A deadly silence: the epidemic of missing and murdered BC Aboriginal women

Thousands of Canadian women have been murdered over the last four decades, and hundreds, if not thousands, more are missing. Walk4Justice, a non-profit organization committed to raising awareness of this epidemic, says the number of missing and murdered women is as high as 4,200, with a disproportionately large percentage of Aboriginal women represented.

Although the RCMP hasn’t released information about victims’ ethnicity in the past, it is estimated by Walk4Justice that at least 75 percent come from First Nations, Inuit, or Métis ancestry. There have been many detailed reports, commissions, and hearings on the subject, but human rights organizations such as Amnesty International Canada say the need for action is urgent.

An interim parliamentary report released in April by the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, titled Call Into the Night: An Overview of Violence Against Aboriginal Women, outlines the root causes of violence against Aboriginal women, in particular. According to the report, the vulnerability and mistreatment of Aboriginal women is due to a history of colonization, overt racism on the part of media, law enforcement, and the justice system, and the indifference of society to the violence faced by Aboriginal women.

The increased vulnerability of women in remote areas is also apparent. A disproportionately high number of missing or murdered women have been reported around Highway 16, commonly referred to as the Highway of Tears, between Prince George and Prince Rupert.

The tragedies have hit the island, as well. In January 28, the body of 18-year-old Tyeshia Jones was found in a wooded area in Duncan, near a First Nations cemetery, six days after she disappeared. Witnesses say she had left a party to meet a friend at 3 am Witnesses say she had left a party, then went to a friend’s house, and left the friend’s house to meet another friend at 3 am, not far from where she was last seen, but never arrived. Although the RCMP has been bombarded with tips and information, they have not named a suspect.

Statistics from the Sisters in Spirit initiative, an education and research project of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, show almost half of the Aboriginal women murdered in BC are killed by strangers; the rate is much lower in the non-Aboriginal population.

Stolen sisters

In October of 2004, Amnesty International Canada released a report, Stolen Sisters: Discrimination and Violence Against Indigenous Women in Canada, which helped bring political awareness to the subject.

According to the report, young indigenous women in Canada are five times more likely than non-indigenous women of the same age to die as the result of violence. Stolen Sisters describes a pattern of racism, decades of oppressive government policy, and a lack of accountability within police forces.

The report details that although this is a political and a social issue, it is also a human-rights issue.

“Indigenous women have the right to be safe and free from violence,” states the report. “When a woman is targeted for violence because of her gender or because of her indigenous identity, her fundamental rights have been abused. And when she is not offered an adequate level of protection by state authorities because of her gender or because of her Indigenous identity, those rights have been violated.”

According to RCMP corporal Annie Linteau, victims aren’t discriminated against because of their ethnicity.

“Regardless of someone’s nationality or racial background, we promptly investigate any reported missing person or instances of violence against women,” says Linteau.

Linteau also says two major, ongoing projects in BC are dedicated to apprehending the people responsible for these crimes.

One is Project Even Handed, which was responsible for the Robert Pickton investigation, and the other is E-Pana. E-Pana is a government-funded, approximately 70-person team dedicated to investigating disappearances and murders.

“The project has a very specific mandate,” says Linteau. “It’s looking at the disappearance or homicide of women who meet specific criteria: they have to be female, they were involved in high-risk activity such as hitchhiking or the sex trade, and they were last seen or their body was found within a mile or so from Highway 16, Highway 97, or Highway 5. The purpose of E-Pana was to try and establish if a serial killer was responsible for any of the deaths.”

Currently, 18 cases are being investigated under E-Pana as homicides, although the remains of some women have not been found. Using databases, the team’s reviewers are now able to see similarities between cases, follow leads, and hopefully discover new evidence that may lead them to making arrests.

But controversy surrounds E-Pana. Some families whose loved ones aren’t on the list feel they are being neglected. Others feel that the team isn’t doing enough, or that it’s too little, too late.

“In many cases some of the evidence that had previously been looked at forensically has been resubmitted for analysis, because of technological advances,” says Linteau. “The oldest case dates back to 1969.”

With state-of-the-art technology like DNA sampling, and seemingly limitless government-funded resources, some victims’ families have a hard time understanding why all 18 cases remain unsolved.

“In some of them we may be able to determine what happened, to provide a bit of closure to the families,” team commander RCMP staff-sergeant Bruce Hulan said in a December, 2009 interview with The Vancouver Sun. “Is it likely that we will be able to charge on all 18 of them? I’m doubtful about that.”

Winds of change

In 2006, Gladys Radek participated in a walk along the Highway of Tears for her niece, Tamara Chipman, who went missing near Prince Rupert in 2005.

“I knew there would be no justice for Tamara, or any of these women,” says Radek.

