The human face of grief and desperation

Page 7

Editors note: Cheam First Nation member Ernie Crey, 52, is waiting for final word that his sister Dawn, 10 years younger, met a violent end at the Port Coquitlam farm where the remains of many other women have been found. Crey said the evidence already at hand makes him fear the worst. He discussed his feelings with heart-breaking directness during an interview with Windspeaker on Nov. 19.

"Half the women who are missing were Aboriginal as were 50 per cent of the women he's alleged to have murdered," Ernie Crey said of Robert "Willie" Pickton. "I've taken a bit of heat for making that distinction, but I'm past the point of caring anymore.

"Some people have said 'Why are you mentioning that some of the women are Aboriginal? What does that serve? Are you just trying to divide us up and make a racial issue out of this?' I said I'm going to answer this question one time and one time only. I'm sorry if that sounds arrogant. But doesn't it strike you as significant that Aboriginal people make up maybe four per cent of the British Columbia population, but 50 per cent of the women who've gone missing and have likely been murdered are Aboriginal? Isn't that significant? Half the women that Willie Pickton is alleged to have murdered are Aboriginal. Isn't that significant? The Aboriginal population in Greater Vancouver constitutes less than one per cent of the population, but half the missing women and half the murdered women are Aboriginal. That is significant.

"I will not simply turn a blind eye to that. These Aboriginal women and non-Aboriginal women, the two groups of women come from families, they come from communities. They have mothers and dads, brothers and sisters. They're real breathing people.

"Let me make this more real for you. Yes my sister was a drug addict for a good part of her adult life. She lived down on the downtown eastside and yes she lived from prostitution to support her habit and to feed herself. That's true. She lived in dire poverty.

"But you have to realize that in my private life I call Dawn my baby sister. You have to keep in mind that I changed her diapers when she was an infant, fed her Pablum and . . . you know, rocked her to sleep at night when she couldn't fall asleep. Does that help you understand? I say that to people.

"At one time she was a vivacious little Indian girl living in a family with all her brothers and sisters and we all loved one another. That's the Dawn we all remember.

"My eyes are not blinded to how she lived most of her adult life. That's true too. She was sick. She was drug dependent. She was ill. Regardless of that, she didn't deserve to die the way I think she did. And because she was drug dependent and lived in the downtown eastside, that doesn't mean she deserved less attention to her disappearance than were she a fair-skinned, blond hair, blue-eyed woman from the upper middle class from the west side of Vancouver. She deserved the same kind of attention.

"But you know what? She didn't get it. And neither did all the other women get that kind of attention when they disappeared, when they vanished. It's all there in the public record for people to see. Call me bitter. I don't care. The point is policing authorities didn't respond quickly enough. If they had, many of these women would still be alive to this day."