Red River Girl

by Joanna Jolly

  It was a decision that quickly paid off. Tina flourished in class, excelling in math and science. Thelma noted how, in her new school, Tina amassed a group of friends who were themselves outcasts who had been bullied. It was as if she wanted to extend her natural protection of her sister to everyone in need. But the sadness that followed her father’s murder remained, manifesting itself in bouts of crying and isolation. Tina was no longer the happy girl who would skip down the hall and bake muffins for her family. Her moods remained dark. Sometimes her aunt, Thelma’s daughter Laurie, would take her on a drive to talk about her problems, and Tina would open up and cry about her father. It was still possible to cheer her up by giving her a baby or a small child to look after, but she was never quite the same joyful girl that Thelma had come to know.

  On New Year’s Day 2014, Tina turned fifteen. She was increasingly asserting her independence but was physically small and could easily be mistaken for an eleven- or twelve-year-old. For her birthday, she had asked for two special presents. The first she gave to herself. It was a tattoo of her father’s name, his birth and death dates, and angel wings inked on her back between her shoulder blades, a tribute that would become crucial in confirming her identity later that year. The second present was something she requested from Thelma. She asked to be allowed to go to Winnipeg to reconnect with her biological mother.

  Valentina Duck had not seen Tina or Sarah since Eugene had taken them to live with Thelma. But she had reappeared in their lives after Eugene’s funeral when she phoned Thelma’s house to speak with her daughters, having managed to prise the number from the funeral directors. This had annoyed Thelma, who would have preferred to be the one in control of reintroducing Valentina to the girls. But Tina had welcomed the call and the two spoke regularly. Even though she was settled with Thelma and Joe, Tina desperately missed having a relationship with her biological mother. While at school on the reserve, she had told her counsellor that her feelings for her mother were confused, alternating between anger and love. She didn’t understand why her mother had given her up, but she also wanted to be part of her life.

  Valentina’s call came at a sensitive point. Tina was grieving her father’s death and at the same time was beginning to experiment with life beyond the sheltered confines of the reserve. The teenager was pushing back against authority, both at home and at school. In the fall of 2013 she ran away for the first time, finding her way to Valentina’s house in Winnipeg. Back in Sagkeeng, Tina struggled with the discipline expected from Thelma and Joe. The couple had always run an orderly household, with strict rules about finishing homework and chores before being allowed out. They had also banned alcohol. There had been a time when they drank socially, but they’d quit after Thelma suffered a stroke at the age of forty and was confined for months to a wheelchair. Tina rebelled by smoking marijuana and was suspended from school. “I just wanted to try it,” she protested when Thelma grounded her and confiscated her iPod in punishment. Thelma could see that the teenager was making new friends online. She had posted sexually provocative selfies on her Facebook page and was chatting to adult men in Winnipeg she’d never met. Tina’s moods remained dark, and during one family argument she slashed into her forearms with a pen. She was desperate to spend time in the city and begged Thelma to let her go for her fifteenth birthday in January. She explained that it wasn’t just that she wanted a taste of city life: Valentina had told Tina that she had younger half-sisters. Tina, whose love of small children had not diminished, was thrilled at the prospect of meeting them.

  Thelma hated the idea of Tina and Sarah staying with Valentina but didn’t think it fair to say no. But before giving permission, she sought to reassure herself that the girls would be safe. For the first time since Tina had come into her life, Thelma called Valentina directly. She asked about her circumstances and whether she had a social worker she could check in with. Valentina was open in her responses, replying that she was in the process of getting her other children back from foster care and giving Thelma the name of her CFS case worker. Thelma said she called the case worker, who told her she was confident that Valentina was sober and no longer funding her drug habit by selling sex on the streets. And so Thelma agreed to let the girls go. Later, CFS staff said they had no record of this interaction.

