Saturday June 21 is National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada. Although there are other days dedicated to Truth and Reconciliation and Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, I can’t let June 21 go by without reflecting on the tragedy of our lost women. I live in Port Coquitlam, BC, where notorious serial killer Robert Pickton was born, raised, and spent several years murdering at least 49 women. Many or most were Indigenous sex workers, their murders undetected by RCMP until they stumbled on a grisly scene when executing a search warrant for illegal firearms on the Pickton family’s pig farm. 

All women are subject to violence, largely at the hands of men. While feminism has been bringing attention to the scourge for decades, few inroads have been made into the reality that Indigenous women are three times as likely to be subject to gender-based violence and six times more likely to be murdered than their non-Indigenous sisters. So when I saw that Canadian journalist Jessica McDiarmid (class of 2016) had published Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Penguin Random House, 2019), I bought and read it almost immediately.

“The Highway of Tears is a 725-kilometre stretch of highway in British Columbia,” McDiarmid writes, running approximately from Prince George to Prince Rupert. “And it is a microcosm of a national tragedy—and travesty.” 

She continues: 

I was ten years old the first time I saw Ramona Wilson. A photo of her, smiling, black hair cloaking her left shoulder, was printed on sheets of eight-by-eleven paper and hung up around Smithers, the B.C. town where we both grew up. Over the picture was a banner that read: MISSING. Under it was a description: 16 years old, native, 5 foot 1, 120 pounds, last seen June 11, 1994. The posters plastered telephone poles and gas station doors and grocery story bulletin boards throughout town and the surrounding areas for months. But in April the following year, the posters were taken down. She was gone. 

I would learn later that Ramona wasn’t the only First Nations girl or young woman to vanish from the area … There wasn’t a great fuss about these missing and murdered girls. “Just another native” is how mothers and sisters and aunties describe the pervasive attitude. Police officers gave terrified, grieving families the distinct impression that they didn’t care and didn’t try very hard. Nor did the public rally to the cause in large numbers …

I left northwestern British Columbia in my late teens and never planned to return, aside from the odd week or two to visit family. I reported from across the country and overseas, focusing when I could on human rights abuses and social injustice … Over those years, I watched as women and girls in northwestern B.C. continued to disappear —Nicole Hoar, Tamara Chipman, Aielah Saric-Auger, Bonnie Joseph, Mackie Basil—and long felt that I needed to come home to this story. The first time I spoke with local family members … was in 2009. But it wasn’t for another seven years that circumstances aligned and I returned home to research and write this book. 

In June of 2016, not long after I arrived back in Smithers, I had the honour of walking the Highway of Tears with Brenda Wilson, Ramona’s sister; Angeline Chalifoux, the auntie of fourteen-year-old Aielah Saric-Auger; and Val Bolton, Brenda’s dear friend, along with dozens of family members and supporters who joined them for part of the way. … [We arrived in Prince George on] June 21, National Aboriginal Day, and hundreds of people had turned out … Angeline told Aielah’s story, and then she read to the crowd her favourite quote, from Martin Luther King Jr. “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it,” she read out. “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” 

This is a thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and compassionate book. It was a finalist for the RBC Taylor Prize and the Hubert Evans Prize and a national bestseller. I encourage you to read it.

Post Script: There is also a Highway of Tears documentary (2015), a documentary called The Pig Farm (2011) about the Pickton murders, and a true crime documentary series called Sasha Reid and The Midnight Order (2024), which focuses in part on the so-called Butcher of Port Coquitlam. 

Other not-so-great moments in Canadian history:

Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, by Catherine Fogarty.

Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, by Tyler LeBlanc.

Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys, by Jenn Thornhill Verma.

Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster, by Gina Leola Woolsey.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31240893