Is it time we start talking about our murdered and missing indigenous men?

Grace Lafond-Barr.

Indigenous men are more likely to be murdered than anyone else in Canada – possibly more than 2,000 in a 30-year period.

By Jeremy Warren, The Starphoenix, April 18, 2015

Grace Lafond-Barr believes healing starts in the home, so she moved her family to Muskeg Lake Cree Nation from Saskatoon two years ago to escape the city where murder took away her two brothers and a son.

She hopes the distance between the city and her grandkids will mean a quieter life without the spectre of violence and vice following them as they grow into young men. Lafond-Barr has seen enough of that: in 2002, her 36-year-old brother was stabbed to death; in 2011, a 15-year-old boy shot and killed her 28-year-old son; her 35-year-old halfbrother was fatally stabbed in front of their elderly father in November 2014. “It’s a heartache I don’t wish on anyone at all. In a lot of ways, we’ve failed our children because we’re not the parents we’re supposed to be,” Lafond-Barr said in a recent interview at her home on the reserve north of Blaine Lake.

“We just keep on forgetting how to heal – quit the drugs, quit the gangs. Sometimes I feel powerless because every day you’re reminded of a girl missing or a guy missing.”

Lafond-Barr, 55, has lived the heartache while working as an addictions and family counsellor for others struggling to do the same. She and people such as Assembly of First Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde say Canada is failing its indigenous communities by seeing men as mere perpetrators while not considering how a colonial legacy and systemic racism make them just as vulnerable to violence as indigenous women.

For many, the violence caused and experienced by indigenous men is a taboo subject.

“Communities have to start talking about the abuses: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual,” Bellegarde said in a recent phone interview. “Those are learned behaviours and intergenerational effects of the residential schools. The whole system of being a healthy family has broken down. People have been guilted and shamed. People don’t

want to talk about it.” Said Lafond-Barr, “We still make it tough for men to feel something or admit they feel something.

“They’ve had abuse in their life, too, but big boys don’t cry, eh? My 95-year-old dad still hasn’t put his arms around me and said, ‘I love you, Grace.’ ” Indigenous people in Canada are three times as likely to be victims of crime compared to non-indigenous people and the homicide rate for indigenous people is seven times that of nonaboriginal people – 8.8 compared to 1.3 victims per 100,000 people, according to Statistics Canada.

RCMP say 1,017 indigenous women were murdered between 1980 and 2012; a recently published article in Aboriginal Policy Studies suggested the number of murdered indigenous men in that period could be more than 2,000.

According to statistics prepared by the RCMP for the Saskatchewan Association of Chiefs of Police, Saskatchewan had 123 unsolved missing persons cases between 1940 and late 2014. Thirty-eight of the 90 missing men and 18 of the 33 missing women are of aboriginal descent.

Some people suggest including the victimization of indigenous men in a national inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women for a more holistic approach to combating family violence and sexual abuse. “There should be a national inquiry focused on murdered and missing indigenous people,” said Michele Audette, former president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, in a phone interview.

“If there is action or we do a strategy for this sad reality of women, then we also have to think about the men and boys who are missing or killed … We have to address the entire community to make sure the approach is appropriate for aboriginal women and men and for mainstream society to say, ‘Can you be part of breaking that cycle?'” Audette said indigenous men and women face different problems – women are more at risk for human trafficking and domestic abuse – as do people on reserves and in urban centres, so Canada needs a comprehensive strategy for programs such as family violence education and sexual abuse prevention.

Chief Felix Thomas of the Saskatoon Tribal Council, which represents seven Saskatchewan First Nations, has long supported an inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women. He said the victimization of men should be somehow included in that inquiry. “I’m not going to say we need a specific inquiry for men, but it is a serious issue,” Thomas said in an interview.

“An aboriginal person is more likely to be murdered or go missing and that’s a shame in a country like Canada … I think we have to look at society in general and why it is that there is disparity with aboriginal people being victims.”

Lafond-Barr said people need to understand that generations of indigenous people have struggled to learn how to parent because of a residential school system that painfully and violently tore families apart.

“A lot of people are so traumatized; they can’t work, they can’t parent, they can’t see through life … My kids went through the same thing,” she said.

As a teen mother raised in a residential school and struggling with addictions, Lafond-Barr lost custody of her first two kids. In the early 1990s, she said she was arrested after taking a gun and threatening people she believed were abusing her children. It was while awaiting her legal fate in Pine Grove Correctional Centre that she decided to get sober and figure out how to help others.

“It starts at the grassroots – healing each other, accepting each other,” Lafond-Barr said. “It just takes one person to change another person. Never give up. If society just gives up, what the hell will happen to the rest of us?” In 2002 her brother Elroy Lafond bled to death from stab wounds inside the Saskatoon apartment he shared with the man later convicted

of manslaughter in his death. Lafond-Barr said Elroy – the youngest of eight siblings – struggled with alcoholism. He was once implicated in the beating death of a man in 1996, but charges were later stayed.

Her son Jaron Tyler Jahnke, also known as Jaron Lafond, was shot in the stomach with a sawedoff .22-calibre rifle and died in hospital in July 2011. An altercation in his Saskatoon neighbourhood earlier that day and a case of mistaken identity led to his confrontation with a 15-year-old boy who shot him.

