Introduction

On November 14, 1997, at the age of fourteen, Reena Virk became a victim of bullying and murder by a group of teenagers in Saanich, “a suburb of Victoria,” British Columbia,^[1] “named after the Indigenous peoples for whom that territory is ancestral.”^[2] Virk, who was “a girl of South Asian origin,” was “first beaten by a group of seven girls and one boy, all aged between fourteen and sixteen… [then] forcibly drowned”^[3] by Warren Glowatski and Kelly Ellard. In her Trillium Book Award and Griffin Poetry Prize winning poetry collection, Tell, Soraya Peerbaye addresses teenager Virk’s murder through the interrogation of fragmented court testimonials and information on the murder trial in the media. She reanimates Virk’s body to pose questions of national belonging and racial violence. From this sophomore collection, the poem “Narrows” explores a Songhees First Nation myth in relation to the story of Virk’s murder within the shared landscape of the Gorge Waterway in Saanich. As noted in her “Notes” at the end of the collection, through this poem, Peerbaye notably revisits a conversation she had “with Cheryl Bryce [of] Songhees First Nation of the Lekwungen ancestral land” (107)^[4] as part of her process of writing Tell. Through this work on a recollected conversation, she highlights the parallels between the murder of Virk, a racialized girl, and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and relates them to the Canadian nation-state. She relates these murders first, to the erasure of race and racism in the trials of the perpetrators of Virk’s murder and the media coverage of those trials, and second, to the erasure of Indigenous oral stories.

In this chapter, through an anti-racist and feminist close reading, I analyze Peerbaye’s poem “Narrows” from the collection Tell in order to reveal the erasure of race in relation to Canadian settler colonialism. I look at the Songhees First Nation “myth of Camosun” as shared by Bryce with Peerbaye and reproduced in the poem, contextualizing the poem within the public discourse surrounding the trials of Virk’s murder, as well as how Canadian multicultural policies separate Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized Others. It is important to note that Peerbaye does not specify the time when this conversation between her and Bryce took place. Instead, she clarifies that the “italicized text” is derived from her personal “notes” and stands for Bryce’s spoken words. (105) Further, the “myth of Camosun… as told by… Bryce” (107) only exists as a Songhees First Nation oral story, reproduced in her poem in print for the first and only time.

While Peerbaye’s Tell centers race and racism as the central discourse within Virk’s murder—a “counter-hegemonic understanding… of [the] crime”—,^[5] in “Narrows” particularly, she does this centering through a juxtaposition of violence against non-Indigenous racialized bodies—like Virk’s—and violence against Indigenous women—through the myth of Camosun in Bryce’s “italicized” voice (105) in the Canadian landscape. The conversation between Peerbaye and Bryce highlights an exchange of dialogue between two racialized women: a non-Indigenous racialized Other of South Asian descent, Peerbaye—born in London, Ontario, in 1971, to Mauritian immigrant parents of Indian origin—, and Bryce of the Songhees First Nation, an Indigenous woman. As a first-generation immigrant from Kolkata, India (via Dubai, United Arab Emirates) to Canada—a woman of South Asian descent—and a female post-colonialist scholar of South Asian literature and its diaspora, I have a personal stake in this essay in understanding the precarious relationship between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized Others in Canada. Through my analysis of Peerbaye’s “Narrows,” I seek to highlight this conversation between Peerbaye and Bryce as being crucial in exploring this precarious relationship.

By analyzing “Narrows” in the context of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized Others in Canada, this chapter engages with: (a) the sense of allyship between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized Others through storytelling between Bryce and Peerbaye as a dismantling of settler colonialism; and (b) the hierarchy of justice for racialized female bodies by the Canadian nation-state. I especially reference Winnipeg’s “Drag the Red,” that is, the dredging of the Red River for bodies of missing Indigenous women and girls, which has been taking place since 2014. This reference is particularly salient given that Virk’s body was found after washing ashore at the Gorge Inlet in Victoria, B.C., on November 22, 1997. Virk’s case found national media attention and her perpetrators were brought to justice.^[6] However, the Canadian nation-state’s National Enquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women was delayed.^[7] When understood in parallel with Virk’s case and its outcome, the delay in dredging rivers—or the earlier refusal to search landfills^[8]—for the bodies of missing Indigenous women and girls, reveals how Canadian multiculturalism as a “hegemony-making process”^[9] creates a hierarchy in the way the Canadian state views racialized bodies. While certain bodies are considered worthy of justice (here, that of women and girls of colour, like Virk), the state delays or refuses justice to the bodies of Indigenous women and girls. To understand this hierarchy, it is important to look at how Canadian multicultural policies separate Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized Others.

