Intersectionality:
The Convergence of Race, Trauma, Violence, Gender, and Indigenous Peoples
“If you can’t write about us with a love for who we are as a people, what we’ve survived, what we’ve accomplished despite all attempts to keep us from doing so; if you can’t look at us as we are and feel your pupils go wide, making all stereotypes feel like a sham, a poor copy, a disgrace—then why are you writing about us at all?” – Alicia Elliott, Indigenous Author
Our long white Cadillac slinks through the streets of Winnipeg, north along Main Street, past Portage Avenue, and turns west onto Higgins Avenue. We glide along Higgins before taking a left onto Princess. We slow, our darkened windows separating us from the cold and frozen Winnipeg night. Gospel music plays on the cassette deck, the Bill Gaither Trio is singing The Family of God, my mother’s favorite song.
The car is warm and soft, and I grow sleepy listening to the music and my parent’s low voices in the front seat. But I will not fall asleep; I feel tense with what I know still lies before me. The Cadillac takes a gentle left, as the sidewalks start to fill in around us. It is still early, maybe seven pm. Our dinner reservations are not until eight, plenty of time yet to slink through these streets, as we weave further into the night. A right on Higgins will take us either left to the Union Gospel Mission or right to the Salvation Army Centre of Hope. But we are here for neither of these. Tonight, my father is on the hunt. It is 1980, and I am ten years old.
“Perhaps one of the biggest issues with sex work when it applies to Indigenous folks is ‘choice.’ The concept of choice is critical to understanding the difference between sex work and survival sex. These are two different types of sex work that I have much experience with.” Sekani D – “One Woman’s Story”
My father’s window slides down with the gentle touch of the button, silently opening us up to the night. Cold air rushes in, and I gather my scarf around me, as I sit up strait, staring down at my lap. I have my prettiest dress on, peach with white lace, and white shoes with a buckle on top. A woman starts walking towards our car, and my father slows down. I cannot stop myself. I lean forward and peer through my father’s window, transfixed. She is magnificently tall, with a cropped white fur coat, just to her belly. Her skirt is a flash of jewels of sequins, and her legs are long and lean. I have never seen anyone so exotic, with her browned skin and jet-black hair falling down to her waist. She nears our car, swaying as she walks on unfathomably high heels. My father leans out the window as she draws closer, murmuring something that I cannot make out. His laugh is low and long. I am frozen in place, dread and danger paralyzing me. I cannot look, and I cannot look away.
Just as the woman reaches our car, my father chuckles and starts to drive away. I swivel in my seat, peering out through the back window, watching the woman, as she follows us for a few steps, uncertain, quizzical, then gives up, gestures at our car, and walks back to her place on the sidewalk. I hear my father’s whistle, and then his catcall, and I press my body back down into the maroon leather seat. He has gotten his first taste of the night, and I have the start of a familiar nauseous ache forming in my belly.
“First Nations women were considered ‘exotic’ sexual commodities and were assumed by colonizers to enjoy that status, not only because they were viewed as primitive but because they were female. Men’s assumption of the right to rape indigenous women is not a new idea – whether that right is institutionalized in prostitution or not.”
Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter – “Prostitution of Indigenous Women”
I stare out through my window, where groups of women come into view, huddled together under streetlamps, or standing separately, off to the side, in long furry coats, or short fake minks, with stiletto heals and bright red lips. Some women wear no coat at all, shivering in shimmering dresses of reds and blues. Some women sit right on the cold concrete, even lying down, exhausted and alone. Some women look hopeful and others look despondent. Some eyes are open and some eyes are closed. I am just a little girl, and I already understand that I will never speak of this to anyone, yet these nights will stay with me, stuck in the dark corners of my mind, continually chipping away at all the good parts of me.
I am ten years old, but I already know things, like how if we want to come here, to drive around here, it is supposed to cost us something. But we don’t pay on these nights. These nights are meant to prove something, something about power and wealth, and something about dominance and masculinity. I am ten years old, but I already know things, like how there are other nights here, where my father comes alone, with other things to prove.
“The magical function of money is gendered; that is to say, women are not supposed to have money, because when women have money, presumably women can make choices, and one of the choices that women can make is not to be with men. And if women make the choice not to be with men, men will then be deprived of the sex that men feel they have a right to. And if it is required that a whole class of people be treated with cruelty and indignity and humiliation, put into a condition of servitude, so that men can have the sex that they think they have a right to, then that is what will happen. That is the essence and the meaning of male dominance.”
Andrea Dworkin – “Prostitution and Male Supremacy”
We glide through the streets, my father’s elbow resting casually, jauntily, on the open window of the car, relaxed and unhurried as we criss-cross through the night. Here a whistle, now another catcall, but otherwise, silence. Just the purr of the engine as we glide. The car slows down as he likes what he sees, then slowly accelerates when his feast is over. What is my mother doing? I can’t remember her at all. But yes, she is there, in the front seat, right beside my father. Maybe she is flipping the tape over, the Bill Gaither Trio, comforting her, set to start all over again: “Because He lives – I can face tomorrow. Because He lives – all fear is gone. Because I know He holds the future – And life is worth a living just because He lives.”
As the cold and the dark deepens, and eight pm approaches, my father takes a right onto Main Street, the main corridor of Winnipeg, and I know that for tonight, we are finally moving on. The Christmas lights are on full display, and cheery businesses now line the streets. Just a few short blocks, and a new world presents itself to us, everything we have been a part of tonight swallowed up by the inky night we now drive out of. We silently glide out of the downtown core and turn right at the infamous Portage and Main intersection, my body starting to unwind with the familiarity. Ten minutes later, we are at the front entrance of Rae and Jerry’s, a steak house that dates back to the 1960s. It is an icon, a classic, where visitors to Winnipeg come to see and be seen. And the rich locals come here to dine on gigantic steaks, lobster tails, and crème brulé. We are whisked into the restaurant. My father is on cloud nine. His laughter is raucous, his jokes are perverse, and all eyes are on him, as he swaggers behind the pretty hostess. He is on fire. He is ready for his next feast.
The establishment is lavish, with crisp white table cloths, baskets of fresh hot bread, ice-cold butter, walls of aged wines, and brass bars lined with beers from across the world. The walls are cedar and oak, and the chairs are mahogany and leather. This is where old and new money meet and mix, where men like my father come to see and be seen. Only later in life, will I finally understand that we were neither new money nor old money. It was all just a part of his game.
"Many men assume that if there's an Indigenous woman walking down the street, or standing and having a smoke, or waiting at the bus stop, that she is working the streets. And so, that is deeply hurtful to many women. They cannot be themselves without it being assumed that they're available to these men. . . These men feel entitled and they pick on Indigenous women, and that's what creates this lack of safety, and this is one reason why we have so many women among the missing and murdered."
Kate Quinn - director of the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation (CEASE) in Edmonton – “Include Indigenous women living on the streets in MMIWG inquiry”
I order a Shirley Temple; it costs $6, and I will soon order a second and maybe a third. I feel nothing but the richness around me; the floor-length sable fur coat my mother wears, the unfathomable diamonds perched on her fingers and dangling from her ears. Cost is of no matter on nights like this; nights where men like my father set out to prove that they are men.
My father orders the same meal each time we come to this restaurant: a 30-ounce T-bone steak that takes up his entire plate, a giant shrimp scampi, garlic toast, sauteed mushrooms, a double-baked potato, and a lobster tail. He looks around at us, making sure we all understand that we can order whatever we want. He guzzles pints of beer, Bailey’s coffees, and various liqueurs. He flirts with the waitresses that greet him, and the owner comes over to make sure he is happy.
My father watches the waitresses walk away, adorned in short black skirts, low-cut white blouses, and he slowly whistles under his tongue. “You’re lookin’ good tonight,” he tells our waitress with the beginnings of a slur, his face starting to tinge red. She smiles demurely; she knows the tip my father will soon hand over, and his hand on her waist will not deter her. The more she smiles and leans in, the deeper my father’s pockets. I don’t know how we make it home on these Saturday nights, somehow alive, but we do. It might have something to do with the way our long white Cadillac glides through the night, the illusion of wealth our protection.
It is early now, Sunday morning, and my mother hollers down to us from upstairs, “Get up! Get ready! You’ve got twenty minutes!” I splash water on my face, put on my bright yellow Sunday dress, and head to the kitchen. I am still groggy from candied cherries and Shirley Temples, but my father is already outside, the Cadillac purring in front of the house, ready to go. My sister and I pile in the backseat once again, but today we are off to church. We sit in maybe the tenth or so row from the back, all side by side, listening to scripture and belting out hymns, the unspoken events of the night before sitting in the spaces between us. Church is our second home.
