‘A dangerous place for our women’
Fort St. John, B.C., is a resource-driven city, often filled with young men flush with money, where policing and other services face challenges. Its social strains put indigenous women at high risk, advocates say. They fear it’s getting worse
Helen Knott remembers only that she was in an overcrowded apartment, not far from home, with another young woman and about eight men, all transient workers from outside the community.
“My body, my choices, my rights, my voice, taken that night,” Knott, a social worker, activist and poet wrote in a per- sonal essay online about the sexual assault — not her first — that was so violent she feared losing the ability to have more children.
She was struggling with sobriety at the time and continued to spiral downward, binge-using cocaine and eventually leaving Fort St. John — and her young son — to escape to Edmonton, where she knows how close she came to becoming another statistic, another indigenous woman dead from suicide, drugs or violence.
“I was in this place where I was ready to disappear and I probably would have hit street level and how long would my lifespan have been after that? I’m not sure,” Knott, 28, recalled one afternoon in Fort St. John, the heavy snowfall settling on her hood.
Knott credits a friend in Toronto with saving her life by encouraging countless supporters to flood her with text messages of love and light.
She chose to live, to get treatment, to return home to her family.
She also chose not to be silent anymore, and devotes much of her time as an indigenous community activist to supporting other victims of sexual violence in and around Fort St. John, which she believes is linked to the fluctuating resource-based economy — and the transient, mostly male, workforce that comes with it — in this small city in northeast B.C.
“I see it as imperative to talk about things and start highlighting that, because it really does create a dangerous place for our women and our young women coming up,” said Knott, who has played a central role in leading protests against construction of the $8.8-billion B.C. Hydro Site C dam project on the Peace River.
“If you noticed the landscape around here, it is no trouble to go missing,” said Sylvia Lane, who runs the poverty law advocacy program at the Fort St. John Women’s Resource Society, where chaos reigns amidst the laughter and tears that come with serving a vulnerable population with never enough money or people to do so.
The annual Sisters in Spirit vigils for missing or murdered indigenous women and girls in Fort St. John always feature an astonishingly long list of names for a city with only about 21,000 people, especially since when people think of this issue in British Columbia they think first of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside or the infamous Highway of Tears.
That list includes four unsolved cases involving women of aboriginal descent who went missing directly from Fort St. John and have never been found. They are: Ramona Jean Shular, 37, in 2003; Abigail Andrews, 28, in 2010; Shirley Cletheroe, 45, in 2006; Stacey Rogers, a teenager who disappeared in the mid-1980s. There is also the suspicious death of Pamela Napoleon, 42, whose remains were found in a burnt-out cabin about a month after she was last seen in Blueberry River First Nation, about an hour north along the Alaska Highway.
There are other names of women or girls the local indigenous community counts as missing or having died violently, who were connected to Fort St. John or one of the nearby reserves at some point in their lives.
Connie Greyeyes, 44, who organizes the vigils and is connected in some way to many of the women on the list — including Rogers, who one day just stopped showing up at the pool hall they frequented together when they were both teenagers — says many families have felt the RCMP did not take their investigations seriously.
“Over and over again, that’s all we hear,” said Greyeyes.
“Stories of families who were told they had to wait a certain amount of time, who were told, ‘She’ll be back. She took off. She was drinking. She was partying. You know how she is.’ The list is endless of excuses as to why they didn’t want to go and look for this person, right now.” The RCMP did not make anyone from the Fort St. John detachment available for an interview, but Cpl. Dave Tyreman, a spokesman based in Prince George, said he could not comment on any of the unsolved cases — or concerns raised by families — except to say the investigations are still considered active and are routinely reviewed as new information or technological advances become available.
There is a perception in the community that Fort St. John is a training ground for Mounties at the beginning of their careers, a concern that was raised in a 2011 report by the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.