She drew up a petition demanding a public inquiry into the disappearances, which received thousands of signatures, but didn’t draw the attention of politicians.

In early 2008, Radek made a call to Bernie Williams, who has been trying to bring attention to women missing from the downtown east side of Vancouver since the mid-‘80s and asked her to walk across Canada to raise awareness.

“It was a huge task just to get people to listen and believe in the cause,” says Radek. “All we had was our big mouths, and our hearts, but we never turned back.”

Williams and Radek created the non-profit, non-governmental organization Walk4Justice in 2008.

“Our aim is to bring awareness to the plight of murdered and missing women in BC and nationwide, which has been ignored in the past,” says Radek. “Awareness helps the families of the lost women. It incenses the public to ask questions.”

Williams has also been directly affected by the violence that persists against women in this country; her mother and two sisters were murdered in the downtown east side of Vancouver.

This year marks the fourth Walk4Justice. They have walked over 3,000 kilometres through all kinds of weather, including the recent storm produced by Hurricane Irene. The walkers don’t travel in a straight line; instead, they follow a route that takes them to communities where families have lost loved ones. Some families travel from across Canada, including the Yukon and Northwest Territories, to meet the walkers.

Walk4Justice has a grassroots approach to research. Together with the families, they share stories, hold vigils, and add names to their growing list of missing and murdered women.

A core group, plus some who joined to walk partway, will reach their final destination on September 17, after leaving on June 21. On September 19, Walk4Justice will hold a rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

“When will the government do something about the lives being lost? These are hate crimes,” says Williams. “We want a national, Aboriginal taskforce that’s transparent and open to communities and families. We want health, healing, and wellness centres for Aboriginal women only.”

The group is calling for a national missing and murdered women’s symposium to be held in Vancouver.

“We need to take actions to provide better safety nets and to stop this ongoing violence against our women and children, and all women,” says Williams. “These unnecessary, heinous crimes have to stop. These are lives, they are not garbage, but this is how society looks at it.”

Strength in numbers

Walk4Justice is only part of a growing number of organizations dedicated to bringing justice to the women affected by violence in our country.

Sisters in Spirit (SIS) has researched 582 cases of missing and murdered women across the country over the last several years.

According to the SIS, cases in BC make up almost a third of the cases in their national database. Of these cases, almost half are between age 19 and 30. The SIS is concerned with the intergenerational impact these cases have.

Williams agrees. “When you kill off a nation of women, you kill off a future generation,” she says.

Relatives often struggle to care for children of the missing and murdered. Radek’s niece had a young son who’s now growing up without his mother. Families with missing women who aren’t considered by the RCMP to have met with foul play are ineligible for legal aid and other resources such as victim services, because there’s no evidence that a crime took place. When women disappear without a trace, their families are often left to deal with the aftermath on their own.

Findings from the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry will be submitted by December 31. Allegations have been made that law enforcement officials dismissed information about a killer on the streets from women on the downtown eastside.

One purpose of the inquiry is to uncover the conduct of the police forces doing investigations between January 23, 1997 and February 5, 2002 on women missing from the poverty-stricken area of Vancouver.

Each police official involved has been given his own publicly funded lawyer, while the families of victims and women who were involved have been left out of the funding, and must provide their own lawyers.

Recently, Wally Oppal, the commissioner of the inquiry, left a voicemail message for then-attorney general of BC, Barry Penner. Oppal later released the message to the public when Penner claimed Oppal was biased against the inquiry.

In the voicemail, Oppal said, in part, that “the government is now being seen as funding the people who allegedly did everything wrong and ignored the women, ignored the victims but … will not go and fund the victims, and not fund the women, the poor Aboriginal women.”

Although the federal government claims they are doing as much as they can, pleas for a national missing person task force have been rejected.

As of July, the federal government has allocated approximately $2 million to create a missing person database that will allow all levels of law enforcement to share information, but it’s not yet operating.

At this point the RCMP hasn’t released information about whether victims are aboriginal or not. This doesn’t sit well with Radek, who says they’re essentially denying that a problem exists. “It is only through awareness which people start to ask questions, and it is only through accountability that we will find justice,” says Radek.

None of these are new concerns. Several commissions, investigations, and human rights groups have identified many of the issues and outlined recommendations for change, but many argue that not enough is being done.

Both Williams and Radek feel there’s an injustice in the inaction of law enforcement to bring the offenders to trial; they see an inequality in our standard of living in Canada. “This country has a dark side,” says Williams. “It’s beautiful, but there is a dark side.” Considering that the vast majority of missing and murdered women are Aboriginal, Williams says the high percentage of unsolved cases is due to systemic racism within government, law enforcement, and the judicial system.

“If it was me,” she says, “I would bring a class action law suit against the country. These are crimes against humanity.”