Stolen Sisters by Emmanuelle Walter

Author:Emmanuelle Walter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2015-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

BK

Ultimately, local newspapers have a tough time investing in complex stories and making them both moving and easy-to-read. Vulnerable young women, whether Indigenous or otherwise, come with complex baggage. To tell the story of the murders of blonde Ardeth and Jennifer, one a PhD student in philosophy, the other a soccer champion, is to broach the unthinkable, something that should never have happened; they didn’t live in one of those underprivileged neighbourhoods where men kill women to assuage their rage against society; these virginal young women simply encountered an evil man at the worst possible moment. Telling Shannon and Maisy’s story called for other ingredients. The reserve and its damaged, frustrated young men; the Algonquin community’s proximity to a small white town; Shannon’s broken parents; the unchecked emancipation of a precociously independent Maisy, as is often the case with young Indigenous girls; the trauma caused by colonial history and handed down from one generation to the next. Was there a genuine desire to enter into the story in all its complexity and make readers work? Was there a will to transport readers elsewhere? When articles on the murders of young Indigenous women rely on such psychosocial ingredients and invoke “at-risk behaviour,” they forget to describe what the girls had in common with an Ardeth or a Jennifer: their tastes, their likes, their talents. Maisy and Shannon drank, smoked marijuana and hung out with bad boys, yet Maisy played the clarinet, Shannon rode horses; Maisy dreamed of becoming a fashion designer, Shannon belonged to the cadets; Maisy could sew complex, elaborate outfits, Shannon was going into nursing; Maisy loved to draw. Often the families of murdered or missing Indigenous girls mention the lack of curiosity shown by journalists, who generally confine their efforts to reporting on the scars. Conversely, other families distrust the media and are little inclined to fuel such storytelling.

Two editorials reflect a certain exasperation and convey the cultural and social chasm. In the space of a few months in 1992, three young Indigenous women, sex workers, were raped and brutally murdered in Saskatoon by serial killer John Crawford (Shelley Napope, Eva Taysup, Calinda Waterhen). During both the investigation and the trial, media coverage was extremely sparse, especially when compared to the coverage of trials of Canadian serial killers who murdered white women (the Paul Bernardo trial, for example). When criticism reached the ears of Star Phoenix editorial writer Les MacPherson, he justified the silence by blaming “the nearly total absence of connections between the victims [Aboriginal] and the mainstream community.” These women, he said, “inhabited an isolated underworld where people routinely dropped out of sight. [They] did not maintain close contact with their immediate families. They were not expected home for dinner. Rather than condemning white folks for not much caring about murdered Indian women,” he asks, “Who cared for them when they were still alive?”2

“They were not expected home for dinner” and so did not deserve media attention. MacPherson manages both to let his societal racism show

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