The Relationship between Indigenous Peoples and Non-Indigenous Racialized Others in Canada

Multiculturalism in Canada—unlike the United States—is a state-initiated enterprise.^[10] According to its proponents, the Multiculturalism Policy initiated by the Canadian state in 1971, and then changed into the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act, allows for a unified Canadian identity for the nation-state and its citizens.^[11] Some critics of Canadian multiculturalism however point to the erasure of the multiplicity of identities present within Canada through the state’s insistence on a unifying cultural narrative.^[12] By tracing how this erasure of the multiplicity of identities in Canada functions, we can clearly see the ways in which the Canadian state erases Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized Others, like immigrants. I use “erasure” here in the way Jacques Derrida uses Martin Heidegger’s “sous rature,” translated as “under erasure.”^[13] It refers to both the presence and absence of that which is being erased. In this case, the multiplicity of identities in Canada does not disappear under the Canadian Multiculturalism Policy, despite the policy’s impetus to erase these multiplicities. Himani Bannerji terms Canadian multiculturalism as a “muting device,”^[14] pointing to the Multiculturalism Policy’s motivation to erase these multiplicities of identities as being successful to some extent; that is, at best, the policy is able to “mute” these multiplicities but is unable to completely silence or erase them. The multiplicities of identities are both present and absent under the Canadian Multiculturalism Policy.

Bannerji states that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the “official policy of multiculturalism appeared [in Canada]… in a period of a rapid influx of third world immigrants… [and] in a moment of growing intensity of… Francophone national aspirations.”^[15]  In this context, multiculturalism became a “muting device” for “francophone national aspirations… [,] a way of coping with the non-European immigrants’ arrival… [and] also sidelined the claims of Canada’s aboriginal population, which had displayed a propensity toward armed struggles for land claims, as exemplified by the American Indian Movement (AIM),”^[16] thereby “muting” any possible voices of dissent by insisting on a unifying cultural narrative. Bannerji suggests the best way to understand and critique multiculturalism is through a Gramscian analysis of “the different discursive articulations and uses of multiculturalism.”^[17] Gramscian analysis refers to Antonio Gramsci’s approach to the understanding of hegemony through class as a factor of analysis. For Gramsci, a hegemonic class is one that is able to retain the consent of other social forces, and the retention of this consent is an ongoing project. In the case of Canadian multiculturalism, the hegemonic class is maintained by the state through settler colonialism in the case of white European settlers. A Marxist Gramscian historical materialist approach exposes the multicultural project as a part of the “hegemony-making” processes of power.^[18] Hegemony here refers to “a direct or indirect form of domination whose key constitutive elements, consent and coercion, become the accepted and commonsense operating principles of society and the social order.”^[19] Hegemony then is a reference to the relationships of power that exist between the state and its citizens, creating hierarchies in the social order of relationships. In this case, through a Gramscian analysis of the Canadian Multiculturalism Policy, the difference in the relationships of power between Indigenous Others and non-Indigenous racialized Others, and their relationships to the Canadian state, becomes even clearer.

