Missing - First Nation women and children missing from their communities and families

From Indian Country Today

Canada’s racist policies to blame for national tragedy

By Valerie Taliman, Today correspondent - Aug 23, 2010

The sad history of widespread physical and sexual abuse at residential schools has profoundly damaged Native communities, but so have other institutions like Canada’s foster care system.

“The violence happening to our women and children is destroying the fabric of our culture and communities,” said Dave Courchene, Anishinabe founder of the Turtle Lodge and a former school superintendent who gave up his career to follow a spiritual path nearly two decades ago.

“Right now there are 4,600 Native children in foster care in southern Manitoba who need a cultural and spiritual connection to their identity and families. Without that, they get lost. We have to make our children a priority and put them back in the center of our lives.”

Photo courtesy Tommy Allen

Anishinabe elder Dave Courchene, founder of the Turtle Lodge, was honored at the 2010 International Indigenous Leadership Gathering for his message, vision and work to inspire Native youth.

Courchene helps many troubled youth and families who come to Turtle Lodge for guidance, ceremonies and a spiritual connection to their cultures. Seeking hope and healing, they participate in sweat lodge, fasts and seasonal ceremonies. Over time, they find solace and a spiritual family to support their recovery.

During the gathering, a chief from a remote community arrived asking Courchene to make an emergency visit to help – there were no more children left in his community after social services had taken them all.

What happens to children raised by non-Native strangers under government custody is directly linked to their vulnerability for exploitation and abuse.

“The child welfare system is implicated when we realize that many of the missing women we are talking about are not actually women at all, but girls in the care of the provincial ministries for child and family development,” said Angela MacDougall, executive director of Battered Women’s Support Services in Vancouver.

Others familiar with Canada’s foster care system complain it is badly broken judging from the disparities and discrimination embedded in the system that leads to the loss of First Nations children from their families.

“A single Native mother on welfare with one child receives about $580 per month to live on. But if social services takes her child and gives it to a non-Native family, they get $1,000 per month to care for the child,” said Cherry Smiley of the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network. “Instead of policies designed to keep families together, we’re dealing with rules and regulations that break our families apart.”

Manitoba Deputy Premier Eric Robinson told the gathering of traditional healers that the issue is national disgrace in Canada.

“It’s a state of emergency and we have to take some action. The national tragedy of our stolen sisters knows no provincial boundaries, and urgently requires a national strategy.”

Robinson later recalled his family history and his own sexual abuse by a priest while in residential school for three years at Jack River School in Norway House, Manitoba.

“My father was a student at one of these places, went there for seven or eight years, never learned anything more than how to write his name, but he sure became a good farmhand. My mother went at the age of 3. She came out when she was 18 to a world of alcoholism and drug abuse, and she died alone on the streets of Winnipeg at the age of 31 when I was 11 years old,” he told CBC News.

More than 150,000 First Nations children were taken from their families and forced to attend one of 130 government and church-operated residential schools designed to assimilate aboriginal children into Canadian society.

Established in the 1870s throughout Canada, residential schools were commonly overcrowded and lacked medical care and proper sanitation which resulted in widespread deaths from tuberculosis for the first 40 years. In one school, as many as 69 percent of students died from tuberculosis, according to government records.

The last residential school closed in 1996, but the impacts on First Nations are long-lasting. Rampant physical and sexual abuse created an intergenerational cycle of trauma that continues to affect families today.

A class-action lawsuit filed by residential school survivors led to the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which began national public hearings in June to shed light on horrific mistreatment carried out under Canadian policies.

Following a $1.9 billion Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement with survivors, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a formal apology in June 2008. In his remarks, he acknowledged the schools were intended to “kill the Indian in the child.”

In March, Grand Chief Edward John of the Tl’azt’en Nation chaired the International Expert Group Meeting on Indigenous Children and Youth in Detention, Custody, Foster-Care and Adoption in North Vancouver where leaders prepared recommendations for United Nations review.

There is a documented statistical link between the high numbers of indigenous children in foster care (and other forms of custody) and the legacy of the residential schools. This intergenerational trauma is one of the most destructive legacies of the residential school policies, the report said.

Experts agreed that discrimination, economic inequalities, and racially discriminatory policies continue to play a major role in the disproportionate placement of indigenous youth in detention, custody, foster care and adoption.

