When Narrative Writes Its Own Scripts

The Linda Beardy Case

Linda Beardy

By

Michael Melanson

On Tuesday, April 4^th, the Winnipeg Police Service announced that another Indigenous female body had been found by workers at the Brady Road landfill site. The WPS were able to quickly identify the woman as Linda Beardy, 33 (suggesting ID was found on her person), and considered her death as suspicious pending an autopsy. The news of another Indigenous woman being found at a Winnipeg garbage dump quickly became a national headline. It had only been a few months since news broke that two other Indigenous women – victims of accused serial killer, Jeremy Skibicki - were believed buried at privately-owned Prairie Green disposal site. Several years earlier, Brady Road had been unsuccessfully searched for the remains of Tanya Nepinak.

Beardy was not reported missing prior to the discovery of her remains. Although the WPS were duly cautious in not calling this a homicide based on the evidence at hand, many activists and politicians were quick to presume that Beardy had been murdered, ostensibly by a white male because racist motives were also presumed. Who else kills Indigenous women and dumps them in trash bins? The Prime Minister down to the Mayor of Winnipeg queued up to express their sorrow and indignation to reporters who didn't exercise the journalistic probity to remind them that homicide had not yet been determined.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:

“My heart goes out to the community in Winnipeg and to the families of the woman who was left in this way. We will continue to be there with the community as it grieves, but we will also continue to be there to put an end to this unconscionable violence.”

Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh:

“Women are dying, lives are being taken and we have to take it seriously.”

Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham:

"We as a society can never grow numb to this. This is horrible. We can never get used to this. This always needs to spark within us outrage, concern, grief. We need to value Indigenous women."

Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation Chief Trevor Prince:

"It's very sad and it breaks my heart … to hear that we lost another First Nation woman to violence. She was a caring, loving mother."

Assembly of Manitoba Chief Grand Chief Cathy Merrick:

“Canada, the Province of Manitoba, and the Winnipeg Police Services must implement more measures to protect First Nations women from the murderers who target them. Our First Nations women deserve the same human decency and gender equity enjoyed by all women of Canada. Why aren’t the governments implementing the MMIWG’s 231 Calls to Justice immediately? We are losing women every day, and it is shameful we have to come out looking in landfills for our women.”

Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Cindy Woodhouse:

"Many people call it a graveyard and we continue to put garbage there. We know that it's a graveyard. And there's been so many other people, women that are missing. Where are they? We need to begin implementing (the 231 Calls to Justice) to ensure that we're trying to help our women — that we don't keep ending up in landfills."

Cambria Harris, the daughter of Morgan Harris who was one of Skibicki's alleged victims, expressed how she, as an Indigenous woman herself, felt targeted after news of another body being found at a landfill: "It's heartbreaking because people take advantage of that and they take advantage of the vulnerable and the minorities, and we see it happen again and again,” Cambria has been camped outside of Brady Road landfill site for the past several weeks in a protest for landfill searches (even though the police strongly believe her mother's remains are buried at Prairie Green). “When you say that you're not going to search the landfill, you're sending the message that it's OK to dump people or Indigenous women like trash.”

Many people were quick to presume that the discovery of Linda Beardy's body was another case of an Indigenous woman being murdered and dumped at a landfill site. Activists like Cambria Harris can be forgiven for hasty judgment but the Prime Minister should know better than to leap to conclusions on the basis of so little information released by the police. Trudeau undermines public confidence in the police and it's not like Cambria Harris doesn't have a cohort that suspects police perfidy if not outright complicity in Beardy's death.

Trudeau has been no friend to Canada on the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. When the National Inquiry for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded that there was “a genocide perpetrated by the Canadian state against Indigenous peoples,” Trudeau was pressured to agree with that conclusion. He initially disagreed but then conceded: 'Yes, Canada was guilty of an ongoing genocide.' If it wasn't clearly a genocide to him in the first place, what evidence was later presented that caused him to change his mind? It was a remarkable statement from a sitting PM but one he could make without fear of ending up in the docket at The Hague. No serious court would ever consider disconnected murders over so many years which in most cases have been criminally investigated with convictions reached as a genocide were it just a matter of a flaky politician nodding with activists, but is it good for anyone and most of all Indigenous women to pretend these aren't homicides overwhelmingly committed by Indigenous men known to their victims?

In a public address on Thursday, April 5^th, Police Chief Danny Smyth announced that thanks to the public's assistance, video was obtained from a retail store that showed Beardy entering and leaving the store alone and then climbing into a trash bin at the back alone. The video shows she did not exit the bin before a truck came a few hours later to tip the bin. The WPS categorically ruled out any foul play based on the new evidence. An initial autopsy indicated that the injuries found on Beardy's body were consistent with being handled by a garbage truck. A toxicology report is pending at time of writing.

Reaction to the latest revelation has been mixed. The Chief of Lake St. Martin First Nation where Beardy was registered as a band member promptly found a way to still blame Canada. Referring to the fact that Beardy had been dislocated from the reserve since it flooded in 2011, Chief Christopher Traverse remarked, “Had our people had the chance to return home to our traditional lands, Linda Beardy might still be here today. However, she's returning home in a casket."

Beardy grew up in Winnipeg.