Tyreman, who also declined an interview but provided written responses to a list of questions from the Star, acknowledged “many” of the 60 police officers working out of the Fort St. John detachment come straight from training at the RCMP’s “Depot” Division in Regina, but noted “there is a wide range of experience to help mentor and train new officers.”
The circumstances surrounding each violent death and disappearance is as unique as the women involved. But when it comes to violence against women in Fort St. John in general, be it from strangers or spouses, there has been some local research looking at whether the nature of the extraction industry — with its high-paying jobs, transient workforce, isolating shift work, culture of hypermasculinity and boom-and-bust cycles — plays a role.
“Many of the social strains created by the regional resource economy, such as the shortage of affordable housing and the large wage gap between women and men, are among the established risk factors for violence against women and girls,” Amnesty International, which has been investigating violence against indigenous women in Fort St. John for a report due later this year, wrote in an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and B.C. Premier Christy Clark last year outlining its concerns with the Site C dam.
The Peace Project, a three-year initiative funded by Status of Women Canada to end violence against women in Fort St. John, conducted local research on possible contributing fac- tors. These included income disparity between men and women, an increase in substance abuse, the high cost of living, a lack of affordable housing and, perhaps most importantly, social services that are forced to provide for a much bigger population than might be officially recognized by their sources of funding.
“When you get an influx of money, you get the underside that comes with it as well,” said Lane, from the Fort St. John Women’s Resource Society, who often deals directly with homeless people, substance abuse and sex workers in the city, which she said has included young women forced into prostitution to pay for rent, or drug debts.
“It’s a small town, but big things happen here,” she said.
Adrienne Greyeyes, 27, said she has seen it growing up in the community, too.
“It was normal for 24-year-old oil workers to be at high school parties, essentially going after young girls.”
“I feel that Fort St. John, because of the work, attracted that sort of lifestyle. . . . You’re giving a lot of young people who have limited life experience such large amounts of money for doing this work and they end up wanting to party and have fun, but it’s our young women who are the ones vulnerable to it,” she said.
Ashley Watson, 25, said she experienced sexual harassment and racism while working in construction over the past few months, which included watching guys pinning up images of near-naked women in the lunch room, or hearing co-workers start singing “One little, two little, three little Indians” when they passed by her and two other female indigenous co-workers.
“I’d come home from work and I’d be crying,” said Watson.
Tracy Porteous, executive director of Ending Violence Association of B.C. (EVA BC), said companies are getting better at responding to impacts on the community, but her organization is calling for gender-based analysis, including a safety impact assessment, to be built into the environmental assessment process required for project approvals.
“I don’t think anybody is specifically hiving off the impacts on women and unless we specifically look at that, we believe that it is not going to get addressed,” she said.
The economy has shifted with the downturn in the oil and gas sector, in particular, but with the Site C dam promising to bring 10,000 new jobs to the area, people who cannot find work elsewhere in Canada, including Alberta, are making their way up — without always having the necessary skills and training to get a job, or a place to stay.
Fort St. John Mayor Lori Ackerman said the municipality has reached an agreement in principle with B.C. Hydro on community measures to help
“It was normal for 24-year-old oil workers to be at high school par because of the work, attracted that sort of lifestyle.”— Adrienne Gre
"I don’t think anybody is specifically hiving off the impacts on women and unless we specifically look at that, we believe that it is not going to get addressed."
TRACY PORTEOUS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF ENDING VIOLENCE ASSOCIATION OF B.C., CALLING ON A REQUIREMENT FOR COMPANIES TO ASSESS THE IMPACT OF MAJOR PROJECTS ON WOMEN’S SAFETY
mitigate the impact of the project, which includes funding for front-line services.
“We told them that our social fabric would be stretched,” she said.
David Conway, a B.C. Hydro spokesman for the Site C dam project, declined an interview, but emailed a statement that said these community measures included building a camp for workers that is self-sufficient and includes an on-site health clinic, as well as 50 new rental housing units in the city — 10 more than are needed for workers — to help relieve the shortage.