Finding My Voice

Words by Lesa Semmler

My mother was murdered when I was eight years old. She died January 11, 1985, at age 26.

My mother was in an abusive relationship when she passed. My dad had been out of the picture since I was three months old.

I had been living in Fort Smith with my mother for four months while she went to college. I had just come back for school after spending Christmas home in Inuvik.

The night before my mother was murdered, we left the house in the middle of the night because she was being assaulted. We went to a shelter and she decided we had to leave Fort Smith.

She wanted to stop by the house to pick up our belongings in the morning. We were walking there when we passed by my school. I saw my friends playing outside. Being in Grade 3, I wanted to go to school and play with my friends. She said she would pick up our stuff and come get me at lunch.

When lunchtime came, I went outside and waited. I waited and waited and waited.

All of the kids were gone when the principal came out and took me to the office. I remember her making phone calls and somebody coming to get me. They brought me to the hospital, where the social services department was.

That’s when they told me that my mother had been murdered.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT

I remember crying, and then I remember one of my mother’s friends picking me up. I stayed with her that night. She had two sons. I remember playing board games with them.

It’s funny how you remember certain things. I remember playing Trivial Pursuit. They took me to another house, where there were lots of kids playing, and I was able to just play that night.

Later in life, she told me that I had asked her if I was allowed to have fun with the other kids even though my mom had just died. She told me to just go have fun.

AWAY AT SCHOOL

I don’t know if I was ever depressed about it.

I came back home to Inuvik, where all my friends were. I was taken away from anything that reminded me of Fort Smith.

The way I coped was to imagine that she was still alive, just somewhere else. She was away at school, so that’s why I didn’t see her.

In high school, you’re so busy being a teenager that it keeps your mind off some of these things. Everybody knew my mom was gone, but nobody ever talked about it and I never talked about it.

I knew she had been shot. My great-grandmother, Agnes Semmler, never beat around the bush. She said it how it was and I respect her for that. Even though sometimes you feel like maybe you shouldn’t have heard it, you heard the truth and it wasn’t going to be a surprise later in life.

We had to go to court and I was supposed to testify but I couldn’t speak once I got up there. At that time, I felt like I failed her.

I never had a mom and dad. I had granny and papa. They treated me like I was their own child, but I missed having a young mother like my friends did. I used to call my friends’ moms my surrogate moms. I would talk to them about teenage girl stuff that I wasn’t comfortable bringing up with my 70-year-old great-grandmother who grew up in the bush.

BREAKING THE CYCLE

Then I became an adult and had two children of my own, one boy and one girl.

I used to work as a nurse in the labour room. The mother of the woman giving birth was always there, but she wasn’t for me.

My kids have grandparents on my husband’s side, but they never had my mom. I see how some of my friends have their moms and their kids and the relationship they have, and my kids never got to experience that.

My daughter is almost 14. It was an awkward conversation when we talked about one of her friends’ parents in an abusive relationship. I told her that’s never okay. I said people living together might get in arguments – even we argue as mother and daughter – but it should never become violent. I told her a relationship should never be controlling.

My son is out of high school now. I explained to him there is no reason to ever hit your partner or that your partner should ever hit you. Excuses of drinking or this or that don’t fly.

I also told them that not everyone who does something bad is a bad person. But we need to find the root causes, not just ignore them.

OPENING UP

I’m 42 now, and it’s only been in the last three years that I’ve come out and started speaking about it, trying to raise awareness that this is not okay and we’re still seeing it.

I’ve seen it growing up, I’ve seen it as an adult and I see it now. How do we fix it if we don’t talk about it? I’m at fault too. I never talked about it and I feel like I’m in a place now where I’m strong enough that I can speak out and maybe somehow help others.

We have to be able to live together in our families in a safe, happy and healthy way. We can’t just say, ‘Oh it’s the bad person who’s being the abuser and we have to leave them and shun them.’

There’s a reason why somebody is hurting others. There is usually more to the story. We need to bring those things out, because we don’t know how to help people unless we know what’s eating them up inside. We don’t know what’s making them take out their frustrations and anger in alcohol, drugs and violence.

The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry is supposed to come out with recommendations. Regional recommendations are what I hope for, because our region is different from others. Then we can use those tangible recommendations and go to the government or other organizations and say we need these kinds of programs for our people.

I’M NOT MAD

I forgot about the man who murdered my mother for a long time. I put it out of my head.

When I think about the fact he’s now free and back living in the Northwest Territories, I do feel angry and think it’s unfair, but there’s nothing I can do that can bring my mother back, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life angry.

I have to continue living. I don’t want to be mad. He’s living with his own turmoil. He’s the one who killed her. He’s the one who has to hear me speak about it over and over again and bring him up. That would eat up any human who has feelings.

ENDING THE SILENCE

I think when you experience any type of trauma, you feel like everybody’s looking at you. There are so many of us who have experienced some type of violence, even bullying. You don’t want anyone talking about you.

For me to go up to somebody and say I witnessed something and we should do this or that, now I could do that. Five, 10 years ago I couldn’t. I didn’t want to intrude on their space, because I wouldn’t have wanted them to feel worse than they already do.

As a culture, we’re brought up to stay out of everybody else’s business. When you live in such a small community, you know everybody, so you know too much. You’re trying to keep those boundaries and you want to keep relationships good. We’re silent about it as a culture. We know it happens and it continues to happen, but we don’t talk about it, because we don’t know how maybe.

When I was younger, I felt there was nothing I could do. You don’t want anybody to know about the crazy stuff that goes on in your house. Your friends don’t want you to bring up the crazy stuff in their house, so you all stay silent. If I had gone to somebody and told them, maybe the course could have changed direction. I don’t know. I think that’s why I try to speak out now.

These past three years of talking about it have been my way of fighting. I was quiet for so long. Now I’m saying we need to start speaking out and violence is not okay.

I learned that you have to reach out and seek help when you’re feeling that you’re hurting, whether it’s emotional, physical or otherwise, no matter who you are. When you’re seeing things that hurt you or feeling things that hurt you, seek help.

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Lesa Semmler is a national family advisory circle member for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry.