Red River Girl Read online

  “This discriminatory conduct was probably so inbred that the officers did not notice that their conduct displayed prejudice and discrimination,” the report stated. It found that police behaviour reflected a hierarchy established by Canada’s early settlers: white men at the top, Indigenous men beneath them, and Indigenous women at the very bottom. “It is intolerable that our society holds women, and Aboriginal women in particular, in a position of such low esteem,” the report concluded.

  Since Helen Betty Osborne’s death, dozens more Indigenous women had been killed in Manitoba, some of them from Osborne’s own family. In 2003, a cousin, sixteen-year-old Felicia Solomon Osborne, told her mother that she thought she had been followed by a car as she walked home from her Winnipeg high school. A few weeks later, she disappeared. Her mother immediately called the police, but she was told Felicia needed to be missing for twenty-four hours before a search could start. In fact, it was more than a week before the police interviewed her and almost two months before they issued a press release asking for help in finding Felicia. A month after that, the Winnipeg Police Service River Patrol was conducting routine maintenance at the Alexander Docks when they discovered a dismembered human thigh. A few days later, a man walking along the bank of the Red River found an arm. The police established that the body parts belonged to Felicia but learned nothing more about the fate of the teenager. Newspaper reports speculated that she had been killed because she was caught up with gangs and the sex trade. Her mother vehemently denied this, and Felicia’s killing remained a mystery.

  Five years later, another Osborne cousin, Claudette, also disappeared. The twenty-one-year-old was last seen in July 2008, heading to the low-budget Lincoln Motor Hotel, on one of Winnipeg’s inner-city highways. Claudette, who had struggled with an alcohol and drug addiction, had given birth to her fourth child only weeks before. According to her sister, Bernadette Smith, Claudette tried to call relatives to say she was being hassled by a man she had just met, a long-distance truck driver from Calgary.

  “She was still bleeding and this gentleman—I don’t know if I’d call him a gentleman—this man was trying to have sex with her, and she was calling people at four in the morning asking for help,” said Smith.

  Claudette, frightened for her safety, left a phone message describing how the man was trying to push himself on her and pleaded for someone to come and get her. But the cell phone she was calling had run out of credit and her message did not immediately appear. It was days before the family heard her cry for help, and by then she was gone.

  Smith reported her sister’s disappearance to the police but felt it was a struggle to get them interested. She said it took them nearly a week to check the security cameras at the hotel, by which time any relevant footage had been recorded over. Detectives did track down the truck driver from Calgary, but they couldn’t find any evidence to place Claudette in his vehicle. Smith said the police told her to let the matter go as he had a wife and kids and was embarrassed.

  She responded with anger. “Our loved one is missing, and he’s picking up women and he’s got a family and a wife at home and children, and he’s embarrassed? He should be embarrassed!”

  To Smith, it seemed the police were treating the truck driver more like the victim. “I mean we’re all human beings, but we really feel like because we’re Indigenous people in Canada, we’re not taken seriously. They just think that no one is waiting for us, that nobody cares about us, that we’re disposable,” she said.

  Almost unbelievably, a fourth woman from Helen Betty Osborne’s extended family was also killed. Hillary Wilson was eighteen when she went missing from her home in Winnipeg in August 2009. Her body was later found on a dirt path on the outskirts of the city. A few weeks earlier, the body of one of her best friends had also been discovered, this time on nearby farmland. Raven Thundersky, whose own sister had been murdered and who was trying to raise awareness about violence against Indigenous women, spoke to the CBC after the girls were found. “I can’t remember the last time—and I mean for Aboriginal women—when the last time was that we actually were able to see the face and have the name of one of the murderers responsible for taking one of our women,” she said.

  The Osborne women represented just a small segment of a much larger phenomenon happening throughout Canada. Nahanni Fontaine had counted more than 120 missing and murdered Indigenous women in Manitoba alone over the previous three decades. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which collated national figures on the problem for the first time in 2014, estimated that nearly 1,200 Indigenous women had been murdered or gone missing in Canada between 1980 and 2012.

  The Native Women’s Association of Canada had collected its own figures, which showed that the number of those murdered or missing nationally over the last forty years was closer to four thousand. Even taking the lower figure, the conclusions were chilling: Indigenous women made up only 4 percent of Canada’s female population but were four times more likely to be murdered or go missing. In Manitoba, according to the RCMP figures, almost half of all women murdered were Indigenous.

  The frustration for activists like Fontaine was in getting the wider population interested in a problem it didn’t see as its own. In 2010 she had scored a victory when she was appointed the Manitoba government’s special advisor on Aboriginal women’s issues, the first such position in Canada. She was thankful for the official recognition but felt the support was not universal. At the core of the issue was the perception that the violence against women was confined within the Indigenous community. It was true that domestic violence and sexual assault were problems. This had been highlighted in Manitoba’s 1988 Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, which found that one in three Indigenous women in the province had experienced abuse by their partners, a figure far higher than that for non-Indigenous women. But the more recent RCMP figures highlighted a different concern: whereas 74 percent of non-Indigenous women murdered between 1980 and 2012 were killed by a partner or close family member, for Indigenous women the figure was only 60 percent. Indigenous women were more likely to be killed outside the home by strangers or “casual acquaintances,” a term often used to describe the sex worker and client relationship. When Indigenous women left their reserves and moved into cities, they were falling prey to random predators.

