‘It’s sad for us, the survivors’
Inquiry hears of tragedies, and hope for change
Eagle feathers provide strength, symbolic quilts adorn the walls and a sacred fire burns in the courtyard of a Richmond hotel, where the largest — and possibly the last — community hearing is underway by the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
More than 100 people registered to speak over five days this week, making it the biggest of the dozen community hearings the commission has held across Canada in the past year. The response in this province is not surprising given the disproportionately high number of missing women from B.C., the notorious Robert (Willy) Pickton serial murder case, and the many unsolved murders and disappearances along the Highway of Tears. Activists and family members from B.C. fought for years for this national inquiry, which began in September 2016, but it has been criticized for delays and a lack of communication with families, and hampered by high-profile resignations.
The commissioners are to submit a final report by December. They recently asked for a two-year extension so they can hold more hearings, but the federal government has not yet responded.
The people who have spoken so far this week have told of how they walked a common road of violence, racism and despair, but they have all asked the commissioners to lobby for change so the path leads to hope for future generations. Here, we share the stories of four families with diverse histories that are bound together by resilience and strength.
THE DEAD
In a Haida Gwaii graveyard, weeds have grown over the place where Carol Ruby Davis was buried in an unmarked grave in 1987, making it difficult for relatives to visit her exact resting place.
“There is no sign of her being there,” Carol’s sister Lori Davis said.
Lori Davis has fought for three decades to ensure her sister, whose 1987 killing is unsolved, will never be invisible. She asked the First Nations Summit 25 years ago, when she worked there, to push for this type of an inquiry. She keeps in touch with the RCMP for updates on the cold case and she routinely tweets out Carol’s photo with the phrase “I speak her name.”
“I travelled this road — and it has been a very long and lonely road — so I could speak her name,” Davis told the inquiry.
The girls were born to a troubled mother of eight children. Lori was raised by her grandparents and didn’t live with her younger sister Carol until age 15, when she moved to Vancouver to be with her mother and her new husband. He was a white man, Lori said, who was abusive and picked on the sisters for their dark skin.
“Carol felt so bad about the colour of her skin, she would bathe in bleach so her skin could get fairer, so we wouldn’t be made fun of by him,” said Davis, who paused several times during her story to weep. “She had a really hard time.”
The grandparents took Lori back to Haida Gwaii, but Carol’s life spiralled downward as she masked her pain with drugs, ran away from her foster home, and as a teenager had a baby boy, B.J., born with cerebral palsy.
Lori raised B.J., but said Carol was a loving mother who visited often and lavished him with gifts and special outings whenever she could save a bit of money while working the streets of the Downtown Eastside.
“She would always try to make sure that he always had what he needed and what he wished for,” Lori said.
In June 1987, when B.J. was 12, Davis was hosting a barbecue in the backyard of her rented Vancouver home when the Burnaby RCMP knocked on the door. Carol, then 29, had been killed, her body dumped in some bushes.
No arrest has been made, but that doesn’t mean her family has stopped hoping — for answers in Carol’s case, and for a future with less violence against Indigenous women and girls.
“I’m here because we have young children coming up and they need to be safe,” Lori told the commission.
This week on Twitter, Lori changed her daily message to: “I spoke her name.”
THE MISSING
The small photo in Moses Martin’s wallet is peeling and scratched by time, but will never be replaced as it was the last one given to him by his granddaughter before she disappeared 16 years ago.
Martin, a former chief of the Tlao-qui-aht First Nation in Tofino, speaks slowly and softly about 21-year-old Lisa Marie Young, who vanished from a Nanaimo house party in June 2002.
“The pain and the memories that this brings back — but I know it’s important for us to talk about it so that hopefully our grandkids don’t have to experience the same things,” he said. “Like any grandchild, she was beautiful. She was strong. She was young. And somebody took her life.”
Martin urged the commissioners to recommend police get special Indigenous training. Young was driven to the house party by a man in a Jaguar, but Martin said RCMP have not made an arrest and have not provided the family with regular updates.
