Unbroken by Angela Sterritt

Author:Angela Sterritt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

7 ’Et’doonekh, it might happen

HOPE

CLOAKED IN RED AND BLACK BUTTON BLANKETS waving like flags in the streets, Gladys Radek and other Indigenous matriarchs beat drums in unison, winding like a river down Hastings Street from Main at the annual Valentine’s Day Women’s Memorial March in Vancouver. As we sing the Women’s Warrior Song, the one gifted to all Indigenous women by Martina Pierre, Saẃt, of the Líĺwat Nation, I feel power surge through me. I’m connected to the rock and the rubble of these streets from my time living near them, from reporting on them, and from seeing the lives that have been violently lost on them.

In 2008, I took a part-time job in the Downtown Eastside as a women’s mental health worker. “I want to be down there again, and give back,” I told a friend. Every day I worked there I connected with women, including many who were deeply impacted by missing or murdered family members or friends. Working there deepened my connection to the neighbourhood and seeded a resolve in me to shed light on the circumstances that led to the vulnerability Indigenous women there experience every day. It strengthened my yearning to help others have compassion and understanding for those whose trauma is an integral consequence of colonization.

For many years, I’d taken part in the Women’s Memorial March to honour the spirits of those whose lives were cut too short. The event started in 1992 in Vancouver after a woman was murdered on Powell Street. While women I spoke to at the time told me that her name was not spoken due to the wishes of family members, in 2017 two family members reached out to me to tell me they were now ready to say her name: Cheryl Ann Joe. Her cousin Melodie Casella called me and shared brutal details of her murder. It was the most gruesome murder I have ever heard of and the details still haunt me today. When I asked Melodie why the family didn’t want to speak about her name earlier, she told me, “We didn’t want [the women’s march] just to be about Cheryl—her mother, Linda Joe, wanted it to be about all of the women whose lives were taken.”

Cheryl Ann Joe was a young mother of three small boys from the shíshálh (Sechelt) community on the Sunshine Coast of B.C. A 26-year-old Coast Salish woman with an infectious laugh and a big heart, Cheryl was planning a career as a police officer, to help protect Vancouver’s vulnerable. She was murdered on January 20, 1992, her mutilated body found dumped near a warehouse loading dock in East Vancouver. Her killer, Brian Allender, is still in jail and has applied numerous times to work outside the prison. The last time he did, Melodie raised the alarm, stating the danger he posed to the public, and as a result his request was denied.

During one of the marches, as women weaved through the streets flashing abalone shells from their regalia, their cedar

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