Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  Farther along the road the imposing structure of the Pine Falls hydroelectric dam dominated the landscape, serving as a bridge across the river. Nestled next to it was the small town of Powerview-Pine Falls, built in the 1920s to provide homes, a school, and a hospital for the workers at a large paper mill that had since shut down. The town’s stucco-sided houses and tidy lawns fanned out in orderly roads named after trees—Holly, Poplar, Cherry, Birch—their neat geography in contrast to the sprawl of reserve housing. In the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of production, the mill employed Indigenous people from the reserve. But the town always maintained a separate identity. Indigenous children were banned from swimming in the communal pool, and families were forced to sit separately in the movie theatre and hospital waiting room.

  In August 2014, when the news of Tina’s death filtered through Sagkeeng, it provoked a deep sense of shock and grief, but not surprise. The reserve already held the dubious distinction of having the highest number of missing and murdered women and girls of any Indigenous community in Canada. Activists spoke of how poverty, a lack of jobs, and overcrowding were forcing women to leave to find work, separating them from their community and making them vulnerable. They pointed to the fact that one of the victims of the Vancouver killer Robert Pickton was originally from the reserve.

  But it wasn’t only when they left that Sagkeeng women faced danger. It was impossible to grow up on the reserve untouched by domestic violence, abuse, addiction, mental illness, or suicide. A hundred and fifty years ago, when Treaty 1 was signed, the hope was that the government would protect the Anishinaabe-Ojibway, enabling them to thrive. Instead, they had been subjected to decades of policies aimed at assimilating the “Indian” into a European and Christian way of life. Early colonial administrators believed that the Indigenous needed to be civilized, regarding them as ignorant, backward, and incapable of self-governance, an attitude that lingered well into the twentieth century. The central pillar of these policies was the establishment of the residential school system. Its purpose was to educate, but its legacy amounted to a cultural genocide that shattered communities, tore families apart, and frustrated the ability of generations of parents to raise their own children.

  Sagkeeng had been home to the Fort Alexander Residential School, run by nuns from the Catholic order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. The school was an imposing white four-storey building that had towered above the grassland on the south bank of the Winnipeg River. When it opened in 1905, it had been welcomed by the community. But instead of nurturing the children, the nuns regarded them as savages. Students were treated harshly, forbidden from speaking their own language, isolated from their families, starved, and often sexually abused. For a long time the treatment meted out in residential schools was hidden from public view. But in 1990, Phil Fontaine, a distant relation of Tina’s and head of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, shocked Canada when he spoke out publicly about the abuse he had endured at Fort Alexander. His testimony spurred thousands of other residential school survivors to lodge what became the largest class action lawsuit in Canadian history, leading to a settlement agreement that included the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Officials spent six years travelling across the country hearing testimony from 150,000 former students who had been taken from their families and forced to spend much of their childhood locked away. By the time Tina’s body was found, in the summer of 2014, the commission was in its final stages. The following year it would publish a report detailing ninety-four recommendations, one of which was the establishment of a national inquiry into why so many Indigenous women and girls, many of whom had spent time in residential schools, were being killed.

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  Thelma Favel had always counted herself lucky not to have been one of the Sagkeeng children forced to attend Fort Alexander. Born in 1958, the seventh of nine siblings in an Ojibway family, she was too young to attend the school, which was closing down by the time she started lessons. But she had first-hand knowledge of the damage it could do. Both her parents had struggled through the residential system, and she watched her older brother George attend Fort Alexander as a day student. She remembered how George would row across the river to school each morning. He had gone there with a distant relative, Doug Fontaine, who used to tell stories about how the nuns would try to rub their breasts up against him and how he would wet the bed at night to protect himself from being molested.