  One of the most shocking illustrations of this trend was the Robert Pickton case in Vancouver. Pickton, a pig farmer, was known to have killed at least thirty-three women and bragged that he was one short of killing fifty. More than half of his victims were Indigenous. Pickton found his often drug addicted and sexually exploited victims in Vancouver’s shabby Downtown Eastside. It was 1997 when police began to notice that an alarming number of women were disappearing, but it took another five years before they arrested Pickton, and only then because his farm was raided on an unrelated charge. The investigation had struggled because it fell between the jurisdiction of two police forces and because it took time to persuade senior officers that the women hadn’t just drifted away. Pickton was ultimately convicted on six counts of second-degree murder.

  Indigenous women had also been killed along what became known as the Highway of Tears. Between 1969 and 2006, there were eighteen recorded murders and disappearances along British Columbia’s Highway 16, a remote road that stretches from Prince Rupert, on the Pacific coast, through forests and logging towns to the city of Prince George. Locals said the number of missing was closer to fifty, and very few of the cases had been solved.

  “We victim-blame,” says Fontaine, describing how this violence was viewed in mainstream society, where she felt there was a misogynistic impression of what “Native women” were like. It was true that Indigenous women were more likely to live vulnerable lives dominated by drugs, alcohol, and sex work, but Fontaine saw nothing inevitable about it. To her, the real issues were abuse, poverty, and a lack of opportunities. But most of all, she felt women were suffering because of an intrinsic racism.

  “Whereas Indigenous people understood
Indigenous women and girls as life-givers, as sacred and equal, we saw that shift to ‘They’re whores, they’re promiscuous, they’re squaws,’ ” she says of their treatment by the early settlers in Canada. “Squaw is the Iroquois word for female genitalia. We have a swear word that starts with a c and ends with a t, and this is essentially what generations of Indigenous women and girls have been called.”

  Fontaine liked to tell the story of a civic project she commissioned, a mural showing the faces of murdered Indigenous women painted on a bridge over a highway in Winnipeg. The artist told Fontaine that while he was working, a young white man riding a bicycle had stopped to ask him what he was doing. When the artist told him, the man replied, “Oh, those fucking whores deserved what they got.” It was unbelievable, Fontaine said, that he hadn’t thought to blame the killers.

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  —

  On the morning after Tina’s body was found, as he assembled his team inside the Public Safety Building, O’Donovan was acutely aware of the political sensitivities surrounding the teenager’s death. The demand from the Indigenous community to do more to solve dozens of deaths and disappearances was something the city had already tried to address. In 2011, the Winnipeg Police Service had joined with the RCMP to form Project Devote, a special task force dedicated to investigating cold cases.

  The task force’s official objective was to reinvestigate long-standing unsolved cases of missing or murdered vulnerable people, regardless of the victim’s race. The reality was that most of its twenty-eight cases involved Indigenous women, including all three of the unsolved Osborne murders. But although Devote had been running for a couple of years, it had made headway with just one case, and that was only after the main suspect confessed while in prison for another murder. Devote was located separately from the main Winnipeg Police headquarters, in an office crammed full of cold-case box files, a large map tacked on its wall pinned with the possible location of perpetrators. Detectives spoke of their struggle to track down witnesses and find evidence for crimes that had taken place so long ago. The victims’ relatives, though grateful that the cases had been reopened, criticized the lack of results. Bernadette Smith had so little faith in Devote that she joined with friends to organize a private boat to drag the Red River for evidence in Claudette Osborne’s disappearance. It was a small fishing boat that pulled single lines along behind it—barely effective, but at least she felt she was taking action.

  But, by the summer of 2014, something seemed to be changing in Winnipeg. The anger and compassion for a dead Indigenous child that O’Donovan had so clearly articulated in his press conference was beginning to be felt across the city. Two days after Tina’s body was found, Winnipeggers flocked to a rally in support of Indigenous peoples. More than a thousand gathered at the Alexander Docks to commemorate Tina Fontaine’s and Faron Hall’s lives. Indigenous men and women were joined by other Canadians who wanted to demonstrate their support. Office workers, students, and parents pushing children in strollers gathered together and walked down Main Street, holding up traffic behind them. Some carried placards on which they had written the names of other Indigenous women who had been murdered or gone missing and whose cases remained unsolved. It was only a few weeks after the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown had been shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, an event that sparked a mass protest and the birth of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the United States. The Winnipeg marchers spoke of wanting to ignite something similar that might fan out across all of Canada. Many called for the government to initiate a national inquiry into the violence.

