I'm easy to get along with.
Evidence of meeting #4 for Special Committee on Violence Against Indigenous Women in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was know.
Evidence of meeting #4 for Special Committee on Violence Against Indigenous Women in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was know.
1:50 p.m.
Connie Greyeyes As an Individual
My name is Connie Greyeyes and I hail from Fort St. John, British Columbia. My first nations community is in Wabasca, Alberta. I'm a member of the Bigstone Cree Nation. I'm the mother of two sons. I have 12 siblings and about 33 nieces and nephews.
I think what you're seeing here in listening to all these stories is the direct result of how this country has treated aboriginal people from the get-go. The rippling effects of residential school, the breakdown of our families, have had a tremendous impact on all of us. I know that my own experiences, with my mother having gone, and my father, and my aunties, who were sterilized in residential school, have created the person that I am today. I am much different now, 10 years later, than I was prior. I quit drinking and doing drugs 11 years ago.
I've lived quite a painful life. I have been gang-raped, and raped. I have been beaten up. I did go to the police, and was dismissed. I'm standing there at the hospital with my lips cut open, black eye, knowing and telling them who did it, but they're telling me that alcohol was a factor, that we were probably drunk. I can't tell you what that does to a person after hearing it so many times. As I sat here today looking across—because I'm looking at everything—at these things on display in these boxes, it's such a slap in the face that you would show so much respect to those possessions and you can't do that to your aboriginal people in this country. You know, you have to stop thinking with this, and start feeling here.
I'm going to tell you the story of my beautiful cousin Joyce who lived in Edmonton, Alberta. In November of 1993 she was walking through this little condominium apartment and was lost. She knocked on a door and asked for directions. The young man obliged and told her “this is the direction”, and off she went. He decided to follow her and rob her, so he beat her up, rifled through her pockets—I'm assuming—and left her there beaten. He went to the apartment that he happened to be staying in that night. He sat there and decided that she might be able to identify him. He grabbed a can of gasoline and went to where she lay beaten. Then he poured gasoline on her, and lit her on fire. It was such a cold night that when the firemen showed up, they couldn't put her out with water—they would have surely killed her—so they packed her with snow, not realizing that it was a person. When they realized the horrendous scene that they were about to uncover, they couldn't believe it. They said the flames were six feet high off of her. My beautiful cousin didn't die that night. My ancestors covered her and they took care of her. She died 22 days later in the hospital. Thank goodness, you know, my family members were able to go and see her before she passed on, to comfort her and let her know that she was not alone. I often think of my cousin that night, and I made a set of vamps for the Walking with our Sisters exhibit that's going around. It's her keeping me going in this fight.
My Auntie Nora was run down by an MTC. If you don't know what that is, it's called a mobile treatment centre. Three people were in the unit. They backed into her, crushed her between my uncle's vehicle and the MTC. They were 82. Then the medic and the gentleman who was driving and their passenger jumped out, and seeing her laying there, chose not to open up the back of the MTC and transport her to the hospital, they chose to jump into the vehicle and drive away.
What makes it worse was that it was a family friend who had run my auntie down and killed her. He admitted it in court. I did a video plea to him saying that a year ago we were walking up Main Street drumming to end violence to our women and to start respecting our women, and you let my auntie lay there and die. He admitted it. He got two years. He's out, and my family has asked him to live his life in an honourable way, and the forgiveness is there for him.
I don't know the answers, as I know you don't. I know there are suggestions that we can make. I remember giving birth to my sons and thinking, “Please let them be boys.” The second thing I prayed for was that their skin would be light because then they'd be given some privilege. They wouldn't be dismissed. I do have two sons. One is light and one is brown. The light-skinned one grows his hair long so that he can braid it. I'm very proud of him.
If we can all start opening our hearts and living by some honourable teachings, it is not hopeless. Nothing can be hopeless.
In closing, I shared this poem on the Hill last year. I shared it yesterday, and I'd like to share it all with you today so that you can maybe close your eyes and really feel what it is like to be an aboriginal woman in this country. My niece, Helen Knott, wrote this. She said, “Auntie, I wrote this poem. It reminded me of all the women who are missing and I want you to read it and let me know what you think.” I've read it to many people. She is an amazing young survivor of abuse herself. She is just finishing her bachelor's degree in social work.