  By contrast, Thelma’s early schooling at the newly built junior high school on the reserve had been easy and enjoyable. But that changed when she was sent to high school in Powerview-Pine Falls, where the children teased her for a medical condition that gave her seizures. Thelma’s mother, who was raising her children alone after the death of her husband, solved the problem by sending Thelma to Winnipeg to lodge with another son and his family. Thelma was fourteen when she moved, in an arrangement supervised by the provincial government’s child welfare body, then known as the Children’s Aid Society. It was the beginning of a lifelong professional and personal association for Thelma with the agency, which would later become known as Child and Family Services, or CFS. This close connection wasn’t unusual in Manitoba, where CFS played a prominent role in the lives of Indigenous people. Despite a population of only one million, the province had the highest number of children in care in Canada, and the vast majority of these were Indigenous. Over the years, Thelma’s view of the organization would darken, becoming bitter and angry when CFS failed to protect Tina. But in the early days, she was grateful that they had facilitated her move into what would become a happy home environment.

  Winnipeg was a new adventure. Thelma settled into the inner-city North End, where she found a strong sense of community in the working-class neighbourhood of wooden houses and tree-lined streets. After a brief interlude away to complete a nursing qualification, she was offered a job in a home for abused girls, many of whom were Indigenous. She had become friends with the boy living across the street, Joseph Favel, who was a couple of years older than her. Unlike Thelma, Joseph was not a “status Indian,” a person legally recognized as an Indian by the Canadian government. He was Métis, descended from the children of European settlers and Indigenous women. After a few years of getting to know each other, Joe proposed, and in 1978, when Thelma was twenty, the couple were married.

  A year before their wedding, Thelma’s life had changed dramatically when her sister asked her to help raise her eight children. It marked the start of Thelma’s long career as a professional foster mother and the beginning of a relationship that would bring Tina Fontaine into her life. One of the children she cared for was her nephew Eugene Fontaine, or Geno, who would later become Tina’s father. Thelma remembered him as a bright, funny child who would always say “I know” when asked a question, even if he didn’t have a clue what was going on. He joined a household full of other foster children and, by now, Thelma’s own two daughters and adopted son. Joe, a truck driver, was often away, so Thelma was left alone in a small apartment surrounded by children. “It was hectic,” she said. Some of her foster children had children of their own, leaving her with several babies to look after while they were at work. But she also remembered it as being fun.

  In the 1990s, after two decades living in the North End, Thelma and Joe began to notice that the neighbourhood was changing. It was busier now. The area’s cheap housing was popular with new Asian and African immigrants as well as young Indigenous people who were moving into the city to look for work. The bonds of community that Thelma had cherished were breaking down and the crime rate was increasing. The streets were becoming the drug, sex work, and gang hangouts that Tina would experience twenty years later, when she went missing. The breaking point for Thelma was when her children were robbed at a local store three weeks in a row. She told her husband that if the children couldn’t go shopping without her having to worry, it was time to leave.

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  It was a fe
w years after this that Tina arrived in her life. Thelma and her family had returned to Sagkeeng, but her nephew Eugene, now in his twenties, had remained in Winnipeg, pursuing what Thelma called the “party lifestyle.” She knew he drank too much, had an addiction to prescription drugs, and had drifted away from his family. When he was twenty-three, Eugene formed a relationship with a twelve-year-old girl from the Cree community named Valentina Duck, who was living in foster homes and who was known to have been sexually exploited from a young age. Valentina was fourteen when she became pregnant with their first child, a boy, who was quickly taken into care. The couple remained together and, on January 1, 1999, when Valentina was seventeen, she gave birth to Tina Michelle. A year later she had another daughter, Sarah. Thelma remembered vividly meeting Tina as a baby at a family event and noting how sweet and well-behaved she was. But her parents’ relationship was unstable. Eugene’s addiction worsened and his behaviour towards Valentina was violent and unpredictable. In 2001, the couple split. After spending some time with Child and Family Services, Tina and Sarah were returned to their father’s care. Eugene was still drinking heavily and, in 2004, he discovered he had cancer of the lymph nodes. He didn’t think he could manage alone, so he asked Thelma if she would consider raising his daughters.

