Don’t Let Them Get Away with It!

The fact that there are now 510 missing and/or murdered Aboriginal women in Canada since 1980 is still news to many but the message is slowly beginning to permeate throughout the general population. Change is happening albeit slowly.

Beverly Jacobs, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), spoke about the situation and its causes at two special speaking engagements in Montreal on March 16-17. She managed to pack the house twice to two awestruck audiences.

Lecturing solo at Montreal’s McCord Museum March 16 and with a panel of other speakers at the Atwater Library March 17, Jacobs spoke, as she has countless times, for those who cannot. Joining her on the panel at the Atwater Library were Ellen Gabriel, President of Quebec Native Women, Laurie Odjick, mother, Bridget Tolley, daughter, and Sue Martin, mother, all of whose lives had been touched by this issue. A candlelight vigil was held immediately after the Atwater Library event for those whose stories are still untold, who have not been found and whose cases have not been solved.

Jacobs, who has been working diligently on this issue for the last seven years with the assistance of Amnesty International, said that in many of these cases, the families tell similar stories. That they feel alone in their struggle to find answers, they find themselves being interrogated by the police and treated as perpetrators instead of victims in the matter, that they are not taken seriously and that they themselves simply do not have the financial resources to take their fight further.

A recent NWAC report, titled Voices of Our Sisters in Spirit, found that of the 510 confirmed cases, 25 percent of the women were listed as missing. About 67 percent of those women have been reported as murdered and of those 67 percent, at least three-quarters of the cases are still unresolved.

The issue became even more personal for Jacobs last year when her family joined the masses of those wondering what ever happened.

“My cousin Tashina went missing in January and that is the same as Laurie’s daughter. She went missing without her purse or any of her things – she just disappeared. Unfortunately her body was found in our own community, four months later in April. The same situation occurred here with the lack of an investigation and the suggestion that maybe she just ran away,” said Jacobs.

Jacobs spent a great deal of time exploring the history of violence against Aboriginal women in Canada and the theme she kept returning to was stopping the perpetrators of these violent acts from getting away with it. As these cases remain unresolved, the perpetrators are still at large.

According to Jacobs, when the NWAC’s Sisters in Spirit Initiative began to fight for these women whose cases are seemingly of less importance to law enforcement, even Canada’s Public Safety Minister would not take the issue seriously. Though slowly, Jacobs said this is starting to change.

“I am meeting with the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Justice in the next couple of weeks so it is going to change – it has to. There is no doubt about it because the UN is watching them too,” said Jacobs.

While Jacobs and Gabriel focussed on the political end of the issues, the major impact came from the two mothers and one daughter who feel that they and their families have been wronged by the Canadian justice systems.

Laurie Odjick, whose daughter Maisy, 16, went missing from Maniwaki, Quebec, along with her friend Shannon Alexander, 17, said she feels as though her daughter’s rights have been violated. This violation stems from the fact that Odjick feels her daughter’s case has not been investigated thoroughly and because there are jurisdictional policing issues in the case.

Maisy disappeared last September without taking any of her personal effects, such as her purse, her make-up or her ID, and yet her mother said that the police continue to treat the case as a runaway.

“Nothing was done for these two girls. There was a lack of support from my own community, my own Chief and council and their police services. There is no word to describe how my family felt throughout this experience and we are still going through it alone,” said Ojick.

Though Maisy disappeared in Maniwaki, which is Surêté du Québec territory, her case file was transferred to the Kitigan Zibi Police force. Odjick said that she is seldom able to get information out of either force.

Also hailing from Kitigan Zibi, Bridget Tolley has spent the last eight years fighting for justice for her mother, Gladys Tolley, who was struck and killed by a SQ police cruiser back in 2001.

For Tolley the crusade has been to find out what really happened to her mother after, what she described as, a bumbled investigation and a likely cover-up on the behalf of the police.

“We are requesting an independent public inquiry into the death of our mother and a complete independent investigation into the occurrences that happened that night as well as a public review of the conduct of the police officers and homicide team at the scene,” said Tolley.

After the fatal accident, Tolley said her mother’s body was moved before the investigation began and the coroner’s report stated that he never even went to the scene. Also the Tolley family has evidence that an improper formula was used in the collision analysis and that the forensics were inaccurate. The police captain in charge of the accident scene was also the brother of the SQ officer driving the cruiser that hit her mother.

Though Tolley and her family have been fighting for years, they have yet to see an inquiry into the case and have only found more evidence to suggest that things are not as they should be.

“I don’t want my mother’s death to be just another Indian woman’s misfortune,” said Tolley.

Sue Martin, whose daughter Terrie Ann Martin Dauphinais was murdered in Calgary, Alberta on April 29, 2002, is also desperate to see her daughter’s killer brought to justice. Terrie was found naked and brutally beaten to death in her own home while her three young children remained locked in their bedrooms upstairs.

Though there has only been one “person of interest” in the Dauphinais case, the victim’s husband from whom she had just separated, no one has ever been charged with her murder.

According to Martin, while the suspect was never questioned thoroughly in regards to his wife’s murder, the rest of the family faced intense scrutiny from the police as though they were at fault.

“We as parents have no rights to our children when they are murdered. My daughter was treated like a bag of garbage; we could not give her a proper service. We were portrayed as the criminals, not the victims, and that is very sad. That has to change,” said Martin.

Many of the other families involved with NWAC’s Sisters in Spirit Initiative have also started to take on speaking engagements at different events across the country. These families are not just seeking to find out what happened to their loved ones but to also try and change the face of the racialized and sexualized violence that Aboriginal women in Canada face every day. Violence affects everyone.

For more info, go to www.nwac-hq.org