Aboriginal culture in a broken state
Pickton report uncovers a serious crisis
There is a “tragedy of epic proportion” in this country all right, but it isn’t the one cited in the enormous, expensive and weirdly cloying report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, better known as the Pickton inquiry.
That 1,448-page monster report was delivered in Vancouver this week by commissioner Wally Oppal.
Pickton, of course, is the serial killer Robert (Willie) Pickton, who for years lured women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside — many of them drug addicts or street-sex workers — to his Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm.
Though he was a suspect from as early as 1998, Pickton wasn’t charged until almost four years later. When he was convicted on six counts of seconddegree murder in 2007, 20 other murder charges were stayed.
Oppal, a former B.C. attorney-general, came to some predictable and already pretty well-established conclusions — that the Vancouver Police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police botched the investigation of the missing women for years and that their disappearances were ignored or downplayed, in the first instance, because the cops assumed they were transients prone to just disappearing.
Like most good Canadians, the commissioner meant well. His worthy in- tentions are evident in the report’s title (Forsaken) and the sophomoric collage of words (“joyful, brave, loved, compassionate, mother, caring,” etc., etc.) that adorn the cover and are meant to recognize the murdered women as the complete and complicated human beings they were.
Oppal also offers the conventional Canadian solution mix of mea culpa (from the various police forces who dropped the ball), prescriptions for healing (even, God help me, the hiring of cultural and sex-trade advisers for the police) and sweeping institutional change that would, if implemented, cost the moon, rather like the inquiry itself, which as of last August had already cost $7.85-million, a goodly slice of that for lawyers and commission staff.
But the real tragedy in Canada is something that informs this report and so many others across the land — the crisis that is the broken state of aboriginal culture.
That grim reality makes itself felt in the Pickton report.
Oppal correctly notes numerous times aboriginal women are disproportionately represented both among the impoverished, battered women of the downtown eastside and among the list of missing and murdered women.
While only three per cent of B.C.’s population is Aboriginal, aboriginal women made up 33 per cent of the disappeared and dead, as by other measures they make up about 10 per cent of all female homicides in Canada.
The report includes miniprofiles of almost six dozen women — the most common numbers of the missing and murdered used in recent years.
For the aboriginal women in particular, these profiles paint a ghastly portrait of a culture that is pathologi- cally ill.
These stories, many written by family members, have many common elements: alcoholism and drug addiction; fetal alcohol spectrum disorder repeating itself as a generational issue; physical and sexual abuse in the family; involvement of the childwelfare system; the prevalence of mental illness,
such as schizophrenia; families rent by shocking violence, such as suicide and murder.
At various times, the same awful tale leaks out in dribs and drabs at various inquiries elsewhere in the country.
In Winnipeg right now, it is doing just that at two separate probes examining the killings of aboriginal youngsters who died at the hands of their mothers (in one case, with her violent partner), but who before their deaths, just like the downtown eastside women, had disappeared into inept Canadian bureaucracies, with no one much appearing to notice.
Both young women in Winnipeg came from shattered families where violence, abuse and profound dysfunction were the norm.
Both were demonstrably dangerous parents, yet both were allowed and encouraged to “parent,” in the name of family reunification, with disastrous results.
Both women were failed twice — as vulnerable youngsters themselves, then as young parents in charge of vulnerable youngsters.
As wards of the state, and then as parents whose children were ostensibly being watched over by the state, the two women are part of an absolutely shattering statistic: Of Manitoba’s approximately 9,000 children who are in care, 8,000 are Aboriginal.
Commenting on the tragic state of aboriginal culture wasn’t Oppal’s mandate.
Neither is it the job of the child-welfare inquiries. And let’s be frank: There is little appetite, either in institutional Canada or among Canadians, for the full conversation.
Both sides, it seems, prefer the minute examinations of narrow systems failures — policing there, child welfare here, tomorrow the prison system or mental-health patchwork — with their demands for apologies and calls for healing, with resolute avoidance of the awful big picture.