Life on the margins: poverty, fear and violence for Aboriginal women

Cousin of murdered woman still fighting for social justice

By THOMAS ROHNER

Holly Jarrett, cousin to Nunatsiavut's Loretta Saunders, who was found dead in New Brunswick in February 2014, says she will continue to talk about the marginalization of Aboriginal women, despite stalkers, poverty and personal setbacks. (PHOTO COURTESY HOLLY JARRETT)


Holly Jarrett, cousin to Nunatsiavut’s Loretta Saunders, who was found dead in New Brunswick in February 2014, says she will continue to talk about the marginalization of Aboriginal women, despite stalkers, poverty and personal setbacks. (PHOTO COURTESY HOLLY JARRETT)

When the dead body of Holly Jarrett’s cousin, Loretta Saunders, was discovered by police in New Brunswick in Feb. 2014, Jarrett says she was left with many questions.

Shortly after her cousin’s murder, Holly, 41 and a mother of four, remembers talking to Loretta’s professor at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, where her cousin was working on a dissertation about murdered and missing aboriginal women and the need for a national inquiry.

“I talked to Loretta’s professor, and asked him all these ‘why’ questions: why? why? why? why? And he said she was murdered because she was poor, Holly, this happened because she was a poor woman,” Jarrett said over the phone from Ottawa Jan. 18.

“That’s why almost everything you’re going to see on my Facebook or on my Twitter is what it’s like to be a marginalized person in society, from a marginalized person’s point of view.”

Saunders, a 26-year-old Inuk from Nunatsiavut, went missing in February 2014. After a two-week search, her body was found in New Brunswick.

Two people who had been subletting her Halifax apartment — Blake Leggette and Victoria Henneberry — were later charged with murder. Their trial is still pending.

Academics and news reports help bring attention to marginalized people, Jarrett said, “but unless you live it, you really aren’t going to get a good perspective of what it’s like.”

It’s a perspective that Jarrett lives every day.

On Jan. 16, someone hacked into Jarrett’s Twitter account: grossly misogynistic messages were posted to her profile and Tweeted from her account.

“No one wants my used up snatch I have had to[o] many men in it and in my ass but I fucking like these hookup site[s],” someone other than Jarrett tweeted from her account shortly after 4 p.m.

Jarrett has a pretty good idea who did it — and police are currently investigating, she said.

She doesn’t think she was a target because of her work raising awareness around missing and murdered indigenous women, but rather because of a man she knew briefly.

Jarrett began an online petition shortly after her cousin’s murder calling for a public inquiry into missing and murdered women. The petition has gathered more than 320,000 signatures at this point.

Jarrett also began the “Am I Next” social media campaign, which went viral, wherein supporters of a public inquiry posted pictures of themselves holding placards with the campaign’s slogan.

But messages the hacker left on her Twitter account show that not everyone supports her activism. No matter: she takes her cue from Saunders.

“Loretta’s last cover photo on Facebook said, ‘Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes’,” Jarrett said.

“That’s what we lived by — her sister, Delilah, and me and Loretta. We really understand that the only way to inspire other people is to set a good example for them. Loretta wanted to speak out.”

Jarrett, whose mother is an Inuk from Labrador, recently opened up to Nunatsiaq News, describing what her life has been like since her cousin’s death.

“Loretta’s thesis was to open up her entire story, and all her scars, to display to everybody so that other people would be inspired to tell their stories,” Jarrett said.

“I just basically put myself up on the chopping block and say, ‘look at this’. I leave everything completely and totally open, everything about my life.”

Spring/Summer 2014

In the months following Loretta’s death, Jarrett decided to carry on her cousin’s work of bringing attention to the hundreds of murdered and missing indigenous women in Canada.

“Inuit are never represented, we don’t have a lot of representation across the board, but with this topic we don’t get a lot of attention at all,” said Jarrett.

Jarrett, who was living in Cornwall, Ont. at the time, wanted to make a short documentary about her trip back to Labrador and Nunatsiavut to be with her family, stopping along the way to interview others whose lives had been affected by missing or murdered indigenous women. She’d grown up partly in Labrador and partly in Ottawa.

She petitioned organizations she thought might support her efforts to raise awareness about violence against women, but she couldn’t pull the necessary funds together and didn’t make it home in time for Loretta’s funeral.

“That left a really big void,” Jarrett said.

She continues to promote her online petition, attended protests and spoke at rallies.

“I felt like that was the most I could do because I was so limited.”

Meanwhile Jarrett scraped by as a single mother with two kids living at home, unable to find a job despite being educated and working in the past as a counsellor for addicts, women and indigenous people.

She continued to tell her — and Loretta’s — story to anyone who would listen, especially social service providers. She got nowhere.

“And I thought: this is what it’s like to be marginalized, this is exactly what it’s like and I want everybody to know,” Jarrett said.

By late summer, living on a monthly $800 welfare check, Jarrett felt hard-hit by constant setbacks. And then news broke of the murder of Tina Lafontaine — a 15-year old Aboriginal girl from Manitoba.