Jaron was raised by an adoptive family, but had remained close to his mother and often visited his nephews, who were living with her. He had plans to be a graphic designer. Jaron, whose older brother was a longtime gang member, resisted attempts to recruit him into street gangs that also tried extorting him for protection money, Lafond-Barr said.

“He was a good son. He just wanted to escape the lifestyle surrounding him,” she said, adding she still has the clothes he was wearing the night he died. “We were supposed to have a ceremony to burn his stuff, but I can’t do it.”

In November, four men burst into the apartment her half-brother Jonathon Keenatch-Lafond shared with their 95-year-old father. They were gang members who assaulted Keenatch-Lafond before one fatally stabbed him in front of their dad, Lafond-Barr said. Saskatoon police say the attack was a targeted killing; the case remains unsolved.

“We had warned Jonathon a year before to quit doing what he was doing. Young men think they’re invincible,” Lafond-Barr said.

She and her partner of 15 years are now raising four grandsons away from the city, hoping to break the cycle of violence that traps too many indigenous men.

The murders and endless stories of other slain and missing indigenous people caused her to question the utility of the social work she does, but she eventually emerged more confident she can help others by passing on her hard-won knowledge.

“If I stopped having hope, I think I’d be dead, too,” Lafond-Barr said of her religious faith.

“There must be something a lot more stronger out there. No matter what the struggle is, something good has to come of it.”

To focus solely on indigenous men as murderers ignores a larger story about violence and Canada’s colonial legacy.

A University of Saskatchewan researcher says RCMP statistics showing indigenous men are responsible for 70 per cent of homicides involving indigenous women fail to address the dire situation of missing and murdered indigenous people. “It’s easy to view native men as victimizers. Why? Because white people are already afraid of them,” said Native Studies assistant professor Robert Innes.

“If you fear someone, you’re going to have a hard time empathizing with them as a victim. You might even have a hard time believing it.”

In a commentary published in the Aboriginal Policy Studies journal, Innes writes that murdered indigenous men could surpass 2,000 victims in the same 30-year period in which 1,017 indigenous women were murdered. The article explores how race, gender and a history of colonization can explain the over-representation of indigenous men as both victims and perpetrators of violence.

“Although far from definitive, the data shows that indigenous men are much more likely to commit, to be charged with, and die as a result of murder than anyone else in Canada,” Innes wrote in the journal article, noting there is little discussion about indigenous men as victims of violence.

“Placing the emphasis on the violence of which indigenous men are capable while at the same time ignoring their victimization is caused by a specific kind of race and gender bias many white people have toward indigenous men.”

Statistics Canada data indicates 1,750 indigenous men and 745 indigenous women were murdered between 1980 and 2012, Innes said. The RCMP report into missing and murdered indigenous women put the number of victims at 1,017 and acknowledged the Statistics Canada data might not be complete, so Innes suggests the number of murdered indigenous men might be much higher than 1,750.

“It’s a difficult issue to raise because you don’t want to say one is more important than the other and it can come across like that,” said Innes, a member of the Cowessess First Nation. “When you raise it, you want to make it clear it’s an issue facing men and women.” Violence against indigenous men and women is a shared history, said Assembly of First Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde in an interview.

“The issue really is ending violence in our communities, male and female,” Bellegarde said.

“Why is it happening? You can go back and look at the imposition of residential schools, the imposition of the Indian Act, the poverty our people face … lack of good education, overcrowded housing conditions. It’s almost a lack of hope. It’s almost that violence has become such an everyday occurrence that it’s become normalized. We have to start changing, not only as First Nations people but as society in Canada as a whole.”

Bellegarde said more needs to be done to get First Nations people into policing and employed in the legal system. He also wants to see Canada establish a comprehensive alternative justice system, incorporating more sentencing and healing circles while opening more wellness centres focused on families.

“There’s a huge cost to keeping a First Nations person in jail, to keeping a First Nations person on welfare, a huge cost to continued overcrowded housing conditions. We have to look at alternatives. It’s in the best interest of everybody,” Bellegarde said.

“On a bigger picture, we should develop a First Nations justice system based on our laws, our principles, our cultural practices, our languages, our traditions and ceremonies.” Jen Mt. Pleasant is a Wilfrid Laurier graduate student researching missing and murdered indigenous people with a recent focus on men, which includes a victims database with about 800 entries she’s compiled on her own through media and police reports.

“We know what the numbers are for women, but nobody really knows the number for men because nobody is really keeping track,” said Mt. Pleasant, a member of the Tuscarora Nation of the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, in a phone interview.

If a national inquiry happens, it should look at the men and women together because of the shared colonial history, Mt. Pleasant said. But there are differences.

“For women, it’s 360 degrees – wherever they go, they’re vulnerable to being victimized. In their homes or in their communities or if they move to the city, they’re met with just as much violence,” she said. “With men, it’s different. A lot of it is nativeon-native crime. There are a lot of gangs, especially in the western provinces.”

Without the hard work so many people put into bringing attention to murdered and missing indigenous women, nobody would be talking about men, Innes said.

“Nobody was talking about murdered and missing indigenous women. That movement didn’t just happen. It was a lot of work hammering away at it.”

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