They cited many examples of discrimination including: Defining suitable households for care-giving primarily based on economic factors, both in justifications for removal of children and in determining placements for children in foster or adoptive homes; significant disparities in funding levels and services provided to Native communities; border security laws that fail to acknowledge the specific needs and rights of indigenous children and youth; and blaming the over-representation of indigenous youth in custody and care on Native peoples themselves, rather than on Canada’s system and policies.

Experts recognized that the cycle of institutionalization for Native people often begins with foster care, continues on to youth detention programs and then to custody in the adult criminal justice system. This cycle is often repeated for the children of incarcerated adults.

“In any discussion of solutions to these problems, issues of racism within law enforcement and the overarching reality of colonization and residential school are what need to be addressed and redressed,” MacDougall said.

“The women and children affected are not forgotten, because the family members, the community members, and the activists who have been working for all these years will not give up.”

Editor’s note: This series, originally set at 4, concludes with Part 5 next week summarizing resources for families and national efforts to stop the violence against women and children. It will also examine Canada’s response to this human rights emergency and intervention by the United Nations.

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Trafficking our children

By Valerie Taliman, Today correspondent

Editor’s note: This is the first in a four-part special series examining the disappearance and murders of hundreds of First Nations girls and women in Canada. Part one highlights sex trafficking of children and the failure of police and the Canadian government to fully investigate these crimes.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Cherri was 11 years old the first time she was bought and sold.

Alone on the streets of Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, abruptly abandoned by her new “boyfriend,” she was accosted by an older man who said he’d bought her, and insisted she now belonged to him.

Shocked by how this could happen, she resisted, and tried to flee. But following a severe beating, she relented and went with the man, who took her to a seedy hotel where she was kept for weeks being indoctrinated into the lifestyle of a child prostitute.

Cherri was told she’d have to earn her keep, and soon became part of his “stable” of children forced into sexual slavery by a savvy racket of pimps and pedophiles who prey on vulnerable young girls with nowhere to go.

Taken from her family as a baby, she’d spent most of her youth bouncing around more than 10 foster homes by the time she fled the sexual abuse she endured under state-sponsored foster care.

So she ran away, thinking there had to be something better.

In downtown Vancouver, she met a charming young man who befriended her and acted like a “boyfriend” for a week, buying her meals, a few clothes, jewelry and makeup. He showed her around Vancouver’s downtown, pointing out the women’s resource center and local soup kitchen where she could get a meal. Then he abandoned her.

That’s when the pimp showed up. That was no accident – it’s all part of a larger scheme to find vulnerable, defenseless youth stuck in limbo between homelessness and the long road home, according to the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network, an organization working on the frontlines to help exploited girls and women.

The girls – ranging in age from 11 to 17 – are routinely introduced to crack cocaine or heroine, and fed a steady diet of alcohol to “loosen them up” and numb them from the horrific experiences they are forced to endure.

The goal is to quickly get them hooked on drugs so soon they are working to support their drug dependency, making it harder for them to escape.

At a time when most girls are in middle school, Cherri was turned out to work the “kiddy stroll,” an area on Franklin Avenue near the waterfront where anyone can buy sex from a child.

“At first they seem like they might be nice to you,” she said. “But then the sex starts and they get mean, and do things to hurt you. I wonder if they have daughters at home, and if they would want them treated this way. Or do they just want to do these things to me?”

To make matters worse, the men who are buying children include people one would not normally suspect – like Judge David Ramsay, who pled guilty in 2006 to charges of procurement and sexual assault on four First Nations girls between the ages of 12 and 16.

All of the girls assaulted had appeared before him in youth or family court, and although a police investigation was initiated in 1999, he was not removed from the bench until 2002, three years after the investigation began.

Gina, another girl forced into sex work, said, “During my time on the street I was physically and sexually abused so many times I couldn’t count if I tried, sometimes with knives and guns. I remember hearing about women that were going missing or were found dead when they were “working” the street. I hate to call it working – it wasn’t a job – men were paying to violate me.”

She said she feared men who wanted to take her out of city limits and refused to go. “If I did, I would be dead too. My friends never had the chance to tell their story because they were found dead in places like the Pickton farm. I cry for them. I even helped carve a memorial (totem) pole for those that disappeared or were found dead. Our sisters are still going missing all the time.”

