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From the Toronto Sun

PART 1: Murder, abuse and Native injustice

By MARK BONOKOSKI, Sun Media - Saturday, December 13, 2008

So little has changed over so many years, with the prevailing winds of out-of-sight, out-of-mind still filling the sails of apathy over Native issues.

Almost 20 years ago, calls for a public inquiry into Native justice in Ontario mingled on the steps of the Queen’s Park legislature with tearful remembrances of a 32-year-old Ojibway woman named Virginia May Nootchtai, a troubled soul from northern Ontario’s Whitefish Lake reserve whose death and post-mortem indignities dealt to her in Toronto were so brutal and so dehumanizing that they defy description.

Back then, provincial Tory Norm Sterling, along with the NDP’s Howard Hampton, today the party’s outgoing leader, told Native protesters gathering before them that the case of Virginia Nootchtai vividly illustrated the need for an inquiry into how the justice system serves Natives.

Liberal Attorney General Ian Scott, who died two years ago this October, heard the protest with apparently indifferent ears, and so the cries for solutions to an ages old complexity once again fell on fallow ground.

Today is little different.

Back in early September, in a quest to shed light on the appalling conditions on too many Native reserves, the families of two young Native men burned to death in a reserve jail cell in Northern Ontario, came to Toronto in an attempt to get the mandatory death-in-custody inquest moved to a big-city venue — Toronto or Ottawa — where it would get the media attention it would fail to garner up north.

Ricardo Wesley and James Goodwin, both 20, burned to death in a police lockup on Jan. 8, 2006 at the Kashechewan First Nation police station on the shores of James Bay.

“The Wesley family takes the position a grave injustice has occurred,” Julian Falconer, the lawyer representing the Wesley family maintains. “They were given the assurance that a broad-ranging inquiry into numerous complex and difficult systemic issues would occur.”

In the fire that took the lives of Wesley and Goodwin, an on-duty Native officer could not get the padlock on the jail cell open, leaving onlookers with the sounds of the men’s screams as they were engulfed in flames, and to watch as surrounding buildings were allowed to burn to the ground because the only fire truck failed to start.

The Deputy Grand Chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, Alvin Fiddler, says he would welcome an opportunity to examine the problems facing the remote community.

“There are problems people need to see if they are ever going to be fixed,” Fiddler says. “They are long-term problems that are easier to ignore because they are so far away.”

In the end, the hearing into the change of venue was halted indefinitely — as well as the Oct. 20 inquest proposed in Cochrane. As a result, the inquest into the deaths of Ricardo Wesley and James Goodwin hangs in limbo.

Out of sight begets out of mind.

Looking back, the life and death of Virginia Nootchtai still seems incomprehensible but, even if the extreme were negated, her sad beginnings would not be novel, and nor would be the fact that she died so hideously in a Cabbagetown rooming house above a down-and-dirty bar.

Only the indignities raise the ante.

By the time she was 32, Virginia Nootchtai already had 11 children through various hit-and-run relationships with ne’er-do-well men, all gathered up by children’s aid, and a lifetime of drowning her despair in alcohol, having left her reserve near Sudbury for a second life in the big city five years before her death.

Her mother had left her alcoholic and abusive husband when she was a child of seven, leading to her and her four younger siblings to eventually be separated from each other and bounced like inconsequential dime-store gee gaws through a series of non-Native foster homes.

When Metro Toronto Const. Daryle Gerry walked into that room atop the old Winchester Hotel back in October 1988, where some of Virginia May Nootchtai’s butchered remains were to be found, he described it as “like entering the Twilight Zone.”

By the time police located her body, Nootchtai had been dead approximately two weeks. Only the torso and legs remained. The arms, legs, and internal organs had been removed, the blood drained away, and the parts either soaking or wrapped in chlorine bleach to mask the smell of decomposition.

Her boyfriend, Solomon Joseph Constantineau, then 44, said he had woken up from a drunk and had found her already dead body lying beside him, causing him to “panic.”

The dismemberment, and the steeping in chlorine for two weeks, however, had done its job. Two separate autopsies by two different teams of pathologists failed to find a cause of death.

Constantineau eventually pleaded guilty to the only charge he would face — causing indignities to a corpse — and was sentenced to two years less a day in a provincial reformatory, with Provincial Court Judge Derek Hogg claiming Constantineau “probably wouldn’t survive” if federal inmates already serving life ever got their hands on him.