Will Kymlicka states that in the Canadian context, “the term ‘multiculturalism’ is only used to refer to… the accommodation of immigrant ethnicity… [and] the accommodation of our nations within [Indigenous peoples and the Quebecois] is dealt with by other policies… under separate sections of the Canadian Constitution.”^[20] Accommodation refers to the state’s recognition of the different groups of people—and their multiplicity of identities; it is an “official recognition.”^[21] Richard Day explains that “recognition” is recognizing the different groups of people—Québécois, Indigenous peoples that include “Indians, Inuit, and Metis… as “‘the Aboriginal Peoples,’” and people belonging to “Other Ethnic Groups” like racialized immigrants and refugees—in “possession of identity.”^[22] This recognition is Bannerji’s “muting device,”^[23] as it is meant to mute claims for legitimacy from immigrants as well as Indigenous peoples. While immigrants lay claims to permanent status in order to mitigate struggles like labour exploitations, Indigenous peoples continue to struggle for land claims in order to secure self-determination and sovereignty.^[24] According to Soma Chatterjee, the difference between the struggles of these two groups of peoples is a conflict “between immigrant and Indigenous justice projects.”^[25] This conflict, to which Chatterjee refers as “a key contradiction,” has led to the “de-linking of immigrant labour exploitation and Indigenous land dispossession [which, in turn,] has contributed to the mystification of settler political economy that thrives on the separation of both political subjects and projects.”^[26] The erasure of immigrant struggles, like those against “immigrant labour exploitation,” allows the Canadian state to conflate immigrants with white European settlers, in turn mystifying—or, obscuring—the deeper understanding of settler colonialism and how it functions within the Canadian political economy. Sherene Razack discusses this “mystification” in the making of Canada as “a white settler” society by pointing to “a quintessential feature of white settler mythologies [which] is… the disavowal of conquest, genocide, slavery, and the exploitation of the labour of the peoples of colour.”^[27] This “mystification” is a form of deception through the erasure of race and racism where white settlers become a part of the immigrant discourse while simultaneously maintaining their hegemony as Canadians, whereas Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized immigrants always remain the Other.

Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua understand settler colonialism as a conflation of white European historic settlers and immigrants as settlers who are complicit in and benefit from the settler project.^[28] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang agree with this conflation, including “white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people” under the category of “settler” (or, non-native).^[29] On the other hand, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright^[30] challenge this conflation of “immigration… with settlement [as] occupation as ‘colonization of resistance.’”^[31] By conflating the immigration of non-Indigenous racialized Others—the act of settling—with settler colonialism, the state colonizes the resistance of immigrants in Canada against “racist labour, immigration, and housing policies.”^[32] The conflation fails to reconcile Indigenous self-determination with that of migrant justice in the context of global dispossession, while erasing the struggles of racialized immigrants such as those against immigrant labour exploitation, as well as racist immigration and housing policies for Chinese, Japanese and later, South Asians.^[33] Sharma challenges the reductivity in what she shows to be a false dichotomy between Native (Indigenous peoples) and Non-Native (non-Indigenous peoples, both racialized and non-racialized). She especially questions the erasure of race in the conflation of settlers as both white colonizers and non-Indigenous racialized Others.^[34] In this limited understanding of settler colonial discourse, non-Indigenous racialized Others—immigrants/refugees—disappear, while also always being the Other, just like Indigenous peoples. This makes it necessary to bring race and racism and open onto a discourse on the difference in struggles for legitimacy for both Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized Others. I believe that Peerbaye’s “Narrows” becomes a creative intervention into this limited understanding of settler colonialism, re-centering race into the conversation. Peerbaye’s conversation with Bryce interrogates the precarious relationship that exists between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized Others under the Canadian nation-state. I posit that this exchange in Peerbaye’s poem is productive and reciprocal in the exchange of stories. But before the analysis of “Narrows,” it is necessary to contextualize the poem in the discourse that creates the erasure of race and racism in the trials and media coverage of Virk’s murder.

The Erasure of Race and Racism in Reena Virk’s Murder Trials and Soraya Peerbaye’s Tell

The attack on fourteen-year-old Virk, a girl of South Asian origin, began on 14 November 1997 “when one of the girls stubbed out a cigarette on her forehead.”^[35] The act of stubbing out a cigarette between Virk’s eyebrows is in imitation of a bindi: a dot between the eyebrows that is a symbol of celebration of womanhood worn by many South Asian Hindu women. Then, the act of stubbing out the cigarette between her eyebrows becomes an act of racism. The irony here is that Virk was not Hindu, but identified as a Jehovah’s Witness. While the surname “Virk” is Sikh in origin, Virk’s Indian immigrant parents were Jehovah’s Witness converts. While the court did not explore this as an act of racism, it is worth noting that Peerbaye explores it in her poem, “Chandlo,” (99) in Tell.

Yasmin Jiwani states that “the media’s initial framing of the murder [of Reena Virk] focused largely on girl-on-girl violence.”^[36] As Jiwani explains, “[n]ot only was Reena’s racialized identity erased, but there was a significant lack of attention paid to the possibility that her death was racially motivated.”^[37] The discourse of racism is erased through the following: (a) a generalized narrative of teen bullying during the trials;^[38] and (b) citations by Griffin Prize judges on Peerbaye’s Tell. The discourse of racism is however complicated through (c) the Métis identity of one of the perpetrators in Virk’s murder, Warren Glowatski.

Jiwani’s approach relies on how the media functioned while covering the murder and the subsequent trial:

Reena’s photograph was constantly shown—often juxtaposed with that of Kelly Ellard, the co-accused. These photographs highlighted the racial differences between the victim and the accused. In portraits of the Virk family, they were often shown dressed in traditional clothes, emphasizing their cultural difference. However, instead of identifying the murder as determined by the violence of race and racism, the media told a different story—one that erased the sexist and racist structures of violence that shape and influence the lives of the racialized girls and young women.^[39]

While the media highlighted Virk’s brownness through the juxtaposition with the white perpetrator, Ellard, it also elided addressing racism as one of the main motivators for the murder. The presiding judge, Judge Macaulay, also failed to address considerations of racism in the courtroom such as the “impunity… [of] a white girl to murder a brown girl.”^[40] Razack highlights how addressing racism in Canadian courts has been very difficult in cases involving racial violence against Indigenous peoples and people of colour.^[41] A similar difficulty emerged in the case of the three trials held in the murder of Virk “to attempt to resolve the murder charge against Kelly Ellard.”^[42] The three trials that took place between 1998 and 2006 highlight the “toll [that] passage of time ha[d] taken” on Virk’s family and the witnesses in the case: the death of witnesses and the unreliability of the memories of witnesses. This “toll” allowed the Defence to build a strong case that positioned Ellard as a “good girl.”^[43] Even though Ellard was found guilty at the third trial,^[44] the handling of the trial within the courtroom and in the media points to the legal system as well as the Canadian media as being instruments of the Canadian settler colonial state. These instruments of the state sought to find the middle-class white “good girl”^[45] Ellard’s murder and assault of Virk to be a momentary lapse in judgment due to “straying from the dominant norms of middle-class white femininity” such as innocence.^[46] By focusing on Ellard’s “innocence” and the murder as a momentary “deviation” from that innocence,^[47] Ellard’s defence and journalists like Rebecca Godfrey played an active role in the erasure of race and racism in Virk’s case,^[48] becoming instruments of the Canadian settler colonial nation.

Second, the erasure of race continues through citations by Griffin Prize judges on Peerbaye’s collection that failed to mention or refer to how Peerbaye keeps bringing race and racism into the forefront. They call the poems “harrowing and deeply empathetic,”^[49] failing to address how race and racism surfaces in every single poem in Peerbaye’s collection. The judges point to the brutality of Virk’s murder as the central discourse of Tell, while forgetting to acknowledge that the murder was racially motivated—a fact that Canadian poet Sonnet L’Abbé highlights in her essay on Tell. As L’Abbé notes, “Tell addresses the reluctance of many Canadians to admit and name the racism that other Canadians continue to navigate each day… For Peerbaye, Virk’s death is an extreme, but not isolated, incident—a brutal illustration of the kind of teen aggression familiar to many young, non-white Canadians.”^[50] L’Abbé’s assertion that there is this “reluctance of many Canadians to admit and name… racism” echoes what Jiwani illustrates in her essay about the complicity of the Canadian media in the erasure of race and racism in Virk’s murder.^[51]

In the “Introduction” to their edited collection, Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives on a Canadian Murder, Mythili Rajiva and Sheila Batacharya state that the “media’s persistent denial of race in the case… obscured the ways in which the murder represented a profound revelation of the fissures in the so-called multicultural tolerance of Canadian identity.”^[52] The fissures refer to the Canadian nation’s hierarchical relationships of power in the way it deals with its Indigenous Others and non-Indigenous racialized Others. In the context of Virk’s murder, one such fissure is the third factor in the discourse of racism: Glowatski and his Métis identity. This fissure points to the complicated relationship between racism and Indigeneity in Virk’s murder.

While in prison for Virk’s murder, Glowatski, one of the perpetrators, discovers himself to be of Métis descent on his mother’s side,^[53] embracing his native heritage.^[54] Glowatski’s discovery of his Métis identity, along with his “prison meetings with Virk’s parents” which eventually led to day parole for six months, points to a possibility of healing between Glowatski and Virk’s family. Glowatski’s Métis identity allowed him to connect with his heritage as well as find a way to seek forgiveness from Virk’s parents. Manjit Virk, Reena’s father, offered advice to Glowatski during his hearing for the day parole, “saying, freedom and responsibility go side by side.”^[55] In this exchange of dialogue, there is a sense of moving forward for both Glowatski and Virk’s parents—a tiny space of possibility of healing between Glowatski and the Virks, as individuals, but also as Métis and South Asian Canadians.

Glowatski as an “ambiguous figure”^[56] complicates Godfrey’s narrative of “chaos”^[57] that led to Virk’s murder. Godfrey is unable to address Glowatski’s Métis identity as an easy explanation of “hegemonic white adolescent masculinity, or even white, working-class, adolescent masculinity.”^[58] Tara Atluri and Batacharya critique Godfrey’s journalistic investigation of Virk’s murder as a failure. Batacharya states that Godfrey’s book, Under the Bridge, “suggests that [the assault and murder] took place within a context of chaos rather than social relations based on racial, gendered and sexual hierarchies.”^[59] Atluri upholds Batacharya’s statement by exploring how Godfrey’s book focused on centering an idealized image of innocent white femininity, instead of exploring race and class as factors in the motivations of violence against Virk.^[60] (2010, 189) In Atluri’s analysis, Godfrey is intent on finding an easy explanation and focuses on “chaos,” thus demonizing perpetrators in Virk’s murder who are both Indigenous Others and non-Indigenous racialized Others—including Glowatski here as someone with an “ambiguous” racial and working-class background—, while explaining Ellard’s actions as a momentary deviation from her usual “good girl” middle-class positionality.^[61] Godfrey’s desire to find an easy explanation for the conditions that led to Virk’s murder rather than complicating it through “social relations based on racial, gendered and sexual hierarchies” as Batacharya suggests, points to Godfrey’s refusal to explore the complicated nature of racism. Racism does not exist alone but in conjunction with other factors such as gender and class. For instance, like Virk, Glowatski also came from a working-class background. Ellard however, was middle-class. Ellard’s (white) middle-class positionality may have not only given her the sense of entitlement which allowed her to finally “drown” Virk—drowning was listed as the official cause of Virk’s death by the coroner^[62]—, but there was a significant delay in finding Ellard guilty. Here, Glowatski’s Métis identity provides a space to interrogate the complicated nature of racism and the precarious relationship between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized Others under the Canadian multicultural state; a relationship that I explore through the conversation between Peerbaye and Bryce in “Narrows” from Tell.

An Analysis of Soraya Peerbaye’s “Narrows” from Tell (2015)

In an interview with Grace Johnstone about Tell, Peerbaye states that she wanted to suggest “other forms of violence and loss” in her collection:

The process of colonization has contributed directly to the loss of eco-diversity in the Gorge Waterway. Sites significant to the Songhee people were destroyed, disrupting tidal patterns, disrupting mythology. Archaeological sites like the Songhee middens… 4,000 years old, were also destroyed. I wanted to locate this story [of Virk’s assault and murder] in a larger temporal and cultural framework. It’s a way of mapping the relationship between violence related to race and gender, colonial violence, and ecological violence.^[63]

Peerbaye demonstrates a meditative self-awareness when articulating her motivations for writing Tell; a self-awareness that helps her make connections between her positionality as a second-generation Canadian of South Asian descent, dispossession and destruction of land that originally belonged to the Songhees First Nation people, erasure of Indigenous myths, continued violence against Indigenous peoples, and the violence against Virk. This self-awareness becomes particularly evident in “Narrows” where Peerbaye engages in dialogue with Bryce of the Songhees First Nation.

