The highway of tears and others canadian secrets
Northern B.C.’s missing women another piece of same tragic story
ANDREW LODGE
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were driving down a remote stretch of highway in Northern B.C.. As we came around a corner, a young woman appeared by the side of the road, arm outstretched and thumb up.
We pulled up and my friend rolled down his passenger side window. A teenage girl crouched down and looked in.
“Where’re you headed?” my friend asked.
“Just up the road,” she answered. “To the reserve. It’s only, like, 20 miles.”
“Jump in,” he said. He looked in the back seat. “Just push that junk out of the way.”
Twenty minutes later, we let her off at the gas station advertising gas and cheap smokes on a hand-painted sign. She waved as we pulled away. The last we saw of her she was walking down the dirt road into town, the majestic British Columbian mountains looming in the background.
On the surface, it was just another hitchhiker. There are tons of them across the country, and while it might be something of a vestige from the past, it is still by no means a rarity to see someone thumbing a ride from the side of the road. But what made this more than just that, what gave us both the shivers, were the circumstances. Here was another young woman, native to boot, on B.C.’s infamous “Highway of Tears.”
A tear and blood-soaked highway
The Highway of Tears is the name given to the B.C. portion of Highway 16, which traverses the northern part of the province, crossing through Prince George. Amnesty International, in its 2006 Stolen Sisters campaign, reports that, in total, 33 women have gone missing on that often lonely stretch of road that cuts through the heart of the northern interior and terminates at the Pacific Ocean port community of Prince Rupert. All but one was aboriginal.
The Highway of Tears used to be a topic locals chatted about in low voices over a coffee or a beer in diners and bars across B.C.’s North. It was the kind of story where people would talk about rumours of some girl going missing, but which authorities were content to let slowly drift into the realm of folklore and oblivion (sort of akin to the silence surrounding Helen Betty Osborne’s savage rape and murder in northern Manitoba three decades ago). There was nothing strange about this. The victims — poor, native and female — were faceless even as living breathing human beings, and they remained faceless, known only as the disappeared women of Hwy. 16. They didn’t need to exist, and their deaths or disappearances were not treated as a huge calamity by the majority of the Canadian public, or indeed by anyone at all — except those who loved them.
But it’s no longer just a local story. After Nicole Hoar, a white woman tree-planting in the area for the summer, went missing several years ago, the Highway of Tears made national news. And it has become yet another patch on the sometimes horribly disconcerting quilt of stitched-together stories about marginalized women in this country. The same country, our politicians and business leaders never fail to remind us, that prides itself on being the best place on Earth to live.
Pickton and the expendable women
Tell Val Hughes that this is the best country in the world. That certainly wasn’t the case for her sister, Kerri Koski, one of the many women who was allegedly raped and murdered by Robert “Willie” Pickton. The trial of Willie Pickton has catapulted the disappearances of dozens of women from Vancouver’s downtown Eastside into the mainstream consciousness. But these disappearances had been going on for a long time and no one did anything about it, a point not lost on Hughes: “Like all family members, I feel molten rage . . . the women were expendable people no one cared about. They told us our loved ones were just out partying.”
One can’t help but wonder if the popularity of the Pickton trial is as much about our collective appetite for the macabre, a deeply rooted inability to look away from the proverbial car crash. Given the context, we need to ask the uncomfortable question: is it a combined hunger for justice that generates such mass appeal? Or is it a quasi-pornographic public need for voyeurism, much like the near-celebrity coverage of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, that fuels the thirst for more on Pickton?
If altruism is in fact the driving force behind the Pickton publicity, if it really is a yearning for justice that explains the public fascination with Pickton’s case, one must wonder why the very similar plights of women elsewhere in the country remain all but ignored. The bodies of 20 murdered women have been found in Edmonton over the past two decades; still others remain missing. Five hundred Canadian aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered in the last 30 years. There is no uproar. Women are far, far more likely to be killed in their own home than men, just as Corrine McKeown and Doreen Leclair were in Winnipeg back in 2000, but only after five separate 911 calls to the police for help. The police arrived much later after the women had long been soaking in their own blood. There are many more of these sorts of stories and they are rarely heard.
Guilty victims
Tamara Chipman disappeared near Prince Rupert while hitchhiking in 2005. She is one of the most recent victims on the Highway, and like some of the others she has never been found and the crime has never been solved.
Not long after picking up that hitchhiker I mentioned earlier, I visited the area outside of Prince Rupert where Tamara Chipman was last seen. This is incredibly beautiful country, rugged and remote. In the summertime the fireweed stands tall in the ditch somewhere near where Tamara must have gotten that last ride.
For the entire summer, Tamara’s father Tom, a gillnet fisherman, searched the backroads up and down for his daughter, to no avail. He is now helping to raise her young son, Jaden. The large extended family has repeatedly made pleas for information on her whereabouts. They all sorely miss her, but the rest of Canada never knew about her. As one of her aunts says, she seemed “to just disappear off the face of this earth.”
Native women have long pointed out that the value of a life falls somewhere on a wide-ranging spectrum. And, they point out, if you are poor, female and aboriginal, you fall on the far end of that spectrum, the end where the value is very low. What’s more, guilt on the part of the victims, or at the very least a “you-get-what’s-coming-to-you” message, is often implied by virtue of the social status of women who experience violence. When it comes to media reports of these victims of violence, the public is all too often forcefully reminded that the women were “high risk” or some other such classification. The implication is that the victims have a hand in bringing the crime on themselves. After all, who else hitchhikes?
In the case of the downtown Eastside victims, the public is told only that these were drug-using prostitutes, living and working on the streets. “Like so many of the fifty women who have disappeared from a seedy neighbourhood in Vancouver’s east end, Jacqueline Mcdonell, Heather Bottomley and Diane Rock were drug addicts who sold their bodies to support their habits,” opens the National Post in 2002. The Post article goes on the say that one of the victims was actually a “bright woman” who was somehow “out of place on the street.” According to the Post, the tragedy is more profound and the crime more repugnant when the victim was not meant to be in the gutter. However, those that do belong in the gutter, those that are not “out of place on the street” are, by inference, less tragic in their deaths.
By failing to report on the aspects of lives that don’t fit the stereotypical mold, women on the margins are easily reduced to the status of the junkie whore, making their disappearance or murder all that more palatable. The public never hears about who they loved, what their hopes were, the things others loved about them, and all the other details that humanize names on a page.
Ten years ago on the outskirts of Saskatoon, two college boys out partying murdered Pamela George. During the trial, the defense pointed out that these men all had a “bright future” and that it would be unfair that they pay for this “one mistake” with their entire lives. The court agreed, and the judge instructed the jury to bear in mind that George was “indeed a prostitute.” The jury complied with this instruction and gave the two murderers the lesser degree of manslaughter and a sentence of six and a half years each. They ended up serving even less.
The deadly cocktail of race, class and gender
The stories share several critical features: the victims were all women, an overwhelming number were aboriginal, and almost all of them were poor. To what degree and how exactly these factors interact to contribute to their vulnerability and marginalization is a matter of much debate. But the end result — their marginalized position in Canadian society — is not in doubt.
For Darlene Osborne, this end result is a burden she must bear every day. She was a cousin of Helen Betty Osborne, the raped and murdered victim of a local boys’ romp in The Pas in 1971. While the guilty parties were known to the community and to police, no convictions were brought for over 20 years.
But one tragedy was not enough. Four years ago, three decades after her cousin was taken, Darlene’s niece Felicia Solomon was also murdered. “Families like mine all over Canada are wondering how many more sisters and daughters we have to lose before real government action is taken.”
It has long been acknowledged that the intersection of race, class and gender creates a powerful undercurrent that forces people to the margins. The Aboriginal Justice Inquiry in Manitoba concluded that Osborne’s death “was a racist and sexist act” and that she “would be alive today had she not been an Aboriginal woman.”
That conclusion is a terrible one to contemplate. For the women who live and travel along B.C.’s Hwy 16, it must be all the more chilling.
