Trial puts spotlight on missing women

Brenda Wolfe, Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Andrea Joesbury, Georgina Papin and Mona Wilson were all Aboriginal women who were loved and respected by their friends and family. And all six women died violent deaths at the hand of Robert Pickton, who on Dec. 9 was found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder in connection with those deaths.
Pickton also faces additional charges in the deaths of 20 other women-Jacqueline McDonell, Dianne Rock, Heather Bottomley, Jennifer Furminger, Helen Hallmark, Patricia Johnson, Heather Chinnock, Sherry Irving, Inga Hall, Tiffany Drew, Sarah de Vries, Cynthia Feliks, Angela Jardine, Diana Melnick, Debra Jones, Wendy Crawford, Kerry Koski, Andrea Borhaven, Cara Ellis and one as yet unidentified victim being referred to as Jane Doe-who have gone missing from Vancouver's downtown eastside. Pickton is scheduled to appear in court again on Jan. 17 to secure a date for a possible second trial.
Most, if not all, of the women who have gone missing or murdered have been pegged as prostitutes and drug users but that shouldn't matter, said Mona Wilson's brother, Jason Fleury.
"Even if they were prostitutes they didn't deserve that sort of execution," he said.
Fleury remembers his sister as an "awesome lady."
"She was very caring, curious and bright eyed, always wondering, asking questions, always growing and always learning. Always trying to make the best of a sad situation."
Windspeaker asked Fleury if he felt justice has been served by the Pickton verdicts, and he replied with a resounding no.
"We are all aware that our kids are still being murdered, our kids are still missing," said Fleury. "It's not safe on the highway for anybody. When's this madness going to stop? Is this somebody's way to control our population here in Canada? I don't know."
Fleury said he will stop at nothing until an inquiry into these deaths is undertaken.
"We're going to push for that. We've got support and we're going to take this to the next level," he said.
Like so many other family members and friends, Fleury is frustrated and, more then anything, disturbed about the death of his loved one, but for Fleury, it's something more. He's also enraged because of the lack of support for Aboriginal women.
"The resources available for women of any nation is obsolete," he said. "There's a lot more First Nations women that are homeless today and it's a big concern of ours down here."
Fleury has been volunteering at the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre (DTES) since May of 2007. The centre is an initiative organized through the Aboriginal Women's Elders Council.
"My job is a lot of trust. I'm about the third male to be in that women's shelter since it opened and that women's shelter has been opened for 10 years," said Fleury.
Fleury believes he's lucky to be where he's at today and "that's only because of hard work and me reaching out to my higher power and the community," he said.
"Not everybody can do it but when somebody does reach out for help, we need to be there. The right people need to be there."
Throughout the Pickton trial, media covering the story routinely reported on the more graphic details of the evidence presented. This type of coverage was hard on the friends and family of the victims, and sickened others, like Gloria Larocque, who had never met any of the victims, but was moved by their stories.
"What I felt was a lack of humanity to the women. The media exposure was very degrading," said Larocque, whose own sister battled with addictions before dying of cancer earlier this year.
"It really promoted that these women were to blame for being in the situations they were in by not even promoting factors that lead them there like poverty, abuse and various other issues. It just left one with the impression that they just decided to take drugs on their own."
Wanting to pay tribute to the murdered and missing women and thinking about how the children that the women left behind are trying to cope with their losses, Larocque decided to create 100 Aboriginal angel dolls.
According to Larocque, the 100 handmade, faceless dolls represent a symbolic gesture to express the neglect that the Aboriginal women received in life and in death.
"I feel it's a bit of a responsibility on my part to be a voice for women like my sister and allow their memory to be served in a dignified manner as opposed to what society has taken as being her own fault because she was addicted to drugs," said Larocque.
Not only is Larocque the sole creator of the 100 dolls, but she also formed the Kookum Educating Traditional Acceptance (KETA) Society in August 2005 to acknowledge and raise awareness of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada.