  At first Thelma was hesitant. She was older now and had decided to foster only teenagers, because she no longer had the energy for young children. But Eugene persisted, telling her that he probably didn’t have much longer to live. Both he and Thelma hated the idea of his girls being raised in the child welfare system. Thelma was developing an ambivalent attitude towards Child and Family Services. On the one hand, they had provided her with a job and income as a foster mother. On the other, she found them too eager to put Indigenous children into care. The agency seemed to prefer to do this, often taking children when they were babies rather than providing long-term support for families. Thelma suspected they relied on these placements to secure their funding, and she regarded their attitude as a continuation of the colonial belief that Indigenous families couldn’t take care of their own children. But she knew the problems weren’t one-sided. She told her husband, “There’s a lot of foster homes out there that are only doing it for the money and not really caring.” In the end, it was Joe who made the decision to take in the girls, telling Thelma they needed a proper home and that the months they had already spent with CFS were enough. When Tina was five and Sarah four, Thelma became their guardian through a private family arrangement.

  It had been a while since Thelma had looked after young children, and at first, she struggled. They had been sent to her with just the clothes they were wearing, but the Sagkeeng community rallied round, bringing over bags of children’s clothes, pyjamas, and toys. On the first night, at bath time, Thelma wasn’t sure if she should stay in the room with the girls, but they called out to her to wash their hair. Afterwards, she sat on the side of the tub and splashed cold water on them, laughing at how much they loved it. Although Tina was the older of the two, she was smaller than her sister. But Thelma could see she was confident and strong. Her father had nicknamed her Monkey and her sister Chubby. Monkey was a curious child who was not afraid to ask questions, grilling Thelma and Joe early on as to why her father referred to them as Momma and Papa as well as Aunt and Uncle. She quickly developed a special bond with Joe, teasing him and making him laugh. It wasn’t long before Monkey and Chubby were calling the couple Momma and Papa themselves.

  Thelma, a devout Catholic, had the girls baptized at the St. Alexander Roman Catholic Church in Sagkeeng First Nation. She had fond memories of how she and Joe would sit with Tina and Sarah on their laps and ask them, “How come Momma and Papa love you so much?” to which Tina would reply, “Because we have Jesus in our hearts.” The girls were enrolled in nursery school, and from there grade school and Sagkeeng Junior High. Tina was interested in her Ojibway heritage, and Thelma tried to teach her a few words. But her own knowledge was rusty, so they would usually end up speaking English. Thelma was more successful in showing Tina how to cook, and she remembered how the schoolgirl would bake blueberry muffins to share at family gatherings.

  As Tina grew older, it was clear she had a love for small children, especially babies. In the summer, when Thelma and Joe would gather their relatives together on a beach by Lake Winnipeg, Tina would splash in the water with her younger cousins. Whenever Thelma’s great-grandson was brought to the house, Tina would immediately scoop the baby up into her arms. She held him so much that he became known as her baby, and whenever Thelma couldn’t find him, she knew he would be in Tina’s room. Tina confided in Thelma that she wanted to work looking after children, possibly for CFS, as Thelma had done. A few years later, when Tina was a teenager, she and Thelma would sit on the sofa and watch the nightly TV news reports on the Phoenix Sinclair Inquiry. Phoenix was a five-year-old Indigenous girl who had been kept in a basement, starved, and finally beaten to death by her mother and her partner. “I want to check on every one of those kids,” Tina had cried when she heard the details of the abuse.

  If there was one issue that could still cause Tina and Sarah pain, it was that they didn’t see enough of their father. The girls understood he was gravely ill and couldn’t live with them, but they missed him deeply. He had tried to keep their relationship going, visiting Thelma’s home on Sundays to eat supper with his daughters. He brought them presents for Christmas and birthdays and spoiled them with their favourite candy and treats when he cashed his monthly welfare cheques.

