General

Sta’lo’ Mustimuhw: A story of the river people

Published

10 months ago

January 24, 2023

A canyon section of the great Quw’utsun Sta’lo’ showing how over tens of thousands of years, the river has carved its way across our valley. Photo by Jared Qwustenuxun Williams

There exists a mighty river that carved its way down from high mountain tops and wove its way through old growth forests. Rainfall, snow pack, and underground springs feed the multitude of creeks that flow into the river. Water is carried from its source, at the mountain lake above, to the many thirsty plants and animals below.

This ancient Quw’utsun Sta’lo’ (Cowichan River) cascaded over dozens of waterfalls and encountered more than a hundred sets of rapids on its way to the sea. The thick forest in the mountains above kept the river’s flow clear and consistent year round. A deep lake at the source of the river kept it cold and flowing even during times of drought. The lower river forked as it entered its estuary, creating a massive silty beach that ran on for kilometres.

The Sta’lo’ was the lifeblood of the ecosystem. It not only shared its life, giving bounty with the surrounding forests and creatures, but it also shared its depths with a plethora of finned and insect relations. Entire species called the river their home, some living in the river permanently while others visited at different times during their lives.

For untold generations, stseelhtun have spent their youth cradled in the river’s flow before leaving to the sea, only to return in their adulthood to create the next generation of stseelhtun. Each successive generation, for millenia, have left their home and returned, always certain the river would be waiting for them when they were ready to return.

The first person

When the time was right, the first person came to the river and declared it to be a sacred place. As the story goes, this first person’s name was Syalutsa and he dedicated his life to bathing in every creek and tributary of the great river. This first person was soon joined by other people in the valley and they formed the first villages along the river.

A map found at Sh-hwuykwselu, which translates to busy place creek. This map shows, in red, all the known creeks that were covered, dammed, or diverted away from the river. These creeks were an integral part of the pre-contact river system and all played their part in the story of the great river. Photo: Jared Qwustenuxun Williams

The river showed the people where to build their first village, for the strong ocean tides could push water back up the river from the sea, up to a certain point. It was where this rising tide stopped that the people would build their village. This allowed the people of the village to paddle their snuhwulh (canoes) up the river to the village with ease on a rising tide. There were also two great creeks where the first village was built that flowed into the river from the lakes above. In time, the village would grow so vast that it would run all the way up these creeks to their sources at the lakes. Like natural highways, the creeks and rivers connected the people to the sea and its incredible bounty.

Eventually, the Smeent Mustimuhw (Mountain People) moved down from their village in the upper watershed to the lake, and other villages grew and formed down river. Although these new villages were made up of different families, the people shared a common understanding: The river was sacred and its bounty was common and the people would not harvest more than they needed.

The people developed vast technologies and economies based on the river and its cycle. The fishing weir technology was developed to allow the people to fish selectively and breed stronger and more resilient salmon returns. Generation after generation of the people would selectively fish and leave the strongest males and females to spawn, ensuring that each successive generation was more prolific than the last. In time, the salmon returns on the great river became renowned throughout the world.

A picture of me building a basic weir in the lower Cowichan River. My son asked me what I was doing and I said, “I am making a weir.” He laughed and asked me where I learned how to make a weir. All I could say was, “It’s in our blood, son.” Photo by Jared Qwustenuxun Williams

Beyond the sta’lo’

Life on the river had shown the people how to make great and strong snuhwulh that eventually took them to the sea. The Sta’lo’ Mustimihw (River People) created a vast network of villages in the many bays and coves they found on the surrounding islands. Most of the island villages were fishing or gathering sites that would be populated more densely during the busy seasons and sparsely in the winter. Some of these island villages were specialized shellfish farms where monolithic stone walls were built to create and enhance natural shellfish habitat. These qwext tu saxwu’ (clam gardens) became an integral food producing powerhouse that fed the nation and beyond.

