| Finding Dawn |
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| Written by Joanne Bealy | |
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View a PDF of this article. "One woman goes missing. Then another. And another. For a long time, only those who know and love them pay attention. Until the numbers start to add up." As the camera sweeps the streets of Vancouver's downtown eastside, then pans the farm now reduced to rubble by forensic investigators searching for human remains, the narrator of Finding Dawn, a new film about missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada, is easing us into what Amnesty International has called this country's national tragedy: the heightened and too often ignored risk of violence against indigenous women. Despite inconsistent record keeping on the part of the authorities, it is a well understood statistic that over 500 women of aboriginal descent have gone missing across Canada in the past 20 years. We know that sixty-seven women are murdered or missing from Vancouver's downtown eastside, all of them poor, more than half of them aboriginal. Nine women are murdered or missing along Highway 16 in northern BC, all but one of them aboriginal. As the numbers grow, the implied violence becomes more and more difficult to take. It's hard to not lose faith or give up hope. We want to pretend it's not happening, we want to move on. But for B.C. based filmmaker, Christine Welsh, the numbers moved her to act. After waking in the middle of the night to a message urging her to pay attention to what was happening, Welsh started on the journey that would culminate two and a half years later with Finding Dawn. "It was the relentless adding up of numbers that got to me," remembers Christine, referring to the Vancouver Missing Women case. "The number of aboriginal women was way out of proportion to the numbers in the population at large. This was OUR story." Dawn Crey, after whom the film takes its title, was the 23rd woman from Vancouver's downtown eastside whose DNA was found at the now notorious Robert Pickton farm in Port Coquitlam just outside of Vancouver. And it was the crushed looks on the faces of her family, who Welsh saw on the news one night, that gave her the final impetus to start the film. But while Dawn provided a way in to the biggest serial murder investigation in the history of Canada, Welsh quickly realized that the story was much bigger than Vancouver. With 80% of aboriginal women experiencing violence, Vancouver was nothing new. On and off reserve, it appears to be open season on Native women, with very little public outcry. Finding Dawn would ultimately encompass 5 stories, painting a swath from Vancouver Island to the Prairies. Far from the urban centre of Vancouver, Highway 16 is part of the Yellowhead Highway that spans 722 kilometers between Prince George and Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia. It serves as the only link among dozens of small isolated communities where, for many, hitchhiking is the only mode of transportation. Also known as the Highway of Tears, it is where Ramona Wilson disappeared the night of her high school graduation in June 1994. It would be nearly a year before her body was found just 2 miles from where she was last seen. While the RCMP is officially investigating the murder or disappearance of nine young women between the ages of 14 and 25 along that stretch of road, some say the real number may be as high as 32. All but one of the missing are aboriginal. It was after the disappearance of Nicole Hoar, the only non-native woman on the list, that media attention started to focus on the unsolved cases. Every June 11 since Ramona's body was found, family and friends walk the 2 miles to remember her. And as Mattie Wilson, Ramona's mother, tells us in the film, "We will always be here. If it's not me, it will be my children and if it's not my children, it will be my grandchildren and if it's not my grandchildren, it will be my great-grandchildren. I'm fighting for the loved ones. I'm fighting for the unsolved murders. I'm fighting with everything I have. I will always be here." Fast forward to Saskatchewan and we find the same determination with the family of 26 year old Daleen Bossee, who mysteriously disappeared after a night with friends nearly three years ago. In that time, only her car has been found and that was two weeks after her disappearance. The police waited another eight months before listing it as a criminal investigation, and it was nearly a year before any real effort would be put into the search. But still the families of the missing women have hope. For some it's their faith that gets them through. For others, it's the fight, the number of people they see starting to get involved, the changes they see slowly starting to happen. Finding Dawn weaves in the stories of Native rights activists Janice Acoose and Fay Blaney, and we find strength and hope there. I ask Christine what gives her hope. "I always have hope when I tell the stories of our women. Always. I am continually blown away by the strength, the resilience, the power, the determination; all the fears that they have overcome, the pain that they have lived with and continue to live with, but they move forward, anyway." Just six months after Welsh started writing Finding Dawn, in October of 2004, Amnesty International released its report titled "Stolen Sisters: Discrimination and Violence Against Indigenous Women in Canada." The report raised much national and international attention around the issue while decrying Canadian authorities for having "failed in their responsibility to protect the rights of Indigenous women in Canada," noting that there are two different levels of protection at play, one for the First Nations and another for everyone else. And whether that is because of social and economic marginalization, government policies, inadequate police protection or racism, and indifference, it remains unacceptable. "When I began the film," reminisces Welsh, "there was nothing out there in terms of serious coverage of [the Vancouver Missing Women case] as being part of a larger issue. I wasn't aware that Amnesty was working on their report. Now I see all of our work starting to generate what is hopefully the birth of a movement around this issue. The families of the missing and murdered women have become much more proactive. There's a kind of groundswell of activity which is aimed at increasing awareness and providing support for families, but also putting pressure on the Canadian public, Canadian government, and Canadian authorities to do more, to ensure that this doesn't keep happening." The "do more" can take many forms. It's often local and specific. Welsh knew early on that there was only so much she could do with one film. To even attempt to get into solutions could easily have sidetracked the project. "It's easy to say it was a serial killer, we've got the guy locked up, everybody is safe now. But the conditions that led so many of those women to be on the streets and vulnerable to that kind of attack haven't gone away and the resources to address those issues have not increased. Every one of the so called contributing factors— homelessness, dislocation, loss of land, loss of culture, loss of identity, foster care, addictions, survival sex, the list goes on and on—in a place like Vancouver's downtown eastside has a different set of possible solutions, and they're different again for rural communities. I hope what the film will do is start conversations about solutions. Get people talking both within aboriginal communities and in the larger Canadian society about what we can do about the contributing factors. I've always said I make my films to start conversations and this film is no different." I wait as Christine seems to have a silent conversation with herself. "This film was one of the most difficult things I've ever done, and it will take me a long time to recover. By the end, I was not as strong as I was at the beginning, that's for sure. It took a toll. But I learned how to ask for help. And I surrounded myself with people who were very good at what they did, who were really committed to the film and who would help carry it. And the people whose stories we told were extraordinary. They were ordinary people doing extraordinary things." Welsh believes in the power of stories to change hearts and minds. Based on her impressive body of work, we would be hard pressed to argue that point. It is a tale in and of itself to trace Welsh's own path from her 1991 film, Women in the Shadows, in which she searches for her Métis roots, to three years later when she travels across Canada for Keepers of the Fire, documenting the voices of native women on the front lines of some of their communities' most important struggles. "The making of all of my films has led me to the people I think of as my teachers. Women in the Shadows led me to the people who taught me about who I was. Keepers of the Fire led me to the women who had been my heroes and who taught me what it really meant to have the courage of your convictions. I always think of that film as the one that got me to recognize my own power. There is a scene in Keepers of the Fire where Catherine Brooks, who was the executive director of Anduhyaun, an aboriginal women's shelter in Toronto, reminds us of our elders' teaching that each of us has power. We have not to give away that power, but to use it. For me, that was the defining message of that film. Whether you are standing up in front of the Canadian army, as the women were in Oka, or you are packing a bag and leaving your abusive husband, it takes personal power and a personal decision." And therein lies the theme that runs through all of Welsh's films: we have the power to change our lives. Even Finding Dawn is not only about the violence facing aboriginal women, but also about those who have escaped it, who return to their own communities as agents of change, who look to the teachings of their elders to renew their lost heritage. "None of this is a death sentence," says Welsh. "There's always hope. And there's always the possibility of change. Individual choices do make a difference, no matter how big or small. For me, the quintessential line in Finding Dawn came from Janice Acoose when she was talking about her recovery and her realization that "the violence had to stop with me." It's as simple and as profoundly difficult as that. It starts and ends with each of us. Comments (0)
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