Article originally posted on doppleronline.ca

I wanted to start this article by talking about Cindy Gladue.

I found, however, as I rolled words around in my head and then tried them out on the page, that there is no way to discuss the cruel details of this case without dehumanizing Cindy Gladue further, or without using sensationalist language in an attempt to force empathy, which of course cannot be forced.

Even the facts seem to exist as the horrors of another world. Surely not my world – well, indeed, not my world. As a white person with a significant social safety net, I have not had to live in Ms. Gladue’s world of human trafficking, rape, violence, racism, death, and the posthumous degradation of the body. But this is not another world. It’s the world overlaid atop mine. It’s the layers deeper into the sexual abuse, misogyny, and poverty that I’ve experienced.

If I exist somewhere in the middle, perhaps representing the average woman’s experience, Ms. Gladue was an outlier, the counterbalance to the women who insist they’ve never experienced sexism or the people of colour who haven’t experienced racism. Ms. Gladue lived at the intersection of being a woman, an Indigenous person, and someone in poverty. This intersection is now the topic of much debate, though it shouldn’t be. First Nations, Metis, and Inuit women have been saying, and urging white folks to hear, that at this intersection lies death, dehumanization, and annihilation.

Genocide.

Cindy Gladue, a Metis woman who worked as a prostitute, died in an Edmonton hotel room bathtub from an 11-centimetre wound to her vaginal wall. The case was founded on the idea that Ms. Gladue consented to rough sex and died as a result. Under a feminist lens, money cannot purchase consent because when a person is in poverty, money is inherently coercive.  And it is only due to the ‘othering’ of Native women that a jury could even consider that a woman would desire being assaulted so violently that it caused her death. Women, and especially Indigenous women, have been so removed from the category of ‘Human’ that a lawyer can argue, and a jury will believe, that she consented to sex that killed her. That she wanted it. It seems some people have forgotten you cannot consent to being murdered. Pay attention to this argument because it’s often being used to get abusive men off the hook for sexual assault and murder under the guise of rough sex and BDSM. Convenient when the woman is no longer around to say what she did or didn’t want …

Ms. Gladue’s vagina was displayed in the courtroom, to the jury and all else, as evidence. Just her vagina. Not photographs, not an expert’s description. A body part had been removed and displayed, her sanctity desecrated, and it STILL did not sway the jury. Ontario trucker Bradley Barton was found not guilty. To the relief of Ms. Gladue’s loved ones, her community, and for justice as a whole, the Supreme Court decided in May there would be a retrial.

Maybe now that we can see this case as evidence of a genocide against Indigenous women, Ms. Gladue will have justice after all.

The commissioners of the report on Canada’s participation in this genocide describe it in the present tense: “a continuous policy, with shifting expressed motives but an ultimately steady intention, to destroy Indigenous peoples physically, biologically, and as social units.”

In my opinion what happened to Ms. Gladue was a deliberate killing of an individual. The courts did not agree. I believe this is because for far too long, the legal system, police officers, politicians, and citizens have regarded the rampant abductions and killings of Indigenous women as isolated cases. Unfortunate, but not part of a larger pattern. However, it truly does not take much to delve into the current and historical context of oppression and abuse of FNMI (First Nations, Metis, and Inuit) people in Canada (residential schools, forced assimilation including loss of language, 60s and millennial scoops, Highway of Tears) and come to the conclusion that this violence is systemic, deliberate (as in, the harm is done because they are Indigenous women specifically), wide-scale, and intergenerational.

What does it do to a community or a group of people to see their loved one treated so inhumanely, to see themselves and their culture systematically destroyed? When the police don’t help you and the courts define you only by the words they choose (prostitute, addict, Native) and white people look away? When your language is stolen and your ancestors traumatized and no one is telling your story and you’re not allowed to speak for yourself? What kind of collective trauma occurs from young Indigenous girls growing up hearing about MMIW – to learn that they are desirable but disposable and no matter how careful they are, someone wants them dead? What would that do to your daughter?

I know what the version for white girls did to me – eating disorders and self-destructive behaviour and acceptance of abuse and low self-worth and no hope for my future. Pile on the racism and poverty, and how is that not an attempt to destroy a people?

We do not get to shy away from this word because it reminds of a war, after which we’d collectively claimed Never Again. We do not get to clutch our pearls and cry, “Not us! We would never…” We do not get to quibble over the word that reminds us we are not always the polite and inclusive nation we play on TV. We should hate this word. We should be horrified. We should be looking deeply into our individual and social culpability and we should be facing a reckoning of conscience. We should be willing, eager, desperate to make amends, to facilitate reconciliation, to be on the side of those most harmed. To act as shields between vulnerable populations and those who would enact violence against them.

I have never cared less about the reputation of this country. I care about my sisters, who are confronting epidemics of violence, racism, lack of resources like access to clean water and housing (human rights), and now the hand-waving of those offended by a word, shifting the focus from the reality of these women, to the feelings of men in positions of privilege and power. It’s a diversion, and it’s divisive; two things we need to avoid when the most necessary thing is staring truth right in the face.

Ms. Gladue’s story has stayed with me as proof of our social disregard and literal destruction of FNMI women – it’s, always in the background of my thoughts when I write or read about the oppression of Indigenous women. How could she have been confronted with so much of the darkness of Canada, from male violence to the court system? Genocides, and our understanding of them, often have a pinnacle, a turning point in our awareness of the issue. Frequently, we need that person to humanize the group in its entirety, because otherwise it’s too many names, too many faces, simply overwhelming. I wonder sometimes if our brains can even contain the horrors of what our own government, religion, or society are capable of. And if we cannot accept it, we must deny it, or live in permanent cognitive dissonance. I have now witnessed each of these options, and I know where I stand.

I have heard the family members of the missing and murdered indigenous women – I have read definitions and historical precedents. I have learned the human cost. And I am ready to do what needs to be done, as defined by women Indigenous leaders, to make this right in this country of which I am ashamed and yet for which I still have hope.

Talk to me in the comments, or leave your thoughts on the Doppler Online website.

Kathleen May is a writer, speaker, and activist. Her work in our community includes co-founding the long-running Huntsville Women’s Group, being a Survivor Mentor in the pilot survivor-to-survivor program through MPSSAS, co-facilitating instinct-unlocking workshops for women through I Got This, working as a host and community producer of Herstories on YourTV, volunteering with Women’s March Muskoka, and her role as a front-line counsellor at a women’s shelter. Kathleen is a 2018 Woman of Distinction for Social Activism and Community Development and also received the Best Author award for her 2018 submission at the Muskoka Novel Marathon, a fundraiser for literacy services. Her dream is a sustainable women’s land co-operative in Muskoka.