Shortly after the WPS ruled out homicide as the cause of Beardy's death, her family issued a press statement.

In a CBC interview Lucy Beardy, Linda's sister, said she is planning to file a complaint with Manitoba's Law Enforcement Review Agency over what she feels was their insensitivity towards her even though she admits WPS officers accompanied by a family support and resource advocate came to her home prior to Thursday's press announcement and 'repeatedly asked if she wanted to see the video and photos of her sister' which Lucy declined.

"They were going to just state that there is not a homicide, to ease the public, and no details further than that would be provided — and it's an ongoing investigation," Lucy Beardy said. "I believe it was like a breach of trust and confidence, you know, like they manipulated the whole situation. There is more, there has to be."

Irrational disbelief might be expected from a person so raw in their grief but how much of that incredulity is prompted by a massive activist discourse that depicts police as the instrument of a genocidal state?

Writing for the Canadian Press, Anna Mackenzie expresses a morbid conceit 

“I want a world where my Indigenous daughters don’t read headlines about their kin being so violently discarded. 

I’m not sure what else needs to be done for ‘Canada’ to disrupt its deep rooted lethal romanticization of Indigenous women and girls that empowers folks to believe we are disposable. Thousands upon thousands of Indigenous women’s bodies have been violated and discarded. 

The reality of what this country has allowed is like the rancid scent of the garbage dump, cascading over the cedars to assault our senses. Every 'Canadian' should be outraged.”

Mackenzie regards MMIW as a genocide and “Canada” (she uses quotations to signify the inherent illegitimacy Canada has in the minds of aboriginal nationalists) as doubly genocidal after Pope Francis was cajoled into saying that Indian Residential Schools were a genocide. For Mackenzie, so certain of the grand maleficence of Canada, Linda Beardy's death was a cue to submit an indictment she probably already had in mind. If another Indigenous woman ended up in a landfill, it could only be because she was murdered by a settler, and discarded like garbage because how else could this possibly happen?

Only in the bizarro land of Canada could romanticization be lethal but if genocide can be untethered from reason, what isn't possible?

That dark expectation of Mackenzie comes from the activist effort to depict Canada as a genocidal enterprise since Confederation to the present. It has been a remarkably successful effort considering the House of Commons voted unanimously on Oct. 27^th for a motion to declare Canada's Indian Residential School as a genocide, like Rwanda, the Holocaust or the Holodomor. Our detractors are many, our defenders few.

One of the more prolific detractors is Niigaan Sinclair, a columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press. In a column that appears to have been started before it was disclosed that Beardy wasn't murdered, Sinclair used her coffin for a soapbox to speak about “the normalization of the genocide of Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit/queer peoples”

“Linda Beardy may not have been murdered by an individual,” Sinclair conceded, “but her life ended because of a society’s apathy, racism and policies that offered a refuse bin when what she needed was love.” Even when an Indigenous woman is the author of her own demise, Sinclair still argues that it is society's fault. That is blood libel. Society didn't offer Beardy a refuse bin; that bin was private property and it wasn't, of course, something intended for public use. Sinclair simultaneously manages to libel society and denude the late Beardy of any personal responsibility.

“Just as everyone is a part of creating a problem, everyone has to be part of the solution,” states Sinclair. On the same day that the WPS announced that Beardy wasn't murdered, the police announced new charges of second degree homicide for four aboriginal males (three of whom were teens with the youngest being 14 years old). In a senseless, violent rampage last year these four males killed a man in a wheelchair in a downtown alley, beat another man who recently passed due to his injuries and beat Danielle Ballantyne to death in her home. Ballantyne was Indigenous but so are her alleged killers. There were no downtown rallies for justice on Ballantyne's behalf. As far as I know Sinclair has never written an angst-filled column about Ballantyne's tragic death; he hasn't tried to mash the libel of genocide into her homicide. Bad actors like Sinclair only turn out for the women who don't perish at the hands of other Aboriginals. He selects the props for the script he wants to read.

Hundreds fill the Portage Avenue and Main Street intersection on Friday at a rally in honour of Linda Beardy. (Travis Golby/CBC)

It could not have been easy for Chief Smyth on Thursday. Maybe he figured Beardy's family would be somewhat relieved to know that Linda hadn't been murdered. Maybe Smyth anticipated some disbelief in a public encouraged to think the worst of the police and the state. The chief would have been most foolish if he expected a single politician to help cool tempers by apologizing for not waiting for the facts before reacting on cue to the activist narrative. We can count our blessings for an unelected police chief if being elected means having to preserve a blood libel because of who expresses it.

Addendum:

In the Good Friday rally in downtown Winnipeg, protesters paid a visit to WPS headquarters where they started banging on windows causing one to shatter. One participant urged the mob not to bang on windows but “a woman who took the bullhorn later during Friday's rally downplayed the vandalism.”

"That's just a little bit of an inconvenience for them, but our lives are more than a broken window," she said.

"They're killing our women."

The police are killing their women?! And that despite the fact that Beardy wasn’t killed by anyone. Maybe Mayor Scott Gillingham is on Easter retreat but he helped fire up this mob, he should be just as quick to dowse the flames when they senselessly attack the police at their central station in downtown Winnipeg.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, A Funny Thing Happened on the way to The Hague

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