"I call these women a tribe of lost souls because many of them don't even have a cultural identity," said Larocque.
"Many of them haven't been claimed by their nations. How many Cree, who's from which reserve? We don't know any of that information either. It is unfortunate that these women aren't being claimed."
Larocque has recently launched another project, called A Million for 500. From Dec. 21, 2007 to Dec. 21, 2008, Larocque and the many organizations involved in the project will try to get one million signatures in an effort to raise awareness regarding the women going missing and being murdered. A candlelight vigil was held the same day the petition was introduced.
"What I'm petitioning is not only the fact that 500 Aboriginal women who go missing or who have been found murdered in Canada is not considered a crime against society and the reason it isn't is because the justice system dictates what is a crime against society. The justice system has not taken this on as part of their agenda. They haven't taken it on as a file to be worked on," said Larocque.
"We will see in a year, do a million people care in Canada what's been happening to Aboriginal women?"
Larocque added that what's been going on within the community of Aboriginal women needs to be an issue of importance to Canadian society as a whole.
"I want society to take it on and say we need to do something about this. The perpetuation of negative stereotypes, that is a society problem. It's a wrong way of thinking and very damaging and it's neglecting the important role Aboriginal women have had in building Canada. Aboriginal women have had an integral role within the creation of Canada and this is what we're left with?"
By the end of next December, Larocque will tally up how many people actually signed the petition, but will also be watching to see how many organizations sign on, "because that will be harder to ignore, I think, as a call of action," she said.
Larocque said she gets her inspiration for her work from people like Mona Woodward, a First Nation crisis worker at the Battered Women Support Services.
Woodward works with women who are in a crisis, assists with police complaints, helps women who have been assaulted and offers short term counseling. On a volunteer basis, Woodward has been working with a group at the DTES for two years.
As a former sex trade worker, she uses her experiences to help women out of that lifestyle.
"I just use my personal experience when it's relevant, to give them hope and inspire them, to show them to make small changes within their own life, to give them more self-confidence to be able to do what they need to do," said Woodward.
"I think it's really great that there's more Aboriginal women that are part of the healing movement and that are taking more leadership roles and starting to motivate other Aboriginal women. Just by making those small changes within myself and getting the help that I need, it sort of had a ripple effect, not just on my personal life and my children but it's also rippling out to other people I encounter."
Woodward recognized that if she didn't get out of the high-risk life of a sex trade worker, she herself could've been on the list of missing and murdered women.
"I guess one of the things that rang true for me is the fact that there were a lot of missing women, and also that I myself have gotten a bad date, where he almost killed me. That really affected me," said Woodward.
She knew Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson for close to 15 years and describes them as two completely different people.
"Sereena was really happy-go-lucky and she was always smiling. She had a lot of love for people in general and very easy going," said Woodward.
"Mona was very quiet. She had her own friends that she used to hang out with."
Abotsway was the 48th of 50 women to disappear from Vancouver's downtown eastside. Wilson was the last on the list of Pickton's alleged victims to vanish.
Woodward points out a positive aspect that she said came from the Pickton trial and that it helped to increase awareness of "how society has socialized marginalization of women who are judged because they are homeless, have drug addictions, they're women of colour and because they're poor.
"It just needs to be put out there that marginalized women are human beings and that their concerns of violence, of being looked at as thrown away women and as disposable, needs to be acknowledged by the general public in order to make social changes, and more importantly, to make changes in the three levels of government," said Woodward.
"It's very shameful for the provincial government to have this happen and to be turning a blind eye."
Muriel Stanley Venne, president of the Institute for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women in Edmonton, told Windspeaker she has composed a letter that will be sent to the federal cabinet ministers. The letter is a plea for help and a request to work together to end the unnecessary violence against Aboriginal women.
"I'd like to meet with you to see where we could make a difference to the lives of women," Stanley Venne states in the letter.
"We have answers and solutions but we don't have the resources to implement the changes and policies to ensure life for each of the citizens. I'm asking for your help in addressing this critical situation."