“Protect him from prison? Who protected Virginia Nootchtai?” asked Barbara LaValley, then a family counsellor at the Native Women’s Resource Centre, that was located not far away under a day care centre near Gerrard and Parliament, a block south of the old Winchester Hotel.

“If it had been a Native man who had done that, we believe he would have got the maximum sentence,” says LaValley. “Or if Virginia had been a white woman, the public outcry against this crime would have been terrible.

“But, everyone thinks, who cares? She’s just a ‘squaw.’ ”

Deep in the library files of this newspaper, in a section called the morgue, is a faded manila folder bearing the name Virginia Nootchtai. Her story ends with the curled photos and washed out clippings.

But not the story of her family.

Nearly two decades ago, a 14-year-old Native girl, Virginia’s sister Alice Faith Nootchtai, arrived pregnant in Waterloo, Ont., at Saint Monica House, a home for unwed mothers founded as a Canadian centennial project 11 years earlier by the Anglican church.

Alice’s baby daughter was snatched by children’s aid. Liz Nootchtai, Virginia’s niece, now 32, was that snatch-away baby.

Her biological father, she has since learned, was actually her grandfather, an abusive alcoholic from the Whitefish Lake reserve near Sudbury who worked the bush as a logger.

“He raped his own child,” Liz Nootchtai says. “He tied her to a bed post and raped his own daughter.

“And the result of that rape was me.”

Liz Nootchtai, fathered by her grandfather, was born on April 26, 1976,

At the age of 10 months, through the Sudbury-Manitoulin children’s aid, she was adopted by a white family, the normal probationary period waived, and ended up living in Cornwall, Burlington and finally in Mississauga.

“My adoptive father ran a construction company, his wife was a registered nurse,” she says. “They had three sons, but wanted a girl, and that girl ended up being me.

“They said I was ‘special’ — which meant ‘different’ — but they totally removed me from my culture,” she says.

“They dressed me up in pretty dresses, and tried to make me picture perfect, but I knew something was very wrong with the picture they were forcing onto me.”

At age 14 — allegedly after her adoptive father used a squash racquet as a strap one time too many — Liz Nootchtai called the Peel Police, reported the abuse, packed her bags and left for good, ultimately ending up in group homes for juvenile delinquent youth, even though she had never been in trouble with the law.

Today she is one of the strongest, warmest, open, and most considerate women one could meet — a mother of nine between the age of 13 years and 15 months, six of them hers, two of them children from a previous relationship of her partner of six years, and one child a relative-through-relationship.

Yes, it is complicated.

Liz Nootchtai cares and provides for them all, however, except the oldest who lives with her paternal grandmother, teaches them their culture, and she does it well — all while working as community development coordinator, and outreach worker with Native Child and Family Services in downtown Toronto.

Native youth flock to her for guidance at her office at Yonge and College streets and, to a one, she finds the right words to say, and finds the right path for them to follow.

Considering where she came from, and what she has witnessed and endured, makes it even more remarkable.

Liz Nootchtai met her natural mother, for the first time in cognitive memory, only last November, finding her “living on the streets of Sudbury” where clocks can virtually be set with her arrival at a local soup kitchen.

Their meeting raised no spirits.

“Put it this way, my mother is not dead, just living, if you know what I mean,” says Liz. “But she is not dead.

“She looks sad, not like a Toronto crackhead looks sad, but sad nonetheless. Alcohol. Trauma, Abuse.

“Time doesn’t always heal.

“I don’t care about who she is or what she has become, but I care about what she is to me. But she is not ready to face that yet,” she says. “She’s not prepared.

“She has never even been back to the reserve, which is understandable considering what happened to her there, and what life has dished out since to her.

“There has been a lot of trauma in her life, but hopefully the connect will come ... in time ... before it is too late.”

Liz Nootchtai became pregnant for the first time when she was 18, and she did so for all the wrong reasons.

She admits to it, as well.

Confused, and not yet schooled in the Native culture that she now embraces, uncertain of what she was, who she was, and where she was going, she purposely chose a black man to father her first child.

Remember, this was Liz Nootchtai then, not the Liz Nootchtai now.

“My daughter understands, because I have talked about it at length to her,” she says.” I have told her about how I love her now more than I did back then, and how rebellion can twist your thoughts when you are so young.

“But I had her, truth be told, so I could take her to my ‘racist’ adoptive parents, put her in their arms, and say, ‘Here’s your first grandchild. And she’s black.

“Does that make her ‘special’ like me?”

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Last Updated: 6th December 2008, 5:45pm

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