Robert William Pickton, of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia is a pig farmer and serial killer who confessed to the murders of 49 women. He was charged in the deaths of 20, but only convicted of the second-degree murders of six women in 2007.

At least six of his victims were First Nations women, some whose bodies were never found because he fed many of his victims to his pigs. Soil samples later revealed DNA evidence of some of the murdered women.

While many of the girls on the streets disappear or are found murdered, many missing women and girls had no links to prostitution – they were simply hitchhiking or went out for an evening and never came home, said Angela MacDougall, executive director of Battered Women’s Support Services in Vancouver.

MacDougall is a leader in the fight to demand that police and government officials fully investigate and prevent the widespread violence against First Nations women and girls.

As of March 2010, more than 580 Native women and girls have been murdered or disappeared throughout Canada, according to the Native Women’s Association of Canada, which conducted a five-year study to collect evidence that documented issues of violence that women, families and communities had been pointing to for nearly two decades.

“That number came from just one study, but we know it’s much higher. More than 2,900 people signed petitions during last year’s March4Justice across Canada looking for their daughters, sisters, mothers, and aunties,” said MacDougall.

Laura Holland from the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network agrees. “The study was just the tip of the iceberg because many cases have not been documented. For years, no one kept track of what happens to aboriginal women – they don’t seem to care,” she said about the police and provincial social service agencies.

Though Native families have reported relatives missing for the last 20 years, only recently did Vancouver police organize a task force to look into the high number of missing women.

Limited police cooperation only happened recently after thousands of people organized marches for several years in downtown Vancouver on Valentine’s Day to bring attention to the lack of response from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and government agencies.

Gladys Radek, an organizer of the March4Justice across Canada, was trying to find her missing niece Tamara Chipman when she first became aware of how many families were affected. Chipman was last seen hitchhiking on Highway 16 in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and was reported missing in December 2005.

Radek said there are currently more than 3,000 missing women in Canada, 40 percent of which are of aboriginal descent.

Given the fact that First Nations people as a whole only make up three percent of Canada’s population, Radek was alarmed and created the walk to raise awareness of the missing and murdered women and children, and to educate communities about the violence against women.

Now in its fourth year, the 2010 Walk4Justice is currently underway from British Columbia to Manitoba.  In September 2008, Radek and supporters presented more than 2,900 names to Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa, Ontario and demanded that public inquiry be held.

She and an alliance of other organizations are demanding attention be paid to the lack of full investigations by the police and the fact that perpetrators remain unpunished.

Part two of this series explores the links between widespread racism, oppression and abuse in Canada’s residential schools, the “60s scoop” that placed thousands of Native youth into foster care, and the systemic social and economic conditions that contribute to this tragic situation.

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Children dying while predators roam free

Part 2 of 4 part series

By Valerie Taliman, Today correspondent

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Convicted sexual predator Martin Tremblay is still roaming free after two teenage girls died in March – one at his home – after being given a lethal mix of alcohol and drugs within hours of their deaths.

Friends of Martha Hernandez, 17, and Kayla LaLonde, 16, said the two First Nations teens had been hanging out with a man named “Martin” who supplied them with free drugs and alcohol at parties he held for teens at his Richmond home.

Angela LaLonde, whose daughter was found collapsed on a road with bruises on her body, said police told her they were close to an arrest in her daughter’s death, but then they stopped returning calls.

“That was the last time I saw them, the last time they even said anything, and I’ve tried calling and calling and they will not call me back,” she told CTV News in June.

Yet no arrests have been made, and the families are worried there will be no justice for their daughters, particularly after hearing that Tremblay recently had a garage sale and plans to move to a new location where no one knows his history.

What is particularly alarming is that Tremblay was convicted in 2003 for raping five Native girls between the ages of 13 and 15, most of whom were in foster care.

Tremblay, 44, not only drugged and raped young girls, he made pornographic videos of them while they were unconscious. Witnesses told police he had given the girls a mixture of morphine, ecstasy, codeine and alcohol.

It was his habit of videotaping his rapes that led to his arrest after an anonymous source delivered the tapes to the Vancouver police who initiated an investigation and eventually brought charges.

Tremblay pleaded guilty to five counts of sexual assault, but was only sentenced to three-and-a-half years in custody and 18 months of probation – and released after serving little more than a year in prison.

