PORT ORCHARD, Wash. (AP) – The parents of a slain 6-year-old Washington girl have asked for a full trial as they attempt to regain custody of three other children.
James and Denise Wright of the Bremerton area appeared Monday in Kitsap County Family Court. Also participating in the hearing was a lawyer from the Nooksack Tribe. Denise Wright is a member of the tribe and has asked Nooksack officials to help represent her family.
Court Commissioner Thurman Lowans set an Oct. 14 trial date on the custody question regarding the Wrights’ two boys, ages 8 and 16, and a 12-year-old girl. The children are currently with their maternal grandparents.
The body of the couple’s daughter Jenise was found Aug. 7 in woods near her home. A 17-year-old neighbor of the little girl has been arrested for investigation of first-degree murder and rape.
The other children were taken into protective custody Aug. 4, a day after the Wrights reported Jenise missing. Officials have not said why. James Wright says he can’t talk about the reasons yet.
Teeth and bone fragments were found last week near Sacramento, and officials say that they belonged to a prehistoric Native American.
At 11 a.m. on August 15, a passerby noticed what looked like human teeth and bone fragments on a small beach near the Sacramento River, the Daily Democrat reported. The human remains were noticeable because the water levels in the area have dropped due to a drought. And on Wednesday, the Yolo County Coroner’s Office announced that the bones were, indeed, prehistoric – which means they predate written record.
Chief Deputy Coroner Gina Moya said the bones were collected and later submitted to the Chico State Human Identification Laboratory. It was there that the bones were discovered to be prehistoric Native American. Once the bones were identified as Native American, Moya said, officials contacted the California Native American Heritage Commission, so the bones could receive a ceremonial burial.
On August 16 – one day after the human remains were found in California – more bones were discovered at a popular lake in Steuben County, Indiana.
A resident in the area found the bones by the shoreline of a lake, News Channel 15 reported. Additional human remains were located in the water by Indiana Department of Natural Resources scuba divers following an underwater search.
Archeologists with the University of Indianapolis reported Monday the remains are of a “prehistoric” Native American.
“We’ll pull together both state folks and some researchers, and we’re also going to be working with the tribes to get as much information as we can,” Indiana State Museum Director of Archeology Michele Greenan told Wane.com. “But, right now, it’s still really early. My first call will be to the tribes and different researchers to try and figure out what steps to take.”
Steve Ringman / The Seattle Times What’s left of the 210-foot-high Glines Canyon Dam, a section of about 30 feet, is awaiting a final blast in September. In the distance, the bottom of former Lake Mills today forms part of the new Elwha Valley.
Fish are storming back to the Elwha, there’s a sandy beach at the mouth of the river again, and native plants are growing where there used to be lakes.
The last dam will be blasted out of the Elwha River sometime next month, cementing the hopes of generations of advocates and tribal leaders who fought to make it happen.
With the concrete out, the long-term revival of a legendary wilderness valley in the Olympics can now unfold unfettered after 100 years dammed.
The watershed already is springing back to life from the mountains to the sea: Salmon are swimming and spawning miles above the former Elwha dam site. Alders stand more than head high as the native forest reclaims the former lake beds. There’s a soft, sandy beach at the river mouth, where before there was only bare cobble. And birds, bugs and mammals are feasting on salmon eggs and carcasses as fish once again nourish the watershed.
The Elwha is a rare chance to start over on a grand scale. The $325 million federal project, begun three years ago, has reopened 70 miles of habitat for steelhead and salmon, rebuilt wildlife populations and restored native plants. The river is hard at work with its restored natural flow, rebuilding its plunge pools, log jams and gravel bars.
While it will never be the Eden it was, the Elwha one day likely will be pretty darn close — and sooner than many expected.
“It goes against my deepest notions of how fast ecosystem recovery can possibly happen,” said Christopher Tonra, a research fellow with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington, D.C., who is tracking the response of dippers, a native, aquatic songbird, to dam removal in the Elwha. “We are all trained, as biologists, to think of things over the long run. I am not saying the Elwha is fully recovered. But it is so mind blowing to me, the numbers of fish, and seeing the birds respond immediately to the salmon being there. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”
Early hydropower
The dams were built beginning in 1910 for hydropower, but lacked fish passage. It took an act of Congress, passed in 1992, to finally take down Elwha Dam and then Glines Canyon Dam, about eight miles above it.
Unbuild it, and they will come: Salmon have been storming back ever since Elwha Dam was blasted out of the way in March 2012. Taking down Glines Canyon Dam has taken longer, in part because it holds back a larger load of sediment.
Managing the release of about 27 million cubic yards of sediment as the dams come down is why removal has taken so long. There was so much sediment stuck behind the former Glines Canyon Dam alone that, stacked up, the pile would tower more than twice the height of the Empire State Building, notes Jonathan Warrick, of the U.S. Geological Survey.
The dams were lowered notch by notch, allowing the river to naturally flush about half the total sediment load downriver and out to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
There have been bumps along the way. A water-treatment plant — the single most expensive part of the project — failed when a critical intake clogged with debris rinsed out by the river, delaying removal by a year while repairs were made.
The tribal hatchery and federal fish-restoration plan, which includes stocking of some hatchery fish, have been a magnet for lawsuits and controversy.
But nature, meanwhile, has carried right on.
Ian Miller, a coastal hazard specialist based in Port Angeles for Washington Sea Grant, has been monitoring the beach at the river mouth.
The surprise to him isn’t the big volume of sediment the Elwha is delivering downstream, but the fact that it is sticking around. “Basically, this is all new land,” Miller said, walking the beach east of the river mouth on a recent visit. “Everything here is less than two years old. You can walk to (sandy) spots on the beach that are 30 feet deep. It is just a dramatically different system.”
A beach that used to be too rocky to comfortably walk on is today used by kids to play soccer.
Meanwhile, fat chinook salmon are cruising up the river. Staff from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife started working the Elwha in July with a gill net to eventually capture 1,600 big Elwha fall chinook. The fish, of both wild and hatchery origin, are taken to stock the next generation of Elwha fall chinook raised in the state rearing channel, used since the 1970s to preserve the unique Elwha strain.
Stars of the river
Working the fast current was a fish rodeo to capture, then quickly take the powerful, thrashing fish from the net unharmed. Long and thick as a thigh, the chinook, the largest in the Puget Sound region, are the celebrities of Elwha River restoration, and a major reason for dam removal.
Elwha fish populations are projected to grow from about 4,000 to 400,000 over the next 20 to 30 years. Salmon already have hatched and migrated up- and downstream of the former Elwha dam site for the first time in a century.
Revegetation — the most visible piece of the Elwha renewal project — also is unfolding dramatically. Already, terraced banks of the former lakes are burgeoning with alder and cottonwood, the gift of seeds carried by the lakes as they gradually were lowered during the drawdown that started dam removal.
Most difficult to revegetate are the cobbly, gravel flats of the lake bed farther upstream, in the former Lake Mills, a land where many a planted Douglas fir and other seedlings have gone to die.
But in other spots, cottonwood seedlings have established so thickly they look like a lawn. Alder trees seeded in 2011 as lake levels dropped now have grown more than head tall. Where there used to be bald sand, goldenrod buzzes with bees, and a young, stocky Nootka rose bush conceals a bird’s nest full of eggs.
In all, more than 500 acres of former lake bed are being replanted, with nearly 60 varieties of native grasses, flowers, woody shrubs and trees from the Elwha Valley through 2018.
Dam removal also is kick-starting broader effects in the ecological systems of the watershed, from its food chain to the home ranges of animals.
Kim Sager-Fradkin, wildlife biologist for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, already has tracked fish-eating otters to parts of the Elwha that salmon have recolonized since dam removal, and documented an increase in the otters’ nutrient levels derived from fish.
John McMillan, a biologist with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries walking the tributaries since dam removal began, said that in the first year he saw salmon carcasses on the riverbank. But now he doesn’t because the otters, bears, cougars, bobcats and mink have learned to take advantage of food where for so many years there was none.
“The ecological relationships between the animals are coming back,” McMillan said. To me, that is such a great feeling.”
Walk the river
Take a walking tour of the Elwha River with Park Service rangers on the former Lake Aldwell. Tours are on Tuesdays and Sundays at 1 p.m. through Sept. 2. The hourlong walks are free, and begin at the former boat launch at the end of Lake Aldwell Road, north off of Highway 101 just west of the Elwha River Bridge. For more information, call 360-565-3130.
ESPN analyst and former Chicago Bears head coach Mike Ditka isn’t falling in line with the growing number of sportscasters, journalists and sundry public figures who refuse to use the name of the Washington NFL team. Instead, he says people who oppose the team’s name are “asinine.”
“What’s all the stink over the Redskin name?” Ditka said during an interview with Mike Richman of RedskinsHistorian.com. “It’s so much [expletive], it’s incredible. We’re going to let the liberals of the world run this world. It was said out of reverence, out of pride to the American Indian. Even though it was called a Redskin, what are you going to call them, a Proudskin? This is so stupid it’s appalling, and I hope that owner keeps fighting for it and never changes it, because the Redskins are part of an American football history, and it should never be anything but the Washington Redskins. That’s the way it is
“It’s been the name of the team since the beginning of football,” Ditka added. “It has nothing to do with something that happened lately, or something that somebody dreamed up. This was the name, period. Leave it alone. These people are silly — asinine, actually, in my opinion.”
Ditka continued to berate all those who oppose the name – a group that includes high-ranking individuals like Hillary Clinton, Keith Olbermann and former Washington player Champ Bailey.
“It’s all the political correct idiots in America, that’s all it is,” Ditka said. “It’s got nothing to do with anything else. We’re going to change something because we can. Hey listen, I went through it in the 60s, too. I mean, come on. Everybody lined up, did this. It’s fine to protest. That’s your right, if you don’t like it, protest. You have a right to do that, but to change the name, that’s ridiculous. Change the Constitution — we’ve got people trying to do that, too, and they’re doing a pretty good job.”
CBS Sportscaster Phil Simms, who will call Thursday Night Football games beginning September 11, said Monday that he is hesitant to use the name of the Washington team and is sensitive to the complaints about the name. “My very first thought is it will be Washington the whole game,” Simms told The Associated Press.
Simms said he is not taking sides in the contentious debate, but that once he thought about the name his conscience kicked in. “I never really thought about it, and then it came up and it made me think about it,” Simms added. “There are a lot of things that can come up in a broadcast, and I am sensitive to this.”
Nearly two weeks after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, protesters continue to call for marked changes in law enforcement policy.
Brown, an 18-year-old black man, reportedly robbed a convenience store in the St. Louis suburb around noon on August 9. Thirteen minutes later, he was shot dead by a white police officer.
The incident, which rocketed to national attention with the help of social media, touched off days of vigils, riots and military police action in a town of about 21,000 people. It also sparked a federal investigation and brought to the surface complaints about racial profiling and police brutality.
Among protesters’ demands is creation of a federal commission to investigate trends of militarized police forces nationwide—and the civil unrest that follows. If formed, the federal commission would be the first in nearly half a century to address these issues.
“I think the time is long overdue for something like this,” said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the leading national authority on racial profiling. “There’s talk in the wake of Ferguson of reconstituting a commission that would look at police use of force, if not the entire criminal justice system.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 established the 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of race riots in Los Angeles, Detroit and Newark in the mid-60s. Also called the Kerner Commission, the group met for seven months and produced a report that suggested white America bore much of the responsibility for racial unrest.
Protestors confront police during an impromptu rally, Sunday, August 10, 2014. (AP Photo/Sid Hastings)
The commission found that black frustration came from a sense of powerlessness, poverty and lack of opportunity. It called for the federal government to intervene and provide housing, education, employment and social services to black communities, and to dismantle discriminatory practices system-wide.
The commission’s most quoted conclusion was this: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Johnson accepted the report in March of 1968, but ultimately did not support it.
Yet many of the Kerner Commission’s findings are still relevant today, Harris said. Minorities still experience social inequalities and police departments—often undertrained and overworked—lack meaningful federal direction.
“One of the things that the Kerner report said is that many of these disturbances began with police encounters with citizens—even traffic stops—that went awry and ended up with people dead,” he said. “It’s amazing how that thread moves through so much of the last six decades.”
The militarization of police departments has happened just in the last two decades, Harris said. As many as 80 percent of small- to mid-sized police departments have SWAT teams armed with military surplus weapons. Too often, when the tools are available, departments want to use them, he said.
Police wearing riot gear try to disperse a crowd Monday, August 11, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday was in Ferguson promising a thorough investigation into the shooting. In a statement, Holder pointed to the bond of trust that should exist between law enforcement and the public, calling it “all-important” and “fragile.”
That trust has been historically absent in relationships between minority populations and police forces, Harris said, noting that it can be hard to find a black man anywhere in the U.S. who has not been a victim of racial profiling. Profiling—from both sides of the equation—happens long before an incident becomes violent, he said.
“In relations between African Americans and other minorities and police, you’re never writing on a blank slate,” he said. “There’s a history that goes all the way back to slave patrols, which were among the first sources of organized law enforcement.”
The U.S. Constitution, which reflected attitudes and beliefs of the time, defined slaves as “three-fifths of all other persons.” Those beliefs trickled through the generations and centuries and are still apparent in today’s conflicts, Harris said.
“The history of race relations and racism in this country pervades police institutions just as it does every other institution in the United States,” he said. At the same time, when a white police officer shoots a black person, “perceptions and memories and beliefs are already there for people to say this is another one of the worst examples of how police treat black people. It fits a long-existing, deeply held narrative.”
Conflicts like the one continuing in Ferguson have broad implications for all non-white populations, said David Patterson, assistant professor at Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work, located in St. Louis. Patterson, who is Cherokee, said it all boils down to identity and experience.
Protestors rally Sunday, August 10, 2014 to protest the shooting of Michael Brown, 18, by police in Ferguson, Missouri on Saturday, August 9. Brown died following a confrontation with police, according to St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, who spoke at a press conference Sunday. The protesters rallied in front of the police and fire departments in Ferguson following Belmar’s press conference. (AP Photo/Sid Hastings)
“Any human being who has experienced suffering, the default emotion is anger or rage,” Patterson said. “When you see images like men lying dead in the street, those emotions are easily brought on. To be non-white in certain communities, those images are burnt into our minds.”
Patterson pointed to historical conflicts like the 1864 massacre at Sand Creek, Colorado, or the American Indian Movement’s 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee—two confrontations where military action resulted in excessive violence. He believes the incidents illustrate a pervasive disconnect between military or police forces and minority populations.
“Using words like ‘they’ and ‘them’ allows us to be separate,” he said. “When you view a community or race as the ‘other,’ you don’t have to connect. You can view African Americans or Indians in a certain way and see them as less than human.”
David Patterson, assistant professor at Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work, located in St. Louis, weighed in on the events in Ferguson. (Washington University)
The same section of the Constitution that defined slaves as three-fifths of a person excluded Natives entirely. Natives were not considered citizens at all until 1924.
As federal investigators review the Ferguson shooting, a separate probe continues in Albuquerque, where officers have been accused of a pattern of excessive force. That federal investigation was launched in March after Albuquerque officers shot and killed a homeless man who was camping in the Sandia foothills.
Patterson said he wants to see protests continue in Ferguson until meaningful work toward solutions begins, including more federal direction for police forces and resources for minorities.
“In some sense, this community is at its most powerful right now,” he said. “As long as folks keep marching and keep the cameras here, things can happen.”
Tatiana Bumgarner is joined by younger sister Priscilla as they show off their summer scrapbook full of photos they have taken during the groups field trips. Photo/ Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
By Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
TULALIP – Native teen girls, age 14-17, have been busy this summer at the Tulalip Family Haven’s Girl Group building pride in their accomplishments as well as building self-esteem.
The group provides teen girls the support they need to become the most successful person they can be. Using the “Canoe Journey, Life’s Journey” curriculum guide by June LaMarr and G. Alan Marlatt, the young women are taught to make choices that promote positive actions and learn to avoid the hazards of alcohol, tobacco, and drug use.
Fifteen-year-old Jaylin Rivera plans to be a teacher and one day serve on the Tulalip Council. She says the girls group has been instrumental in helping her prepare for college and enjoys the mentoring and support from staff. Photo/ Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
To promote positive experiences, the group has participated in a whirlwind of summer activities that have included a rope course to teach overcoming one’s fears and learning to trust, a tour of the University of Washington campus to learn college preparation, a chance to watch basketball star Shoni Shimmel at a Storm’s Game played in Seattle –a reward for good group attendance and a visit to listen the Seattle Pixar Symphony, among others.
“Our mission is to help girls experience and learn life skills to help them through their teen years. We want to build positive memories and confidence so they can be successful in their goals,” said Sasha Smith, Girls Group lead youth advocate.
Girls Group is held Tuesday through Thursday, 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the Tulalip Family Haven building across from the Tulalip Boys & Girls Club. Transportation is available. For more information about the Girls Group, please contact them at 360-716-4404.
Brandi N. Montreuil: 360-913-5402; bmontreuil@tulalipnews.com
Tatiana, 15, with Sasha Smith, the groyp’s lead advocate, likes the craft projects the group works on and thinks the group wouldn’t be as successful if it was co-ed.
Photo/ Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
Tulalip teen Priscilla Bumgarner, 14, has been with the group since it’s opening and enjoyed the chance to see Shoni Shimmel play and her trip to the University of Washington.
Photo/ Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
Chaske Spencer plays an alcoholic Blackfoot Indian man whose wife has run away in “Winter in the Blood,” set in Montana. Credit KBD Photography/Kino Lorber
‘Winter in the Blood,’ a Drama About Alcoholism
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
WINTER IN THE BLOOD
Opens on Wednesday, Aug 20, 2014
Directed by Alex Smith
and Andrew Smith
1 hour 38 minutes; not rated
Like its broken antihero, an alcoholic Blackfoot Indian named Virgil First Raise (Chaske Spencer), “Winter in the Blood” lacks energy and volition. What it doesn’t lack is compassion, either for the wounds of childhood or the trap of ethnicity.
Filming in their home state, Montana, the brothers Alex Smith and Andrew Smith (adapting a 1974 novel by the Native American writer James Welch) sweat to translate Virgil’s existential pain into a visual narrative. Scenes dissolve and bleed into one another as he staggers between a small, arid town and the farmhouse he shares with his tart-tongued mother and his silent grandmother. Rarely without a flask or bottle at his lips (we first meet him passed out in a ditch), Virgil has a bloated, tipsy gait and a lost-boy look. He also has a runaway wife and a black hole where his identity should be.
Similar to the brothers’ previous feature, “The Slaughter Rule” (2002), “Winter” buckles beneath male conflict and heavy-handed metaphors. But the cinematographer, Paula Huidobro, captures the Montana plains and infinite skyline in wide, lyrical sweeps, while gauzy cross-fades parallel the ebb and flow of Virgil’s memories and hallucinations. Real and surreal weave together, and an impeccably chosen soundtrack — by, among others, the Heartless Bastards and Robert Plant — reinforces a mood that veers from dreamy to violent with shocking suddenness.
The journey from page to screen may have battered Mr. Welch’s novel, but its lamenting heart beats loud and clear.
Courtesy Hoopa Valley Tribe Chairperson Danielle Vigil-Masten and Tribal Council members took Bureau of Reclamation officials and Supervisor Ryan Sundberg on a boat down the Trinity River in Hoopa.
Dropping water levels and rising temperatures in the persistent California drought have tribal members concerned about a fish kill—and, some say, fish are already dying.
The Hoopa Tribe is pressing for a release of water from the Trinity River, which feeds the Klamath. Hundreds of tribal members from the northern coast of California, along with river conservationists, traveled to the state seat in Sacramento on August 19 to urge officials to reconsider their decision to stop pre-emptive water releases.
Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley tribal members joined with people from the Klamath Justice Coalition, coming by the busload, according to the Times-Standard.
It was the second attempt at confronting officials to try and get the message across. On August 11 others showed up in Redding, California, at a press conference on wildfires to ask U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell directly to authorize such a move.
Tribal members are looking for a release of Trinity River water out of Lewiston Dam, they said in a release. The Trinity is the Klamath River’s main tributary. They are worried about a fish kill on the scale of one that occurred in 2002, also for lack of water and a too-high temperature. Tens of thousands of otherwise healthy fish died that year, under very similar conditions.
“The Klamath fish kill of 2002 led to poor salmon returns devastating west coast fisheries for years afterward,” said Dania Colegrove, Hoopa Tribal member and activist with the conservation group Got Water, in a statement. “Since then tribes, scientists and the Department of Interior have worked together to avert fish kills by preventively releasing water during drought years.”
Many say they are already seeing dead fish. They fear that a release once that starts happening would not come in time to stop disease from spreading. Though Jewell met with the protesters after the press conference, she did not agree to release water.
“There is an opportunity to do emergency releases, if we see the temperature rise,” Jewell said to the group at the press conference, according to the Times-Standard. “We’ll make sure that people come out and there is an opportunity to see it. We are dealing with profound drought all over. We’re dealing with it in the Klamath. So, I’ll follow up. Also, I want you guys to understand the biggest issue is the lack of water.”
Two days later, though, Jewell sent a federal team to tour the river along with Hoopa Valley Tribe experts. On August 14, Bureau of Reclamation Regional Director David Murillo and Assistant Regional Director Pablo Arroyave toured the river. In addition the Humboldt County Fifth District Supervisor, Ryan Sundberg, added his voice to that of the Hoopa Valley Tribal Council and Chairperson Danielle Vigil-Masten, calling for immediate water releases into the Trinity River, according to a release from the Hoopa Valley Tribe.
“It affects the economy throughout the county when the fish are threatened,” Sundberg said in the statement. “It’s a diverse County and a diverse Board of Supervisors, but everyone is united on this issue.”
YouTube/Yurok youth video This is what the Klamath River looked like in 2002, when conditions were similar to those present now. Releasing water from the Trinity River into the Klamath would cool it down and raise water levels, enabling fish to survive.
So says one teen in this video put together by Yurok youth who, fearful of a fish kill on the Klamath River in California, went out and interviewed tribal leaders as well as those who witnessed mass fish death in 2002.
Water levels are low in the river, and the temperature is rising. Fish, especially salmon about to spawn, congregate in the cooler water, and their proximity can spread disease—which gets cultivated in warmer water. In 2002 this resulted in the deaths of 60,000 to 80,000 fish, crippling fisheries and severely compromising sustenance fishing.
Members and leaders of the Hoopa Valley, Karuk and Yurok tribes have confronted U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell about the decision not to release water from the Trinity River into the Klamath. They have also protested outside state government buildings in Sacramento.
“The Klamath River is on the brink of another massive fish kill,” claim the makers of this video.
The river smells terrible, one girl describes, and the salmon, while alive, had gills that “looked weird to me,” she said. “It made me angry and broke my heart, seeing that happening.”
The river looks sad and sick, said a Yurok man, recalling when it used to be a glorious emerald green, when he was a child. Now it’s green, alright—neon toxic green with things floating in it.
“It’s pretty sad,” he said.
Much of the video is devoted to recounting what transpired during the 2002 fish kill, then drawing parallels between the conditions then and now. Is the Klamath River on the brink of another fish kill? Wathc Yurok youth investigate, below.
CBC News A memorial to murdered Sagkeeng First Nation teen Tina Fontaine, whose body was pulled from the Red River, wrapped in a bag, on Sunday August 17. She had been missing for just over a week.
Calls are being renewed for a national inquiry into the vulnerability of aboriginal women to violence in the wake of the murder of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, whose body was pulled from the Red River in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Sunday.
Fontaine’s death, which has been ruled a homicide, comes just a few days after formal identification of the remains of Samantha Paul of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Band in British Columbia, hundreds of miles away. Paul, 25 when she went missing in September 2013, was found on June 1 near Kamloops First Nation by some ATV riders, according to CBC News. Although a cause of death has not yet been determined, her family believes she was murdered and is calling for an investigation.
Winnipeg is suffering a double blow, as the body of Faron Hall, a homeless man and a member of Dakota Tipi First Nation, was pulled from the Red River on the same day as Tina. It was the same river that Hall had rescued two people from in 2009, earning the nickname the Homeless Hero, the Winnipeg Free Press reported.
On Friday August 15 an off-duty police officer saw the man who turned out to be Hall in distress in the river and directed a water taxi to where he was. As the boat’s captain tried to pull the man from the water, he himself suffered a heart attack, CBC News reported. By then, rescue crews had arrived, and the search continued until Hall was found on Sunday. The boat captain was hospitalized and is recovering.
Hall, who had alcoholism, himself was no stranger to violence against aboriginal women. His mother had been murdered 10 years earlier and his sister was stabbed three years ago, the Winnipeg Free Press said.
Fontaine had last been seen in downtown Winnipeg on August 8, wearing a white skirt, blue jacket and pink-and-white runners, CBC News said, adding that the diminutive teen was five-feet-three-inches tall and weighed about 100 pounds. She had been living in foster care and had run away, the Canadian Press reported.
A vigil is being held at the Alexander Docks, where both Fontaine and Hall were pulled out from, on the Red River at 7 p.m. local time.
The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and other indigenous leaders called once again for a national inquiry into why this happens all too often to Native women.
“This tragic incident is yet another stark reminder of the urgent need for action to ensure safety and security for all indigenous women and girls,” said AFN Alberta Regional Chief Cameron Alexis, who oversees the portfolio on missing and murdered aboriginal women, in a statement after Paul’s remains were found. “We are calling for immediate action to prevent any further tragedies as well as a national public commission of inquiry to look into root causes and long-term efforts. The federal government has offered no clear or defensible rationale for its refusal to establish an inquiry. We know Canadians stand with us when we say that no other family, individual or community should have to experience this kind of loss.”
Meanwhile the homicide investigation is in full swing in Fontaine’s death. Police are holding back many details, including how she died, pending the outcome.
“At 15, I’m sure she didn’t realize the danger that she was putting herself in,” said O’Donovan at a news conference, according to the Canadian Press. “She’s a child. This is a child that’s been murdered. Society would be horrified if we found a litter of kittens or pups in the river in this condition. This is a child. Society should be horrified.”
