EPILOGUE
A SAFER PLACE
Brenda Wilson and Gladys Radek embrace outside the National Inquiry in Smithers in 2017.
VICKI HILL DID NOT know it at the time, but when she began to speak publicly about her mother, the RCMP took notice. Shortly after the National Inquiry sessions in Smithers in September 2017, Vicki received a response to the information request she had submitted that spring. The RCMP released hundreds of pages of documents, which included internal correspondence about how to respond to Vicki’s public appeals that had started a decade before. According to those documents, E-Pana tried to find the original file of the investigation into Mary Jane’s death. No one could locate it. Investigators then “took another approach to see if [they] could glean enough information to conduct a proper review without the original file” and contacted the officers who had worked on the case in 1978 to request any documentation they still had. Some submitted notes, and others relied on their memories. The notes indicate that investigators felt the circumstances were suspicious, but that they could not find evidence of foul play.
RCMP correspondence in 2008 noted that the inquest’s finding of manslaughter together with bronchitis and bronchopneumonia seemed “quite conflicting.” However, it posited the verdict likely came from factors such as how Mary Jane was found. “We think the jury was considering these facts in finding that there may have been an offender involved in this matter. Was she possibly left there after a[n] epileptic attack or high fever resulting in exposure and, ultimately, her death? If so, was the offender that left her there negligent to the point of manslaughter? Again we can only speculate on the jury’s conclusions. As HILL may have died of causes other than that of an attack by an unknown person(s), her case does not fall into our mandate.”
The National Inquiry provided modest funding for families to pursue activities that would help them to heal. Vicki used the money to purchase a headstone. When Vicki passes away, she wants to be laid to rest beside her mom. She wants to finally be with her.
On a soft gray day in late August of 2017, four men unloaded a headstone from a red pickup truck and carried it over the grass of the cemetery in Gitanyow. One of the men was Francis Williams. Francis and Claudia had fundraised for many months to cover the cost of headstones for Alberta and her sister Pamela. It had been twenty-eight years since Alberta had vanished from downtown Prince Rupert, and finally her siblings were able to lay her to rest, beside Pamela and close to her parents. Claudia and the family stood beside the graves as Francis and the others brought over the gleaming marble that bore an inset photo of Alberta and an inscription that read:
There Is No Death, The Stars Go Down,
To Rise Upon Some Other Shore,
And Bright in Heavens Crown,
They Shine Forever More
Earlier that summer, Francis had erected a cross near where Alberta was found, just west of the Tyee Overpass. The podcast and the renewed attention it generated had brought a wave of hope to Alberta’s family, but as time passed without charges or resolution, disappointment set in all over again. Francis would not attend the National Inquiry that fall; he didn’t see the point of rehashing Alberta’s story and the family’s frustration before the commission. He told Claudia that now, with the headstones, their sisters could rest. That’s what the headstones were for. But it’s hard, he said.
Roddy Sampare told the story of his sister, Virginia, to Commissioner Marion Buller in a college classroom in Smithers. He told the commission of how, when their mother was diagnosed with cancer and given a week to live, the family flew her home for her final days. She held on for three months. She was waiting for Virginia. Almost fifty years after Virginia vanished, the family is still searching for her, still waiting for her to come home. On Virginia’s sixty-fifth birthday, her sister Winnie made her cupcakes and brought them to where she was last seen. Winnie told Virginia that they had not forgotten her. She told Virginia that they never would.
Lana’s aunt, Sally Gibson, still searches, too. Each year when the snow melts, she finds herself scanning roadsides looking for her niece. And Marge still hears her daughter calling out to her when she’s at the mall or walking down the street, still catches glimpses of Lana from the corner of her eye. She waits for a daughter she knows will never come home.
Mary Beaubien thinks every day of her sister as she raises her children and grandchildren, who Delphine never got the chance to know. In the nearly thirty years since Delphine disappeared, not a day has gone by when Mary did not wish she had more time with her little sister.
Audrey and Aielah were in a car accident when Aielah was little. They hit black ice and spun into the ditch. Aielah struck her head on the dashboard and was momentarily unconscious. Audrey thought her youngest child was dead. When Aielah came to, she said to her mom: “Look, I think there’s an angel up there.” Audrey looked up to the clouds her daughter pointed to; she saw it, too.
Afterward, Aielah brought it up sometimes, asking her big brother if she would ever have angel wings. They watched the movie Ghost, in which a murdered man returns as a spirit to exact revenge for his death and protect his love. That’s what Tim would do. “If I ever get murdered, I will stick around and make it right,” he told Aielah. She said, “I don’t want to be a ghost, I want to be an angel.” He told her she already was. “I don’t have wings so no I’m not,” she replied. “Well, you just have to grow them,” he said.