“At this point I’m pretty close to giving up, saying ‘screw it, I’ll just be on welfare the rest of my life,’” Jarrett said, “because the longer you don’t have a job, the harder your chances of getting a job.”

Jarrett felt nearly paralyzed with anger at the world and nearly gave up trying at all.

“If Loretta caused so much of a media storm in Canada… if everybody knows about this, I thought they’re not going to let it keep happening,” Jarrett said.

“And then Tina…”

Fall 2014

But she decided not to give up.

With her 13-year-old daughter, she filmed a short video in early September based on the idea of starting the “Am I next?” campaign. After posting the video on Facebook, her friends back home (who were tagged in the video), shared it, created the hashtag #AmINext and the campaign went viral.

At that point Jarrett decided her best chances of finding employment — without a car — were in Ottawa, where she also felt close to the local Inuit community.

An online fundraising campaign gave her $1,500 — enough for first and last month’s rent for a townhouse apartment.

A man she had known for a year — and had helped grow a community organic garden with her — offered to help pay the rent by moving with his two children into the basement of the townhouse.

“I’ve worked a lot with violence against women so I’m always a little leery of men’s behaviour and the misogyny that goes along with it sometimes,” Jarrett said. But this guy didn’t raise any red flags for her.

Less than a month into their living arrangement, Jarrett said his behaviour changed. Signs of a temper, including towards her children, emerged.

When he yelled at her child for leaving a cereal bowl on his table, Jarrett decided to confront him.

“You will not talk to my kids that way,” Jarrett said she told him, “you shouldn’t talk to any kids that way.”

When he left for work, Jarrett called his ex-girlfriend to find out if this behaviour was normal for him.

The ex-girlfriend told Jarrett that the man had threatened to kill her in the past, which was why he was going to a correctional facility on the weekends.

“Now I’m scared, I honestly didn’t know,” Jarrett said.

She called the police to file a report.

“I knew they couldn’t do anything at that point. But Loretta went missing and was murdered and I didn’t want my family to have to wonder if anything happened to me.”

When the man returned, he confronted her with an eerie calm, Jarrett said.

“He said, ‘I have no problems making you disappear and I know all the people that can do it,’” Jarrett said he told her.

He went on: “’I have this shell inside of me so I’ll just crawl in there and forget the world exists. I won’t have any morals… I’ll just do what I have to do.’ And then he smiled at me and walked into the house with those four children, my two and his two,” Jarrett said.

“So I just shit bricks.”

Jarrett grabbed her kids and left for a women’s shelter.

The shelter was an welcoming, supportive haven, Jarrett said, but this man continued to harass her.

Jarrett has reason to believe he was the one who hacked into her email account, deleting everything from her social media campaign.

She believes he also tracked down sexually-charged pictures Jarrett had exchanged with a past boyfriend. She also believes he used one of those pictures to create a false Facebook profile under her name. She reported it to Facebook and it has since been removed.

Jarrett is also quite sure he hacked her Twitter account and posted the misogynistic text.

In telling her story, without holding back the details, Jarrett said she hopes people can come to understand the perspective of marginalized people, especially indigenous women, in Canadian society.

“It doesn’t even bother me to tell the public, ya, I sent sexypictures to my boyfriend,” Jarrett said.

“If I was the prime minister’s daughter sending sexy pictures to my boyfriend, I’d still be a girl sending sexy pictures to her boyfriend. The only difference between her and me is that I will get targeted as someone who is worse for doing something like that.”

Christmas 2014/On the up and up

Although the shelter proved to be a safe, supportive environment for Jarrett, by the time Christmas rolled around, she had spent what little money she had retrieving her belongings under police supervision from her townhouse apartment.

The locks had been changed, so Jarrett needed a locksmith; the movers she hired stood around collecting their hourly rate, waiting for the locksmith.

“I had nothing left for my kids for Christmas, nothing,” Jarrett said.

But a local newspaper wrote a story about Jarrett and the Christmas gifts started to pour in just in time for the holidays.

“We got tons and tons of stuff, and now everything is looking up,” Jarrett said.

“Everything is looking up,” she repeated.

Jarrett has enrolled in a five-month French language course which she hopes will help open doors for her.

“And I got a car. So things are definitely getting better,” she said.

Jarrett also has a safe place close to friends to move into soon, so she no longer fears the man she says has stalked her. He didn’t win.

“I’m still trying to get attention to the fact that we need a public national inquiry, because that’s what Loretta wanted with her thesis. She wanted to write a book, and she wanted an inquiry. Her sister Delilah will finish the book, and I’m still pushing for the national inquiry.”

What first caught Jarrett’s eye about the “Am I Next” campaign — a phrase originally used for a social media campaign around racial violence in the US — was the acronym: AIN.

“Every time I’d be on the internet, researching marginalized societies these words kept coming right in front of me: AIN, AIN, AIN.”

“Ain,” Jarrett explained, is how those she and her family acknowledge loved ones in Inuktitut. It made Jarrett think of the loved ones she stood to lose in her life.

“At any minute, my 21-year-old daughter could walk out of her house and be next. My 17-year-old daughter could walk out of her house and be next… any one of us could be next.”

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