RISING TIDES
WITH NICOLE HOAR’S DISAPPEARANCE, communities not just in northern B.C. but across Canada and, to some extent, the world became aware of what was happening along Highway 16. In October 2004, Amnesty International released a report, Stolen Sisters, that estimated the number of victims on the Highway of Tears could be more than thirty, and insisted the Canadian government should have done more to protect Indigenous women and girls. The report made note of the systemic, deeply ingrained nature of the violence toward Indigenous females wrought by inadequate policing, social and economic marginalization, and historical and present-day government policy.
With the passage of the British North America Act in 1867, the Canadian government unilaterally declared authority over Indigenous people and their land. “This, despite the fact that First Nations people did not knowingly enter into any such arrangement to forfeit their inherent rights to their land and resources, much less their autonomy as the first people of what became Canada,” wrote Lynda Gray, a member of the Tsimshian Nation and author of First Nations 101. “Canada was formed under the false pretenses that it had the cooperation and assent of the many individual First Nations—Nations that had already been here for a very long time. And so began the wholesale implementation of laws and policies that would govern the day-to-day lives of First Nations people.”
The government’s policy and practice viewed Indigenous people as inferior and sought to absorb them into European ways or, failing that, annihilate them. Stolen Sisters noted that the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, tasked in 1991 with investigating the relationship between Indigenous people, the government and the public, described legislation as “conceived and implemented in part as an overt attack on Indian nationhood and individual identity, a conscious and sustained attempt by non-Aboriginal missionaries, politicians, and bureaucrats—albeit at times well intentioned—to impose rules to determine who is and is not ‘Indian.’ ” The Indian Act imposed federal government control over virtually every aspect of Indigenous people’s existence. It defined who was “Indian” and quashed traditional governance and social structures, replacing them with band councils consisting, in patriarchal European fashion, of only men, and gave the federal government the power to veto any decisions councils made. It restricted the work and economic activity Indigenous people could perform; any aberrance—earning a university degree or becoming a lawyer, for example—resulted in the loss of one’s Indian status.
As the power of Indigenous nations waned, subsequent amendments to the Indian Act tightened the noose further: a ban on cultural ceremonies such as the potlatch; legalization of forced relocation and, in some cases, seizure of reserve land; and the appointment of Indian agents—federal bureaucrats dispersed to administer the Indian Act—to chair band meetings and cast votes. A 1906 amendment expressly stated that those registered under the act were “non-persons.” Indian agents implemented a pass system under which Indigenous people had to get written permission to leave their reserves; they faced jail or forcible return to their community if caught without the documentation. Even the North-West Mounted Police protested that such a practice was illegal. The Department of Indian Affairs continued it nonetheless. In short, the Indian Act was “a piece of colonial legislation by which, in the name of ‘protection,’ one group of people ruled and controlled another,” noted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The Indian Act, and the wider forces of colonization, took particular aim at women. “It was absolutely part of a larger project to assimilate and eliminate,” said Dawn Lavell-Harvard, former president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, “but also just completely reflective of a misogynistic, patriarchal world view. Women were property.” In most Indigenous societies, men and women played complementary roles that were seen as equally valuable. Indigenous women were independent and powerful, with control over their property, sexuality, marital choices and resources. They were leaders in their communities, responsible for major decisions. They were revered and respected as the givers of life. The prevailing view of women is reflected in an oft-quoted Cheyenne proverb: “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is done, no matter how brave its warriors or strong its weapons.”
Colonial legislation and policy deliberately set out to dismantle the long-held power of Indigenous women. Matriarchal and matrilineal traditions were swallowed up in patriarchal laws. The Indian Act, which already defined those registered under it as less than human, left women out entirely by classifying an Indian as a “male person” with “Indian blood.” It forbade women from voting in band elections, holding leadership positions or even speaking at public meetings. It dictated that any Indigenous woman who married a man from another community—even if he was also Indigenous—lost her status. Children born to an Indigenous mother and a non-Indigenous father were denied status. This assimilatory provision, which sought to reduce the number of “Indians” in Canada, had the added effect of making Indigenous women who married outside their communities extremely vulnerable by cutting off family ties and support systems.