Before his release, women’s advocacy groups petitioned the judge to prohibit Tremblay from contact with girls under the age of 18, but that didn’t happen. Nor was he ever listed on a sex offender registry.

Frustrated by the lack of concern by law enforcement, women’s advocacy groups plastered the neighborhood with posters bearing his picture, warning girls that Tremblay has a history of drugging and sexually assaulting teenagers. And they repeatedly questioned why police didn’t issue a public warning about him.

So when two more teenagers linked to Tremblay died, activists and families were angry and frustrated that police had not done more to protect them.

“The community wants to know what happened to these girls and why was it allowed to happen,” said Carrie Humchitt, a lawyer with the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network. “These warnings weren’t taken seriously and here we are again.”

At the time, Richmond Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cpl. Jennifer Pound told the media that they had received many questions regarding “a specific individual and whether or not police will be putting out a public warning.” She said while the investigation was active, police were not in a position to name suspects or issue any warnings “based on speculation.”

According to a 2010 report by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, 582 cases of murdered and missing Native women have been documented so far, mostly over the past 10 years. Experts agree, however, that the actual numbers are much higher – in the thousands – and that more cases need to be documented though funding is limited.

NWAC’s research found that the intergenerational impact of colonization and Canada’s Indian policies such as residential schools, the “60s Scoop,” and the child welfare system are underlying factors in the violence experienced by aboriginal women.

The “60s Scoop” was Canada’s 20-year effort to remove thousands of Native children from their families and place them in non-Native foster homes, where many were abused and raised without exposure to their Native culture. Some were adopted, and records of their birth families were sealed, making it nearly impossible to find links to their First Nations families or reserves.

Stripped of family, language, culture and a proper education, many children have no where to turn once they leave foster care, and end up in vulnerable situations seeking shelter and food on the streets.

“Aboriginal girls are hunted down and prostituted, and the perpetrators go uncharged with child sexual assault and child rape,” said Laura Holland, a spokeswoman for the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network. “These predators, pervasive in our society, roam with impunity in our streets and take advantage of those aboriginal children with the least protection.”

Holland said many women and girls leave their reserves because of poverty, violence and terrible economic conditions. Many are the children of parents who were separated from their families when they were young and taken to residential schools.

“We have a long, multi-generational history of colonization, marginalization, and displacement from our homelands, and rampant abuses that forced many of our sisters into prostitution,” said Holland. “It’s the ultimate form of colonization – they have now colonized our bodies.”

AWAN, NWAC and leaders from First Nations communities are continuing to demand that Canadian officials conduct a public inquiry into the hundreds of murdered and missing women.

“We are tired of being told to stand down, step aside and shut up,” said Holland. “We are not doing that anymore. We are here to speak out against violence committed against us and our children.”

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women has called on Canada to set up an inquiry into the reasons for the failure of law enforcement agencies to promptly investigate the cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women.

“The CEDAW Committee has clearly recognized the urgency and gravity of the documented disappearances and murders of aboriginal women and girls from communities in Canada,” Humchitt said.

“It is important to examine why Canadian officials failed to protect these women, or investigate promptly. This is a human rights issue of central importance in Canada, and one that needs the immediate attention on the facts and solutions that the U.N. Committee is calling for.”

Editor’s note: Part three of this series will examine widespread efforts since 1992 by Native women’s organizations to demand police investigations and seek justice for women and children across Canada. Their persistence led to the 2009 formation of the Missing Women’s Task Force, a joint program of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Vancouver Police.

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Turning anger into action

Families struggle for justice for murdered, missing women

By Valerie Taliman, Today correspondent

Part 3 of 4

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Through their work at the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network and a local rape crisis center, Cherry Smiley and Laura Holland are on the frontlines of helping girls and women escape the horrors of forced prostitution.

On a daily basis, they witness the despair and destruction of women targeted by pimps and johns who earn profits from their bodies. They see the gaping wounds and scars of women bruised and battered. They hear the stories of those trying to escape, and they help to provide hope and resources that can change a young girl’s life.

“Why is society not horrified by what is happening here? This is not child labor, it’s child rape, yet the authorities have done little to deal with the pimps and perpetrators,” said Smiley, an activist and artist who is part of AWAN’s collective of women volunteers and advocates.

