From the Franklin Expedition to the Marlborough Hotel: Indigenous voices must be heard

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/01/2024 (678 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Only six years after the 1848 disappearance of the Franklin Expedition in Canada’s Arctic, Inuit traders told a British explorer, John Rae, of the fate of The Terror and the men on board.

Returning to England with this news, Rae’s information was dismissed, largely because the idea of good Christian men being driven to starvation and cannibalism was unimaginable.

For 200 years, various Inuit people and communities patiently retold the story to anyone who would listen, and pointed non-Indigenous explorers to the site of the wreck, which they then refused to investigate on grounds the location was unlikely.

For nearly 200 years,the Inuit held onto this knowledge, kept it truthful and unembellished, until finally, at long last they were believed and the shipwreck was found in 2016.

Inuit oral histories pointed to Franklin wreckage — but no one listened

It’s an impossible tap dance to convince someone of the truth when they only want to maintain their own reputation and status. The labour of proving the truth of something then falls to the teller, instead of the one who is being challenged.

Conveniently, for those who control the narratives, truth can’t be accepted if it can’t be proven, and Indigenous voices and truths have long been cast as unreliable in our country’s history.

So, as many do when not believed, Indigenous individuals and communities resort to providing proof.

It’s an impossible tap dance to convince someone of the truth when they only want to maintain their own reputation and status. The labour of proving the truth of something then falls to the teller, instead of the one who is being challenged.

In agonizing and humbling detail, lived experiences are shared, maps are drawn pointing toward the shipwrecks of failed policy and the lasting effects of trauma:

Doubt about stories of children dying at residential schools brought ground-penetrating radar scans of likely graves.

Convinced her words alone would not prove her mistreatment in health care, Joyce Echaquan livestreamed her own death while being abused by hospital staff.

And knowing there could be a denial or rewriting of events, a bystander recorded a woman held in zip ties at the Marlborough Hotel in Winnipeg on Christmas morning, a situation that was escalated by a three-hour delay in police response.

For Indigenous Canadians, this video does not stand alone, it is not a single story about a single woman. This video is the symbolic proof of the legacy of systematic mistreatment and dehumanization of Indigenous women.

This event is a rallying point and a cry of grief, a desperate plea to hear 200 years of truth that has gone unheeded by those in power.

The desperation to find answers, not only for the people in the video, but for every other lost mother, sister, and auntie, or daughter, is palpable. And they feel they must do this work themselves because all their individual labour of truth-telling continues to be ignored.

Cambria Harris, the daughter of slaying victim Morgan Harris, livestreamed her exploration of the Marlborough basement.

Police are investigating the property destruction and considering charges for those who went downstairs or otherwise participated in the lobby rally.

Harris endured not only the slaying of her mother, but being told by those in power that there is no merit in finding her mother’s body, that it is to stay buried in garbage (a decision only recently reversed by the new premier, Wab Kinew). She has camped out at the landfill, at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and has spoken with leaders on Parliament Hill.

Why does she have to work so hard to get the rest of us to honour her story? Is it any wonder that people put under so much pressure eventually burst?

This video and confrontation is not about the events at the Marlborough Hotel. This is an outpouring of community grief and anger that is centuries long.

The rally at the Marlborough, the ransacking of the basement, the fevered pleas for investigation, the assumptions of human trafficking: these are cries that we all must finally hear.

This video and confrontation is not about the events at the Marlborough Hotel. This is an outpouring of community grief and anger that is centuries long.

For many, this incident brings to sharp focus the plausible treatment and terror of any of an estimated 4,000 missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls.

For many, the woman in the video is emblematic of what happened to their family member, regardless of individual characteristics leading up to the incident.

When we push people to the edges of society, when we murder their mothers and dispose of their bodies like garbage, when we dismiss their assertions of oppression, and insist everything is an isolated, unconnected incident, we create a volatile concentration of injustices.

None of us should be surprised when the pressurized restraint of the Indigenous community explodes like it did in the lobby and basement of the Marlborough Hotel on Sunday.

It is time we allow ourselves to be guided into unfamiliar waters; to challenge our own beliefs about what is true and possible. The events of this weekend were disheartening and scary. There will be inquiries and perhaps charges laid.

But if we can assure others that their experiences and stories are heard when they are first spoken, we won’t drive one another to have to shout and rage, and we won’t make our Indigenous neighbours tell the same story for another 200 years before we believe them.

rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca

Rebecca Chambers
Writer

Rebecca explores what it means to be a Winnipegger by layering experiences and reactions to current events upon our unique and sometimes contentious history and culture. Her column appears alternating Saturdays.

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