These laws remained in place until 1985; the discrimination has persisted long beyond that, despite various changes meant to address it. As recently as January 2019, the United Nations Human Rights Committee found the Indian Act continued to discriminate against Indigenous women and their descendants.
Colonization slashed Indigenous women’s power directly, but also implicitly. Stereotypes of Indigenous women as promiscuous abounded: settler society and the church frowned upon intermarriage between European men and Indigenous women; women were viewed as the “culprits” behind such arrangements. As Indigenous gender roles changed, men absorbed the pervading colonial attitudes, becoming “acculturated into believing they had to think like white men.” This meant a need to control women, a lack of respect for them and, often, violence toward them. In the power structures of Canada, Indigenous people were legislated to the bottom of the heap, and even below that were Indigenous women. As Amnesty International noted, “The resulting vulnerability of Indigenous women has been exploited by Indigenous and non-Indigenous men to carry out acts of extreme brutality against them. These acts of violence may be motivated by racism, or may be carried out in the expectation that societal indifference to the welfare and safety of Indigenous women will allow the perpetrators to escape justice.”
In September 2005, a crowd of about seventy people gathered on the west side of Terrace, B.C., near the sprawling lumberyards nestled against the river. They drummed, sang and prayed, and then began to walk eastward. The march, dubbed Take Back the Highway, was an offshoot of Take Back the Night, an annual event marked in countries around the world aimed at ending violence against women. Communities all along Highway 16 banded together to organize their marches around a common theme: the Highway of Tears.
Four days later, Tamara Chipman disappeared.
Tamara was born in Prince Rupert. Her parents, Tom Chipman and Cory Millwater, lived on the top floor of a duplex on Ninth Avenue. Tamara had her mom’s hair, extraordinarily thick and curly—beautiful hair, except that it grew really, really slowly. Tamara was pretty much bald until she was about four years old. As a toddler, she hated getting dressed. There was a family gathering when Tamara was about two, where she soaked up attention from her relatives, bouncing around the living room butt naked. Her uncle had bought a chunk of plastic poop at a novelty shop in Vancouver and, when Cory was out of the room, dropped it in the middle of the floor. Cory came back in, saw the lump of poop, and exclaimed, “Tamara!” While the room exploded in laughter, Tamara looked around trying to figure out what she’d done wrong. Her uncle picked up the fake poop to show her the joke. “Oh, you asshole!” Tamara said. Everyone in the room went into hysterics again.
Tamara adored her grandfather, Jack, a heavy-duty mechanic. Nicknamed “Jack’s shadow,” she spent hours with him in the shop, playing, chatting, helping, as he worked on big machines. They went everywhere together, an old man with hands permanently stained black from engine grease and a little girl with bouncing curls and a mischievous grin. Tamara was devastated when Jack died in 1987 from lung cancer. The family moved to Terrace where, as Tamara grew into her teens, she got into some trouble—she was feisty and fiery and didn’t take crap from anyone. “She wasn’t afraid of anything,” said Gladys Radek, Tamara’s aunt. “She never was afraid of anything.”
Gladys had moved back to Terrace from Vancouver in June 2001. Born into the Laksilyu, or Small Frog, clan of the Wet’suwet’en in Moricetown, Gladys spent the first years of her life in a hospital in Prince Rupert with tuberculosis. Shortly afterward, she was apprehended by child welfare authorities and moved through a series of foster homes and group homes, before being sent to a reform school in Burnaby. She hadn’t spent a lot of time in Terrace after leaving the northwest as a teenager; it was difficult to return to the small city where she had been abused as a child in foster care, where she risked running into her abuser on the street. But by her mid-forties, she had earned her Grade 12 diploma and began to feel she had control over her life. She went to the police in 1999 about the abuse, and by the spring of 2001, a trial date was set in Terrace. She moved north to see the case through, renting a house less than a block from the courthouse downtown.
Gladys hadn’t seen her niece in years. But shortly after she arrived in Terrace, Tamara, eighteen now, burst through her front door early one morning, singing out, “Hi, Auntie!” with an enormous Rottweiler in tow.
Tamara visited Gladys nearly every day. The two of them would make a pot of coffee and chat for hours, with Tamara often talking about her dreams of one day getting married and having kids. But Tamara also knew her aunt was hurting. She knew how hard the trial was. On days when Gladys would be at court, Tamara arrived in the morning to give her aunt a supportive hug, and would be back, waiting with a fresh pot of coffee, when Gladys returned home at the end of the day. When the man who had abused Gladys was convicted, and she returned to Vancouver, she never imagined it would be the last time she saw her niece.