He also told the commission that police did not begin searching for Young until she had been missing for two months, leaving the job for 30 relatives and friends to do on their own.
“The justice system doesn’t seem to exist, at least in our view,” he said.
To add to his grief, Young ’s mother Joanne Young died last year, never learning what happened to her daughter. Joanne had organized an annual walk in Nanaimo in Lisa Marie’s honour, something Martin and wife Carla Moss will continue.
“It’s sad for us, the survivors, ” Martin said.
After a long pause, he looked at commissioner Michele Audette and added: “I have hope, commissioner, for the work you are doing. I have hope.”
THE SURVIVOR
Michele Guerin, by any measure, leads a successful life. She is a lawyer and has worked on Aboriginal governance issues with B.C. First Nations for three decades.
She lives in North Vancouver with her husband, a retired Vancouver police officer. She is a loving mother and a grandmother.
But, above all else, she is a survivor.
Her fairy tale ending came with a horror-show beginning — one that she shared with the inquiry this week.
When Guerin was born in 1963, her mother Beverly was 25, had worked for three years as a typist at an engineering firm, and was in a relationship with her father. But the baby was taken away before they left the hospital because there was no one to provide “proper parental control,” according to Guerin’s government records.
“They automatically deemed her to be a bad parent because she was Indigenous, and I became another ’60s Scoop statistic,” she said, dabbing away tears.
Her government file contains dozens of letters written by Beverly trying to get Guerin back, but the girl was sent to live with a white foster family with six biological children.
The foster parents cared for her and provided a relatively stable life, but Guerin was sexually abused by several men during her childhood, and grew up feeling not quite Aboriginal and not white either.
“I asked myself the same question a million times: What does it mean to be an Indian?” she said.
Guerin revealed tragic life events that led to her being homeless on the streets, raped multiple times and bounced between foster homes. When she was 15, the government advertised for a new foster family for her, saying she was so independent “absolutely no parenting (was) required.”
“The foster care system failed to protect me. Worst, nothing has changed since I was a 14 years old living on the street,” Guerin said.
She did meet her biological mother, but the relationship was strained by time and other challenges.
Guerin, though, has developed a strong bond with other members of her family and of the Musqueam nation, and believes the best future for Indigenous kids is to stay within their own culture.
“My main message is: Our people can do a better job caring for our children than the current system,” said Guerin, who urged children in care to stay strong and not give up.
“There are hundreds of our kids still living these stories.”
THE PICKTON HORROR
For nearly 20 years, Bonnie Fowler and Cynthia Cardinal have cried and mourned together, two sisters supporting each other through the news that a third sister, Georgina Papin, had been murdered by serial killer Robert (Willy) Pickton.
The sisters have not always been close. Their mother had nine children who were split up and raised in different foster homes.
“We grew up as strangers,” Fowler, the youngest sibling, told the inquiry.
That cycle continued for their beloved sister Papin, who had seven kids of her own who she mothered successfully for a time, but ultimately lost to her battle with drugs.
Papin was funny, an excellent bannock cook and a talented guitar player, her sisters recalled. But because this large Indigenous family had grown up being separated, it didn’t seem unusual when no one had heard from Papin for a couple of years.
“I had always thought of my whole family being missing my whole life,” Fowler said. “We didn’t see each other on a regular basis, and this was normal for me.”
In 2001, Papin’s hand bones were found on Pickton’s Port Coquitlam farm, where the DNA of more than 30 other women missing from the Downtown Eastside was also discovered. Pickton is serving a life sentence for six of those murders, including Papin’s.
That horror still haunts the sisters, but they are also angry that another generation of kids has lost their mothers, and urged the commissioners to recommend that the system try harder to keep families together.
“I think about her children every day and how Georgina missed out on seeing her grandchildren,” Cardinal said.
“They are growing up really fast, most of them are adults now, and they are still feeling the loss and the hurt, and not knowing exactly who they are, and who their mother was,” Fowler told the commissioners. “And it is not money that is going to fix that — it is love and culture.”
The pain and the memories that this brings back — but I know it’s important for us to talk about it.