Indigenous women urge Canadians to imagine enduring their pain
Trudy Smith was born at sea on her father’s fishing boat 61 years ago, one of 12 children in an Indigenous family living a remote lifestyle on B.C.’s northern coast.
But when she was six, authorities forced Smith’s parents to take her and her siblings to a residential school near Port Alberni. She can remember running after their departing truck, yelling “Mommy! Daddy!” until a nun grabbed her roughly by the wrist and dragged her into the school.
“You are scared. You are in Grade 2,” a weeping Smith told the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which is holding hearings in Vancouver this week. “I wet the bed that night.”
She spoke to the commission about a childhood and young adulthood marred by sexual abuse and violence, and also of her beloved sister, Pauline Johnson, who was stabbed to death in 1985 when she was 30 years old. There has never been an arrest, making Smith feels like she and her sister are “invisible” to the justice system.
“It’s really, really hard because I feel so lost and so alone, because I need somebody out there to help me with this case,” said Smith, whose heartbreaking sobs echoed throughout the large inquiry room. “I want justice for Pauline so she can finally rest. She’s had enough pain, just like I did in my life.”
Johnson, originally from Gold River, was last seen working as an exotic dancer at the Marble Arch Hotel, then boarded a bus alone, apparently on her way home. Two days later, in April 1985, her badly beaten body was found in some bushes on a road in Coquitlam.
Smith told the inquiry Johnson was a funny, loving sister who graduated from high school and was doing her best to raise her three children, despite being the victim of domestic abuse.
“Pauline had a lot of friends. She was just like me: You are happy on the outside, but you’re hurting on the inside,” said Smith, who now lives in Campbell River. “She didn’t deserve this. She was a good lady.”
Smith was one of more than 100 registered to speak over five days this week at a Richmond hotel, as the inquiry gathered information about how to reduce violence inflicted on Indigenous women.
The commission has held community hearings across Canada. Metro Vancouver will be the final stop, unless the federal government grants the inquiry’s recent request for an extension.
Elizabeth Wilson told the commission she was a Heiltsuk language teacher in Bella Bella for 12 years and is now at the University of B.C. studying to become a teacher in her hometown. She believes teaching native language and culture to the next generation is an important part of the healing process.
“Through residential school, we all learned that their intent was to take away from us what we had,” she said. “Now I’m teaching youth about things that were hidden from them for so long.”
Her youth was not a happy one. Her father, a member of the Heiltsuk Nation, had a difficult life, and that cycle continued for Wilson, who fled the violence as a young teenager. She met her now ex-husband at age 15, and the teenage couple had three babies, but her spouse became extremely violent when he drank.
She told the commissioners there should be more support — counselling and emergency help — for youth and young couples.
“To have a place for them to go at any age, I think would keep them safe. And that would keep a lot of our youth in our lives,” she said.
Her mother’s cousin, Tracy Clifton, went missing in the 1970s, before Wilson was born, after running away from her family home in Prince Rupert.
“She had an argument with her mom and left home and started walking the highway, which is now referred to as the Highway of Tears, and was never seen again,” Wilson said.
She hopes Canadians will listen to the stories being told at the hearings, and learn from what Indigenous women have experienced.
“How would they cope with living a life like I’ve lived? Would they have survived? Would they have come out a good person or a broken person?” she asked. “Put themselves in the shoes of the person they are listening to.”