“It’s disheartening to see the conditions in which they must live. We try to provide options for a way out, but it’s challenging. Escaping prostitution can involve getting clean from drugs, getting an education, and a decent place to live. Some of them make it and some don’t.”

Holland, who has worked with battered women for 25 years, provides a historical view that frames the role that churches and the Canadian government play in devaluing Native women.

“We are Canada’s first prostituted women. We know brothels were set up around trading posts and military posts to sexually service fur traders and military men. Then came the churches and residential schools where thousands of children were kidnapped and abused. Now the foster care system takes our children and places them with well-paid strangers. These systemic forces helped to create the devaluation towards First Nations peoples that has continued into today.

“A big part of the reason our people end up on urban streets is that we are denied access to our land and resources. We are land poor because the colonizers have taken our land, our children, and our way of life.”

Overcoming widespread apathy, institutional racism, and a lack of action by law enforcement and provincial officials is a major part of the problem.

“We can’t talk about violence against Native women in Canada without understanding the role, the attitude, the practice of colonization, and the imposition of Eurocentric reason on indigenous peoples,” said Angela Marie MacDougall, executive director of Battered Women’s Support Services in Vancouver.

“At the heart of violence and intimate relationships, and at the heart of colonization, is power and control. We need to talk about redressing the effects of colonization, and the issue of power and control. It’s very challenging to grapple with because those with power and control don’t want to give it up.”

MacDougall’s personal commitment to missing and murdered women began in 1986 when a friend went missing without a trace. Another friend was found murdered in 1994, followed by the murders of two others in 1995. There have been no arrests in their murders, and the numbers continue to grow.

“Their faces and their lives are with me every moment of every day, holding me to account, holding me accountable. This is not a game. Women are dying. Our networks have been fighting to expose the issue and seek justice for all the women who still struggle, all the women who have been murdered, and who have gone missing.”

For more than 25 years, women and their families have been collectively trying to get justice for the horrific crimes committed against their daughters, sisters, mothers and aunties. Volunteer organizations were formed over the years including AWAN, BWSS, Vancouver Rape and Relief Women’s Shelter, March4Justice, and the Native Women’s Association of Canada.

They have organized to raise awareness, to hold law enforcement accountable, and to speak about murders and missing women amidst tremendous social and government apathy, while also doing the frontline work to help those in need of shelter and protection.

“In 1991, Vancouver police found the body parts of an indigenous woman who had been missing,” MacDougall said. “We don’t say her name anymore out of respect for the family. Her family began an honoring and a mourning ceremony to lay medicine and say prayers at the various locations where her body parts were found. There were about 20 family members and five Vancouver policemen who were in attendance then.

“This one woman’s murder became a way for us to mourn and to heal. So we began an event called the February 14th Women’s Memorial March. Family members chose Feb. 14 as a date to show love and to honor. You have to know that there was no police intervention at that time; in fact, the police were not investigating the disappearances at all.”

The Women’s Memorial March – held annually to illustrate “absence, silence, action and voice” in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – is now in its 20th year under the leadership of a planning committee headed by Marlene George. More than 5,000 people participated in this year’s march during the 2010 Olympics.

Ceremonies happen at each location where a woman has gone missing or was found murdered. The four-hour event stops for a vigil in front of the Vancouver police station at Hastings and Main where family members and activists have repeatedly called for police investigations into the murders and disappearances.

MacDougall said it is no coincidence that it has taken so long for police to get involved given the systemic racism by law enforcement and judges.

“We can connect the dots to the truth that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was created to move indigenous people off their lands. What we have seen in the last 20 years is ongoing governmental and social apathy regarding the number of women who are living with violence in their homes, and the numbers of women who are dealing with violence in the community. That includes the estimated 3,000 women that are missing in Canada.”

In 2010, approximately one in three women deals with violence in their lives, according to Amnesty International. For indigenous women, the numbers are higher – Native women are five times more likely to die as a result of violence in Canada than women of other races.

In addition to the Women’s Memorial March and March4Justice, memorial marches to bring awareness and demand justice are now held across Canada in Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Montreal, Toronto, and Thunder Bay.

Part four of this series takes us to the Highway of Tears and reports on widespread violence that is destroying the social fabric of our communities.