The names of Indigenous people who have been murdered and gone missing in the Hope area were marched through the streets Monday morning.
Their names were hand-written on posters and printed on t-shirts, in a procession of about 500 people. Most were wearing red clothes to honour Red Dress Day. Many also had red hands painted across their mouths, a symbol for the No More Stolen Sisters movement.
Chawathil First Nation, Yale First Nation, Skawahlook First Nation, Shxw'Ow'Hamel First Nation, and Fraser-Cascde School District came together to create a unified march to coincide with 15th anniversary of the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and 2SLGBTQIA+ People.
In Hope, the day also honours the murdered and missing Indigenous men in the community.
Linda Kay Peters spoke to the crowd that gathered at Memorial Park. While she has been a Seabird Island band member for over 50 years, she explained she is Ojibway and Cree, and came here from a mining town in northern Ontario. She worked in Aboriginal Health for over 30 years, and is now retired and shares stories about murdered and missing Indigenous women, she said.
She spoke about Marcedes Myran and Morgan Harris, the two women found in a dump in Winnipeg, years after it was known that their bodies were there.
“Remember these names, because we shouldn’t forget them,” she said. “Emily Pike, 14 years old, was found dismembered about a month or so ago. These are not beautiful things to hear but it’s true and that’s why we do these marches.”
She spoke of her niece Shawnee Inyallie, who went missing in 2019 and whose body was eventually found alongside the Fraser River in Delta. But help wasn’t at the ready when it was needed, Peters said.
The family was met with red tape and refusals, as RCMP had decided that the disappearance of the unhoused but “happy-go-lucky” Inyallie wasn’t foul play. So, Inyallie’s family gathered together along with volunteers from the community and conducted a grid search.
Peters said there are efforts underway to build an Indigenous-focused search and rescue team, to bypass the sort of resistance they’ve experienced in the past and find their loved ones sooner, and bring family members home. Peters also opened up and spoke from her personal experience as an eight-year-old child, and told the story of a time her mother disappeared for about a week without explanation.
“I didn’t know until I was an adult until she told me what she survived,” she said. "There was lots of strange, strange men wandering through our town all the time. My mom and dad went out one evening and they got separated from each other and my mom was walking home by herself.”
A car with two or three minors with a reputation for trying to pick up Indigenous women abducted her, Peters explained.
“They took her to an isolated community, where she was assaulted and beaten unconscious with a tire iron. And she was thrown in the bush and left to die,” Peters said, pushing back tears.
“She didn’t die. She managed to pull herself together and drag herself to the road, and she got a ride to her mom’s place. And that’s why I didn’t know where she was for a week. She was ashamed to come home. She thought it was her fault. And many of our women think it’s their fault and it’s not.”
Peters underlined that the reported numbers of murdered and missing women and girls in Canada are much lower than reality.
“We cannot continue to let this happen,” she said.
The day included speeches, drumming and dancing, along with a special performance by the West Shore Canoe Family.
Hundreds of students from the Fraser-Cascade School District took part in the march and much of the gathering afterwards. Coquihalla elementary students also performed a drumming song.
The siblings of April Parisian also took to the stage to honour her memory. Parisian went missing from her home in Spuzzum in 2020, and still has not been found.