  But in 2011, this family routine ended abruptly. On October 31, when Tina was twelve, Thelma was at home when her sister called to say she was with the police. She said officers had found Eugene’s body on the reserve. Thelma immediately jumped in her car and drove to her sister’s location: the old road that ran along the south side of the river. “That’s Geno,” her sister had shouted when Thelma arrived, pointing towards a shed at the back of a property which had been cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. Thelma could make out the shape of Eugene’s body lying on the ground outside. She later found out that her nephew had been on a three-day drug and alcohol binge with two friends and had fallen into an argument with them. The friends had ganged up on Eugene, kicking him in the head, and tying him up behind a shed where he died from his injuries. He was forty-one. Thelma had known his illness would take him early, but she wasn’t expecting to lose him so violently and so soon.

  She collected Joe to make the short journey to Sagkeeng Junior High and wait for Tina and Sarah to be taken out of class. Finding the words to tell the girls was an impossible task. All Thelma could manage was, “Your dad’s not going to come around anymore.” Sarah asked why, and Thelma carefully explained that some men had beaten him up and killed him. At first the girls screamed. Joe held tight to Tina and Thelma hugged Sarah. Then Tina became quiet before asking why anyone would do that to her father. Thelma could find no answer. She tried telling the girls that Eugene wouldn’t suffer anymore and that he was at peace, but that only made Tina ask, “How can he be at peace if I’m not with him?” Hearing the girls’ screams, the school counsellor, Cindy Guimond, had come into the room to see if she could help. She found the two girls hanging on to Joe and Thelma, looking pitifully small and vulnerable, their faces still covered in the green paint they had put on that morning to dress as witches for the school Halloween party.

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  In the weeks that followed, Thelma was proud of the way the girls held themselves together as she planned Eugene’s wake and funeral. The proceedings were a mixture of Christian and community traditions. An Indigenous elder lit a sacred fire in her garden before Eugene’s body arrived to lie in her house for four days prior to the funeral. As friends and family members filtered in to pay their respects, Tina and Sarah busied themselves serving drinks and sandwiches. After the funeral, they helped make up a plate of food for their father so they could share a last meal, burning it on the fire according to the Ojibw
ay tradition.

  Though the girls appeared strong, Thelma could see they had been changed by the tragedy. On the brink of adolescence, Tina had already begun to distance herself from family life. Sometimes, when the reality of losing her father sank in, she would break down and cry. Other times, she withdrew into her own world. In Winnipeg the Crown was preparing its case against the men who had killed Eugene, and Thelma learned that, in their defence, they wanted to speak about the abuse their parents had suffered at residential school. This provoked an explosion of anger. “You can’t keep putting the blame on everything,” she complained to Joe. “Sometimes you have to take the blame yourself and learn to try to change yourself.” She knew plenty of people who’d been to residential school, including her own parents, who had not gone on to be violent or commit murder.

  Tina wanted to attend the preliminary hearing, but the lawyers advised that the details were too graphic for a child to hear. Instead, she was asked to write a victim impact statement for the court. She struggled to find the words to express her grief. “How can I tell the judge what those guys did to us?” she asked Thelma, and crumpled up the paper she was supposed to be writing on. Thelma told Tina that she would write the statement instead.

  Tina was also struggling with anger, and for her the pain was directed inwards. Despite repeated calls to victim services, the teenager received no counselling for her grief. She had always been reserved at school, and the strain of her father’s murder was beginning to affect her studies. Cindy Guimond remembered how Tina already stood out because of her protective relationship towards her little sister. Now the schoolgirl’s reputation was becoming fiercer. She lined her eyes with black makeup and projected a tough girl image. “If she acknowledged you,” said Guimond, “you felt like you were one of the lucky ones.” Guimond remembered a time when she was called in to mediate between Tina and a group of girls who Tina thought were picking on Sarah. She had been impressed by the way Tina was willing to work through the problem and reconcile her differences, but this wasn’t the last of the arguments. Tina complained to Thelma that kids were saying they were glad her dad had been murdered. She was sent home from school for fighting, and Thelma felt the teachers were ignoring her side of the story. Tina was also being kept back in classes, even though she was clearly an intelligent child. After a few months of strained relations, Thelma decided the best thing to do was take both girls out of the reserve and put them into the mixed environment of the high school at Powerview-Pine Falls.