The Value of a Native Life

Across Canada, today (October 4) is the National Day of Vigils to remember missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls. This morning, the Globe and Mail marked the occasion with a column by National Affairs columnist Gary Mason comparing the disappearance of Tina Fontaine, the 15-year-old Anishinaabe girl found murdered in Winnipeg in August, with that of Alice Gross, a 14-year-old white girl whose disappearance in London, England prompted a stunning manhunt of over 600 police officers from a variety of different police organizations.

Mason is right to compare the searches for both girls—the latter boasting a $36,000 reward and the largest manhunt in England since the 2005 terror attacks, and the former meriting only, as Mason puts it, “a perfunctory release alerting the public to her disappearance [that] mentioned her aboriginal heritage, described [clothes] she was last seen wearing [and] included the line: ‘Police are concerned for Fontaine’s well-being.’” Surely, one senses Mason implying, finding each girl should have been worth $36,000 and should have merited hundreds of police searching for her. Surely, then, the indifference to Fontaine’s fate says something about us all.

Reading his sensible contrast between the institutional response to the disappearances of a wealthy white girl and a poor Aboriginal girl, it’s hard not to reflect on Mason’s flat dismissal last month of demands for an inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women. In that column, Mason argued that we couldn’t benefit from an inquiry, because we know why Aboriginal women and girls go missing and get murdered:

“There are thousands of young aboriginal women living in situations not dissimilar to the one where Tina found herself,” he says. “They stay with relatives because their parents, struggling with addiction and other issues, are unable to care for them. Some are physically or sexually abused. For many, a life on the streets is better than the one they have at home.” On the street, he concludes, girls are more likely to be murdered.

Mason doesn’t expand this thought further. Instead, he shifts into a discussion of the findings of BC’s provincial Representative for Children and Youth, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond. Last year, Turpel-Lafond released “When Talk Trumped Service: A Decade of Lost Opportunity for Aboriginal Children and Youth in B.C.,” a damning report that noted that BC’s Ministry of Children and Family Development spent $66-million on bureaucratic activities, such as discussions about regional Aboriginal authorities. Though establishment of such regional authorities has been correlated to reduced figures of on-reserve suicide (noted by scholar Cassandra Opikokew in the presentation “Indian Solutions to Policy Problems,” delivered to the 40th-anniversary conference of the Quebec Native Women’s Association last fall), Turpel-Lafond is likely right in her assessment that “The expenditure of $66 million—and maybe more—during a time when the most vulnerable Aboriginal children could find few appropriate residential services and supports, and few therapeutic child and family services to address their significant and known needs, is a colossal failure of public policy.”

Fair enough: politicians everywhere, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, are known for nothing more than wasting money on themselves and their bureaucracies, even when they’re not actually stealing it. The recent political histories of Toronto, Montreal, the province of Quebec, and the Senate of Canada have underlined this as a given for most people. (Accepting in a discussion of Native issues that politicians tend to be corrupt, of course, turns on its head the widely held assumption that a Native person is more likely to be corrupt than her non-Aboriginal counterpart. Rather, Native or non-Native politicians seem equally more likely to rip off the public than non-politicians of either ethnic group. It’s the job, rather than the ancestry, that seems to determine dishonesty and corruption.)

But for Mason, Turpel-Lafond’s report is the end of the argument about missing and murdered women, a subject to which the report itself bears only tangential relation. “Nearly $66-million of federal and provincial funding had gone to aboriginal child-welfare authorities without a single penny of it going to help children,” he cries, flush with proof that some Aboriginal politicians and bureaucrats have wasted money, before winding his argument into the same old assumptions about First Nations: they’re lazy. They’re selfish. They’re incompetent. They demand handouts. The reason over 1,000 Aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered doesn’t have anything to do with the trauma inflicted on every Indigenous community in Canada by what Mason charitably—and repulsively—calls “the residential schools experiment,” and it has nothing to do with the effects of racism on a broader level affecting the way police investigate cases involving Aboriginal women.

Certainly, to Mason, systemic racism in non-Aboriginal communities making it more difficult for Aboriginal people to get jobs and be promoted or to find affordable housing off-reserve isn’t any issue at all when it comes to the problem of missing and murdered women. Neither, of course, could the issue be racism at the federal government level that has resulted in the unconscionable shortage of on-reserve housing, cramming families together in toxic buildings that AANDC isn’t in any hurry to replace. That stuff, to Mason, seems too vague to have any power over whether Aboriginal women live or die. The real issue, he thinks, is shifty Natives wasting money.

“The hard truth about today’s debate around missing and murdered aboriginal women,” Mason says, “is this: Nothing will be done to address this matter until aboriginal leaders own some of the responsibility themselves. For too long now, they have pointed the fingers at everyone else and refused to be held accountable. It’s the province’s fault. It’s Ottawa’s fault. It’s the fault of everyone but First Nations themselves.”