Darrell remembers seeing his family together—Aielah, Audrey and nephews who have since died. He hopes they are together now. “I believe everything is done for a reason on this earth to us. I don’t know. It’s hard to say because we’re not God. We’re just people. We just live the lives that we’re given, that’s all.
“She was brave, she was so brave. She was full of life. I miss that. I really miss that.”
Ray Michalko passed away in 2017. He is sorely missed by families who describe him as a beacon of hope in a difficult time. “He keeps me grounded, I don’t know where I would be without him,” said Claudia Williams not long before his death. “He gives me hope.” He was, said Gladys Radek, the only person she trusted with information. He did so much for so many along the Highway of Tears, and he is remembered with love and gratitude.
Girls and women continue to go missing along the Highway of Tears. In 2017, Frances Brown vanished while picking mushrooms north of Smithers. The next year, eighteen-year-old Jessica Patrick went missing from Smithers and was found dead not far from town. Shortly afterward, Cindy Martin disappeared from Hazelton. Indigenous women and girls continue to go missing and be murdered across Canada, too. Yet, as a May 2019 APTN story notes, there is still no database to track cases, and numbers have not been updated since the RCMP’s 2015 report.
In March 2018, the National Inquiry asked the federal government for an additional two years and $50 million on top of its existing $53.8 million budget to complete its work. The government denied the request, granting instead a six-month extension. In response, Chief Commissioner Marion Buller accused the government of putting politics “ahead of the safety of our women and girls.”
Gladys had moved home to Terrace in 2017 to be closer to her family. She worked as a support person for families throughout the national inquiry, as well as an adviser to the commission. The walk in 2017 was to be her last, but when the inquiry released its final report in June of 2019, she crossed the country once again to be there. This time, she drove.
The final report, called Reclaiming Power and Place, concluded that the violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people in Canada is a genocide. Colonial violence, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, it noted, has “become embedded in everyday life,” in interpersonal relationships, institutions, and the laws and structure of society. “The result has been that many Indigenous people have grown up normalized to violence, while Canadian society shows an appalling apathy to addressing the issue. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls finds that this amounts to genocide.”
The Commission issued 231 “Calls for Justice,” which demanded a sweeping range of measures. Among them are that Canada develop a national action plan to address violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people, that it implement and comply with international human rights laws and treaties designed to protect them, and create a national police task force to review and re-investigate cases. It called for changes to the justice, health and education systems, as well as to police departments, media and industry. And it challenged all Canadians to act by denouncing violence against Indigenous people, learning about and celebrating Indigenous history and culture, listening to the stories shared by the families of missing and murdered women and girls and recognizing the burden they carry, being an ally to Indigenous communities, and holding government accountable to act. Commissioner Michèle Audette had walked part of the Highway of Tears with families on the way to the hearings in Smithers in 2017. Shortly before the release of the final report, I asked her what message she most wanted to convey to Canadians. She said some might find the commission’s evidence and conclusions difficult. “Some of us will feel guilty,” she said. “[But] let’s acknowledge, let’s recognize, that the past, yes, we cannot change the past. But let’s not deny that this happened. Let’s not deny.
“Let’s change.”
When the report was released, Brenda Wilson spoke on CBC Radio, pointing out how little had changed since the 2006 symposium meant to stop the deaths on the Highway of Tears. “How many times are we going to have to do this over and over before there is an action plan?” she asked. Days later, on a Saturday afternoon in June of 2019, Matilda Wilson stood beside the highway. It was the twenty-fifth time she had done so since her daughter was found murdered a few hundred metres away. It was the twenty-fifth time she had addressed a group of supporters with tears in her eyes and resolve in her voice. Trucks roared by on the highway and wind rustled in the aspens overhead.
Ramona’s dream was to be a psychologist. Someone, or several people, took that from her. But no one could take her power to help others, to be a force for good in this world. She has been here all these years: in the courage in her mother’s eyes, the strength in her sister’s voice, in all the work they’ve done. “She never died for nothing,” her uncle, Frank Sampson, said several years before. “She’s still with us and she’s helping to make this world a safer place for our children. We just gotta keep on trying. We can’t give up.”
Kristal, Ramona’s best friend from high school, sees the difference Ramona has made. And she thinks that Ramona would have sacrificed herself if it meant change would happen, justice would be served, other lives saved. Ramona would have given her life to stop the killing.
The question that remains is whether she has.
The answer lies with all of us.