A 'lingering evil'
From residential schools to murdered women.
Warning: This article recounts scenes of rape that some readers may find distressing or triggering.
In this six-part series, Al Jazeera tells the stories of some of the Indigenous women and girls who have gone missing or been murdered along an infamous stretch of highway in British Columbia, Canada.
British Columbia, Canada – Fifty-seven-year-old Mary Nikal flops down onto a blue Chesterfield couch. Her scruffy miniature black poodle sits at her feet.
Mary is exhausted. She has given countless interviews to the press over the past 30 years, but they still don’t get any easier.
Her hair – dyed a warm caramel brown – is tied back in a low ponytail, her bangs – with their strands of grey – frame hazel eyes, similar to those of her little sister, Delphine.
Delphine’s pictures are displayed on a nearby table, illuminated by candlelight.
She was 16 years old when she disappeared in 1990 – one of three members of the Nikal family to have vanished; all of them under 20, all of them female.
Less than a year before Delphine disappeared, her 15-year-old cousin Cecilia Nikal went missing from Vancouver. A year before that, in 1988, another cousin, 19-year-old Roberta Nikal, disappeared near the city of Surrey in British Columbia.
“I was thinking the worst for years … She was either in the river, someone beat her and raped her. Someone overpowered her because she was pretty strong,” she says, forming a fist.
'A good life'
Delphine was the youngest of five siblings. Her Dutch father was 49 when he met and married her Wet’suewet’en mother, who was just 17 at the time. But they had a good life, Mary says.
The family lived a few kilometres outside of Smithers, on a farm surrounded by snowcapped mountains. They kept pigs, chickens, goats, cows, horses and dogs. Delphine had a deep affection for animals, Mary says, and an attraction to mischief.
“One time when Delphine was three, we lost her. We were looking all over and dad found her sitting in the garden eating strawberries. Her mouth was stained red,” Mary chuckles, adding that Delphine’s nickname was ‘baby’.
Delphine was exceptionally close to her father who liked to spoil her, says Mary. It was their mother, Judy Nikal, who enforced the rules, handing out chores to the children.
Mary attributes her mother’s sternness to the fact she was a residential school survivor.
The notoriously abusive state- and Church-run schools – to which Indigenous parents were forced to send their children under threat of arrest – unleashed the sort of trauma that would be passed on through the generations.
Judy attended Lejac residential school. It operated from 1922 to 1976 and was run by the Roman Catholic Church with the aim of forcing Indigenous children to assimilate into settler culture while forcibly removing them from their own culture, communities and families. Abuse of all kinds was rampant, but there was one story, in particular, that came to define Lejac in the minds of many Indigenous people. In 1937, four young boys ran away from the school, but before they could make it home, they froze to death on a nearby lake.
“Mom went through a lot of pain and suffering she never dealt with,” says Mary, her eyes distant and filled with tears.
'The family fell apart'
Everything changed for the siblings when their father died of a heart attack. Delphine was just nine years old. Mary was 20.
“The whole family fell apart,” Mary remembers.
As the only child still living at home, Delphine moved with her mother and her mother’s new boyfriend, Mickey McGee, to Telkwa, a village located just outside Smithers, on Highway 16.
Mary says none of the children liked Mickey too much because he was an alcoholic and angry much of the time.
“One time Delphine got so mad at Mickey she punched him and broke a few [of his] ribs,” Mary recalls, marvelling at her sister’s tenacity. She misses that fiery personality, she says.
“Oh, she was strong, independent. She was smart too,” she says, before adding: “And she knew to keep in touch.”
By this time, Mary was a busy mother of three young children but she always kept tabs on her little sister, even when, aged 14, she was sent away to an all-girls reform camp for several months after being charged with minor offences.
“She missed her family a lot. She wrote us pages of long letters … she was such a good writer,” Mary says.
Then she leans back, crosses her legs and rests her chin on her hand. After a few moments of quiet contemplation, she reaches forward to pick up a photo of Delphine from the coffee table. For several minutes, Mary just looks at it.
'If Delphine had blonde hair and blue eyes'
Before she went missing, Delphine was staying with her uncle in Telkwa while her mother was recuperating from a botched stomach surgery at a hospital in Prince George.
The night she disappeared – June 13, 1990 – she had been hanging out with friends in Smithers and reportedly planned to hitchhike back home to Telkwa, which was 15km (9 miles) away.
It was a common thing to do, Mary explains, as public transportation between the small towns and reserves that line Highway 16 was – and still is – limited.
Mary, then 26 years old, immediately went to look for her sister.
She turned to the Smithers detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to ask for help but says she didn’t get any.
“The cops wouldn’t listen to us; they weren’t very concerned at all. We basically got the doors slammed in our face,” she says, her cheeks turning red with anger.
So Mary had missing posters printed and put them up in and around Smithers. She organised searches in which volunteers joined the family to comb through the ditches along Highway 16. They went on for weeks, but Delphine was never found.
Judy fell apart, Mary says.
“The cops weren’t nice to my mom. She would spill her guts out to try to get help. She cried every night.”
Mary believes there was a lot of racism because Judy was Indigenous.
“If Delphine would’ve had blonde hair and blue eyes, the whole community would have cared,” she reflects.
“There would [have been] search parties, help with reward money, food would [have been] brought to feed searchers, it would [have been] on the news. People would be helping their neighbour, but it wasn’t like that,” Mary says.
“[But] her family misses her and loves her like anyone else,” she adds.
A perfect setting for a serial killer
Delphine’s missing person case is still active and is one of 18 being investigated by the RCMP’s E-PANA unit. Established in 2005, the unit was set up in response to a series of murders and disappearances of mostly Indigenous women and girls along Highway 16, or the Highway of Tears as it is commonly known, and other highways in British Columbia.
The purpose of the task force is to “determine if a serial killer, or killers, is responsible for murdering young women travelling along major highways in BC”.
Mary has tried to move on from the trauma of her sister’s disappearance, but it hasn’t been easy. Her love for Delphine runs deep, like a mother’s, she says. She will probably shut herself in her bedroom for days after this interview, she explains, but the pain will be worth it if it helps her find out what happened to Delphine.
She had hoped the dangers facing Indigenous women and girls would have lessened since her sister disappeared, but in the following years, many others have gone missing or been found dead. Advocates and family members say the number of missing and murdered could be as high as 50.
'I leave my DNA in the vehicle'
Fifty-eight-year-old Marian Duncan is standing outside the home where she works as a live-in carer and companion to an elderly lady. It is her dream job, she explains, describing how they stay up together until all hours talking and playing cards.
The 1970s home is located on an acreage a three-minute walk from Highway 16. Marian knows all about the dangers of the highway. She started hitchhiking there when she was a teenager growing up in the Binche Whut’en First Nation, about 318km (197 miles) east of Smithers. And she still hitchhikes there today.
She is not afraid, she says, because she believes “the Lord will protect” her.
As the bitterly cold wind blows strands of her dark brown hair and the sunlight reflects off the snow that covers the ground, she explains that she has been raped – more than once – while hitchhiking. But unable to afford a car and with limited public transportation along the highway, she will often hitch a ride on her days off – to visit her children or head to a medical appointment.
“When I’m determined to go somewhere, I’d rather go than wait for a ride,” she says, admitting that she can be stubborn and set in her ways.
Her eyes drift off into the distance as she begins to recount a time when she almost ended up in one of those ditches.
She was 14 years old when she and a friend hitched a ride on Highway 16 near Vanderhoof. They were heading to the bright lights of Prince George, an hour away, where they would often go to parties, to shop and to couch surf at friends’ homes. But after about half an hour, the driver – a white man in his 30s or 40s – suddenly took an unfamiliar turn onto a rural backroad.
“My friend and I looked at each other,” Marian remembers. “We were so afraid.”
