The Port Alberni Friendship Centre hosted its second annual Sisters in Spirit Vigil on Oct. 4. The gathering was held in conjunction with hundreds of similar events across Canada to remember and honour aboriginal women who have been murdered or who have gone missing.
Organizer Janice Amos welcomed participants, which included family members of three women lost to violence: Lisa Marie Young, who went missing in Nanaimo on the night of June 29, 2002; Delaine Watts Cloutier, who was murdered in Port Alberni on Aug. 5, 2001, and Agnes Williams, murdered in Seattle in 1976.
In her opening prayer, elder Winnie Charleson acknowledged the overwhelming sense of loss within the room.
“I’m glad we have these families that are strong enough to come forward and share their stories,” Irene Robinson said to introduce her overview on First Nations women’s history. (See more photos at the end of this report.)
Robinson said if aboriginal women continue to be devalued and viewed as second-class citizens, it is the result of forces that date back to the arrival of the first European explorers, and their accounts of the New World.
“What they described was a vast land with no fences; forests so vast you could harvest them and never run out.”
The waters were teeming with fish, the resources seemed endless. To restless Europeans with few opportunities to better their lives, the New World represented a chance to make a fresh start.
“What the explorers described was the way our people looked at our land: hishuk’ish’tsawalk, everything is one. That was how our people pictured what was here,” Robinson said.
But the new settlers were intent on seeking individual wealth, which set the stage for systemic conflict with First Nations.
“The second problem was women,” Robinson said. European women were subjugated and without power, and European men were not used to seeing women having equal power.
In the long-term struggle to impose European control and values over the New World, removing aboriginal women from the decision-making process was one consistent element.
“They wanted to take power away from the women and give it to the men,” she said.
In the early days, European men found it advantageous to marry aboriginal women, Robinson said. These partners served as translators, guides and intermediaries between the tribes; they held all the local knowledge and knew the protocols.
“Our women were valuable to them,” she said. “But later, they brought their own women.”
These European women now became the model for what a (Christian) woman should look like and act like. Now First Nations women, with their realistic views on sex, were branded as “easy,” and the stigmatization has had long-term consequences.
Robinson said the denigration of First Nations people had a purpose.
“It was intentional. They needed us not to know what we owned, and women, especially suffered. This led to our women becoming disposable women.”
In the 20th century, residential schools became a training ground, Robinson explained. By breaking the family/social ties and by introducing interpersonal violence and sexual abuse, the goal was to make aboriginal people abandon their cultural values, chief among them the concept of equality for women.
“Nowadays, people think chauvinism is part of our society. That was introduced,” she said.
For family members of the missing women, it has been important to keep their memories alive.
Agnes Williams was 49 years old when she was murdered 37 years ago. For her granddaughter, Jacqueline Watts, the pain has never left, even after her killer was convicted in 2006.
Watts said she has fond memories of picking berries with her “nanny” on Vachon Island, near Seattle.
“She loved living in Seattle. She didn’t think that harm was going to happen. She trusted. Later, people said she may have trusted too much,” Watts said.
Nearly 30 years later, a DNA sample taken from a man already imprisoned for murder linked the suspect to Williams’ slaying.
“They also believe he was a serial killer,” said Watts.
Family members attended the trial. Afterwards, they were able to visit Williams’ gravesite, which was on Vachon Island, the scene of those happy berry-picking expeditions of childhood.
Justice – or at least, the court system – was swifter when Delaine Watts Cloutier was stabbed to death by her partner Toby Jones in their Fourth Avenue apartment. It was Aug. 5, 2001.
“That was the day the walls inside my heart shattered,” Cloutier’s sister Lena Ross said, flanked by family and holding a studio portrait of the then-39-year-old.
“It was a difficult time in the Nuu-chah-nulth community, because she died right here in the community, right close to here, in fact.”
Ross said the murder of a young aboriginal woman hardly caused a ripple in the greater community.
“For many First Nations people, you see an article in the newspaper, and it’s about this big,” she said. holding her fingers a few inches apart.
Jones immediately pleaded guilty, but to a charge of manslaughter, not murder. He was sentenced to just four year’s incarceration.
“In the eyes of the greater community, she was second-class,” Ross said. “Not to those who knew her and loved her. She didn’t deserve to die. I think one of the biggest injustices is how people look at our women.”
For Joanne Young, it has been more than 11 years since her daughter Lisa Marie disappeared in the course of an evening out with friends. She still holds out hope that one day she will find out what happened to the confident 21-year-old.
Young said she wants people to know that Lisa Marie was nobody’s victim. That is what makes her disappearance so inexplicable.
“She had everything going for her in her life. She was moving to a newer apartment in north Nanaimo and she was beginning a brand new job two days after moving. She had all kinds of friends; she knew everybody; she was born and raised there and never thought any harm would come to her.”
Calling her sort of a “macho girl,” Young said Lisa Marie didn’t identify herself through her relationships with men.
“She wasn’t afraid; she always felt she had control.”
How in-control? Despite her aboriginal heritage, which included a diet with plenty of salmon and wild game, Lisa Marie made a commitment to be a strict vegetarian at a very early age, something her two younger brothers never adopted.
“I think she was about four years old when she decided, ‘No fish, no chicken, no meat,’” Young said. “So every night, I’d be cooking two different meals.”
But that strength of character did not protect Lisa Marie from violence. Young said while it helps to share her story with others, she still has moments of extreme pain. But at one agonizing juncture, when she was close to succumbing to despair, she was visited by a vision of her daughter.
“She was there. She was beautiful, as she always was. Her hair was flowing in the breeze.”
In those few moments, Young said, she had to make a decision to give up or to go on. She chose life. And now she shares her story to help others.
In his closing remarks, elder Archie Little called on participants to examine their own lives and their own family experience. Little believes aboriginal people must make a concerted effort to re-establish the traditional family structure that was systematically destroyed by the residential school program.
“I hope to leave this hall with a strategic plan to stop violence, to become part of society, to have no violence in our homes, no violence against aboriginals.”
Elder Simon Lucas seconded the need for a re-examination of the current family structure among First Nations people. He recounted how, at the age of seven, his father, who was a strong Catholic, subjected his mother to a severe beating when she tried to prevent him from being taken to the Catholic residential school.
Seven years later, enraged at what he had experienced at the school, Lucas said he punched out his father.
“We need to talk about the ghosts in our closets,” he said. “There are some terrible things that need to be changed in our culture.”
Foremost among those changes is the need for greater respect for one another, Lucas said, and most especially greater respect for women. But change must come at all levels of society, he added.
“Our leadership needs to learn that: what it means to live with pain for years.”
