storytelling techniques. A few are joined at the hip, but otherwise the girls are chosen at random.
All of them could, in some ways, be considered “lucky.” They aren’t on the streets. They aren’t without hope, or choices. Their grades range from just passing to the 90s, but they all plan to go on to college or university or to pursue a trade. They play hockey and guitar, volunteer and work part-time jobs. They are regular teenagers, who complain about how long it takes to get ready in the morning and find solace in the lyrics of their favourite songs.
The girls live in a neighbourhood called Maples. It borders the rough north end of Winnipeg, but is an up-and-coming suburb where the average family income is $45,000 (higher than the city’s median income) and the streets are lined with modest bungalows. While aboriginal students make up just 15% of the student body at Maples — one of the biggest, most diverse schools in the city, with 1,625 kids — the school strongly supports indigenous culture. The week of the workshop, a new wing of the school is blessed with a pipe ceremony.
Despite their relative advantages, however, most of these girls have been touched by tragedy: They talk about a cousin murdered in her own home; a friend discovered dead on a snowmobile trail — brutalized so badly locals thought she was attacked by dogs; relatives who went downtow and never returned; parents who succumbed to drug addiction.
Some of the girls also say they have been bounced from home to home, or displaced from reserves they’re not sure they’ll ever return to.
They are surprisingly open about how all of this makes them feel. They talk about their struggles with depression, anxiety, eating disorders and abusive partners. They also express that typical teenage feeling of not quite fitting in — a feeling amplified by identity and circumstance.
They are also keenly aware of the subtle and not-so-subtle racism aboriginals face — particularly in Winnipeg. The week of their workshop, a teacher at Kelvin High School, across town, wrote a Facebook post about aboriginals that made headlines: “They have contributed NOTHING to the development of Canada. Just standing with their hand out.”
The girls experience reverseracism as well. Despite deep roots on reserves — many of them were born there, others have left only for the opportunity to finish high school in Winnipeg — the girls say they are often criticized for living away from their traditional land. They are bullied, and called “whitewashed.”
And yet they have deep pride in their traditions. They don’t despair about their futures — if anything, they have grand dreams and ambitions, for themselves and the aboriginal community.
These girls are certainly not victims.
But they are afraid. The biggest threat, they believe, lurks outside of their communities, on the streets of Winnipeg. The girls say aboriginal women are being “targeted” by strangers. They share warnings posted on Facebook about a black van that’s been driving around “kidnapping girls/women for sex, then dumping their bodies.”
“It’s not so much a coincidence,” one girl says. “I think it’s a plan.”
The reality is more complicated: The RCMP report on murdered and missing aboriginal women released last May showed how close the majority of victims are to perpetrators; 40% of aboriginal women die at the hands of spouses or boyfriends, 23 % are killed by family.
The week after the girls’ workshop, the Winnipeg Police Service said the black van warning was a “hoax.”
So is there actually targeting going on? How much of how the girls see their world is influenced by social media, by one another? It’s tough to parse, when even First Nations leaders and politicians are still grappling with the forces behind the violence and racism experienced by so many.
Cameron Alexis, Alberta’s AFN Regional Chief, acknowledges the challenges within the aboriginal community. In December, he issued a statement saying, “We must all stand together to condemn these senseless acts of violence, particularly by our own people. We must stop hurting one another, we must end the pattern.”
The girls in the workshop don’t usually share their fear or frustration with loved ones, let alone other girls their age, or teachers, or the press. It’s painful.
For most of them, expressing all this started with the workshop, an experience they describe as both difficult and empowering.
After the first day of talking, Indigenous Peoples teacher Reuben Boulette lights sage in a smudge bowl, an opalescent half shell.
“This has been pretty heavy,” he says, as he passes the bowl around.
One girl says, “No one has ever asked us about this before.”