The cost of indifference

After she had been reported missing on July 27, Mina Iquasiak Aculiak was found alive in Montreal August 2. That’s the good news.

The series of events that lead to the disappearance of the Inuit woman remind us why there’s an epidemic of murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada.

Aculiak speaks neither French nor English. She had travelled to Montreal from the small Nunavik village of Umiujaq on the Hudson Bay coast for a surgical procedure, following an injury sustained in a collision with a police vehicle last April. That incident was only investigated by Quebec’s civilian police review board after the media reported on the story and its official fuzzy details.

After surgery, Aculiak found herself in a rehabilitation clinic. Before going missing, the Globe and Mail reported that she had expressed suicidal thoughts. However, while at the rehabilitation centre she somehow turned a 10-minute smoke break into an hours-long drunk, until she was picked up by police.

Once in police custody, Aculiak found herself nine kilometres away from the rehab centre. After hours at the station she was sent on her way with a city bus ticket, still with a surgical catheter in her arm.

That was on July 27. Two days later, an outreach worker reported Aculiak missing after noticing her absence at one of the spots she frequented during her stay in Montreal. She was found by an off-duty police officer a week later near Autoroute 40.

It’s easy to see how Aculiak could have “fallen through the cracks”. Only it’s not cracks, it’s people and the choices they make.

Take the choice made by the Montreal police in June to scrap an Indigenous sensitivity training program designed for officers who work with the population they regularly arrest. The SPVM dropped the ground-breaking program conceived by a network of local Indigenous groups, including the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal, in favour of one doled out by one of their own.

Or the choice by the rehab workers to not report anything out of the ordinary when Aculiak had already been missing for days.

Or the choice to let a clearly vulnerable woman, who only speaks Inuktitut, leave a police station with nothing more than a bus ticket.

All these choices work in unison and have consequences. In this case there was a silver lining, but how many thousands have gone the other way? How many have paid the ultimate price for this indifference?