5 Chapter 5 The Lost Ones, Who Weren’t Blond Enough for Justice

This semester we had the opportunity to explore Sheena Kamal’s fictional story about Nora and her missing daughter Bonnie.  While this crime novel tackled many cultural issues, the one I have chosen to focus on in this paper relates mainly to Nora Watt’s background and how that affected the entire plot of the novel.  In the novel we learn of Nora’s past sexual abuse and subsequently being left for dead in the woods.  While this novel is fictional, this situation is all too real for native women throughout Canada.  The Canadian government has repeatedly failed to deliver justice to marginalized native people living throughout the provinces, such as Nora and Bonnie.  Native women such as the ones mentioned in The Lost Ones go missing and are never found with striking regularity.  Only recently has the Canadian Prime Minister begun to address this silent genocide.

Across the internet you find articles referring to the epidemic spreading throughout Canada.  Some of the hyperbolic article titles seem unbelievable.  Articles describing genocide and mass murder across the country (and even in the United States).  However, it has become clear that this problem is in fact widespread and showing no signs of ending.  Even in today’s world with social media and the internet making news available to everyone almost instantly we find that this issue is not properly addressed.  As recently as this year the issue received a lot of press.  Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came out and responded to the report that thousands of indigenous women have disappeared without justice.  He responded by saying, “To the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls of Canada, to their families and to survivors, we have failed you. We will fail you no longer.” (Trudeau, Justin) This response came in lieu of a report that made 231 separate suggestions for how to better handle this systematic problem in Canada.

The scale of Canada’s problem is great, so let’s look for a root cause.  The main cause is the governments repeated failure to respond.  In the response from PM Trudeau I mentioned earlier, the countries leader strayed from the use of the word genocide despite all of the evidence pointing towards just that conclusion.  While people today would say all genocide must be stopped, you see no such response from the government.  Wars have been waged over problems with far less tangible evidence.  However, the marginalized populations in those causes were not native Canadians or Americans.  The response from the government came after a report was crafted by numerous indigenous organizations responded to a national inquiry.  “The report comes after a nearly three-year inquiry (Links to an external site.) into murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, during which more than 1,500 families of victims and survivors testified at hearings…” (Austen, Ian and Bilefsky, Dan).  In a podcast on NPR, Annita Lucchesi even went on to say that since 1900 over 2,000 incidents have been reported.  With a vast majority of those occuring in the last 40 years (Shapiro, Ari).  Despite all this evidence and the pleas of tribespeople throughout the country the only action the Canadian government has taken towards a resolution is a promise.

This problem proliferates Canadian society in more ways than just one, however.  The issue of the justice system failing the families of victims’ time and time again is only half the story.  The racist attitudes that prelude these disappearances and murders has not been dealt with either.  This is a problem as old as any.  There is no easy fix to this.  But if we are to truly resolve this issue in Canada then serious steps must be taken to limit the spread of hate and racism.  In an article on the Canadian National Post website I read an interesting quote from a protester at the national inquiry that sums up what I am trying to explain very well: “This paradigm-shift must come from all levels of government and public institutions,” she said. “Ideologies and instruments of colonialism, racism and misogyny, both past and present, must be rejected.” (Kirkup, Kristy).  This solution will not come just from the Canadian government but from everyone as a society (even outside Canada) making a commitment to changing the way we teach, learn, communicate, and interact with one another.

Going back to the Canadian novel we read in class, it is important to note the underlying affect these issues had on the entire novels story.  The main story focused on Nora finding and saving her estranged daughter from a villain from her own past.  That story however was created by an underlying chain of events directly related to the injustice indigenous populations experience in Canada today.  Nora’s rapist was never found and ended up being directly linked to the antagonist of the entire novel.  While we were never truly presented with the detail behind Nora’s rape and attempted murder case, we can still see the lack of commitment to justice for native women in Bonnie’s disappearance.  When Bonnie disappears, her adoptive parents reach out to Nora knowing she is a private investigator of sorts.  After this we learn about the heart of the issue in Canada.

“There’s a whole highway in the north of the province stained by the tears of indigenous girls and women who weren’t blond enough to matter, whose families are still looking for justice. This lack of justice isn’t isolated to a single highway, either. It is more like a cancer that has spread through every segment of Canada’s social and political systems, generating press during election times and buzzwords like “the missing” and “murdered.”” (Kamal, Sheena p. 41)

Despite this 15-year-old girl being missing, police do not act because she is not “blond” enough.  The rest of the novel focuses on Nora putting all the work in to find Bonnie herself.  Who knows if Bonnie would have survived the ordeal had Nora not been involved, seeing as the Canadian justice system cares little for indigenous rights in the novel.

These issues of rampant racism and social injustice for minorities are not isolated to Canada.  In fact, many believe the problem may be even worse in the US.  There is no denying that the US has had a history of racially motivated hate and injustice.  There are large communities of native Americans throughout the country.  But clear actions have been taken in the US to try and curb this issue.  Policymakers have passed the Violence Against Women Act as well as Savanna’s Act which both attempt to limit the issues of marginalized women being taken advantage of in society.  While this is just a small step in solving the real issue, it is a good start, and one that Canadian lawmakers should attempt to at least mimic, perhaps even improve.

            Through the lens of Kamal’s novel, The Lost Ones we learned about an issue that plagues Canadian natives.  It provided the setup for the plot of the novel.  And through my research I have learned that the Canadian government has done very little to this point in terms of preventing this problem of providing justice to victims or families of victims.  It has taken a large-scale inquiry across the country for the PM to even acknowledge an issue exists and must be rectified.  Serious policy change and cultural change must occur for this problem to cease, not only in Canada but in countries across the planet.

Works Cited

Bilefsky, Dan. “‘Why Are So Many of Our Girls Dying?’ Canada Grapples With Violence Against Indigenous Women.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 May 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/world/canada/canada-indigenous-violence.html.

Kamal, Sheena. The Lost Ones. William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2018.

Kirkup, Kristy. “Trudeau Avoids Calling the Violence against Indigenous Women a ‘Genocide’.” National Post, 3 June 2019, nationalpost.com/news/canada/newsalert-inquiry-on-missing-murdered-indigenous-women-released.

Shapiro, Ari. “How The Treatment Of Indigenous Women In The U.S. Compares To Canada.” NPR, NPR, 7 June 2019, www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730758953/how-the-treatment-of-indigenous-women-in-the-u-s-compares-to-canada.

Trudeau, Justin. “Addressing the Violence Against Indigenous Women”, 2019