‘Don’t give up,’ mother urges at MMIWG hearing
Survivors traumatized by legal experience, commissioners hear
SASKATOON Sitting through the sentencing hearing of the man who killed her 19-year-old daughter was the hardest part for Gwenda Yuzicappi.
In January 2009, Yuzicappi was in Regina Court of Queen’s Bench to see the man who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for his role in the slaying of her daughter, Amber Redman.
During that process, Yuzicappi heard the tragic details of her daughter’s last moments — that she was raped and begged for her life before she was punched and fatally stabbed. The court experience was traumatic.
Victim services workers were present in court, “but it was like they weren’t there,” Yuzicappi said. Members of Redman’s family had poured out their feelings in victim impact statements and didn’t know where to look for support. The family had received an autopsy report that detailed how Redman died, but they didn’t know how to read it and were shocked when they heard the details in court.
Yuzicappi shared her story on Tuesday in Saskatoon with the commissioners of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. She said courts need to change the way they deal with victims and their families.
“We need that support, we need that counselling, we need that culture, we need our teachings to come in — and that wasn’t offered,” she said.
Yuzicappi last saw her daughter on a July night in 2005. Redman — a happy, fiercely independent woman who took pride in fixing the beat-up car she’d bought after a win at bingo — was going to a Fort Qu’Appelle bar with her boyfriend and cousin.
That night, she got drunk and argued with her boyfriend, who left the bar. He called Yuzicappi the next day to see if Redman had ever made it home. She hadn’t.
At first, Yuzicappi wasn’t concerned. Redman was the type of person who was happy to go off on her own and likely needed time to cool off after the argument, she told the inquiry. But days passed and she still didn’t come home. Her boyfriend filed a missing person’s report four days later.
For two years and 10 months, Yuzicappi and the police searched for Redman. Yuzicappi told the commissioners she blamed herself for not calling police sooner. She liked to stay by her phone and kept her car full of gas so she could get to Redman immediately if she called.
Prayer, smudging and going to sweat lodges helped her cope during that period, but she still suffered from depression and had suicidal thoughts.
The phone call informing her that her daughter’s remains had been found on the Little Black Bear reserve was devastating.
“My hope that I had grasped onto for so long, for those two years and 10 months, was gone. My daughter wasn’t coming home,” an emotional Yuzicappi told the commissioners.
It later came out in court that two men from Little Black Bear met Redman in the bar and invited her back to their home, where she was beaten and later killed.
Little Black Bear is less than 70 kilometres from Standing Buffalo First Nation, where Redman grew up. Yuzicappi said there were rumours surrounding her daughter’s death and she can’t understand why no one from Little Black Bear told her or the police what had happened.
She said she still has many unanswered questions, including why only one person went to prison for Redman’s murder.
In the nearly three years Redman was missing, she became a symbol of the challenges faced by missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Today, her likeness is immortalized in a statue outside the Saskatoon police headquarters, which captures her dancing with her shawl transforming into eagle wings.
Yuzicappi said she hopes some lessons can be learned from her daughter’s story.
“I know that there is a reason, there is a purpose, within her 19 years of life. There’s a purpose in her gifts that she taught me, as her mother, in knowing there are more and more of our First Nations women that are going missing,” she said.
“Every day is a tragedy and we have to bring this issue to the forefront and I strongly believe this public inquiry is going to do that. I believe that so strongly that all the family members that are here, that still have loved ones missing, don’t give up your hope, keep a grasp, hold onto that hope. Don’t give up.”