When the vehicle slowed down, she says they knew something terrible was about to happen.
“At that age, I didn’t know any better,” she says. “I was never warned about what a man can do.”
Marian says she wasn’t taught about sex when she was at school – the Lejac residential school.
Both girls jumped out of the car and hid in the bushes by the side of the road. The man searched for them for what felt like hours, but the girls eventually managed to escape – making their way back to Highway 16, where they hitched another ride.
“I didn’t care or regret it,” Marian says. “All that mattered to me was I walked away alive.”
With no other way to get around and carrying the pain and trauma of residential school, Marian continued to hitchhike. It was mainly white men between the ages of 30 and 50 who would pick her up, she says.
A middle-aged white man had stopped to pick her up. He was quiet but friendly, she says. Then, after about 45 minutes, he turned onto a rural backroad.
“I jumped out of the van, [but] he came around and grabbed me,” she recalls, shivering at the memory.
“He brought me to the back of the van, opened both doors and I had no chance to run away. He was overpowering me. He put me in the back of the van.”
That was when she noticed the rifle.
Marian says she felt helpless, alone and lost in her fear.
“I did what I had to do to survive. I knew if I fought back, I was about to die,” she says. “In my mind, I thought, ‘just get this over and done with so I can get out of this alive’.”
The man raped her.
Marian says she felt numb and an eerie sense of calm.
“I had no choice but to let him have his way,” she explains.
Then he drove her to Prince George and offered her a bottle of whiskey. Marian didn’t drink and felt insulted by his assumption that because she is Indigenous she must have been a drunk. So, when she got out of the van, she threw the bottle in the bush and tried to do the same with the memory of what he had done to her.
It wasn’t the last time she was raped. But, despite that, Marian says she is not afraid of the murderous Highway of Tears. Maybe the other women and girls who have been killed or gone missing had the same fearless spirit, she wonders. As for the perpetrators of the violence, she is clear about what they are: “cowards”.
“They like to prey on women. And maybe they’re prejudiced,” she adds.
Marian says she has learned to look for signs of threatening behaviour and take precautions. She removes the ties from her hoodie and never carries a weapon because, she says, those things could be used against her.
“I look for body language, how he talks, some people whistle or hum, tap fingers on the steering wheel – that’s a red flag to me,” she explains.
“I’m constantly looking in the rear-view mirror. I leave my DNA in the vehicle – like I pretend to wipe my mouth or spit in my hand and wipe it on the seat or door or leave a handprint on smooth surfaces, leave behind strands of hair in tissue and tuck it away somewhere in the vehicle.”
'There's no consent here'
Just outside the town of Houston, three hereditary chiefs are visiting their Wet’suwet’en traditional territories. It is a land teeming with wildlife and traditional medicines and where the remains of their ancestors are buried. But now, this land is also teeming with workers constructing the Coastal GasLink (CGL) liquified natural gas pipeline, their security team and an RCMP patrol unit that is there on standby to protect the pipeline from its opponents.
Among its many opponents are the Wet’suwet’en traditional leaders who believe the pipeline project threatens to destroy the environment and way of life the Wet’suwet’en are working to preserve for future generations.
And with harm to the land comes harm to their people, particularly the women, say the chiefs.
To hereditary Chief Namoks of the Tsayu (Beaver) Clan of the Wet’suwet’en, systematic racism, violence against Indigenous women and girls, and abuse of the land are deeply intertwined.
“There’s no consent here on our land,” the 63-year-old declares.
Today, the prolific storyteller of Wet’suwet’en history, culture, land and rights is chain-smoking. It upsets him to see his territories like this.
“Most times the words of women will be pushed aside,” he says.
He believes industry treats Indigenous people as less than human and attributes this to systemic racism.
“You have industry with no monitoring and a government that lets them have free rein,” he adds. “They think they’re above the law. No, the law is for everybody.”
'Ugliness draws ugliness'
A couple of hundred kilometres east, smoke rises from the roofs of dozens of rows of white and blue modular structures. This is a labour camp – or ‘man camp’ as they are commonly referred to – housing workers building the CGL pipeline.
The camp sits alongside Highway 16 and across a gravel road from the camp is the site where the Lejac residential school once stood. The buildings were demolished decades ago, but a cemetery and memorial remain.
It is a sorrowful, sacred place of mourning for what was taken and what was lost there, says 71-year-old survivor David Dennis. He attended the school from 1958, when he was nine years old, to 1965. When the CGL built the large man camp across from the former residential school, it was, he says, a “desecration”.
It rubs salt in the wounds of what happened to him at Lejac, he says – abuse that is too distressing for him to talk about.
It is as if the CGL is repeating the harms of the past by housing workers there who are harming Indigenous territories and posing a threat to Indigenous women, he reflects during a phone call from his home, which sits across Fraser Lake, in sight of the former school.
“Every time we saw the sight of the Lejac residential school it was an ugly site for the survivors,” says the respected elder who has 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
“It was a prison. We weren’t allowed to speak our language or even speak to our own sisters – it was a sin for the boys to speak to the girls … But look at what they did to us … So when I see that camp my stomach turns, just like my stomach turned when Lejac was there.”
He believes an evil presence lingered there. It went, he says, after Indigenous communities prayed and held ceremonies to cleanse the land. But since the man camp arrived, he says the evil has returned.
“Ugliness draws ugliness. The man camp is ugly. The people that are going to be there are going to feel that ugliness and are probably going to end up doing ugly things. It [rape and other forms of violence] is going to happen, I know that,” he says.
TC Energy, the company behind the CGL pipeline project, declined a request to be interviewed but did email a statement saying it recognises “and takes seriously the concerns about gender and sexualized violence against Indigenous women – a broad social issue that transcends industry”.
Suzanne Wilton, TC Energy’s communications manager, wrote that CGL has “engaged with Indigenous and local communities” during the development of the project, that it employs Indigenous advisers who live and work at the accommodation sites to promote an inclusive workplace and that the camps are “designed with communities in mind”.
But these measures are not enough for David. He wants the camps – and the pipeline – out of his territory.
He also wants to see Indigenous-run security forces patrolling the highways.
“For our people to feel safe we would have to have our own security system. There’s no real safety for Indigenous people here right now,” he says.
Catching a killer
Most of the cases of women and girls who have been gone missing or been found murdered remain unsolved. But in 2014, British Columbia’s youngest known serial killer, Cody Legebokoff, who was 19 when he began his killing spree, was sentenced to four concurrent life terms without the possibility of parole. His victims were 35-year-old Jill Stuchenko, 35-year-old Cynthia Maas, 25-year-old Natasha Montgomery and 15-year-old Loren Donn Leslie. Cynthia and Natasha were Indigenous.
Then, in January 2019, a British Columbia Supreme Court found 73-year-old Garry Taylor Handlen guilty of first degree murder for the 1978 killing of 12-year-old Monica Jack.
The Gitsegukla First Nation girl was last seen riding her bike along a highway adjacent to Highway 16 near the city of Merritt, British Columbia. Her remains were found 17 years later. Handlen, who had multiple sexual assault convictions dating back to 1969, was arrested in 2014 after confessing to Monica’s murder during an undercover police operation.
Meanwhile, Mary Nikal isn’t sure she will ever find closure over the disappearance of her sister.
Several years ago, the family filled out official paperwork to legally pronounce Delphine dead. But they haven’t held a memorial for her because there are too many unanswered questions, and it’s too painful to let go.
Mary’s tears begin to fall and her voice breaks as she says, “I’ve suffered along the way – not grieving. My world needs a little peace now…I hope she’s with my dad.”
Her poodle scratches at her feet and she bends down to pick her up. Then with clenched fists, she says, “I hope her spirit’s strong enough to haunt the guy that killed her. I sometimes hope that whoever hurt her pays in hell.”