Putting aside as manifestly obvious the shrill racism of the assumption that “Aboriginal leaders,” generally, agree on anything at all, and that none has borne responsibility or been held accountable for failures in their Nations and communities leading to issues such as increased family violence, addiction, or homelessness, it’s still stunning that Mason can miss the central problem of missing and murdered women: the notion that the women themselves have little or significantly reduced value to those around them.

There is no question that in many Aboriginal communities across Canada, there are problems with substance abuse and family violence. A quick review of Canadian history leads to the unfortunate conclusion that stealing Native children, beating their languages and cultures out of them for years, raping and torturing them for good measure, and dumping them back in the communities you worked hard to teach them were worthless is probably a good way to promote a high degree of violence and addiction.

This is, as Mason puts it, “the hard truth.” In Mason’s argument, “the hard truth” is the extremely widespread argument that Native leadership is selfish and corrupt and irresponsible—and there’s a lot of evidence to show this isn’t the truth at all, although it’s actually a “truth” very easy for anti-Aboriginal racists to find comfort in, and lends credence to contentions that whatever Native people are left in Canada are really mostly to blame for whatever their present-day problems are.

A much harder actual truth to swallow is that for well over 100 years, our country engaged in a quiet genocide (defined according to Article 2, parts b, c, e, and sometimes d, of the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) against Aboriginal people through the Indian Residential Schools system. When it finally stopped that genocide, our country didn’t do nearly enough (or, for that matter, very much at all) to attempt to right that massive wrong. That wrong lives on in suffering communities from coast to coast, and it’s not hard to understand why even if it’s hard for some to accept. On reflection of our official history of destroying Aboriginal people and families, it’s hard not to notice that what the government of Canada was doing was driving into those children what so many of us already believed then and still believe now: that Native lives don’t matter.

Within their communities, at least, the women who go missing have some value—that’s why Indigenous Nations across Canada have been sounding the alarm over the missing women for years. The real problem is outside of Native communities, where 1,000 missing and murdered women don’t add up to the panic Mason profiles over a single missing white girl.

American author Vanessa Veselka spent her adolescence as a hitchhiking runaway, and had the horrific experience of encountering (and, fortunately, escaping) a likely serial killer—one of possibly more than 100 who were preying on hitchhikers at that point in the late 1980s. (In 2009, the FBI began discussing its Highway Serial Killings Initiative, which charted the murders of more than 500 people, mostly women, last seen near truck-stops. Most of their 200 suspects were truckers.

It’s shocking to learn that there could possibly be so many people killing so many other people in our midst, but it becomes easier to understand when we recognize that if you kill a person with little or no social value, hardly anybody notices. In Veselka’s case, the likely killer she encountered was someone who preyed on female hitchhikers, because in society at large, nobody really cares about hitchhikers.

Attempting to find out more about murders that occurred near where she was hitchhiking, Veselka returned some 20 years later to the area of her close call with the killer, but found she was rebuffed by virtually every local she talked to.

“Wherever I went,” she writes, “I was told nothing ‘like that’ ever happened, which was remarkable given the numbers of bodies the FBI had tracked over the past thirty years. The newspapers were equally silent. It seems our profound fascination with serial killers is matched by an equally profound lack of interest in their victims. One library archivist explained that I was looking for the kind of news nobody wanted to read. The girl, he said, ‘wasn’t one of our own. She was a drifter.’”

In Tina Fontaine’s case—or in the cases of the many women killed by Robert Pickton—the killer knew enough to recognize that the community wouldn’t see another missing Aboriginal woman as “one of our own.” He understood that Aboriginal women don’t have a lot of value in Canadian society. Extremely poor people don’t have a lot of value. Drug- or alcohol-addicted people don’t have a lot of value. People who sell sex don’t have a lot of value. So an impoverished Aboriginal women or girl impaired by drugs or alcohol, willing to accept money or a place to stay in exchange for sex? Who would care if they learned one of those people went missing?

That last question is the one that Gary Mason should have been trying to answer: how do we make police, governments, institutions, and one another care more about Aboriginal women, even if they do things that some among us may find unseemly, like drinking or using drugs or selling sex?

This is precisely the question that those demanding an inquiry into missing and murdered women hope to see answered. Because it’s become excruciatingly obvious in Canada that men—sometimes Aboriginal men, often white men—can kill Aboriginal women with virtual impunity, and that is not the fault of Aboriginal women, or the fault of the leaders of the Aboriginal communities they come from. The murders, of course, are the fault of the killers. But the fact that we have such a hard time noticing it happening, let alone bringing the killers to justice, that’s someone else’s fault, and an inquiry would help us identify the culprits and, hopefully, stem this epidemic. Not just the epidemic of murder, but the epidemic of seeing Indigenous women as worthless.