LLS facilitator Julie Sutherland lives and teaches in Canada. Please note, some of the details in this reflective piece are distressing.
How can art teach us? How can it help us unfurl into a more exposed, humane and empathetic version of ourselves? This short piece provides a brief summary of Indigenous Peoples (known in the United States as Native Americans) and considers how art may offer us insight into the lives of the first human inhabitants of the lands to which my ancestors came.
When I say ‘Indigenous Peoples’, I am referring to the first human inhabitants of the lands now called Canada, many of whom have lived on, and in relationship with, these lands since time immemorial. Pre-European contact, ‘North America’ was home to as many as 112 million Indigenous People. However, within a century of Christopher Columbus having arrived on these lands, that number was reduced by as much as 90% – a sobering result of violent displacement, disease and what Canada has now formally recognized as genocide. Officially, Canada recognizes three distinct groups of Indigenous Peoples: First Nations (originally, and now offensively, called ‘Indians’ by white settlers); Inuit (originally, and now offensively, called ‘Eskimos’ by white settlers); and Métis (individuals of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry). Indigenous Peoples are resilient. Today, they are the youngest and fastest-growing population in Canada.
The Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, which is located on the traditional and unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples, is popularly referred to as ‘the poorest postal code in Canada’. While this isn’t quite accurate, a stroll down East Hastings Street reveals more heartbreak than the average middle class resident of any ‘Western’ country would usually encounter in a lifetime of strolling through their own neighbourhoods. Indigenous Peoples comprise less than 5% of the population in Canada; Vancouver’s DTES has the highest Indigenous population in the city, at 31%.
An extremely high number (over 50%) of the street-based survival sex workers (those who trade in sex out of dire need) in the DTES identify as Indigenous. Between 1978 and 2001, at least 65 women, many of them sex workers, disappeared from this neighbourhood. In a jailcell confession, Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton, a pig farmer and serial killer from a nearby suburb, claimed he had killed nearly 50 women in the neighbourhood, though he was only officially charged with the murder of 26. In 2007, a jury found him guilty on six counts of second-degree murder and he is now serving a life sentence in prison. An official inquiry in the matter identified ineptitude by police and prejudice against racialized peoples as two of several explanations for the delay in apprehending Robert Pickton. The case was a turning point in the nation’s recognition of the tragic issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls not just in Vancouver but also across Canada.
Sarah de Vries was one of the 33 women whose remains or DNA were found on Robert Pickton’s pig farm. Sarah was a poet and artist of mixed-race descent, including First Nations, who lived in Vancouver. She was last seen April 12, 1998. In one of her poems, she asked, ‘Will they remember me when I’m gone / or would their lives just carry on?’
We remember. Sarah was a daughter, a sister, a mother. Her disappearance broke their hearts, and mine. I lived in Vancouver’s DTES and worked for many years for different organizations that aimed to support the lives of survival sex workers in the area. I spent hundreds of hours on the streets with these women, and in safe houses, hearing their stories. I also heard the remarks of others who, not understanding or knowing these women, said hurtful, hateful things about how these women brought this on themselves, how they deserved no better than disease, rape, death. How ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. I watched cars go by, hurtling raw eggs and bags of human excrement at the women’s bodies, heads, hearts. I saw them held at knifepoint. I looked at photos of their children and visited them in hospital when they gave birth. I saw them ‘tweaking’, overdosing, dying. I also saw them singing, laughing, living.
Reading another of Sarah’s poems presents an opportunity for us to understand ways in which art – and in this case, poetry – can, however disturbing, help readers to learn, reflect, grow and change. It demonstrates how poetry can expose us to new perspectives and encourage us to think about ourselves in relation to the world around us.
Woman’s body found beaten beyond recognition
You sip your coffee
Taking a drag of your smoke
Turning the page
Taking a bite of your toast
Just another day
Just another death
Just one more thing you so easily forget
You and your soft, sheltered life
Just go on and on
For nobody special from your world is gone
Just another day
Just another death
Just another Hastings Street whore
Sentenced to death
Sarah de Vries, (used with the kind permission of Maggie de Vries)
A poem like Sarah’s may conjure up many negative emotions. We may react in myriad ways. An easy, and understandable, reaction might be defensiveness. How dare she tell us we don’t care? Who is she to attack us anyway? If this is our experience, we might try to reflect on it. Why have we reacted defensively? Is it because there might be some truth to what she says? Have we ever written someone off because of our preconceived notions of their identities?
Such an awareness may lead us to consider our own positions vis-à-vis Sarah’s and try to see ourselves from her point of view. Can she help us to reflect on our own apathy? If we conclude we are not personally apathetic, can she lead us to contemplate apathy (or worse, active racism, sexism, etc.) at systemic and structural levels – perhaps at the levels of media, healthcare, justice, child welfare and education? How can we find more out about lives such as Sarah’s? What else can we read? Who can we listen to? Who can help us shed our prejudices and inspire us to work toward a more equitable, just, caring society?
The self-reflection that creative writing can inspire may be a compelling reason for engaging with ‘off-putting’ art. Critics of this kind of reading may say compositions like Sarah’s fall into the genre of ‘misery lit’ or ‘misery porn’, that is, writing in which central characters endure great hardship. They may say we as readers are merely revelling in the horrors of others. But, in fact, there is a well established body of research that has found that reading all kinds of literature has transformative power. If the studies don’t convince you, look into your heart. Has it changed because of the art you’ve encountered? Has it made you reflect? Has it made you grow? Keep reading.
Copies of Julie Sutherland’s forthcoming book: Bright Poems for Dark Days: An Anthology for Hope (to be published in November, available in Canada, the UK, the US and Australia) can now be pre-ordered. See here for more information.