We attend both Sunday morning and evening services, Wednesday bible groups, Friday night youth group, and many other special events. My father often collects the tithes and offerings, and our family is of high regard. I am proud of my father; he is handsome, generous, gregarious, funny, and respected. Yet, something is starting to form in my mind. There is the beginning of an idea, that my father is not one man, but two. That the man I go to church with is not the same man that drives me to Princess Street on Saturday nights. Which one of these two men is my father?
“This should not have to be said but it has to be said: prostitution comes from male dominance, not from female nature. It is a political reality that exists because one group of people has and maintains power over another group of people. I underline that because I want to say to you that male domination is cruel. I want to say to you that male domination must be destroyed. Male domination needs to be ended, not simply reformed, not made a little nicer, and not made a little nicer for some women. We need to look at the role of men-really look at it, study it, understand it-in keeping women poor, in keeping women homeless, in keeping girls raped, which is to say, in creating prostitutes, a population of women who will be used in prostitution. We need to look at the role of men in romanticizing prostitution, in making its cost to women culturally invisible, in using the power of this society, the economic power, the cultural power, the social power, to create silence, to create silence among those who have been hurt, the silence of the women who have been used.”
Andrea Dworkin – “Prostitution and Male Supremacy”
Nearly forty years have come and gone. It is January 29th, 2017, in the early hours, long before dawn, yet well after nightfall. Barbara Kentner, an Anishinaabe woman, walks down the sidewalk with her sister, Melissa, in Thunder Bay, Ontario. They are having a good night; they are together, and they enjoy each other’s company. They laugh, and they tell stories, of their youth and of their life. They hear a low rumble, and a vehicle approaches from behind them, with a white man hanging out of the passenger window. What is he saying to them? Maybe they even smile at first, not yet understanding the danger. Or, they do understand the danger, but it has long been normalized.
But now, the passenger, is he hurling insults at the women? Yes, he is, what is he saying to them? And now, now he is hurling something much more dangerous. Does Melissa see the man throw something at them? It is dark, and she isn’t sure. But yes, something has hit her sister; her sister is down, she is down on the ground, and she is wounded. It is a trailer hitch – later they would find out it is capable of holding up to 3500 pounds of trailer weight. And this 3500 pounds of trailer weight, imagine the 16 foot Jayco Flight for one, it hits Barbara directly in the stomach. But Barbara doesn’t take flight, Barbara drops. And as the men speed away, Melissa hears the passenger – later the world would call him Brayden Bushby – yell, “Aha! I got one! I got one of them.” This is Thunder Bay, the murder capital and the hate crime capital of Canada, with, not coincidentally, the largest population of Indigenous Peoples. And on all three statistics, the direct runner-up is Winnipeg, Manitoba.
“Barbara Kentner is brutalized in the McKenzie neighbourhood, an area of Thunder Bay that can turn deadly by night. I am a seasoned journalist, I grew up in Thunder Bay, on these streets. I am Indigenous myself, and comfortable in most of the streets of Thunder Bay, but I am not comfortable driving through the McKenzie neighbourhood by nightfall. It is an area where white men roll through, poking fun, poking fingers, cracking jokes. People of a certain kind, looking to exploit, know to target this neighbourhood. I am an Anishinaabe journalist and writer, and I am on a quest to uncover the truth in Thunder Bay.”
Ryan McMahon – podcaster, writer, and documentarian of Thunder Bay.
When McMahon tells us what the white men do in this Thunder Bay neighbourhood, I am rocked. I have never heard of this before, and I feel sick. But wait. I am wrong. There is something nagging at the fringes of my memory. White men drive through these neighbourhoods late into the night just to taunt the Indigenous women that live there? Something rolls in my stomach, and I feel sick. A memory slowly comes into shape: there is a car, white and long and sleek, and it is dark outside, black really, and I am so cold, and we are winding through foreign streets. Where are we? What are we doing here? I dig down deep into my memory bank, and I excavate my father’s laughter, as he whistles at a woman standing beside our car. Who is this woman? I don’t recognize her. She is smiling at my father, but I cannot hear his words. I know they are not what this woman wants to hear though, because our car slinks away, and the woman walks back to her corner, gesturing angrily at my father.
“This symbolic journey of the white man traveling to the bad side of town to do mean things to Native people and then going back to their nice white houses. This happens so much in fucking Thunder Bay, it is disgusting.” Mount Royal University professor – Thunder Bay
“Brayden Bushby’s are everywhere. Our city produced Brayden Bushby and will continue to produce another one and there will be no transformation as long as we continue to reproduce that model.” Indigenous Journalist – Thunder Bay