  On that warm summer evening, the marchers headed along Main Street towards the Forks, the spiritual heart of the city, at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Only a few weeks earlier, on a grassy bank overlooking the water, Nahanni Fontaine had unveiled a monument to the missing and murdered. It was made from smooth white granite, its rounded contours echoing the shape of a woman’s body. To Fontaine, it symbolized the Indigenous “female spirit, both beautiful and hard.” Now the marchers converged around it, laying pouches of ceremonial tobacco at its base and settling down in the nearby Oodena Celebration Circle to listen to singing and drumming. Even as the sun went down and the sky turned a deep, inky blue they remained in place, lighting candles for the dead. Beside them in the dark, the waters of the Red River slid silently by.

  A few blocks away, O’Donovan was still in the Public Safety Building. He regarded the vigil as an opportunity to gather intelligence and had assigned a surveillance team of plainclothes detectives to film those attending. A few years earlier, he had investigated a double homicide where the perpetrator had stood right at the front of a memorial held for the women he had murdered. The detective knew that killers liked to insert themselves into their dramas, and he suspected that the person who had murdered Tina could be at the Forks, acting in a telltale way. I will find you, he thought. Later he would review the footage, a task he would repeat many times in the coming months.

  That night he headed home in time to catch up with Mary before bed. She noted that in all the years he had been a detective, her husband had never, until Tina, referred to a victim by her first name.

  2.

  “TELL MOMMA AND PAPA I LOVE THEM”

  On the Sunday that Tina Fontaine’s body was found in the Red River, her great-aunt and official guardian, Thelma Favel, had been spending the afternoon at her house on the outskirts of Sagkeeng First Nation reserve. Outside, under a wide sky, the birch and aspen were turning yellow in the late summer sun. Thelma remained inside, too anxious to enjoy the good weather. Six weeks earlier, her baby, as she liked to call Tina, had gone missing after a trip to visit her biological mother in the city. Thelma had repeatedly tried to find the teenager, contacting the police and the provincial child welfare agency to register her as missing and in danger of exploitation. Now it was days since she had heard any news, and her concerns for her fifteen-year-old charge were mounting.

  Thelma had Wi-Fi, something of a rarity in the neighbourhood, and her house was a popular hangout for her foster kids, young relatives, and their friends. Around mid-afternoon, her grandniece alerted her to a post on Facebook written by a cousin in Winnipeg. It said that the body which had just been pulled out of the Red River had been identified as Tina. Thelma read it with a rising sense of panic. This was Facebook, she told herself, and you couldn’t always believe what people wrote. When she went to bed that evening, she decided that as she had heard nothing from the police, she wasn’t going to allow herself to think the worst. But the next day, two RCMP officers were standing at her door. Gently, they told her to brace for bad news. It was true that a body had been found, they said, and they could confirm it was Tina. As the first waves of grief flooded through her, Thelma felt like her heart was being ripped out of her body.

  In the blur of days that followed, Thelma struggled to absorb the fact that Tina was never coming home. Sagkeeng First Nation had been Thelma’s home for decades, and now her door was constantly swinging open as family and friends arrived to express sympathy and make sure she was looked after. Her home was officially “off-reserve,” within the town line of neighbouring Powerview-Pine Falls, but she was still very much part of the Indigenous community and was grateful for its support. At the same time, she found herself fielding calls from journalists from across the country wanting to hear her reaction to the teenager’s death. Tina’s young and pretty face had sparked a national sense of outrage and mourning, and Thelma was beginning to realize that her grief would never be only personal. “I don’t understand why it had to take Tina’s death to open everybody’s eyes to the fact that there’s a problem out there,” she said with some bitterness.

  Situated an hour and a half’s drive north of Winnipeg, Sagkeeng was a world away from the city where Tina had died. Reaching there meant travelling north on Highway 59, past the city limits and into a landscape of flat fields and creek beds fringed by tall brown grasses. At the Br
okenhead Ojibway Nation reserve, the highway passed the art deco façade of the South Beach Casino and continued on into forests of pine and birch, where billboards at the roadside advertised holiday resorts and warned drivers to be “bear smart.” As the road neared the freshwater expanse of Lake Winnipeg, it cut right across low hills and to weave its way down to the southern bank of the Winnipeg River. Here, a dark wooden sign painted with white letters welcomed you to “Sagkeeng Territory, Signatory to Treaty 1.”

  Past the sign, the small, rundown homes of the reserve loomed into view. The buildings spread out in two straggly fingers along the north and south banks of the river, marking the point at which it emptied into the lake. The land was home to the Anishinaabe-Ojibway people, who had fished, hunted, and traded here for centuries. Treaty 1 was the name of the agreement that had established Sagkeeng back in 1871. It had been signed by the newly formed Canadian government and Indigenous leaders, the first of a series of treaties by which land was exchanged for money, goods, and what the Indigenous people hoped would be a prosperous life under colonial rule. The reserve was originally named Fort Alexander, after a nearby fur trading post. Later, its inhabitants chose to take the name “Sagkeeng” from the Ojibway word meaning “mouth of the river.” By the time Tina was growing up here, the two names were still in use, with the older generation still referring to the settlement as Fort Alec.