'She was Aboriginal. She had an addiction': Sister of MMIW says family had to push police
*This is a special edition of The Current from Winnipeg where the show hosted a public forum on the issue of policing when it comes to missing and murdered Indigenous women.*
Bernadette Smith's sister Claudette Osborne went missing in 2008. She was 21-years-old and was last seen near a Winnipeg hotel.
She has four kids who are are waiting for their mom to come home.- Bernadette Smith
According to the Native Women's Association of Canada, in Manitoba there are 40 missing, 120 murdered and five suspicious deaths recorded in the MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls) database. There are 90 MMIWG recorded in Winnipeg.
Two other relatives of Bernadette's have gone missing or have been murdered. Drag the Red, a volunteer-run organization that drags Winnipeg's Red River to search for traces of missing and murdered Indigenous women founded by Bernadette began as a personal mission.
Bernadette tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti a bit about her sister and how her case was treated by police.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
BS: She was just this young girl who loved life. She was someone who cared about others and would give the coat off her back which we heard she did many times for some of the girls on the street that she became friends with. She had sisters. She has a mother and she has four kids who are are waiting for their mom to come home.
AMT: What do you know about what happened when she was missing?
BS: My sister was someone who always called someone in our family. So two days went by and … of course everyone was concerned because it was out of character for her. So my sister Tina went to the police station, made a police report. And she had a pay-as-you-go cell phone and at the time she didn't have any minutes on it. And when she put minutes on the phone it was about three and a half days later. She got this disturbing call from my sister saying 'I'm at the Lincoln hotel and I'm with this long distance truck driver and I'm scared. He's trying to have sex with me.'
We think there were four things that kind of played into the way her case was handled. She was a woman. She was Aboriginal. She had an addiction. And she also had a police record.
When my sister got that phone call she went to the police and it was difficult because my sister was 21 and we were being told that because she was 21, she's an adult. If she wants to be found, she'll be found. All of these different things we were told. We think there were four things that kind of played into the way her case was handled. She was a woman. She was Aboriginal. She had an addiction. And she also had a police record. The police didn't take her case seriously because of that. And you know we had to really push the police. We were like 'can you release her picture at least? Nobody knows she's missing.'
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AMT: Did they release her picture?
BS: They did. Ten days later.
AMT: Did they release a picture you gave them?
BS: No. They didn't ask us for a picture. And when they did release her picture it was her mug shot, the picture that they took at the police station when she was charged with a crime. So when that was released to the media, it was very difficult for our family because there were comments like 'Oh well obviously that's a mug shot of her. She got what she deserved. She put herself in that situation.'
Martha Troian, an investigative journalist, is part of the CBC's Indigenous unit and the team working on CBC's missing and murdered indigenous women database. Martha joined the discussion.
AMT: How emblematic are the stories we're talking about now?
Families talked a lot about being just rebuffed by the police and being dismissed.- Martha Troian
MT: I know with the data we did see a lot of patterns. Some of them, for instance, there were to do with initial reporting issues with the police. So sometimes families felt like they had to convince the police, or try to persuade them that they wanted to make a missing persons report. Families talked a lot about being just rebuffed by the police and being dismissed.
One problem that they talked a lot about was how some cases are always being handed off from one investigator to the next. So as soon as that happens it makes it really difficult for families to keep that momentum with one investigator and then they have to re-explain everything to a new investigator.
AMT: So in terms of families dealing with officials, there's a disconnect? They don't know where to go? People aren't hearing them? They're not keeping them informed?
MT: Yeah ... there's a lack of communication basically. When we called the families across Canada, a lot of them said to us that this is the first time anyone's called them in a long time about their relative. And one of the standard questions that we had for families was basically when was the last time that police contacted you, and who was it? What did they say? And a lot of them said to us that they don't hear from the police anymore.
The Current has requested information from the National Inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women about when the next phase of the inquiry will begin.
Our Winnipeg public forum was produced by The Current's Josh Bloch, Cathy Simon, Kathleen Goldhar and Winnipeg network producer Suzanne Dufresne.