  By all accounts, it was a successful visit. The weekend coincided with one of Valentina’s younger children’s birthday, and Tina and Sarah helped organize a party with balloons and a cake. Tina’s Aunt Laurie picked the girls up, noting that Valentina was living with an older man in a well-maintained house in the North End. When they returned home, Thelma observed how excitedly they spoke about their new little sisters, hardly mentioning Valentina at all.

  But the visit stirred a restlessness in Tina. On the morning of March 2, Thelma went into Tina’s bedroom to hurry her up for school only to discover the teenager was missing. The previous day had been her father’s birthday. Thelma immediately called the police, then Valentina, and was relieved to find out that Tina was safe at her house. When the police brought the teenager home, Thelma wanted to know how she’d managed to reach Winnipeg on her own, but Tina just shrugged off the question. In April, she went missing again. This time she was brought home by a friend, Larry Dumas, a deaf young Indigenous man she had met in Winnipeg. Thelma was reassured by Larry’s demeanour, finding him polite and well-mannered. Again, she asked Tina to explain why she had run. Tina promised to talk about it, but somehow she avoided the confrontation.

  When Tina went missing in April, Thelma had contacted Child and Family Services to ask them to take the teenager into care because she was having difficulty managing her behaviour. In May, a social worker met Tina and arranged counselling. However, the sessions were booked at a location seventy-five kilometres away, and Tina was unable to attend. Instead she asked Thelma to allow her to spend more time with her biological mother and half-sisters. Thelma disliked the idea, but fearing the teenager would take off again, she struck a deal. Tina would be allowed to visit Valentina for one week in the summer holidays if her grades were good enough. Even though school records showed the teenager was absent from classes that summer, Thelma believed that Tina had done well in her exams so kept to her side of the bargain. On June 30, Thelma’s daughter Samantha and son Brian volunteered to drive Tina and her sister down to Winnipeg. When the day arrived, as the girls were walking out the door, Sarah suddenly changed her mind saying she didn’t feel comfortable with Valentina. So Thelma loaded just Tina’s bag into the back of the car and hugged her tight before waving goodbye. She could not have known it would be the last time she would ever see her.

  As a precaution, Thelma had given Tina sixty dollars and a prepaid phone card, telling her that if things didn’t work out she was to call anytime and she would pick her up. In a decision she would later regret deeply, Thelma chose not to ring Valentina’s social worker again, assuming she was still doing well. If she had, she would have discovered that Valentina’s life had begun to spiral downwards and she had lost custody of her younger children. Brian and Samantha had an inkling of this when they reached Valentina’s house and found it locked up. But Tina insisted everything was fine and asked them to drop her off at Valentina’s sister’s, where she said she would be safe.

  A week passed and Thelma heard nothing from Tina. She tried phoning the number at Valentina’s house but discovered the line had been disconnected. Finally, she and Joe drove down to Winnipeg, only to find Valentina’s house deserted. Thelma was terrified that Valentina had abducted Tina and would try to keep her, so she called the regional CFS office to say she had lost control of the schoolgirl. The worker noted her concern and was able to locate Valentina and assure Thelma that she didn’t have Tina. Thelma then contacted her local RCMP station to report Tina missing. She was in the process of pleading with CFS to arrange counselling for when Tina returned when Sarah showed her a Facebook message Tina had sent. It was a selfie of Tina with a black eye and scratched face. Underneath the photo
, the message read, “Chubs—look what our MOM did to me.”

  Thelma later heard that Valentina had got Tina drunk, beaten her, and thrown her out, though Valentina always denied abusing her daughter. Tina was now on her own in the city, and Thelma was extremely worried. The police put out a missing persons alert on TV for the teenager, but it was only shown once, and Thelma felt it would have little impact. Meanwhile, Sarah had come to her with another message from Tina, which read, “Tell Momma and Papa I love them but I’m not ready to come home.” It prompted Thelma and Joe to drive to Winnipeg again to search the malls and shopping areas where they thought the teenager might be. They believed Tina was in danger of sexual exploitation and were desperate for more help from CFS. But when Thelma called the agency, she faced confusion over which branch was looking after Tina. She felt as if she was going around in circles. Finally, she was told that CFS in Winnipeg had taken on Tina’s case.

