Loved ones are still waiting for the task force to investigate MMIWG cases

Val Charlette wonders if her daughter’s death would have been considered suspicious had an Indigenous-led task force been brought in to investigate.

Angela Lavallee wonders if a task force would have determined someone was responsible for her granddaughter’s death.

Destiny Paupanakis wonders if the case of her sister’s death would have been reopened as a murder investigation rather than written off as a suicide.

None of them get a chance to find out. Not yet anyway.

My daughter’s truth needed to be heard.-Val Charlette

That’s because the federal government has not established a national task force that would investigate all unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls — despite the fact that this was a major call for justice in the 2019 final report of the MMIWG investigation.

“There’s almost this story… of ‘Don’t tell me how to do my job,’ and that has to stop,” says Angela Lavallee. “Police and police and medical examiners must listen.”

The call for a national task force – Call for Justice 9.9 – was one of 231 calls for justice in the June 2019 Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The calls, called “legal obligations” in the report, are guidelines that governments and institutions were required to implement to stop violence against Indigenous women, girls and two-minded people.

The investigative report indicated that the national task force “would review and, if necessary, re-examine every case of all unsolved files of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people across Canada”.

However, it is one of more than half of calls for justice that have failed to start as of July 2023, according to a CBC analysis. The federal government says it will take a commitment from multiple governments, police forces and indigenous leaders to implement it.

So far that has not happened.

In a written statement to the CBC, a federal government spokesperson said that “the Government of Canada remains steadfast in its commitment to working closely with all partners on this critical, ongoing priority to address the root causes of violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people, and end the ongoing national crisis of MMIWG2S+.”

Families of lost loved ones, meanwhile, live with unsolved cases that may never be reopened.

Angela Lavallee’s granddaughter Zaylynn Emerald Rain was just nine months old when she passed away in 2015. Despite Lavallee’s suspicion that she had been fatally attacked by someone they knew, her concerns were dismissed, she says.

“There has never been a thorough investigation. Her [cause of] death was considered indeterminate,” Lavallee says. “I was called the ‘paranoid’ grandmother.”

It feels like no one cares about us.– Fate Paupanakis

Val Charlette also lives with the pain of an unsolved case. She believes she has the answers that would solve it.

In October 2022, the body of her daughter, Tristan Jobb, was found on a golf course in Creighton, Sask., off the beaten track and several miles from where she was last seen. Her face was bruised; her hair was matted and covered in rubble.

The coroner’s office determined her death was not suspicious. However, in a traditional cultural ceremony, Charlette came to a different conclusion.

“During that ceremony I was told that someone gave her a [date rape] drugs with a needle… and that they accidentally overdosed her, and that they had to take her body somewhere. And I know it’s far from science,” says Charlette.

Her daughter’s truth, as she called it, will not be recognized by the justice system.

“Science says I have to see it to believe it. With our culture… the truth had to be heard from my daughter.”

A national task force, with indigenous representation, would listen to that truth, says Charlette.

“[They would] knows how to look at a scene, [they would] carry sacred bundles to be part of it. They can see things that we can’t really see,” Charlotte says. “So the only responsibility the local police would have is to secure the scene.”

Destiny Paupanakis is blunt about the lack of progress on the call for justice 9.9.

“It feels like no one cares about us. There is no justice,” she says.

Paupanakis wonders if an Indigenous-led team of investigators would believe her suspicions that her sister Angel Blue Sky did not commit suicide.

“As she would always say, ‘I would never kill myself, so if anything ever happens to me, know that I didn’t kill myself,'” Paupanakis recalled.

An indigenous-led justice system, she says, could remove the risk of racism-fueled investigations.

“Justice would mean that we get the truth out… and that our people have our own police force.”

Support is available to anyone dealing with the details of these matters. If you need support, you can contact Ka Ni Kanichihk’s Medicine Bear Counseling, Support and Elder Services at 204-594-6500, extension. 102 or 104, (within Winnipeg) or 1-888-953-5264 (outside Winnipeg).

Support is also available through Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Liaison Unit at 1-800-442-0488 or 204-677-1648.