Tamara gave birth to her son, Jaden, when she was nineteen. She loved him fiercely. But in the years that followed, her family noticed that she was looking rough; they worried she was getting into the drug scene. She didn’t come around as often. Her mom, Cory Millwater, would later tell the Vancouver Sun that Tamara’s life was troubled and she was hanging out with a “not very nice” crowd. “She was just going through a really hard time at that point,” Cory said.
Prince Rupert clings to the northwest edge of Kaien Island, a rugged, steep piece of land separated from the mainland by a narrow waterway. Highway 16 runs along the northern shoreline at the base of the mountain that forms the island’s centre, wedged against the jagged inlet. From downtown Prince Rupert, the road climbs steeply and the city abruptly disappears into towering cedar forests and damp, mossy cliffs. About five kilometres from downtown, beside the highway, lies the industrial park, an expanse of warehouses and heavy trucks and parking areas for machinery with a gas station at the area’s edge. This is the last place Tamara was seen.
September 21, 2005, was a chilly day, and it rained on and off throughout the afternoon. Tamara had been in Prince Rupert for a couple of days. She frequently travelled between there and Terrace; her parents had split up years before and her mom had moved back to Prince Rupert, while Tom remained in Terrace. She visited both frequently. Tamara had her own car—a Mustang—but it had broken down a few weeks earlier and was parked in Terrace until she could get it repaired. A long-time friend of Tom’s saw Tamara hitchhiking east toward Terrace the next afternoon at about four thirty. And then, nothing.
It was a long time before anyone realized she was gone. Tom saw his daughter regularly when he was home, but during the fishing season, he was gone for long stretches of time. When he was away, Tamara called every so often to check in and make sure he was safe. She knew fishing was a dangerous job and she worried about her dad. But they didn’t have any set schedule to touch base. October ticked by and he still hadn’t heard from her. And while family and friends in Terrace assumed she was in Prince Rupert, family and friends in Prince Rupert figured she was in Terrace. Tamara was facing several assault charges, and warrants for her arrest had been issued. When she failed to show up in court, some people suspected she was trying to avoid the law.
Tamara Chipman adored her father, Tom. He realized she was missing after returning from a fishing trip.
When Tom returned home in early November, he phoned around, and it was quickly apparent that no one had heard from Tamara in weeks. He reported her missing, and RCMP in Terrace and Prince Rupert launched a joint investigation on November 15.
Unlike so many families previously, Tom found the police co-operative from the outset. There was also support from the public, in the form of searchers, donations and media coverage. But it was difficult, after so much time had passed, to piece together Tamara’s last movements, to figure out where she might be. A week after Tom reported her missing, the RCMP put out a call to the public for information. “It’s definitely out of character for her,” Tom told reporters. “At first it wasn’t so bad, we figured she’s going to call, she’s going to call.” But she hadn’t paid the rent on her apartment. She hadn’t touched her bank account.
Ten investigators were assigned to find Tamara. The story published in Prince Rupert’s daily newspaper was picked up by the Canadian Press newswire and published in papers around the province, including the Times Colonist in Victoria and the Vancouver Sun. The Province, Vancouver’s other daily, had a staff reporter do its own story about Tamara that noted her “colourful wigs or short-cropped hair, tall stature and fiery personality.” Two days later, the Vancouver Sun followed suit with a 2,200-word feature about the murders and disappearances along the highway. A Prince George businessman launched a website to help raise awareness about Tamara and the other missing women and girls.
Tom walked the highway from Prince Rupert to Terrace and back again, checking the shoulders of the road, the ditches, the culverts for his daughter’s body. The Kitsumkalum fire hall at the edge of Terrace was converted into a search headquarters. Volunteers congregated at seven each morning to divide the rugged terrain surrounding them into search areas. The B.C. Forest Service donated maps. The searchers covered fifteen to twenty kilometres a day, helped by local search and rescue, volunteer firefighters and fishermen who came up from Prince Rupert—many dropped their work when the call came across the radio that Tom’s daughter was missing. They combed every logging road snaking off Highway 16 between the two cities. But it is tough land to search, vast and steep and heavily forested. A human body is nothing in this place.
