Honouring Indigenous males we’ve lost

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This article was published 19/06/2022 (1215 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As people took to the downtown streets to walk in honour of murdered and missing Indigenous men and boys on Father’s Day, 16-year-old Callie Starr found herself at the head of the line.

She carried an eagle staff in her hand and around her neck the ashes of her boyfriend, 17-year-old Andy McKay, who had been murdered last July. She said she found herself in a place of advocacy in part by the trouble that had plagued her short life.

“He saved me that night, I was there when it happened,” Starr told the Free Press.

“I witnessed him going, and after that, I kind of decided to start honouring him any and every way that I can. I’ve been hoop dancing and carrying my staff to every event.”

McKay’s was just one of many names on signs and in people’s chants as the fifth annual Warriors’ Walk took place on the hottest day of the year so far. Around 25 volunteers handed out water and offered their vehicles as cooling spaces for the 50 attendees, a number that doubled at the meet-up at the walk’s end.

Organized by the Manitoba-wide Ohitika/Ogichidaa (Warrior) Wellness Men’s Group, which seeks to provide support services to Indigenous men, walks were planned in cities and First Nations across the province, including Brandon, Portage la Prairie, Rouseau River and Swan Lake.

Those who couldn’t join the walk were encouraged to light a candle and hold a vigil for loved ones they have lost.

Gina Settee organized the first walk when her son, 24-year-old Bryer Prysiazniuk-Settee, was murdered in 2017. She has watched it grow since then and looks forward to the solidarity with other parents who have experienced the unimaginable.

“I get excited because of the support,” she said before stopping to hug a fellow walker. “It’s the support, it’s all about the support and people being aware and coming out to acknowledge all the other missing and murdered men and boys. I feel like it’s under the radar.”

The Winnipeg walk took participants from Thunderbird House to the “grandmother stone” at the Oodena Celebration Circle at The Forks.

“For every lost boy, for every lost man, he came from a mother,” co-organizer Mitch Bourbonniere said. “So we’re going to go back to the mother.”

Bourbonniere has helped run men’s groups for six years, which were first requested by women at the North Point Douglas Women’s Centre in 2016, and said walks like these, and offering support to Indigenous men who may need it, has had a visible impact.

“When we started running our men’s groups, I could hardly find another man that expressed an ‘I love you,’ or cried, or asked for help, or showed his emotions,” he said. “And now there’s a whole nation of men that are doing that.”

Indigenous men remain overrepresented in Canada’s homicide statistics, making up 2,500 of the 15,000 murders in Canada between 1982 and 2011. Of those murders, 71 per cent were committed against men.

Starr was walking for her cousin, who had also been murdered, but she said she wasn’t a unique case among the crowd and that many people on the walk were in the same place of pain.

“I feel like in some ways that everyone needs to hear at least one story to at least realize how much pain is actually there,” she said.

“These people were someone’s brothers, someone’s uncle, someone’s kid, possibly somebody’s father. Everyone’s aching, not just me. And a lot of people are aching a lot worse than I am.”

At the end of the line, one woman walks alone, with a sign that makes it clear she’s one of the many aching. The sign is simple — a photo of her son, Steven Dodge, in a graduation cap. He was murdered, the sign says, in 2011 at the age of 26.

“I had a future!” the sign reads.

His mother, Deborah Woodhouse, has a simple reason for coming out in the sweltering heat.

“I don’t care how hot it is. It’s worth it to me,” she said.

“I want everyone to know my son existed. And he didn’t deserve to die that way.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca