A warrior for Indigenous women and girls

As the sun set over Rome, Lorelei Williams calmly observed the steady stream of tourists who flocked into the Colosseum, where warriors once fought to the death before tens of thousands of spectators.

Wrapped in a blood-red silk cape and with her black hair neatly braided, she was in Italy to witness a historic event – one she had come all the way from Canada to be part of.

Lorelei is Salish/Coast Salish from the Skatin Nations/Sts’Ailes, near Vancouver, British Columbia. When a delegation of First Nations, Inuit and Metis representatives were invited to Rome to meet with Pope Francis, Lorelei knew she had to be there, too. So she took time off work and paid for the trip herself. For Lorelei, it was a way to honour her late parents.

The delegates were there to ask the pope to apologise for the Catholic Church’s role in Canada’s residential schools – the federally funded, church-run institutions that operated from the late 1800s until 1996 with the goal of forcibly assimilating Indigenous children.

More than 150,000 Indigenous children from across Canada were torn from their families and communities and forced to attend the schools where physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual abuse was rife.

Lorelei’s parents were among them.

Thousands of children died at the schools, and while Lorelei’s parents survived, she believes the trauma her mother endured at her residential school eventually killed her.

That is why being in Rome was so important to her.

“This is something I needed to see with my own eyes,” she said, softly. “For the children, for the missing and murdered and for my parents, I just felt like I needed to be here.”

Lorelei’s father was George Pennier, a celebrated artist from the Sts’Ailes Nation known for painting intricate, colourful animals and carving masks, bowls, plaques and totem poles out of wood. He was 57 when he died in 2014.

Lorelei says he never talked about his time at residential school. “I think he was just bottling it down,” she said.

“I think his way of dealing with it was [through] his artwork, and I think that’s why he became very famous because he not only did amazing artwork, but he would give it away. And that’s what our people do is give things. So, I think his name became well-known for that.”

But Lorelei’s mother, Corrine Williams, of Skatin Nations, could not conceal the trauma residential school had inflicted upon her.

She was terrified of the dark and refused to sleep with the lights off.

“This was normalised for me, to grow up with a mom who’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming or would not sleep on a regular bed. She always slept on the couch in the living room … because in residential school bad things happened to her in the dark, in the bed,” Lorelei explained.

There is one memory that particularly stands out for Lorelei. A friend of hers was sleeping over at her house and turned the lights off in a room where Corrine had fallen asleep after a night of drinking.

“She drank a lot that night and she passed out from drinking,” Lorelei recalled with a pained expression. “But once that light went out she jumped up screaming her head off. We were all like, ‘What’s going on?’ Our friend didn’t know not to turn the light off and she felt so bad. But that’s how traumatised my mom was, to be passed out drunk and to have that happen.”

When her mother died of liver failure in 2012 after decades of abusing alcohol, Lorelei was filled with anger towards the government and the churches that ran the residential schools.

“I one hundred percent feel like the government killed her – I even wanted to sue them,” she said. “The government has killed all our people that have died [before their time]. My mom was trying to numb that pain, that’s what killed her.”

She took a deep breath and lifted the hood of her cape, designed to draw attention to the crisis of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), over her head. In Canada, Indigenous females are 12 times more likely to go missing or be murdered than non-Indigenous females.

In 2019, a federally-funded National Inquiry declared the crisis a genocide. Its final report outlined 231 Calls for Justice for the public, private and governmental sectors to help end the crisis. But Canada has since taken little to no action and Indigenous women and girls continue to face high rates of violence and murder.

In 1977, three years before Lorelei was born, her aunt, Belinda Williams, vanished from Vancouver. Then, in 2002, Lorelei’s cousin, Tanya Holyk, was declared to have been one of the victims of Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton, who is believed to have murdered tens of women, many of them Indigenous, after her DNA was found on his farm. Another of Lorelei’s cousins was kidnapped and raped but managed to escape her attacker.

“As soon as they [colonisers] had contact our women began going missing and being murdered. And then the residential schools happened. It’s all around me, violence. I grew up with it all my life,” Lorelei reflected.

“They [colonisers] just wanted to wipe our people out for our lands. And what better way to do that than to target our Indigenous women and girls, the life-givers? So that’s where it all started, and it’s still happening. We don’t have residential schools any more, but the genocide is still happening, it’s not something of the past. And that’s my issue with the whole reconciliation thing because it’s still happening,” Lorelei explained as the Colesseum glimmered in the twilight.

For more than 10 years, Lorelei has campaigned against violence toward Indigenous women and girls. In 2012, she founded a dance group called Butterflies in Spirit made up of family members and survivors of the MMIWG crisis. The group has performed across North America bringing attention to the crisis. She has also worked with at-risk women in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside – where many of Pickton’s victims disappeared from – using Indigenous-based healing initiatives with the Vancouver Aboriginal Community Policing Center.

“I went to school for trauma training in a programme called Indigenous Focused Oriented Therapy on complex trauma. It’s not the Western kind of counselling or trauma training. It’s amazing. And I feel like that has helped me in the work that I do because it is emotionally draining. And I’m grateful that I haven’t gotten sick yet, but I know a lot of advocates out there doing this same work are getting sick. It’s very hard on the body. And if you don’t take care of yourself properly, then it wears on you,” she explained.

A couple of months before she travelled to Rome, Lorelei spent several weeks helping a local organisation find missing and murdered Indigenous women in Mexico, where femicide rates are high and Indigenous women are disproportionately affected. She was with the team when they uncovered the remains of several of the missing women. That was tough, she says. It triggered a lot of past trauma so she tapped into her support systems.

“I have a lot of elders that I talk to, I have a lot of support in the community. I have two counsellors and an emergency counsellor back home.”

The work she does is fulfilling and aspects of it are healing, she explained, because she is helping others.

“I’ve been through a lot. I don’t want others to have to go through the obstacles that I went through,” she said.

Two days later, I met with Lorelei again, this time at her hotel. Being with the delegation had given her an opportunity to speak to other residential school survivors. She had lost count of how many times she had cried over the two days, she said. Throughout it all, though, she had felt her parents’ presence with her and that had been a comfort, she explained.

“My parents would’ve been proud of me for doing the work that I’m doing and for being here,” she said with a smile before suddenly switching topics.

“Did you hear what happened?” she asked excitedly. “I got my name last night! In the square!”

Unbeknownst to her, Sts’ailes Chief Ralph Leon Jr., a relative of Lorelei’s late father, had travelled to Rome to provide cultural support to the delegates. An elected councillor from Sts’ailes who was with the chief had brought a drum featuring a design by Lorelei’s father. Just before midnight on the day before we spoke, the chief had performed a naming ceremony for Lorelei and gifted her an ancestral name. It happened spontaneously, but Lorelei believes it was meant to be.

They named her Palexelsiya, after the meeting place where the Sts’Ailes nation’s upper and lower villages once connected. They told her it is a place name with deep roots in their family and community before wrapping her in a blanket and placing a woven headband on her head. Then they began drumming using the drum with her father’s design. Then, in front of the Vatican in St. Peter’s Square, they sang and danced in the moonlight. It was a sacred moment, Lorelei explained, describing how she broke down in tears.

“Here we are halfway across the world. This is where it all began – they tried to take our culture and our laws away. For us to be practicing our laws right here in front of the Vatican like, ‘we’re still here! We still have this’. My cousin said to me, ‘This is reconciliation,’ it was happening right there.”

Although Lorelei did not have a private meeting with the pope, she had a message for him.

“If I had the opportunity I would tell the pope we need help. We need help for our racist country’s system to change. And I don’t know if I’ve ever heard the pope acknowledge the genocide of missing or murdered, but I’m here right now to tell him,” she said.

She wants him to know about the MMIWG crisis and believes that if Indigenous people “get him on our side”, he can use his power and influence to help.

The beauty of Rome with its centuries-old Renaissance architecture, greenery and history of conquering other nations was a lot for Lorelei to take in.

“It’s a little weird. It’s beautiful [here]. But at the same time, this is where Christopher Columbus is from. And this is where all our stuff [colonisation] started. I have mixed feelings about it,” she said.

She felt the same way about the meetings with the pope. During their meetings at the Vatican, the Indigenous delegation – made up of community leaders, residential school survivors and youth – told Pope Francis about the horrors of the residential school system and asked him to come to Canada to apologise on Indigenous lands.

In 2008, the Canadian government established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) to document the legacy of the residential schools and to hear from those affected by them. More than 6,500 survivors came forward to share their accounts of abuse. In December 2015, the TRC released its final report with 94 “calls to action” on reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous Peoples. Number 58 on that list called upon the Pope to issue an apology to survivors, their families, and communities for the Catholic Church’s role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit and Metis children in Catholic-run residential schools within one year. Seven years later that apology still had not come.

“I am hopeful, but I won’t be shocked if nothing comes out of it,” Lorelei said of the meetings with the pope. “I am grateful, but I have trust issues with the government. I have trust issues with the churches, which is understandable considering our history.”

Four days after Pope Francis issued his unexpected and historic apology to the Indigenous delegates at the Sala Clementina Hall in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, Lorelei was back home in Vancouver and grappling with the effects of her journey to Rome. The rush of various emotions and the jet lag had taken its toll, but it had been worth it, she said. Bearing witness to the events leading up to the pope taking responsibility for the atrocities against Indigenous children and families was momentous, she reflected.

She was not in the room when the pope apologised but believes it was better that way. She was in the back seat of a taxicab in Rome with a friend when they received the news, and was flooded with memories of her parents. She thought of the children who had not made it out alive and all of the other survivors.

“My emotions kind of took over and I was almost crying in the cab. I just couldn’t believe it. I feel like I wasn’t meant to be in that room. I heard that some elders cried right away and it’s emotional already. You know, so just being with survivors in that room would have made it more intense for me, I think.”

Jumping out of the cab she rushed to St. Peter’s Square to join the celebratory dancing with survivors and delegates. But she was not dancing to celebrate, she explained. She was dancing in honour of the survivors and victims of residential schools.

“[In those moments] I was wondering if it’s [the apology] really sincere. I have a lot of trust issues with them. Action definitely needs to take place. You can’t just apologise and expect everything to be okay. Much has been taken away from our people.”

But she has confidence in the Indigenous delegates who came together to demand that their voices be heard.

“I think some people came over here [to Rome] before, but now there are so many of us, with more knowledge, more strength, more education. And the pope has been invited to Canada now [to give an apology on Indigenous lands] so we will see…I think my mom would’ve cried if she heard the apology.”

Now that Lorelei is back home her work to eradicate violence against Indigenous women and girls continues. And she feels empowered by having expressed the urgency of the MMIWG crisis in Rome.

“I’m thankful I was able to put MMIWG on the map [there] and I don’t know when I’ll get that chance again. And it’s hard because this is such a huge issue in our country. So, I hope the pope can start saying stuff about this because a lot of people will listen to him.”

Ultimately, Lorelei dreams of a day when Indigenous women and girls will not have to worry for their safety or need to fight for their right to exist.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to say as an Indigenous woman, ‘I’m just trying to survive every day’? Yeah, cause I’m fighting every day.”