Welcome figures at Xwaaqw’um, colonially known as Burgoyne Bay. Xwaaqw’um was once a great food producing village in one of the many bays on the islands in Cowichan Territory. Photo by Jared Qwustenuxun Williams

The Sta’lo’ Mustimuhw mastered the art of smoking and drying food for long term storage. This ability gave the people an advantage, not only in stockpiling food, but also utilizing its shelf life for trade purposes. Soon, the Sta’lo’ Mustimuhw grew and expanded their family’s reach across the sea to the great rivers beyond. The people created a vast trade network that connected them with other Sta’lo’ Mustiimuhw and Kw’atl’kwa Mustimuhw (Ocean People) all along the continent. Great cedar boxes filled with dried clams and other shellfish would be traded for obsidian or jade from hundreds of kilometres away. The Sta’lo’ Mustimuhw were at the center of a great coastal civilization.

Back at their home village, the Sta’lo’ Mustimuhw had grown into one of the largest villages in the territory. With this great population and economic power, many of the surrounding villages and families held the Sta’lo’ Mustimuhw in great esteem. Their power made them generous and peaceful, with some even calling them the philosophers of the coast.

The ocean water washes over the sand at Cherry Point looking out at Ts’uween, colonially known as Mount Tuam. This beach was once a great shellfish harvesting site that produced great wealth and peace in the Quw’utsun Nation. Photo by Jared Qwustenuxun Williams

This civilization of interwoven economies, languages and cultures was created around a river; a river that drew the power from the mountains and enchanted even the first ancestor of the river people; a river that would provide endless water, food and life for untold generations; a river that cradled the ancient civilization of my ancestors.

This is a story of the mighty Quw’utsun Sta’lo’ which was once the centre of a massive Indigenous nation. A river that once fed and moved an entire civilization. A river that many people simply drive over and pass by. A river with a history that goes back before even our first ancestor, Syalutsa, arrived in Quw’utsun.

The post Sta’lo’ Mustimuhw: A story of the river people appeared first on IndigiNews.

General

After Centuries Of Stealing Land, The U.S. Govt Is Actually Inviting Tribes To Help Manage It

Published

9 months ago

February 21, 2023

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Biden is laying the groundwork for a seismic shift in public land management ― one that treats tribes as partners instead of an afterthought.

Jennifer Bendery

By Jennifer Bendery

Feb 20, 2023, 05:30 AM EST

Last April, in a farm field in eastern Virginia, Ann Richardson gathered with a few hundred people for a celebration. It wasn’t a party, though. Several people were crying. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland was there. She was crying, too.

“I can’t really describe it,” Richardson said of that day’s event, which took place along the shores of the Rappahannock River. “Incredible. Surreal. Emotional.”

“I felt like we were surrounded by ancestors who had lived there thousands of years ago. We were standing in their hopes and their dreams for their people.”

Richardson is the chief of the Rappahannock Tribe, and on that Friday afternoon, her tribe took back more than 460 acres of ancestral land along the river that shares her tribe’s name. Last month, her tribe reclaimed another 960 acres of its homeland, too.

It took 350 years. It took survival, after her tribe was forced off of its homeland by English settlers in the 1600s, virtually

erased by white supremacists

in the 1900s and endured centuries of persecution sanctioned by the U.S. government.

It also took a new kind of partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as the Biden administration forges ahead with what it hopes will spur a seismic shift in the way the government approaches managing public lands: inviting tribes to be co-stewards of the land their ancestors were forcibly or illegally removed from by the government.

Since President Joe Biden took office, Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have signed off on nearly two dozen co-stewardship agreements with tribes. There are another 60 co-stewardship agreements in various stages of review involving 45 tribes. Haaland and Vilsack launched this effort in November 2021 with a joint secretarial order directing relevant agencies to make sure their decisions on public lands fulfilled trust obligations with tribes. In November 2022, the Commerce Department signed onto their order as well.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management have since produced a co-stewardship guidance document, too.

To make sure their mandate trickled down to the practical, day-to-day activities of their tens of thousands of federal employees, Haaland’s and Vilsack’s order specifically requires that co-stewardship efforts be discussed in individual employee performance reviews.

President Joe Biden listens to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland speak before signing a proclamation restoring protections to Bears Ears that were stripped by the Trump administration.

President Joe Biden listens to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland speak before signing a proclamation restoring protections to Bears Ears that were stripped by the Trump administration.
OLIVIER DOULIERY VIA GETTY IMAGES

Why is this a BFD? For starters, it likely means the U.S. government’s management of millions of acres of pristine public lands and natural resources will be better with tribal voices engaged. They have extensive and traditional knowledge of how to sustainably care for their land, and that, in turn, can play into efforts to mitigate climate change.

“The history of federal public lands cannot be separated from the history of tribes,” said Monte Mills, a law professor and director of the Native American Law Center at the Washington University School of Law. He wrote a 2020 white paper on tribal co-management possibilities.

“So one core starting point for redefining this relationship is the historic and continuing connections tribes have with these landscapes,” said Mills. “To have tribal folks weighing in on decisions on how lands should be managed benefits landscapes and benefits all of us.”

On a deeper level, tribal co-stewardships are simply a matter of justice.

Since the country’s founding, the U.S. government’s relationship with tribes and land has been almost entirely defined by an infuriating series of broken treaties, dispossessions and exploitation of mineral-rich lands. Beyond that, the government has almost completely erased tribes from laws that govern how public lands are managed.

“The National Park Service, in its organizing act enacted in 1960, really set up this paradigm of park management that treated parks as if nobody had ever been there,” Mills said.

“At its core,” he said, “this is about justice and restoring the rightful, in my view, place of tribal voices and their connection to these landscapes.”

The sun sets over Valley of the Gods in Bears Ears National Monument. So pretty.

The sun sets over Valley of the Gods in Bears Ears National Monument. So pretty.
THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

Each of these land-sharing agreements is unique, and depends on the way that tribes want to engage. There are distinctions between co-management, where tribes share legal authority with the federal government to make decisions affecting the land or the species on it, and co-stewardship, where they collaborate on activities like forest-thinning.

Co-stewardship is also one of a number of options tribes can pursue to have more say in how the public land around them is used. Some tribes may be more interested in improving their consultation with state and federal governments. Others may be focused on reclaiming their ancestral lands entirely, which taps into the broader Land Back movement to put Indigenous land back in Indigenous hands.

“Co-stewardship is a pathway to land back, a pathway to justice, absolutely,” said Nick Tilsen, the president and CEO of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led activist organization in the frontlines of the Land Back movement.

While he praised the Biden administration’s “historic” efforts on co-stewardship, he emphasized it’s not the same thing as returning land to tribes that was illegally taken from them. Giving land back is the only way the U.S. government can truly restore justice for tribes, he said, and it’s an issue likely to get congressional attention in the near future.

Co-stewardships remain “a step in the right direction,” Tilsen said. “The more we can manage land, it increases the likelihood we get it back.”

The co-stewardship agreement with the Rappahannock Tribe, for example, involved land being given back to the tribe. It also took a network of Virginia-based partners. The Chesapeake Conservancy bought it with help from a private donor, connected by musician Dave Matthews and The Wilderness Society. This donor wanted to protect the land to honor her late husband, who loved water birds. The Chesapeake Conservancy provided a permanent easement to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and donated the land title to the tribe, which placed it in trust with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

An agreement with the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho, meanwhile, involved the Interior Department transferring all fish production at a national fish hatchery to the tribe. Then there’s the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and three tribes who share Lenape ancestry, which clears the path for tribal members to rebury ancestral remains on federal land in Cherry Valley National Wildlife Refuge in Pennsylvania.

Indigenous rights protestors demonstrate in Keystone, South Dakota ahead of a visit by then-President Donald Trump. They were demanding that the U.S. government give back the Black Hills to the Lakota people.

Bears Ears National Monument in Utah is easily the Interior Department’s most prominent example of a tribal co-stewardship. The Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and five tribes jointly oversee this monument and the federal lands within its 1.36 million-acre boundaries. The sign at the entrance features the logos of the U.S. governmental entities managing it ― alongside the insignias for each of the five tribes. Each of the tribes has written its own plan for how to manage the land, based on their more than 10,000 years of historical connections to the place that they all call by the same name, something akin to Bears Ears in each of their languages.

This partnership makes for exciting, if awkward, joint events with tribal leaders celebrating not being kicked off their land by the U.S. government for a change.

“Today, instead of being removed from a landscape to make way for a public park, we are being invited back to our ancestral homelands to help repair them and plan for a resilient future,” Carleton Bowekaty, a former Bears Ears Commission co-chair and lieutenant governor of Zuni Pueblo, said at the 2022 co-management signing ceremony alongside government officials.

“What can be a better avenue of restorative justice than giving tribes the opportunity to participate in the management of lands their ancestors were removed from?” he asked.

The sign greeting visitors at Bears Ears National Monument bears the logos of the U.S. governmental agencies that manage the land ― and the insignias of each of the five tribal partners.

The sign greeting visitors at Bears Ears National Monument bears the logos of the U.S. governmental agencies that manage the land ― and the insignias of each of the five tribal partners.
BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT

President Barack Obama established the Bears Ears monument right before he left office in December 2016, only to have President Donald Trump come in and dramatically scale it back in one of the largest reversals of U.S. land monument protections in history. Trump’s move opened the door for oil and gas drilling on the previously protected land, which tribes consider sacred.

When Biden took office, he fully restored the monument’s boundaries.

“This is a place that must be protected in perpetuity for every American and every child of the world,” Haaland, who is the country’s first-ever Native American cabinet secretary, said at the time. “Today’s announcement, it’s not just about national monuments. It’s about this administration centering the voices of Indigenous people and affirming the shared stewardship of this landscape with tribal nations.”

Of course, a co-stewardship agreement is one thing. Securing the federal money to effectively manage 1 million acres of land is another. Because these kinds of partnerships are relatively new, the Bureau of Land Management didn’t have a system in place for transferring money to tribes for labor costs at Bears Ears National Monument. So government officials scrambled to redo their process so tribes could submit a formal request to the Bureau of Land Management for funding.

As the deadline was approaching, “very, very senior people” at the Bureau of Land Management were on the phone with “very, very senior people at the tribal nations,” racing the clock to figure out everyone’s target costs, said an Interior Department official who requested anonymity to speak freely about the chaos it took to pull off this agreement.

“We don’t have a process. We don’t have people. We don’t have technical experts in the bureaus for this,” said this official. “We don’t have a playbook. We’re trying to create the playbook.”

“We don’t have a playbook. We’re trying to create the playbook.”

– an Interior Department official

Haaland has been forging ahead with co-stewardships by using authorities the interior secretary has had all along, but that previous people in her position haven’t used. Some tribes have told Interior Department officials they didn’t even know these authorities existed.

It’s also understandable why tribes would have a healthy degree of caution about making any agreements with the U.S. government, given their historical relationship.

The Interior Department in particular was “a huge, huge force in removing and attempting to sever tribes’ connections to land,” said Hillary Hoffmann, a law professor at Vermont Law School and a former co-director of the Bears Ears coalition.

But many tribes kept up their connections to their ancestral lands through storytelling, she said. In the case of Bears Ears, she said a tribal leader in the area shared with her that his uncle had never been to the monument but could describe a particular spot near it, in detail, because of the stories passed down in his family.

“These stories have been kept alive for generations, the significance and the ways ancestors used these places for medicine or food, subsistence, plant gathering, wood gathering have stayed with tribes, despite all this history, the attempted assimilation, the boarding schools policy….” said Hoffmann, trailing off as she listed horrific injustices tribes have faced.

“It’s remarkable and profound,” she added. “I’m not a member of any of these tribes. I’m not Indigenous. It’s emotional for me, so I can’t imagine how it feels for tribes.”

Rappahannock Tribe Chief Anne Richardson stands in front of a display of historic photos at the Rappahannock Tribal Center in Indian Neck, Virginia.

Rappahannock Tribe Chief Anne Richardson stands in front of a display of historic photos at the Rappahannock Tribal Center in Indian Neck, Virginia.
THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

It’s hard to say how the Biden administration’s efforts on tribal co-stewardship will play out in the long term. Lasting policy change takes time and commitment. There’s a lot of government bureaucracy involved in overseeing public lands. Presidents and their political appointees come and go.

But for the moment, Haaland has already opened up pathways for tribes to have a real voice in managing public lands in a way that hasn’t been seen before.

“The potential for a real paradigm shift is being potentially realized,” said Mills.

This movement toward co-stewardship is also happening amid a shift toward a broader policy of revitalization for tribes, whether it’s in language, culture or economic development. Two years into office, Biden has invested billions in tribal infrastructure and water rights settlements. He’s put record numbers of Indigenous people in his administration, the least of whom include Haaland and National Park Service director Charles Sams. He’s also restarted the White House Tribal Nations Summit, which gives tribal leaders direct access to administration officials to talk about priority issues.

