Rethinking Representations of Violence Against Indigenous Women in Vancouver’S Downtown Eastside

“(listen to the women)”: Rethinking Representations of Violence Against Indigenous Women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside by Sylvie Lorraine Vigneux A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Department of English and Film Studies University of Alberta © Sylvie Lorraine Vigneux, 2015 Vigneux ii Abstract This thesis investigates contemporary representations of violence against Indigenous women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). I argue that sensationalist representations of violence against Indigenous women serve to distance readers from understanding their own implication in systems of colonial violence and sever individual acts of violence from their broader colonial context. Pushing back against such sensationalism, I turn in my first chapter to Missing Sarah, a memoir written by the sister of one of Vancouver’s missing women. I argue that, although this text eschews the sensationalism that characterizes mainstream coverage of violence against Indigenous women in the DTES and seeks to humanize the victims of violence, its political potential is circumscribed by its unacknowledged Western cultural investments. In my second chapter, I take up the work of Mohawk/Tuscarora poet Janet Marie Rogers alongside first-hand narratives of women living and working in the DTES. Together, I suggest that these representations offer a more nuanced understanding of ongoing violence in Canada and, in the case of Rogers’ work, a vision for a decolonial future that moves beyond this violence to reconnect Indigenous women to the land. Vigneux iii Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Teresa Zackodnik. From the earliest stages of this project, Teresa has guided and supported me with unwavering calm, a sense of humour, and a clear belief in my abilities. I am so grateful to her for the countless meetings, drafts, and emails she has shared with me. This project would be vastly different without her input. Thank you, Teresa. I would also like to thank my examining committee: Susanne Luhmann, whose insightful comments throughout this process have pushed me to consider new perspectives and Keavy Martin, who helped to set me on this path. I am also indebted to Christine Stewart and the Writing Revolution in Place Collective, whose generous intellectual and emotional labour has enriched my life immeasurably over the past two years. These folks have helped shape how I understand my research and scholarship and my responsibilities as a person living in Treaty Six territory; they have helped me to understand myself. Thank you to each of you. Thank you as well to Rebecca Blakey, the friend and ally who was there for all my ups and downs during this process and always knew just what to do. Thanks to my family, Mark, Mariella, and Timothy, for their loving support and critical engagement with the issues at the heart of this thesis. Special thanks to Rob Jackson: you pushed me to push myself where I might otherwise have settled with the easy analysis. Your intellectual influence lives in these pages. Thank you. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for supporting my academic research with a Master’s Scholarship from the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships Program. Vigneux iv Table of Contents Abstract ...........................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgments......................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: “I want all of us to know them”: Grievability and the Problem of Intimacy in Maggie de Vries’s Missing Sarah: A Memoir of Loss ................................................................................27 Chapter 2: “drums are sounding / the women are coming”: Refusal and Resurgence in Janet Marie Rogers’s Unearthed and Robertson and Culhane’s In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver......................................................................................................64 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................107 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................115 Vigneux 1 Introduction In the summer of 2014 I went to Vancouver to visit my brother, who works as a nurse at the Royal Columbian hospital in New Westminster. There, I took the opportunity to visit some of the spaces that I had been reading about for my thesis research, namely, the Downtown Eastside (DTES). It was a strange and uncomfortable experience. I was acutely aware of the voyeuristic tourism that many residents of the DTES condemn, and I felt a deep aversion to contributing to that in any way. Yet, to purposely avoid the spaces and people who have been ignored and overlooked by a broader public, as though this might somehow undo my own complicity in their marginalization, was also unacceptable. I felt there had to be a balance to be reached, a compromise between becoming a tourist in other people’s lives and engaging in an act of witnessing that disallows oneself the comfort of turning away from the injustices that we might prefer not to see. I also felt compelled to offer some form of respectful tribute to the women about whom I had been reading. In the company of my mother and brother, I headed in the direction of the memorial stone in CRAB Park. Next to this stone, which is surrounded by flowers, candles, photographs, and news bulletins, is a bench inscribed with a dedication: In memory of L. Coombes, S. De Vries, M. Frey, J. Henry, H. Hallmark, A. Jardine, C. Knight, K. Koski, S. Lane, J. Murdock, D. Spence & all other women who are missing. With our love. May 12, 1999. On the day that I visited, the bench was already occupied. An older, white-haired man sat there already clutching a Farley Mowat novel and eating from a jar of peanut butter. Noticing my interest in the inscription, he asked me if I had some connection to the women. I showed him the book I had Vigneux 2 been carrying with me as I walked through the DTES that day – Missing Sarah by Maggie De Vries. The book had stayed with me, I told him, and I wanted to pay my respects at this public memorial. He nodded, replying that he had tried to read the book himself but found it too upsetting. He had spent many years of his life in the DTES and was certain he must have met many of the women who were murdered, although he could not name them. Now, he often came to sit on the bench, believing that the women to whom it is dedicated should not be forgotten; he was glad I was taking an interest. He then asked me if I had heard of On the Farm, the book from which he had gleaned most of what he knew about the case. He shook his head sorrowfully and repeated how hard it was to learn about these sad events. We parted ways soon after, but what he shared about his reading of Missing Sarah and On the Farm stayed with me. I found it striking that someone who felt a close personal connection to the DTES community – who had lived there for years – still felt that his understanding of events came from two books written by people external to that community. What does it mean to understand such texts not just as particular perspectives on a story, but as cultural documents that influence the ways in which their readerly publics1 are able or willing to engage with the human lives they represent? What other stories are displaced or forgotten when these texts become the dominant or familiar narratives? How do the representational politics of such texts frame the 1 In this thesis, I draw primarily on Laurent Berlant’s theorization of an “intimate public” and Mark Seltzer’s “pathological public sphere” to understand how representations function to structure and influence the public climate within which they circulate. As Seltzer notes, “spectacular public representation […] has come to function as a way of imagining and situating […] the very idea of ‘the public’” (35). Both Berlant and Seltzer point to the way in which a reading public forms around the appetite for and expectation of a particular affective experience, be it the sensationalism of spectacularized violence or the “sentimental saturation” (Berlant 20) of feminized genres of intimacy. Building on Seltzer’s “wound culture” and Berlant’s understanding of intimate publics as “affective spaces” (25), I use such terminology as cultural, representational, or affective climate, public imaginary, and reading public to signal these resonances between my analysis and Seltzer and Berlant’s theories. Vigneux 3 violence against Indigenous2 women at the heart of this story and, crucially, what kind of engagement can follow from such a framing? *** Over the past two decades, the phrase “missing and murdered women” has become part of a public vocabulary in Canada; the growing interest in cases of violence against women has been sparked largely by the revelation of a serial murderer targeting women living and working in Vancouver’s DTES. Violence against Indigenous women – who make up a disproportionately large number of the victims of violence in the DTES – has been epidemic

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