The poem is called Invisible.Your eyes, they curve around me.
I watch you try so hard to find your way past me.
Your sight is like rushing waters,
Moving beside me, behind me, pushing over me,
Indirectly consuming me.
They say the path of least resistance makes rivers and men crooked.
I am here. I have resisted. I am resisting.
I did not make you crooked.
What is it about you structural giants?
What is it about your pockmarked protection?
What is it about your false perceptions?
What beliefs have you bound to my body?
What pathologies have you painted the pigment of my skin?
What bad medicine did your forefathers use to make me invisible?
You don't want to see me.
What's worse is that you have the choice whether or not you see me.
I become a casualty of your blindness,
Subjected to your one-sided absent-mindedness because you've been given a privilege called selective vision.
You weed out the colours that don't match your peripheral preference, and,
I am not part of your rainbow, your twisted-light promises for better tomorrows.
My face can be plastered on posters telling you what I was last seen wearing,
With fitted descriptions, a location to give you bearings, and,
You can choose to look past me, and go on, uncaring.
My raven's hair and heritage does not sound alarm bells.
It does not stir you to look for me.
Because you have never really seen me.
You've seen me all right. You've seen me on street corners,
Lips red like sirens, dreams broken like sidewalk syringes,
Neurotic like Catholic church windows,
Submissive and silent.
You see me in welfare lines, hands open wide, waiting for what's coming to me,
Drinking death-causing concoctions behind dumpsters.
You see me as a standing statistic, a living, breathing, heaving stereotype.
You see me in the bar, another joke for you and your friends.
Just another squaw, but if you want to get laid, I'm your Pocahontas.
You see me as dispensable.
This is how you see me.
Undeserving of stars,
Deserving of starlight rides and pleasurable times.
Funny how you fail to see me when I'm face up,
Lips puffed, body bloated and battered, bruised beyond recognition.
Still not gaining your attention.
Come on, baby, and dance me outside.
I think she was just looking for a good time.
I heard she lived a risky lifestyle.
It was inevitable, some say.
This is how you see me.
Never somebody's daughter, never somebody's mother, never an aunt, a sister, a friend.
Never am I seen as strong, as proud, as resilient.
Never as I am.
Finally, given the stars,
Laid to gaze at them on back roads and in ditches,
On ghostly stretches of forgotten pebbled pathways.
Your vastness swallows me.
Do I fall in your line of sight? Do you see me now?
Because I get this feeling that your eyes, they curve around me.
In my community a dozen women are missing or have been murdered. I come from a community of 18,000 people. I don't think it's a coincidence that it is the oil and gas industry and the insurgence of oil field workers that come in the winter. Unfortunately, they're trying to build a huge dam there, and we're worried for our women. We're really worried. We're surrounded by four reserves, and I just hope that one day this country will start to respect our women and our people as much as you respect the possessions that hang on these walls.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today. I really appreciate it.
2 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Stella Ambler
Thank you.
Thank you to everyone. Just before we wrap up, I want to say a couple of things.
First of all, a special thanks to NWAC, the Native Women's Association of Canada—without them and their help, we would not have been able to have this meeting, so I appreciate that very much.
Also, thank you to our elder, Robert. I just wanted to give you this token of appreciation on behalf of our committee. Thank you very much for leading our meeting in prayer. I think that was a fitting way to do that and I want to thank you very much on behalf of the committee.
2:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Stella Ambler
Thank you for that.
If I might also, of course, thank most importantly all of you who came here to talk to us today, the families, for your strength, for your courage, and for sharing your stories with us.
Please do stay for lunch.
Robert, if you could close our meeting, we'd appreciate it.
2:05 p.m.
As an Individual
[Witness speaks in Mi'kmaq]
We asked the Creator...thank us for everything that happened today, thank us for the ladies here who spoke, and the men, too, who are missing their loved ones.
Also, I wished and asked Him to watch each and every one of us as we're going home tonight. Some of us are going by car, some are going by bus, and a few of us are going by plane. I just asked the Creator to watch over each and every one of us.
Thank you.