For Richardson, it feels like the country is in a defining moment for reconciling its past ― and in a way that benefits everyone.

“The government is a forever partner for us,” said the tribal chief. “Because they’ve stood with us so that we can regain this land that was lost. They’re standing with us ― for us to teach them our ways, for them to teach us the science ― of why we care for the land the way we do. To be able to share that and teach that to the world.”

General

How do you put a price on sacred foods?

Published

10 months ago

January 24, 2023

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Me standing in my smokehouse showing off 20 sockeye. These are sea sockeye, so they are smaller. I almost always prefer bigger river fish. Photo: Jared Qwustenuxun Williams

How much does a traditional smoked salmon cost?

Well, last I heard, on the rez it goes for about $40 a side, so $80 for a full fish. But what’s it really worth?

The Elders talk about how our food is sacred. This sacredness makes it hard to put a price on the death of sentient beings, or on the teachings from our ancestors.

But we walk in these two worlds, and as a chef, I spend more time than I’d like putting a price on food. So with my feet in both kitchens I feel confident I can break down this food cost, while also recognizing the sacredness of traditional Indigenous foods.

First, in this modern capitalist framework, there are basic startup costs. Things like building the smokehouse. My little smokehouse, about four square metres in size, cost about $1,000. To theoretically pay that off over five years is $200 a year. This smokehouse can smoke up to 20 to 30 fish at a time. So we can say the annual output is around 100 to 200 fish, and estimate $1.50 per fish in costs to the smokehouse. While we’re here, let’s add another $1.50 each for supplies like salt, soap, hot water and refrigeration. Then add another $1 for vacuum sealing and a final dollar for overheads like transport and keeping the lights on. Then we’re at a base of $5 per fish just to keep the system functioning.

Now we need to get our hands on some salmon. The current mainstream market for salmon puts a whole wild sockeye at around 70 bucks, and sockeye is what most people want. But if you ask me, smoked chum is much better than smoked sockeye. Even then, go buy some chum eggs and see what they’re worth. With the cost of fish, and the overhead, we’re now looking at $75 per salmon.

Then there’s wood — each batch needs special wood that’s dried in a certain way. With experience I’d say you can get four good full smokes out of a single cord of wood. A cord of dried maple goes for $350+. So that’d make each smoke worth $87.50. At 20 salmon in a smoke, that’s worth $4.38 per fish. With that, our smoked salmon is now up to $79.38.

Eight full smoked sockeye pulled down from the rafters in my smokehouse after a five-day smoke
A mixture of ocean sockeye and river chinook smoked until dry in strips my Elders call lhiput

Now we get into labor and wages. While we are here, I hope we can all agree that a worthy wage for a skilled Indigenous cook would be at least $40 an hour, because a big part of smoking salmon is knowing how to cut the fish properly. Cleaning, cutting and prepping the salmon takes a tremendous amount of skill and shouldn’t be rushed either. Personally, I can do 20 fish in about four hours, from start to finish. Sure, I could technically butterfly a fish in 70 seconds. But four hours includes a lot more than just fileting. It should be noted that it does include a regimented cleaning of the tools and workspace both before and afterwards.

After being cut, the salmon will sit in a salt cure for 24 hours. Then, all the fish will have to be hung on cedar sticks or laid on clean racks in the smokehouse. Carving new cedar sticks, putting sticks in the fish, and putting the fish all on racks also takes time. Hanging 20 fish in a smokehouse requires 60 sticks. Then add to that the cleaning of all the racks, sticks, and smokehouse — which all take time when the main task is done. All said and done, this hanging and cleaning part takes another three hours.

During the smoking process, the main bulk of the work is lighting and monitoring the fire. When the smokehouse is burning, it should be checked at least every two hours and each check takes between 15 to 30 minutes. That adds up to about four hours per day of monitoring and — since this is a four-day process — that multiplies up to 16 hours total. Then, in the end we have another two hours to get everything vacuum sealed. That’s 25 hours per batch of salmon for a cost of $50 per salmon. Add that to the $79 outlined above and we’re now at $129 per fish.

Since we’re already deep into capitalism here — commodifying a sacred and traditional food — let’s be true to this same worldview and say that all food systems operate on profit margins. That considered, all the money I’ve indicated above would turn the wheels of our theoretical business but wouldn’t pay a profit to any owners or investors. In reality they would demand a profit margin of five to 20 per cent. If we split the difference and put aside 10 per cent, that’s an additional $12.90 per smoked fish. Bringing up our total to $142 per fish.