In “Narrows,” Peerbaye introduces Bryce: “[t]he woman who walks with [her] knows the uses/of each plant/each separate part: leaf/flower and fruit; bulb and root/heartwood.” (89) She connects with Bryce in a “heart [to heart]” conversation in order to contextualize Virk’s murder in relation to the Indigenous people of the surrounding areas of the Gorge Waterway—an inlet between Craigflower Bridge (where Virk was assaulted and murdered) and the Selkirk trestle. Bryce is a knowledge keeper here, with her knowledge of “the uses of each plant;” knowledge she freely shares with Peerbaye. Yet, not all information can be shared: “She gives me names… This we used in ceremonies for the dead: she drops her eyes—I can’t tell you: more than that.” (89) Bryce is not being coy when she “drops her eyes” refusing to share sacred knowledge of her people with Peerbaye. The dropping of her eyes signals her polite refusal, one without confrontation, perhaps pointing to Indigenous knowledge—such as “ceremonies for the dead”—that cannot be shared with a non-Indigenous person. Peerbaye too acknowledges Bryce’s inability or refusal to share this sacred knowledge. Peerbaye’s acknowledgement is evident through her continued conversation with Bryce where she respects Bryce’s refusal and does not encroach on forbidden (to her) knowledge. Bryce’s refusal and Peerbaye’s acknowledgement of that refusal reveal a precarious, yet respectful, allyship between them. The allyship locates itself in the colonialist history of violence connected to the land. It is “the violent seizure of Indigenous peoples’ lands and means of livelihood as well as the current manifestations of colonial violence against Esquimalt, Saanich and other First Nations peoples;”^[64] a history that is entangled within the relationship between Peerbaye and Bryce, as well as their respective communities. As Peerbaye mentions in her “Acknowledgments” and “Notes,” (107-109) this poem is significant for bringing to life a Songhees oral story while also exploring the context of the discovery of Virk’s body at the Gorge Inlet. Peerbaye writes in her “Notes”: “[t]he narrowing of the land [in the Gorge Inlet is] essential… to… the Songhees myth of Camosun.” (107) Both the traumatic story of Virk’s murder and the myth of Camosun share the same landscape, further connecting Peerbaye and Bryce.

By engaging in this relationship, Peerbaye pays service to the uneasy co-existence of Indigenous people with non-Indigenous racialized Others within the Canadian nation-state. Through this connection, Peerbaye reveals the narratives of trauma that may overlap for both Indigenous women in Canada as well as non-Indigenous racialized Others:

Yes, she says, she followed the trials, thinking of the children

in her family, her sister, herself

when she was young. I grew up in this skin. (89)

For Bryce, the speaker here, the trauma of Virk’s death (as a teenager, and thus, a child) brings to mind connections to her own childhood. The children she thinks of are female as indicated by the references to her “sister” and “herself.” Bryce points to the trauma of gendered violence targeting women and girls as a shared burden for both of these communities; trauma that lives in “[her] skin.” Bryce shares the Songhees oral story of Camosun with Peerbaye as a way to make sense of the violence against Virk:

  The girl crying on the banks said,

My father is angry with me and won’t give me

  anything to eat.

Her name was Camosun. (90-91)

The story is about Camosun, a Songhees girl who was turned into stone and became a part of the Canadian landscape. Similarly, through the discursive effects of the trial, Virk’s body has also become a part of the same landscape, as has the story of her murder. The juxtaposition of the two stories of trauma—Virk’s story is symbolic through Peerbaye’s poetry, and Camosun’s story is symbolic as a myth—indicates a possibility of healing through engaging with the two stories: “Cheryl offers her story, laughing. She doesn’t need/ to be grieved, this girl, even as she is turned// to stone, her people to trees that would clutch the sky” (91). The “laughter” indicates a moment of ironic joy, an irony due to the eventual fate of Camosun. That is, Camosun’s eventual turning to stone is a symbolic reference to the continuing violence against Indigenous women and girls. And it is through these two stories that Peerbaye reveals a reality of violence against women of colour and Indigenous women in Canada. She engages with Virk’s body in relation to Indigenous peoples in Canada, highlighting the complexity of racial violence in Canada as it functions towards two racialized groups. Despite the conflict between “immigrant and Indigenous justice projects”^[65]—a conflict kept in place by the logic of Canadian settler colonialism—that keeps the two racialized groups from forming any allyship between their respective resistances against the Canadian nation-state, Peerbaye’s “Narrows” is a creative intervention into this conflict. Through “Narrows,” she writes against the erasure of race in the Canadian settler colonial project, as well as the “hegemony-making processes” of Canadian multiculturalism,^[66] creating a space of healing through collaborative allyship with a Songhees First Nation woman, Bryce. This space points to the healing made possible as a result of a similar exchange of words between Glowatski and Virk’s family.

Through the exchange of stories and of words, through having a conversation with Bryce, there is a sense of allyship in this poem. According to Leslie Ekpe and Sarah Toutant, allyship is “an intersectional, anti-racist co-conspirator framework.”^[67] Being a “co-conspirator… requires risk-taking and rule-breaking” which is “a radical embodiment.”^[68] Peerbaye demonstrates this radical embodiment through her self-aware collaboration with Bryce in “Narrows.” Contextualizing Virk’s murder in the pre-colonial Indigenous history of the Gorge Inlet in Saanich,^[69] she seeks to preserve Bryce’s oral story of the myth of Camosun. Actively acting as a co-conspirator against the complicity of Canadian settler colonialism in erasing Indigenous oral stories,^[70] Peerbaye lets Bryce’s Indigenous knowledge inform and transform Virk’s narrative, performing an act of collaborative resistance against the Canadian nation-state. In this sense, Peerbaye mythologizes Virk through this act of collaborative resistance with Bryce.

The Hierarchy of Justice for Racialized Female Bodies in Canada

This collaborative resistance through poetry as a creative intervention is a rare instance of allyship between Indigenous Others and non-Indigenous racialized Others in Canada. Here, I would like to juxtapose Winnipeg’s “Drag the Red” movement, a grassroots activist movement since 2014 to drag the Red River for missing and murdered bodies of Indigenous girls and women, with that of the efforts of justice for Virk’s murdered body found in the Gorge Waterway in Saanich, Victoria. This juxtaposition between two instances of violence against racialized women’s bodies in Canada will shed light on the hierarchy of justice among racialized women and girls.

After Virk’s murder on November 14, 1997, by a group of teenagers in Saanich, British Columbia, rumours of Virk’s murder led to a police-led operation. Eight days later, on November 22, 1997, a police helicopter found Virk’s partially-clothed body that had washed ashore at the Gorge Inlet, a major waterway in Vancouver Island.^[71] “Drag the Red,” on the other hand, began as a grassroots movement in the fall of 2014, after the fifteen-year-old Tina Fontaine was “pulled out of the Red River in Winnipeg, Manitoba,” on 17 August 2014, “eight days after she had been reported missing.”^[72] With the help of volunteers, the movement is a continuing operation used to dredge the Red River for bodies of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. While no bodies have been recovered yet, the volunteers continue the movement in order to provide Indigenous families with hope for their lost women and children. Unlike the police-led search in Virk’s case on the basis of rumours alone, “Drag the Red” came as a response to the failure of the Canadian state to protect and recover the Sagkeeng First Nation teenager, Fontaine. It continues to be a volunteer-led movement, unfunded by the Canadian government, depending on donations to continue their work.^[73]

