Story of disappearance, survival
CBC journalist Angela Sterritt remembers first learning about British Columbia’s infamous Highway of Tears around 2003. The 725-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert is known as the location where many women — mostly Indigenous — went missing or were murdered since 1970.
“I was in Gladys Radek’s apartment in Vancouver,” she says of the prominent Indigenous women’s rights advocate. “Gladys was talking about the human rights cases she was doing with Tinseltown. She was saying that something was going on: There were all of these women who have been going missing along Highway 16 for years. She also said that nobody — neither the police nor the media — was paying attention.”
Sterritt’s debut book, “Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls,” is part-memoir, part-investigative reporting into the lives and cases of the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls who disappeared while hitchhiking on northern B.C.’s Highway of Tears, but also before the 1970s on Vancouver’s Eastside.
As she researched the women’s cases and extensively interviewed family members, Sterritt had an overwhelming sense of familiarity. Many of the Gitxsan journalist’s teenage years and early adult life were spent living on the street in downtown Vancouver. Sterritt similarly had to frequently rely on hitchhiking as a means of transportation from city to city.
Sterritt struggled with the idea that including her own story might be perceived as disrespectful to the family members. “I wanted to balance their stories with mine, but I also didn’t want my story to overshadow theirs,” she said. So she allowed her own experiences to become something of an anchor.
“I’m pretty close with a lot of the family members, but I still struggle with thoughts like ‘Could their stories have been elaborated more?’ Really each story could have been its own book. I want people to understand what Indigenous women went through as part of the project of colonization, where members of a society see us as disposable.”
Sterritt became homeless at age 14 when her father, who suffered from alcohol addiction, kicked her out of the house.
“I slept in bank vestibules, under bridges, in the bush and on the street,” she said. As time went on she would also live in SROs (selfregulatory organizations) for residents with minimal income. “I was pretty much a child and had my own rooming house in Kerrisdale. Even when I was applying for university I was still kind of in that street life.” Sterritt saw young girls a lot like herself on missing posters with alarming regularity. “Our vulnerability was in our bodies: we’re young, we’re Indigenous and we’re homeless,” she said.
She also saw how little Indigenous girls and women seemed to matter when it came to accountability. “The way the police handled the cases showed they didn’t care.” Because they didn’t feel protected, Sterritt and the other girls would flee from police. They would also run away from group homes because they felt safer with each other. “At least this way we had our own systems of support and protection,” she said. But this held its own danger. “Oftentimes we had to rely on men who were scary and it often ended up in abuse. The level of assaults was normalized.”
When she became a journalist, Sterritt writes that she would often conceal her past with blazers and blush, and the “emotionless flair” of a reporter. Slowly, she started to share parts of her story but found that guilt and shame would often chip away at healing. Huge blocks of her memory were also gone.
“I still come across people who said we were good friends when we lived on the street, but I’ll have no idea who they are,” she said. A turning point in came in fall 2016, when Sterritt was asked to speak at a conference about Indigenous girls and sexual abuse in Burns Lake. Being among “sisters” gave her a newfound strength and safety net.
One of these women was Brenda Wilson, whose sister Ramona went missing along the Highway of Tears on June 11, 1994, at age 16, hitchhiking to a graduation event in the town of Hazelton, 75 kilometres from her home in Smithers.
“Like me, (Ramona) was Gitxsan and belonged to the Gitanmaax band, she was living away from her traditional territory, and if she were alive today, she would be not too much older than me,” Sterritt writes. “Hearing that she was a poet reminds me of myself as a teen, filling pages and pages of sketchbooks with prose and poesy. I reflect on my experiences as a vulnerable teenager hitchhiking my way across North America in the late 1990s, thinking of how similar my background was to Ramona’s and imagining what could have been my own fate.”
Wilson became a kind of kindred spirit. “As journalists we’re told not to get too close to a story. Objectivity is about this mass distance between you — and I hate this word — the subject,” she said. But this time her story wasn’t for a mainstream news outlet. She could tell it the way she chose and she chose to be very collaborative with the family members. She made sure they approved what was written about them and their deceased loved ones. “That didn’t mean that I didn’t ask them hard questions so that I could get to the truth of the story,” she emphasized. “It meant taking the time with them.”
By Sterritt’s research at least 75 Indigenous women and girls are missing or were murdered along the Highway of Tears and the adjoining highways. She said some things have helped Highway 16 become safer. “I think having at least some convictions was really important,” she said. “You also see these big signs that say ‘Don’t Hitchhike,’ but what about signs that say ‘Don’t Kill?’” The billboards are haunting, but Sterritt doesn’t think they help much. Cell service on the highway is more useful, something that was only implemented in 2021.
There is an ugliness in the stories, but there is also beauty, Sterritt emphasized. “It’s also about my people’s beautiful land, our connections with each other and our oral history,” she said. “The stories are powerful and resilient. The family members gave me the hope and courage to keep going.”