In early December, volunteer searchers erected a Christmas tree beside the highway in Terrace, decorated with ribbons from September’s Take Back the Highway march, to honour Tamara and the others. The weather by then was making things difficult. Snow began to fall, sometimes shutting down the search for a day or two. As soon as they could, the searchers went out again. But eventually, winter hit in earnest. An average of more than three metres of snow falls in Terrace during the winter months, with some storms bringing a metre or more at a time. “We were forced to stop searching only because the weather, because of the snow,” Tom told a national inquiry many years later, his voice cracking. “We searched for, what was it, over two months. Every day. We had a huge team at first but people have lives and jobs and responsibilities and at the end our search team got smaller and smaller. But we kept going.”
Lorna Brown, Tamara’s aunt, called Gladys in early December to warn her that there would be a story about Tamara on the news that night. After hanging up the phone, Gladys started thinking about where someone would go if they wanted to vanish from northern British Columbia. She thought of her own history. The natural thing would be to hitchhike down to Prince George or Vancouver. Gladys had been living in the Downtown Eastside on and off for thirty years by then; she intimately knew the area where so many girls from the north wind up. She knew that if Tamara was there, she could find her. Gladys began scouring the Internet for any sign of her niece. She checked online forums, web sleuth groups, Facebook pages. A couple of days later, she got a tip claiming Tamara had been seen in front of the Balmoral Hotel, a nine-storey building near the corner of East Hastings and Main in the heart of the Downtown Eastside. It boasts a pub on the main floor and a slew of bug- and vermin-infested rooms above. In 2014, residents of the Downtown Eastside voted the Balmoral the worst of the neighbourhood’s single-room-occupancy hotels.
Gladys printed a hundred photos of Tamara off her computer and headed to the Balmoral. She handed out pictures and asked everyone: have you seen this girl? When she got home that night there was a message from Tom. He was heading up to Fort St. John, about a thousand kilometres from his home in Terrace, for a job. Money was running out and he had to work.
As Tom pulled into the northern town after a fourteen-hour drive, he heard the tip that Tamara was in Vancouver. He called his wife, Christine, in Terrace and told her to jump on the bus and meet him partway. They arrived in Vancouver the next day. For the next few weeks, Tom, Christine, Gladys and other family members got up early every morning, printed off piles of posters, then walked the city block by block, putting up pictures, asking questions and combing the streets until two or three in the morning. Each day, they had to put up the same posters in the same places—for some reason, people take missing posters constantly. They spent hundreds printing out posters, and money was getting tight, so they went to the police detachment on Main Street to ask if the cops could help out by photocopying some more. The officer at the front desk refused, telling them, “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Assholes,” Gladys said.
Late one night when they were cruising the Downtown Eastside in Gladys’s old van, they passed a girl who looked and walked just like Tamara. They circled around, Tom ready to jump out as Gladys slowed down for a closer look. “Tom, that’s not her,” said Gladys. The girl wasn’t tall enough.
That’s the closest they came to finding her.
The day after Gladys heard the tip about Tamara being seen at the Balmoral Hotel, she had gone into the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, on the corner of Columbia and East Cordova. In operation since 1978, the centre provides basic necessities such as showers, a mailing address, breakfast, medical treatment and counselling from its drab storefront in the heart of the neighbourhood. Gladys was studying the bulletin board in the reception area when she sensed movement behind her. Expecting to find a staff member, she turned, asking, “Is it okay if I put this picture up?” There stood Bernie Williams.
Bernie had two decades as a frontline worker in the neighbourhood under her belt. She snatched the picture and pinned it on the bulletin board, while Gladys began telling her what had happened. Bernie had searched for missing women before, including many of those who were ultimately found on Robert Pickton’s farm. She knew what to do. Bernie led Gladys out the door and took her around the Downtown Eastside, asking everyone she knew—and Bernie knew everyone—if they’d seen Tamara. She introduced Gladys to organizations that worked in women’s rights, Indigenous rights, violence and addiction. Bernie walked miles with Gladys around the neighbourhood looking for Tamara; in the coming years, they would walk thousands of miles more together.