A similar initiative to push the Manitoba government to search landfills in Winnipeg for the remains of Indigenous women and girls however was met with refusal, before the Manitoba government agreed to a “robust, comprehensive and thorough search… in a Winnipeg area landfill.”^[74] The former head of the RCMP, Brenda Lucki, refused to search landfills in Winnipeg for the remains of Indigenous women and girls stating that the “police are not able to handle the complexities of searching a Winnipeg-area landfill for the remains of slain Indigenous women.”^[75] The Conservative Manitoba government supported Lucki’s refusal, citing the initiative to be a “dangerous” effort due to existing “asbestos and toxic gases like ammonia” within the landfills.^[76] The Canadian state’s refusal to come up with a solution to provide hope and answers to the families of missing Indigenous women and girls highlights a general apathy towards Indigenous peoples in Canada. This apathy points to a complicity in the disappeared Indigenous girls and women, a complicity that echoes the Canadian state’s history of land extraction and dispossession. Dispossession, which refers to “the loss of Indigenous peoples’ relationships with their territories… typically rooted in communal ownership and responsibility,”^[77] point to the loss of the rights of the Indigenous peoples of Winnipeg. Here, the Manitoba government dispossessed the Indigenous peoples of their right to search landfills in “their territories,” continuing to dispossess them of their relationship to the land they occupy under the Canadian nation state. “Drag the Red” then becomes one of the few ways the Indigenous peoples in Winnipeg can exert a “communal ownership and responsibility” of their missing and murdered women and children.

In the case of Virk’s murder, the search for her body and the subsequent investigation was taken on by the Canadian state, without any initiative on the part of Virk’s family. Juxtaposed with the “Drag the Red” movement—and the subsequent refusal of Manitoba’s Conservative government to search landfills for the remains of Indigenous women and girls—point to a disparity in the ways in which the Canadian state views the bodies of racialized girls and women; a disparity that lies in a hierarchy of which racialized female bodies are deemed more worthy of justice, and which racialized female bodies are denied that same justice. In the end, in Winnipeg, it took a government led by an Indigenous Premier, Wab Kinew, to begin searching landfills for the remains of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

In “Narrows,” Peerbaye recognizes this disparity in the ways race and racism function against racialized women in Canada despite the shared burden of gendered violence against these women. By choosing to engage with racism in Virk’s story in relation to Indigeneity, Peerbaye makes a critical intervention through her creative practice into the problematic unifying narrative of Canadian multiculturalism. She reveals that under this unifying narrative, not all bodies are equal, and not all racialized bodies experience racism—and justice—in the same way. There is a difference in the relationships of power the extend between the Canadian state and its racialized citizens. Peerbaye’s retelling of Bryce’s oral story through a poem in a collection about Virk’s murder then becomes a double-edged resistance to the conflict “between immigrant and Indigenous justice projects.”^[78] On one hand, Peerbaye creates a sense of allyship between herself and Bryce through storytelling; storytelling here becomes a method of resistance as well as demystifies settler colonialism by bringing race into the conversation. At the same time, Peerbaye reveals the hierarchies in which some racialized female bodies receive justice, however delayed (here, in the case of Virk), while some racialized female bodies are completely erased (here, the previous apathy and refusal on the part of the Canadian state to search landfills for remains of Indigenous women and girls).

As Sharma reminds us, “(im)migrants to Canada are… seen as colonizers for their act of crossing national borders [, t]heir mobility… a central problem for both White Canadian and Native nationalists.”^[79] Sharma points out Indigenous communities’ complicity to see immigrants of colour as Other, unwittingly contributing to the settler colonialist project. At the same time, Daniel Heath Justice believes that while Aboriginal peoples might sympathize with the challenges immigrants face, they must still remember that “the opportunities for non-natives in Canada come as a consequence of land loss, resource expropriation, social upheaval, and political repression of Aboriginal peoples.”^[80] The allyship in Peerbaye’s poem, “Narrows,” is thus ephemeral and fleeting, as it exists in this ongoing “key contradiction”^[81] between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous racialized Others in Canada; an irreconcilability. Even Bryce’s final response to this irreconcilability is silence, “[being] close to tears.” (Peerbaye 2015, 93)

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