Robert Pickton & My Cousin Pauline

 

                                                              Pickton during his 2007 Trial

Robert Pickton, murderer of many, has died after being attacked in prison. It's hard to imagine anyone mourning his death, despite the violent end, and surely there will be no funeral or memorial. Pickton preyed on sex trade workers in Vancouver's Lower East Side, taking them to his farm where he killed them. While he was convicted of murdering six of these women he once bragged that he murdered more than 40 and the remains or DNA of 33 was found on his property. 

Around the time of his trial in 2007 some wondered how he managed to kill for so long even though there were suspicions about his involvement in the disappearances. Many of these women were Indigenous and because of their work were not high on anyone's priority list to find them. The crimes were terrible and the societal response fell far short of any sense of protection or justice. 

There were two former sex trade workers in the courtroom during Pickton's trial, reporting for different news sources. One of them was my cousin, Pauline. She was born as a member of the Salish people and adopted as a baby by my uncle and aunt. We didn't see this family often because they lived on the West Coast but I remember Pauline, a decade or so younger, as a small brown child, obviously different in appearance from the rest of the family. She developed the identity crisis of so many Indigenous children adopted into White families and by her teens she was the "troubled cousin." She would run away and be brought home until she left for good and ended up working the streets. 

Somehow Pauline survived Pickton's predation -- by the grace of God?-- and eventually found her way out of the sex trade and into a life with a loving partner. My uncle was a United Church minister and I have no doubt that when they adopted Pauline it was from good intentions. Yet she was a Sixties Scoop child and a casualty of the paternalistic colonial society of the time. 

I haven't had contact with Pauline since I took part in uncle Art's funeral in 2005, two years before Pickton's trial and her presence in the courtroom. I'm not a Facebook person but I do hope that she is flourishing and that Pickton's death doesn't stir up too many negative emotions.