So with all things considered, in a modern free market world a traditional smoked salmon is worth almost double what it currently fetches. This is primarily because of the fact that wild-caught traditional Salish smoked salmon is considered to come from an unapproved source by the food premises regulation. As well as the fact that traditional smokehouses are not considered an approved production method by provincial environmental health standards.

Basically — our food is devalued because it’s illegal. It’s sold primarily on the black market and cannot be served in restaurants or commercial kitchens. So we must enjoy it in secret. But I can hear the Elders and community members rejoicing because they know that if the western world could access our traditional foods and see their true value, that we’d never get our foods again.

Our foods are our medicine and when we were able to subsist only on our Indigenous diets, our Elders lived to be well over a hundred years old.

A silhouette of me spearfishing on the Cowichan River in our traditional territory. Our tribe is one of the few remaining coastal tribes that still spear fish with a traditional two-pointed fishing spear. Photo: Jared Qwustenuxun Williams

So it’s a balance. We need to be able to get traditional foods like smoked salmon into hospitals, schools, and detention centres. We need to be able to get our food to our people wherever they are. And we need to be able to support our producers adequately. All while ensuring that we only take what we need and we don’t forget our place in the food system. Because if we aren’t careful the cost of a smoked fish could be the remaining salmon stocks, and the Elders know this. This can be said with all our foods. Camas, moose, butter clams, soopolallie — all superfoods that contain vital nutrients. All things that are already in a precarious balance.

I guess this is why I mostly give smoked fish away to my community. Smoked fish costs me more than money, it is a connection to the land and the river which are struggling. Smoked fish reminds me of my childhood and the hundreds of fish we’d catch and my uncles would smoke. How the Elders would talk of so many fish you could walk across the river on the backs of fish and I would laugh because the thought was so unreal. But now my children laugh at me when I say I used to catch hundreds: “sure you did dad.”

Smoked fish is a direct line to my ancestors and I can see their story played out in a series of seasons and feasts. Smoked fish shows me that our people once had a great abundance of food and food security, while so many on my own reserve now struggle to keep enough food in their cupboards.

To me the cost of a smoked fish is nothing and it’s everything. It’s free, I give it away. It costs me time and effort and money for a smokehouse and wood. The value of the smoked fish isn’t in its sale. It’s in the teachings I can share with my son while he’s fishing. It’s in the way the Elders’ eyes light up when you give them a fish. It’s in the hope I get every time the salmon returns.

But to the Western market it’s worth $142 bucks a fish, or $71 a side. So remember that when one of my uncles sells you a side for $40 — you’re lucky he’s not charging more.

The post How do you put a price on sacred foods? appeared first on IndigiNews.

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Indigenous advocates in ‘Vancouver’ say they would help search landfill for MMIW

Published

10 months ago

January 24, 2023

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An attendee at a vigil in Grandview Park on Sunday holds up a sign with the names of four women taken by an alleged serial killer in Winnipeg. Photo by Cara McKenna

Content warning: This story contains details about Canada’s epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Please be gentle with your spirit and read with care.

Indigenous advocates in “Vancouver” say they are ready and willing to travel to “Winnipeg” to help search a landfill that’s believed to contain the bodies of two women taken by an alleged serial killer.

During a vigil in Grandview Park on Sunday, dozens of people came together to mourn the deaths of Rebecca Contois, Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran and the unidentified Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe (Buffalo Woman).

At the event, the relations of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) spoke about the massive failures of police when dealing with their lost loved ones — with some offering to step in to do the jobs that officers won’t.

On the Downtown Eastside of “Vancouver,” Indigenous groups are already involved in enacting searches for missing women — efforts which have been led by the groups Butterflies in Spirit and the Crazy Indians Brotherhood.

‘We’ve got to figure out ways to help one another’

Lorelei Williams, the founder of the group Butterflies in Spirit and longtime advocate for MMIWG, clutches a cedar bough as she speaks. Photo by Cara McKenna

Lorelei Williams — who founded Butterflies in Spirit to commemorate the victims of serial killer Robert Pickton and other MMIWG — said in general police aren’t doing their jobs correctly, which is why her group scours the Downtown Eastside searching for missing women.

