A painful whisper for the sisters who can’t speak

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This article was published 26/05/2017 (3085 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IT’s been two weeks since Kim Kostiuk began her long vigil, two weeks since she lit a fire and set up a tent and settled into her mission. The days camped out at Memorial Park have taken their toll on her body, and her possessions.

Yet the sacred fire at the heart of the camp is still burning. Kostiuk’s spirit is too, so she stays.

When the rain came last week, the tents flooded. It soaked two of Kostiuk’s drums. When it was cold, she huddled in damp clothes. Every day, smoke from the fire sends cloying tendrils into her throat, which doesn’t help her asthma.

So that is partly why, when a visitor from the Free Press turns up at the camp Wednesday night, Kostiuk at first declines to speak. She’s sick, she explains, with a voice that scratches like sandpaper. Cough syrup hasn’t helped.

She says her family is worried. Her children want her to come home.

Yet she’s here to be heard, the best way she knows how. So once she starts talking, her words spill out like a flood, rushing through the camp, filling it with passion. She’s here for families of missing and murdered indigenous women.

What she wants is for the national inquiry to be there for them, too.

“They need to be with the families,” Kostiuk says, settling into a chair near the fire. “Right now. No more putting it off. Now. These families are hurting, and they want answers. Why is this taking so long? They need to do something.”

These are Kostiuk’s words, but similar refrains echo across Canada. From these united voices rises a pressing question: regardless of its intentions, is the national inquiry doing right by the families of vanished women?

It cannot afford to get the answer wrong. For decades, advocates fought to raise the issue into a national light; their calls for an inquiry were long pushed aside. They refused to be silenced as the numbers of stolen women mounted.

Whatever the inquiry has grown into since, it started with them. The seeds of this inquiry are broken hearts.

Yet almost from the start, the inquiry has been plagued with delays and criticism of how it engaged families of the murdered and missing. Not enough was being done, they said, to proactively reach out to the people affected.

For some advocates, the final straw came earlier this month, when the inquiry announced it would delay meetings with most families until the fall, citing some families’ busy summer schedules. Its first report is due in November.

Now, advocates have called on the commission to reset the inquiry, to pause and shore up the framework where it was found wanting. In an open letter to chief commissioner Marion Buller, dozens of advocates made a clear case.

In the letter, advocates and family members called on the commission to extend its time frame for hearings, to invite more leaders from the community, to strengthen its communications and to be more proactive in contacting families.

“We all desperately want this inquiry to work, and not only to work, but to succeed beyond what we could imagine,” the May 14 letter reads. “This is an opportunity that will not come again and none of us can afford for it to fail.”

Buller issued a lengthy response on the inquiry’s website, acknowledging advocates’ concerns. In it, she agreed with critiques of the inquiry’s communications, and noted that commissioners were currently “re-evaluating” its timelines.

In Memorial Park, Kostiuk demurs on the question of a reset; she’ll leave that to the families, she says. All she knows is that many people feel they’re not being heard.

This camp, this vigil, is her way of turning up the volume.

“They should have a voice,” she says. “If everyone else has a voice.”

In the fortnight since Kostiuk set up camp, many people have found a voice around her fire. It has become a community, a growing network of new friends and supporters who drop by with stories, or songs or donations.

One elder comes by most days with her teen grandsons; they help load firewood, she helps Kostiuk with traditional medicine. There is Brian, a poet who lost his home in December, and now sleeps most nights in a nearby bus shelter.

Early Wednesday morning, Brian says, a visitor came up to the fire and started crying, explaining that he had lost multiple family members to violence. In that moment, the camp was a safe place to release his grief.

A reset of the national inquiry would be costly. But if it falls short of its aims, the cost of its failure will be borne by the families of women murdered or missing. And they have already paid far too much.

So whether there is a reset or not, the least the public can do is keep their eyes on the inquiry’s progress, and their ears turned to families and survivors. For the future, for the path forward, their questions deserve answers.

The shadows at Memorial Park are growing long. Standing up by the fire, Kostiuk smothers her coughs and begins cleaning up the plates from dinner. She’ll be out here, she says, as long as the families she knows want her to stay.

“Do you need a safe walk home?” she asks. “These boys can walk with you.”

It’s not yet 10 p.m. The long light of dusk still brightens the street; people on a date stroll down the sidewalk, hand-in-hand; at this time of night, at this busy place, the short walk across the Osborne Street bridge feels safe.

Still, Kostiuk puts her hands on a departing visitor’s shoulders and nods back towards the tall young men standing behind her. She has seen too much in her life to not worry about what happens when women walk alone.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

“OK, but stay safe.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca