When I was a student at the University of Saskatchewan, I remember seeing red dresses hung up around campus. Being the young and naïve 17 year-old I was, I did not take the time to stop and learn what these dresses symbolized. Fast forward 5 years later, I understand that each of those dresses represented a woman – a woman with a name, a family, friends, hopes, dreams, and an identity – These women are real, not just statistics.
One of the prompts for this blog post was to focus on one of the missing or murdered Indigenous women from Saskatchewan that were included at the end of the group’s seminar session. With that, this is Richele Bear. Richele was only my age (22) when she went missing from Regina in 2013 and was presumed dead, although her body has never been found.
Something that I noticed while reading an article about her disappearance and murder was that they started it with statements such as, “she is believed to have been living a ‘high-risk lifestlye’”, “[She] struggled with substance abuse”, and “[She] was forced to prostitute out of that home in order to stay there and to get drugs.” It’s almost as if they were using these statements as “excuses” for her murder, as if she deserved what happened to her. It isn’t until the end of the article that they mention that she was a great student with a scholarship to attend Notre Dame and her family’s statements, describing her as a loving and caring individual who has been raised in a normal household. This proves that Indigenous people are more subjected to discourses that make people believe that they are “lesser” and disregard the other side of their stories, causing injustice towards them. However, they do not mention anything regarding Canada’s colonial history that may have caused all this. Instead, they state that she was “lured” into sex trafficking.
In 2014, Clayton Eichler was charged with Richele’s murder and “indignity to a body”, as it was believed that he had intercourse with her after the murder. Something that shocked me was the fact that he was also charged with the murder of another Indigenous woman, Kelly Gofroth whose body was found in a dumpster, has strangled another Indigenous woman with a garden hose and sexually assaulted her in 2012, and it is unclear if he had more victims. I found this surprising because these events are so close together, meaning his charges and time spent in prison were not long. It is infuriating and upsetting that these women are not getting the justice they deserve. In 2016, Eichler pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility of parole for 20 years. However, her body remains missing.