Williams said she personally is willing to go to the Prairie Green landfill north of Winnipeg, where the bodies of Harris and Myran are believed to be located, to search.

The Winnipeg Police Service has been under fire after stating it would not search the landfill for various reasons including the amount of time that’s already passed, the conditions at the facility and officer safety.

“When (police) make up excuses as to why they aren’t doing their jobs properly, this kills us,” Williams said.

“This lets predators know that they can target us and get away with it. … We have our Indigenous communities across Canada willing to do this search on their own without all the resources that they have.”

Kukpi7 Judy Wilson of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs said even though there was a national inquiry into MMIWG, the deaths of Indigenous women have continued without reprieve.

“The (police) and the government of Canada are not accountable nor are they going to do anything,” she said.

“When this was happening here with Pickton farms and all of the atrocities that happened here, we had collective support across the nation and across Turtle Island and that’s what we have to do for the Winnipeg serial murders.”

Wilson said she wants to see a united voice of support and solidarity for the “Winnipeg” families coming from the West Coast.

“If a B.C. delegation gets put together to help with the landfill search, I think that would be important,” she said.

“We’d send the best we can from B.C. to help in Winnipeg. … We’ve got to wake up and stop this from happening, we’ve got to figure out ways to help one another.”

A vigil was held in Vancouver’s Grandview Park on Sunday, where guests lit candles and burned medicines — remembering the four women lost in Winnipeg. Photo by Cara McKenna

The Winnipeg Police Service has charged Jeremy Skibicki with first degree murder for the deaths of the four women, believed to have been killed between March and May.

Meanwhile, in B.C., families are still reeling after the bodies of Indigenous women Tatyanna Harrison, Noelle O’Soup, Chelsea Poorman and Kwemcxenalqs Manuel-Gottfriedson were all found in the “Vancouver” area in the spring and summer of this year.

At the vigil, Natasha Harrison shared that when her daughter Tatyanna went missing earlier this year, she had to scour the streets on her own — finding support from the Indigenous community including Butterflies in Spirit but not from the Vancouver Police Department (VPD).

“Wherever you are, shame on you,” she said to the VPD, which apparently had at least one representative present in the crowd.

“I begged you to search the Vancouver streets and you ignored my pleas so I went and searched myself which is not a unique case, this happens time and time again.”

‘Lied to, ignored and laughed at’

Natasha Harrison shamed police for her experiences while searching for her daughter Tatyanna earlier this year. Photo by Cara McKenna

Olivia Louie, a cousin of Noelle O’Soup, spoke about how the body of her relative was found in an apartment this past summer, after going missing while she was in the “care” of the provincial Ministry of Children and Family Development.

“She was taken from her family, her parents, her siblings and her community,” Louie said between tears, while Williams stood behind her holding a cedar bough.

“For weeks after her disappearance, Indigenous community members and residents of the building had approached the Vancouver Police Department with complaints and sightings of Ellie in that building. All of these complaints went ignored.”

Louie said that the entire policing institution “is a lie” and officers only decide who to listen to based on race and economic status.

“They exist to protect and serve, but they do not protect or serve us,” she said.

“During the search for our missing and murdered relative, my family has experienced being lied to, ignored and laughed at by the Vancouver Police Department. These aren’t unique experiences.”

The family of Kwemcxenalqs has also spoken out about their negative experiences with the VPD during their search for their lost loved one, and released a list of recommendations.

Louie called for international support given that colonial governments have not sufficiently addressed the MMIWG crisis — adding that, despite attempts at removal, Indigenous Peoples are still here and practicing cultures that “Canada” tried to erase.

“This genocide is not a past, historic event. It is happening right now, and it is intentional,” she said.

Natasha Harrison said she is sending prayers to the families who are mourning lost loved ones, and stands with the community impacted by the alleged murders in “Winnipeg.”

“I hope I live to see … this system change,” she said.

“I am saddened to hear the silence throughout Canada. I want to see 10,000 more people standing here, screaming at the injustice.”

People light candles in Vancouver on Sunday in honour of the MMIW in Winnipeg: Rebecca Contois, Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran and the unidentified Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe (Buffalo Woman). Photo by Cara McKenna

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