  In the seven weeks between June 30 and August 17, when her body was found, Tina was registered as “missing” five times by the authorities. The last time was on August 9, when police reported that Tina had disappeared from the city centre hotel where she’d been placed by CFS. Thelma said she was not informed of this development and it wasn’t until she called the agency on August 15 that she was told Tina had been officially missing for a week. It was three days later that RCMP officers arrived at her door to inform her that Tina’s body had been found in the Red River.

  In the first intense days of grief, Thelma found herself asking the same question over and over. How could it be that no one was able to keep her precious teenager from being “thrown away like garbage” into the polluted waters of the Red?

  As Tina’s death became the focus of intense media scrutiny, Thelma struggled to recognize the schoolgirl portrayed on television and in the newspapers. The Tina who was reported to have been living on the streets and taking drugs was very different from the girl who, only a few months before, had hung on to her arm when they were out shopping and forced her to cross the street if they saw anyone drunk or behaving strangely. The photograph Sergeant John O’Donovan had shown of Tina, with her hair shaved short on one side, broke Thelma’s heart. “It was her pride and joy,” she cried, describing how Tina’s hair used to reach all the way down her back. Thelma had loved to brush it for her. Tina’s grandfather, a medicine man, used to say that Indigenous girls got their strength from their hair. It made them who they were, and if they kept it long, they would always be special. Thelma wondered if, when alone in Winnipeg, Tina had stopped feeling special.

  As the city mourned Tina’s death, Thelma refused to join the crowds who gathered at the Alexander Docks. “I’m not going to worship where she was killed and where she was found,” she said. Instead, at the end of August, she and Joe arranged for Tina’s funeral to be held at St. Alexander Roman Catholic Church in Sagkeeng, the same place where the teenager had been baptized. As they had done with Eugene, they first kept Tina’s body at home for four days while friends and family paid their respects. When it came time for the service, Tina’s cousins carried her coffin, each wearing her picture printed on feathers made of purple felt, her favourite colour. Some family members cut off locks of their hair and placed them on her casket so she would still have strength in heaven. As with her father, Thelma hosted a feast, burning a plate of food for the teenager on a sacred fire.

  Later, when Thelma received Tina’s ashes, she kept them close to her at home for a week. Then, on a bright day in September, chosen because it was the birthday of her great-grandson, the baby Tina had looked after as her own, Thelma buried the schoolgirl in the same plot as her father. As Tina was laid to rest in St. Alexander graveyard, on the banks of the Winnipeg River, Thelma felt a sharp wind blowing across the water, signalling the end of summer. High above her, in the cloud-streaked sky, long lines of geese were preparing to migrate south for the winter. All seasons change, she thought as she watched the birds fade to a smudge on the horizon. She comforted herself with the thought that perhaps God had sent Tina for a reason and that she was only meant to stay for the briefest of times.

  3.

  O’DONOVAN

  For Sergeant John O’Donovan, the blue sky days of winter were the worst. Driving through Winnipeg’s suburbs in sub-zero temperatures, he would sometimes see sun dogs on the horizon, the strange illusion of lights hanging next to the sun caused by light bouncing off ice in the atmosphere. When the wind stirred the snow into clouds of white powder, he would think back to his childhood in Ireland. It had been months since he’d last seen grass and it would be months before he’d see it again, so he’d comfort himself with memories of green hills rolling into the distance and the smell of dark, peaty earth. On those days, he would wonder why he had chosen Winnipeg and the frozen prairies as his home. But the thought never lingered. There was always too much work to do, or too little time to spend with his children, who loved to be out in the numbing air, dragging him skating or tobogganing.

