Calls for more protections for Indigenous women and girls featured at MMIWG walk

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“We had to fight for every dollar that we could to find a search party to go look for our daughter. Most of the time, we did it on our own. We had our granddaughters go out— Happy’s daughters. After a while, we’ve got to thinking that ‘what if they found her?’” Carson said. “That’d be the worst thing for them to see after this long.”

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“It shouldn’t be up to the family to find a missing loved one. It shouldn’t be.”

Carson recalled a missing persons liaison came up to La Ronge to present what services were available for families with a member missing.

“And there was slide after slide after slide saying ‘this is what’s available.’ We looked at it and listened, and said ‘no. None of that is available to us. None of that was available to us and nobody even told us about any of it.’ We had to fight for every dollar that we could to find a search party to go look for our daughter,” Carson said.

Carson did make clear that the family’s relationship with the Prince Albert Police Service got a lot better when Jonathan Bergen took over as the detachment’s chief, starting in 2018 on an interim basis. And Kathy Edwardsen, officer assigned to the Historical Missing Persons and Homicide Section of Prince Albert police, calls Regina every week to update her on the police’s progress.

But he still urged that more needs to be done about missing people across the board.

That’s something that Bergen acknowledged in his statement.

“Every day, we have many, many members out there servicing the community exhaustively in their efforts to make sure that we’re doing everything to meet the needs of the community. Sometimes that falls short,” Bergen said. “And when it does, Prince Albert Police Service takes a good look internally, takes a good look at what we can do differently and builds on what we’ve learned.”

RCMP Insp. Murray Chamberlain also attended the walk. He said RCMP have personnel tasked specifically for murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, and are involved in various awareness campaigns.

Charity Fleury talked about how the court system needs to do more as well.

Fleury’s daughter Chase Pearl McCallum-Fleury was only 10 months old when she died while under the care of Fleury’s ex-boyfriend Robert Alexander Bear in August 2020.

Bear was charged with second-degree murder in March 2021, seven months after Chase Pearl’s death. He has been released on bail, awaiting a trial from May 8–19 in 2023.

Fleury did not mention Bear by name while she spoke.

“I believe the court system is failing us. For seven months, we did not receive any words, anything to recollect what happened to her. We were just left in the dark,” Fleury said. “And now he is free. He’s able to walk these streets and is living at home.

“He can go home and sleep in his bed. Meanwhile, my daughter lies six feet in a grave. I can never go see her. The only time I can go see her is at her headstone,” Fleury added.

There were plenty of delegates speaking at the event, including Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan Russell Mirasty.

“They’re still living that experience. It is unfortunate that we have to meet together to talk about these situations, but that’s the reality of the world. I guess it’s really up to us, as individuals, as communities, to come together and support each other, ideally to prevent this from happening.”

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Jeff.dandrea@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @jeff_paNOW