What is the Darkest Crime?
For you, what signifies the beating heart of darkness? What terrifies you the most?
I asked some celebrated crime writers their opinions. If you’re only looking for entertainment, you can stop here and read some of their wonderful fiction. But for anyone who wants to contemplate true crimes, they answered independently, and this is the order in which I received them, in their own words.
“Child murder.” — Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“Genocide.” — Rebecca Cantrell
“Oy. That’s a hard question. I’m split between crimes that target children and crimes that target groups of people simply because they belong to that group (genocide).” — Annie Reed
“Murder. Any murder. The years I worked as a homicide detective were the most painful and most rewarding work I’ll ever do. My partners and I tracked down murderers for a living. That’s all we did and we were good at it.” — O’Neil de Noux
“The darkest crime to me is child abuse and I would never write about it. Not ever. Nothing at all possibly entertaining about child abuse and I write to entertain.” — Dean Wesley Smith
This is your second warning to stop reading now if you’re faint of heart or stomach.
It’s hard to argue with crimes against children and and deliberate mass murder. Those do show how stomach-scrapingly low people can get.
As a writer, though, I’m always asking questions. For example, is it worse to kill a child or abuse him or her for years? What about abuse and then murder?
When I read about residential schools in Canada, it seems like unending horror, starting with the RCMP forcibly removing children from their parents, sometimes at gunpoint and in child-sized handcuffs, to deliberately isolated areas where it would be difficult to escape.
About 150,000 children were mentally, physically and sexually abused at overcrowded schools with poor sanitation. They had their hair cut off and were beaten for speaking their own language. Since funding depended on enrolment numbers, and because they forced children to work 12 to 16-hour shifts of farm labour in what the Indian Department called the ‘gratuitous labour of the scholars,’ they would keep sick children in the schools, spreading tuberculosis, influenza, and typhoid, without proper medical treatment. The Canadian government deliberately experimented on students as part of their studies on nutrition. We think 6000 children died, and as of 2013, we still didn’t know the names of 500 of them.
One school had a death rate of 69 percent. The odds of dying at residential school were 1 in 25, which was worse than the odds of dying as a Canadian soldier in World War II (1 in 26).
They estimate that 1 in 2 students would die in the early years. It was so common that they designed the schools to incorporate cemeteries, and they abruptly stopped reporting deaths in 1917.
That’s children dying. It doesn’t count over a hundred years of beatings, rape, starvation, cultural obliteration, and willful spread of disease. The last residential school closed in 1996, the same year the Spice Girls, Oasis, and the Fugees topped the charts.
So who should pay for those crimes?
We must blame the individuals who committed the abuse.
But let’s take it a step back. The Roman Catholic Church ran 60 percent of these schools, but the Church of England/Anglican Church, the United Church of Canada, and Presbyterians also ran some.
Who hired them to run the schools? The government. In 1913, Duncan Campbell Scott, the deputy superintendent-general of Indian Affairs, wrote, “It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education, which they had received therein.” In other words, the government was well aware they were killing children.
Who elected that government for the century that they were deliberately hurting and killing children? Canadian citizens.
Who believes that other people are less-than? (Stupid, lazy, privileged, etc. — whatever makes you feel superior.)
All of us.
When I was about twelve, I read an article in Ms. Magazine that concluded, “We are all carriers of the disease called racism.”
We all have blood on our hands.
Now. What can we do about this sickening history?
How do we deal with dark crime in general?
1. Educate yourself.
The easiest thing is to pretend bad things never happen. La la la, my life is fine, so forget about you. But we have to open our eyes and acknowledge what happened, and how it’s still happening. If your grandparents and parents were tortured and/or killed, are you as likely to be a scholar with a solid roof over your head? So read, watch documentaries, talk about what happened and is still happening, and figure out how you can make the world one atom better.
To broaden the topic, I’m the only mother I know who talks about terrorism to her little kids, because I’m open like that. I don’t go into detail, but I tell them the basics, like, “If you hear gun shots, run. If you can’t run, hide. If you can’t hide, fight.” They don’t seem too traumatized. My kids’ elementary school has drills on what to do if an active shooter comes into their school, and my son reports that they say, “If a big dog comes into the school, this is what you have to do.” Sure, that makes sense when you’re dealing with kids as young as three.
An elder once told CBC reporter Duncan McCue that the only way an Indian would make it on the news is if he or she were one of the 4Ds: drumming, dancing, drunk or dead. Tragically true. Get out and meet people so you can move beyond the stereotypes.
2. Put your time and money where your mouth is.
Every year, if I’m not working, I go to the Akwasasne Pow-Wow. I bring cash, and I spend it joyfully and liberally on crafts and food, and I talk to the vendors. A lot of them make their living by going from pow-wow to pow-wow, so my money is going directly to artists and cooks and families.
I listen to their stories about gathering sweetgrass or designing a necklace. I learn a lot from them. For example, a little girl said she wanted a coin purse her grandmother had made, and the grandmother gave it to her. Just like that. I do give my kids things, but I’m always lecturing them, or setting a budget so they learn the value of money. At the pow wow, there is no limit except when Mommy runs out of cash. It’s my small way of repatriation by buying things I like!
Side story: I wear mukluks to the emergency department in the winter, and not a shift goes by without a patient saying, “I like your boots.” One woman, who had married an Indigenous man and learned beading from him, said they made her feel at home.
If you don’t live near a pow wow, no problem. Good excuse for a road trip. Or you can buy books, one of my favourite vices. Sherman Alexie’s Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a good place to start.
For music, my favourite song is “Sisters” by A Tribe Called Red featuring Northern Voice. I’m itching to get to ATCR’s Electronic Pow Wows, and I’d like to see Bearing, a dance-opera created by Michael Greyeyes, a Plains Cree performer.
If you don’t have spare cash, you can volunteer. You can write letters and call your representatives. Standing Rock became a powerful gathering place for Indigenous people of all tribes, as well as students, veterans, lawyers, and anyone else who cares.
3. Create your own story.
I’m not a history buff because I’m less interested in how things were than in what we can do now, especially when we can improve on the horrors of the past. Making and consuming art can be part of that journey.
I started off talking about five crime writers who explore dark crimes, in their own way.
But did you know that the residential students did their own writing and sketching? George L. Beeswax, whose real name is Askon in Ojibway, was forced to attend the Mount Elgin Indian Industrial School in the 1940’s. As a nine-year-old, he worked in a barn hayloft. Part of their secret rebellion was making marks on barn beams and posts where the adults wouldn’t find them.
A few of them drew: a car, a skull, a Toronto Maple Leaf after they won the Stanley Cup.
Some of the lines haunt me.
walk on tracks for 2000000 miles
run away
Ponty John was around here without a friend. So long boys
Most of them simply wrote their name and date, which I find unspeakably brave, because it meant they were identifying themselves for extra beatings if they were found out, as well as sad, because the school stripped them of their given names, and the students had been forced to learn the written word as proof of the white man’s superiority, as noted by Basil Johnson, an author, a scholar, and a member of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation.
Still, they rebelled. They persisted. They spoke for themselves. In 2012, at 80 years old, George/Askon led reporters through the old mattresses and clutter on the barn’s first floor and up the ladder to the rotting, fire-charred loft still crusted in eggshells, so they could read the inscriptions themselves.
Here’s another example. You may have heard of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old malnourished Anishinaabe boy who tried to escape after three years at the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School near Kenora, Ontario. He died of hunger and exposure on the 23rd of October, 1966. His sister, Pearl (Wenjack) Achneepineskum, believes he was sexually abused.
Chanie’s legacy continues to this day.
The coroner’s inquest into his death was the first one for any death at a residential school. True, it was an all-white jury. Their concluded that the “Indian education system causes tremendous emotional and adjustment problems …. Is it right?” It sounds tepid to my ears, but at the time, it was probably revolutionary — although largely ignored for the 30 years that they system ground on.
In 1967, Kenora journalist Ian Adams wrote an article called “The Lonely Death of Charlie Wenjack” (the school had renamed him Charlie) for Maclean’s magazine, after the local newspaper only spent two paragraphs on the boy. “It didn’t even mention his name. How could a kid, who had apparently run away from school, just die and nobody know his name?” Speaking up had a cost. Adams received many complaints about his article. “I got a letter from the CEO of Maclean-Hunter publishing who said to me, in the letter, that he didn’t think that my kind of writing belonged in a magazine. So I started looking for other work and shortly after that I became a freelancer.”
In 1972, Trent University Indigenous students lobbied to have their college named Wenjack, and succeeded in naming Wenjack Theatre.
In 1978, Willie Dunn, a Mi’kmaq artist, wrote the song “Charlie Wenjack.”
In 2008, artist Roy Kakegamic, of the Anishinaabe tribe, painted Little Charlie Wenjack’s Escape from Residential School.
In 2016, for the 50th anniversary of his death, a number of artists told his story. Métis filmmaker Terril Calder made a short animated film called Keewaydah, which can be loosely translated as “Let’s go home.” Joseph Boyden wrote Wenjack. A Tribe Called Red references Chanie in their album, “We Are the Halluci Nation.” The Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie, who was inspired by a CBC story about Ian Adams’ 1967 article, created a multimedia project, The Secret Path, which includes songs, a graphic novel, and a CBC film, as well as Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund.
In June 2017, Trent University unveiled the The Chanie Wenjack School of Indigenous Studies.
Chanie Wenjack died.
And yet Chanie Wenjack never died.
The people who are alive today have survived the darkest crimes imaginable. Let’s celebrate their resilience. I knew I’d like Kent Monkman when I heard about his drag queen alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.
One last thing. When I meet Indigenous people, I don’t automatically expect them to dance, drum, or drink. I don’t force them to talk about trauma and resistance, just like I hate when strangers run up to me and demand, “Where are you from?”
I say hi. I often ask what it’s like to be an artist who owns a small business, since I’m a writer who would like to earn a living, and I could use some tips. They smile at my kids, and there is no surer way to a woman’s heart than in welcoming her children.
We are all people. We have varied stories to tell. Let’s hear them.
