Heartbreaking stories aren’t enough to change attitudes

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls met for three days this week in Smithers, one of the communities along northern B.C.’s notorious Highway of Tears. Witnesses told their stories.

A few were heartwarming; most were heartbreaking.

Telling those stories may bring some comfort, even some closure, to victims’ families. But they will resolve nothing. They will merely replicate, in a different context, the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Understandably, families and relatives want perpetrator(s) identified and punished. But the inquiry has no power to reopen cases. The inquiry’s purpose, in its own words, “is simply to find the truth underlying why Indigenous women, girls and LGBTQ2S are so victimized by violence, and are so often the subject of ‘unsolved crimes.’”

I suggest the causes are contained in the inquiry’s title. The victims were indigenous and they were female.

And the deaths will continue as long as indigenous people and indigenous women, in particular, are treated as lesser humans. Or, sometimes, not even humans at all.

I remember the kinds of jokes men used to tell when there were no women present. So-called “locker room humour” treated women as sexual objects, or as sexual victims. “Indian women” were just victims. Fair game for males.

I’m ashamed to admit that I laughed, back then.

Recently, I heard one of those “squaw” jokes told to a mixed group of men, women, and children. I winced. So did several others.

So let’s not kid ourselves that contempt for indigenous women has gone away.

Last January, Barbara Kentner, a young indigenous mother in Thunder Bay, Ont., was hit in the stomach by a trailer hitch hurled from a car speeding by. Witnesses say a blond passenger in the vehicle yelled excitedly, “I got one of them.”

The velocity and impact of the flying hitch caused devastating internal injuries. Kentner died after six months of suffering.

Highway 16, the 700-kilometre stretch of road between Prince Rupert and Prince George, is a spectacular road. In bad weather, spectacularly desolate. Towns average about 100 km apart. If you’re wet, and cold, with no bus until tomorrow, hitch-hiking is the only option; you’ll take any door that opens. Even if it’s opened by a predator who rapes you, kills you, and dumps you.

The Native Women’s Association of Canada lists 582 cases of missing and murdered indigenous women. Forty of those were on the Highway of Tears.

In 2013, the RCMP reported 1,181 incidents of murdered and missing indigenous females, with 225 cases still unsolved. Updated statistics in 2015 showed murder rates “essentially unchanged.”

If the inquiry is to change anything, it has to do more than hear stories. It has to change social attitudes.

When Thunder Bay held an eight-month long inquest into the deaths of seven indigenous students, many indigenous youth testified they were the targets of racial taunts and had garbage thrown at them from passing cars.

An affluent, well-educated congregation in Vancouver arranged a youth exchange with an indigenous band on Highway 16.

The band sent its young people to Vancouver. But when it was time to send Vancouver kids north, the congregation backed out. Who knew what the kids might be exposed to?

It apparently never occurred to them that northern parents might have had the same qualms about Vancouver.

Recurring investigations of sexual harassment in the RCMP, the military, and the prison service confirm a long-standing prejudice against women in male-dominated institutions.

Yes, even in the churches, which supposedly believe in equality before God.

The Roman Catholic Church’s exclusion of women from its hierarchy is obvious.

But even my own supposedly liberal United Church didn’t allow women into ordained ministry until 1936.

After that, it placed a series of hurdles in the path of women seeking ordination. Married women, mothers, and lesbians only achieved ordination after national commissions studied their cases.

When author Louise Mahood documented these hurdles, she commented, “No commission has ever been established, in the life of the United Church, to study a male candidate’s gender, marital status, fatherhood, or sexual orientation.”

Robert Pickton knew he was pretty safe disposing of 49 sex-trade workers — by his own count — in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. If indigenous women disappear, what do you expect? Unreliable. Hooked on drugs and booze...

Changing long-entrenched prejudices calls for mass education, not an inquiry into past practices. We’ve managed to make smoking and impaired driving socially suspect. We need to apply the same effort to overcome prejudice against indigenous peoples in general, and indigenous women in particular.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca.