[Witness speaks in Ojibwa]
Thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate being here, and I look forward to sharing my story with all of you. I had to write down my story because I'm way too emotional to be able to just speak from my heart. Life is hard, life has been hard.
The first thing I want to talk about is mothers. I want to talk about women as parents. As women, we give birth to men and women and children—boys, girls—you know, that's our role; that's what we do; it's our life. I want to talk about how my mother felt when her son went missing and was found murdered seven months later. That's really difficult to have to go through. He died on my birthday, 40 years ago.
It's like yesterday when someone goes missing. It's like yesterday when you watch your mom and dad suffer, and you see the pain on their faces. How does the family function? How does the family function when the parents are lost? How does that happen? You know, as a child you go deep inside yourself, and you look at your mom and dad, and you think, and you wonder: “How do you keep on going, Mom and Dad? How can you look after the rest of us when one is missing?”
I'm not here only to talk about women. I have men to talk about because as women, we give birth to men. My brother Clark was the first one murdered. The police have the nerve to tell me, 35 years later, after I discover—after I get a phone call from a man telling me, “We know who killed your brother.” What does the RCMP do? They phone and tell me, “Shut up. Don't talk to anybody about this.” I know who killed my brother, and people know who killed my brother. Will those two men ever be on trial? Not likely, not freaking likely, because who cares? Who cares about us brown people? Does anybody care? I'd like to know. Because that's a death, that’s a murder. And those two men are still walking around today to torture other people.
Where is justice for our people? It just doesn't exist, does it?
That's just one man, and that's just two parents, my mom and my dad, but we all suffered, us brothers and sisters. We all suffered, suffered so much. My brothers can't even walk across the river because my brother was thrown into that river. That's how he died; he took a beating and they threw him over the bridge. Seven months' later, his body washed up, all swollen. There was my brother. But the people who knew he was missing knew where he was, right? The family knew where my brother was, but they never told anybody. Why would they want to? They committed a crime; they killed a human being. But it’s shameful that the RCMP would tell me to keep quiet. That is the most sinful part of our existence as Canadian citizens—when the RCMP tell you, “Keep quiet. Don't talk about this anymore.”
Now, we all know that we the native people are the bread and butter of this land. I know that. We know that. We've been kind, we've been generous. I'd like to see some of that generosity come back to us.
My niece Daleen went missing. Just so you know what it takes to find one missing person; for four years, my sister put out a quarter of a million dollars.
If my sister was not the superintendent of schools, if her husband was not an educator, a teacher, both making lots of money.... Both saved all their money all of their lives thinking that when they get old, they're going to retire. Where did their retirement dollars go? To finding their daughter, who was dismembered, burnt. That's how we found my niece, how my sister found our niece.
But on that quarter of a million dollars that she spent, would the provincial or federal government ever invest a quarter of a million dollars per family? It took my sister four years, and it took the heart and the compassion of my white brothers and sisters across this land to help my sister.
I don't walk here alone; I don't live here alone. We live here together as brown and white people and all colours of people. We live together. We need to show each other the conscientious minds and hearts that we have by taking care of one another.
When my sister's daughter went missing that first night, we were there the very next day. I went from The Pas to Saskatoon. I had to hike there. That's a 350-mile trip, one way. I walked there. I drove there. I've been to Saskatoon many times to go and help my sister, but that night, the second night that she went missing, my sister said, “My daughter is not the kind of person to go out and prostitute herself, get drunk, and be rowdy and disappear—not my daughter.” Her daughter was going to university.
Nobody believed my sister. The RCMP said, oh no, she's doing her own thing—the audacity.
If one of your children was missing, you would know your daughter or your son so well that you would know that they would come home or not come home. You'd know. All of us know our children and what they're capable of. My sister knew her daughter was not the kind of girl to go out all night long. Sure enough, four years later, the RCMP made a statement and they found out who killed my niece. They found out who killed her because he had told on himself. He was bragging about how much he despises native people.
That's pretty sad when racism is so thick in this country of ours that this person could actually brag about killing a native person—brag about it. The very nerve of that individual. That guy's in jail right now thanks to my sister and her quarter of a million dollars. The RCMP didn't help. They did in the long run, but it was the detectives who she paid from the get-go...and I was there, sitting with her and negotiating how much she was going to pay that detective. It costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of money to get into the hearts and minds of my white brothers and sisters so that you can think about us as a people.
She put out 89,000 shiny, glossy flyers in Saskatoon. That cost her $8,000 for 89,000 flyers. Who put out those 89,000 flyers? Her two boys and her two grandchildren. Four people put out 89,000 flyers to help find her daughter.
I couldn't help. It hurts me that I couldn't help, but we all do the best we can when it comes to finding a missing family member. It takes a lot of energy out of us.
There's my niece Daleen.
There's my almost stepmother.
My dad is a World War II veteran, a sniper, and he and mom didn't get along so dad decided that he would have a second wife. The second wife had the most bitter, toughest life that she could ever have.
It's not that my dad induced that life on her. She had one like that before she went to my dad. One winter night she left Pukatawagan, and no one has seen her since. But nobody could care less either as to where she was. Nobody could care. Nobody cared. There wasn't even a search. Nobody walked. Nobody looked. Nobody wants to know, I guess. But that's Elizabeth Dorian. She's out there right now, lost. Nobody has the manpower, the time to go look for her. For all we know, she might have fallen off a bridge. She might be in the river right now. She might have been taken by animals. We don't know. And until there's an investigation on that woman, then we will never know. But I think her children, two of her children—my half-brother and my half-sister—deserve some closure as to what happened to their mother. Even if all we find are bones, it's something to give those two—my half-brother and my half-sister—a future, an optimism that life could be better, that it could get better.
There's Andrew Flett, another one of my cousins. He's male. Again, he was up in northern Manitoba. He's been missing for two years now. My cousin's daughter, Amanda Bartlett, is another family member. I've come to you with seven names today just in my family alone of people I've lost, who are missing. That's what I've come to this table with. It's the pain that our family is living through right now. And they don't have a quarter of a million dollars like my sister Pauline. They don't. They have to depend on the resources of the province, the federal government, women's organizations, our own communities, and anything that we can pull up to help our people find their missing loved ones.
But finding the money: that's the biggest job there for our people. When you go out to start finding someone to speak for you and to help you look, that is hard to find too, because commitment is tough. So I agree with Brenda, that you have to do things yourself. Who else is going to do it? Who else is going to walk those 16 or 20 hours for us? Nobody is going to do that except us. That's the way our system is today. And I guess it's right too. Because that is our family and it is right that we are the ones who come to their defence. It is right. It is good, and I like that. It sure made me proud to be able to do eight years. My sister created an awareness walk for four years. When her daughter was found she did a four-year memorial run after that. But she's tired.
To the lady who said, “I'm tired”, we know how that feels—to be tired, to be exhausted. We know how it feels to not be able to sleep for 20 hours at a time. You're lucky to be able to sleep three or four hours in a night—that is a blessing to be able to sleep three or four hours in one night. That's amazing if you can go to sleep and wake up really energized because you had four hours of sleep. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Creator. I've been blessed.
I would really like to see an inquiry into the RCMP and the injustices that have happened to our people and the lack of caring and attention. I really need to see a national inquiry into the loss of our children, our sisters, our mothers, our brothers. We really need that. I would like to see that.
[Witness speaks in Ojibwa] That's all I have to say for now. Thank you.