  As a child, O’Donovan had planned neither to emigrate nor to become a policeman. He was born in 1961, the middle son of a carpenter and housewife living a modest life in a terrace house tucked away in the cobbled streets of Cork. School and lessons bored him, but he found his passion in horses, thrilled by the power of a gallop with the wind in his face and clods of earth churning up beneath him. As a skinny teenager, he had been dedicated to competing in point-to-point races and had collected a shelf full of trophies to show for it. His formal education ended at seventeen, when he left school to become an office clerk. When he was nineteen, his mother asked him to drive an old school friend and her family on a day’s excursion as a favour. O’Donovan had been happy to oblige, ferrying them on a two-hour trip up the coast. The eldest daughter, Mary, had sat next to him in the front, and somewhere along the way, amid the chatter and the laughter, he had fallen in love. Within two years, they were married and living in a tiny house in the town of Ballincollig, on the outskirts of Cork.

  For a while, they were settled. O’Donovan continued to travel to the city to work while Mary stayed at home to care for their growing family. But by the mid-1980s the Irish economy was in free fall, with political uncertainty and high unemployment. When O’Donovan’s job came under threat, the couple considered the possibility of leaving. At first they thought of Australia, but Mary felt its reputation for beach life was too glamorous for the serious task of raising children. New Zealand was more attractive, but the distance seemed daunting. In the end, Mary declared Canada the best option. It seemed more like home, and, more importantly, O’Donovan’s mother knew someone who knew someone in Toronto who might give him a job. The couple sent their applications to the Canadian embassy in Dublin and waited for news. Knowing Canada was bilingual, they bought a French dictionary to practise a few phrases for the interview. “We were young and we didn’t have a clue,” said Mary.

  O’Donovan was twenty-eight when, in 1989, he left Ireland. His father and brothers accompanied him to Shannon Airport to say goodbye, none of them knowing when they would see him again. Mary and their three sons followed six weeks later. The couple had sent their belongings ahead by ship and carried with them the $13,000 they had raised by selling their house. O’Donovan’s mother’s friend had come through with a job in Toronto and advised them to rent a cheap townhouse in the commuter city of Burlington, at the western end of Lake Ontario. It was a distribution and sales job, which meant O’Donovan was away for days at a time. When his family arrived, they spent just two nights together before he was back on the road. Mary was so terrified at being left alone that she wedged their sofa against the patio doors for safety.

  After a few months, O’Donovan found a new position selling suits in a men’s clothing store. The income was decent and there was no more travel, but the job was dull and he was keen to find something more challenging. Most of all, he wanted to buy a home for his family. He could see that, even with overtime, a house in Burlington was out of his reach. As the family
prepared to celebrate their first Canadian Christmas, he heard a friend mention that property in Winnipeg was cheap. O’Donovan had never heard of the city, but the idea took root and by January he was spending his evenings researching in the library.

  O’Donovan had been looking for a reason to choose Winnipeg, and in its history he found a story that inspired him. The prairie city had always been a frontier, a magnet for the adventurous, ambitious, and hard-working. The early immigrants had come from his own country, as well as France and Scotland, working in the fur trade under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Intermarriage with Indigenous women had given birth to the Métis people and a leader, Louis Riel, who fought for self-determination before Winnipeg became part of the new Dominion of Canada. O’Donovan was drawn to the story of rebellion, finding in it a parallel with Ireland’s struggle against the British. Modern Winnipeg appealed for its mosaic of nationalities attracted by the railway and the promise of land. In the early twentieth century, the city had grown so quickly that it was known as the Chicago of the North. Immigrants from Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, and Iceland had flooded in. They were joined by Jews from Eastern Europe and German-speaking Russian Mennonites fleeing persecution. Decades later, Winnipeg was becoming home to immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. All embraced the chance to start over, just as O’Donovan was considering now. Although the odds of easy prosperity had diminished as the city cycled through periods of boom and bust, it still had a need for new people.