U of C Law School Lecture 2016-09-18

I’ve been invited here today to talk about my sculpture LEST WE FORGET, a memorial to missing and murdered Canadian women located just outside this room facing your Law Library. 

Two years ago, after the 20th anniversary ceremony of the installation of my sculpture here, a second year law student here who happened to be a friend of my daughter’s, called her to say that he’d never realized what it was all about! He’d passed by it hundreds of times but never stopped to look at it, didn’t read the plaque on its base, never contemplated the names of the 135 murdered women, never wondered why a whole section is devoted to the disappeared and like most students, had no knowledge of the binder in your Law Library’s reserve section which has details about each woman’s murder by a man.  I’m not saying this young man was insensitive, just that it’s easy to overlook what is around us.

And so here I am, explaining to you how it came to be so that you will take notice!

To be accurate, I’m a 65 year old second wave feminist who has been involved in the women’s movement since the late 60’s.  Those years tend to be glorified and in truth, they were colourful and exciting times but they were hard times too. Sexism was rampant.  In 1969 at the tender age of 18, I was incredibly excited to begin my studies at the University of Regina but soon discovered that I had to often defend myself when asked “What are you doing here?  Education is wasted on girls!” coming from not only male students but also male professors (99.9% of them were).  It was next to impossible to get birth control pills in Regina and we all knew that abortions were illegal unless you had enough money to get one in New York City.  Domestic violence was rampant and there was no recourse from women and children caught in these situations.  Feminism kept me sane during those years.

Originally a high school English and Drama teacher, I restarted my life at 27 and  went to art school while supporting myself as a freelance journalist for CBC Radio and cooking in a restaurant.  Fast forward to 1983 in Calgary where I graduated with my MFA in sculpture from the University of Calgary and began making my way in the art world as well as teaching at this university and at the Alberta College of Art and Design.  During the 80’s I created large room like sculptures called installations and exhibited them across Canada.  They were called Sanctuaries – abstract, aloof, multi-layered and replete with metaphors related to human vulnerability and resiliency.  Although I called myself a feminist, I kept that element obscured in my art.

That is, until December 6th, 1989, when 14 female students were gunned down and murdered by an enraged young man who blamed feminists for taking up space at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal while he was rejected.  When I heard the news, I was at home with my infant daughter and two year old son – shocked and saddened, wondering whether my daughter would be safe, even at a university, or would my son be a good and caring man, like his dad, a well-respected lawyer.

This event jarred the country and prompted men and women, to examine ourselves.  What were we doing to stop this?  What was I doing? Distressing thoughts of my past surfaced, memories of being sexually assaulted at 19 but refusing to report my attacker for fear of being doubly victimized by the court system (does that sound familiar today?), of growing up around my aunt, a mother of 5, who lived in terror of my violent uncle’s rages and of being sexually harassed – most notably in 1982, right here in the U. of C’s art department while I was trying to get my MFA.  I was one of 5 complainants who tried to bring the threatening and obscene behavior of one of the non-tenured art instructors to the attention of the university but since there was no sexual harassment policy or process to deal with it, this man was given a slap on the wrist, granted tenure and teaches here to this day.  Our case triggered the establishment of mechanisms to deal with all sorts of discrimination at this university.  A bittersweet victory for us complainants.

And so back then, I felt that women in general were under attack.  However, trying to make political statements through art is incredibly difficult – either the art suffers because the viewer is being hammered by the message or often the artwork itself is so convoluted that we don’t care what it’s about.  I often refer to sculpture as “three dimensional poetry” in that like poetry, sculpture is often not immediately accessible.  You have to work at it, reread the poem, spend time with the sculpture.

My lightning bolt of inspiration for LEST WE FORGET came in 1991 upon reading a long, detailed list of murdered Canadian women in a national magazine.  After the Montreal massacre, a woman named Mary Billy from Squamish, BC tried to find out more information about the 14 Montreal victims’ lives and to her dismay, found very little.  Instead, she was bombarded with facts about the gunman.  Sickened by society’s fascination with murderers, Ms. Billy began collecting the names and ages of female victims since 1990 and details about how each were killed.  She called it the Femicide Register which she shut down when the numbers climbed beyond 2000.

So struck was I by the magnitude of this brutalization of women, that I decided that my first memorial to women’s experience should be about women’s death at the hands of men.  I wanted people to read their names, to be shocked and saddened and inspire them to do something to stop the violence, either on a personal or a political level.  I named this sculpture LEST WE FORGET as a tribute to women in Canada who died in a battle fought under the most intimate circumstances: women murdered by men claiming to love them or by violent men killing women simply because they were women.

When you look at my sculpture, notice that one side is completely filled with names and ages, beginning with the Montreal 14.  After their names, I purposefully wrote those of the 9 aboriginal sex trade workers from the Calgary area whose murderers were never apprehended.  Although not highlighted, there are many more names of aboriginal women on LEST WE FORGET.  I felt strongly that not enough attention was being paid to investigating these unsolved murders.  Having spent time in first Nations communities, I was convinced that the negligence on the part of the police and the courts was due to the fact that these women were aboriginal and thus, deemed lesser priorities.  This question which continues to rage today regarding missing and murdered aboriginal women has recently sparked a national inquiry.

LEST WE FORGET, made from handmade paper and other materials like leaves at its base which were collected and painted by my kids, was never intended to become a public sculpture.  I was just hoping to get it into a local exhibition and get people talking about the issues of missing and murdered women.  When it first appeared in a Calgary gallery in 1992, Law School alumni Judy Maclachlan and others approached Dean Sheilah Martin (now a Queen’s Bench Justice) with the idea that it would be well-placed in the new Law School being constructed at the time to remind lawyers and lawmakers of the inadequacies of the legal system and their responsibilities.  Justice Sheilah Martin’s enthusiasm was a huge driver of this project although I remember her mentioning that she had to keep this “feminist sculpture” a bit of a secret so as not to offend the mostly male law firms from whom she was trying to rally funds for the building.

It took two years of community fund-raising and lobbying to make the installation of LEST WE FORGET a reality in December of 1994.  The Government of Alberta bought the sculpture and permanently loaned it to the Law School, but, because LEST WE FORGET is made from easily damaged materials, a costly and impenetrable case was needed to house and protect it.  A local steel fabricator came to the rescue and offered to design and build the case, only charging for materials.

During the long fundraising campaign to pay for the case, I met and heard from many victims’ families. For example, shortly before the final installation in which access to the sculpture would have  been  impossible, I got a call from a Calgary Sun reporter asking me to include the latest victim, Eileen McCoy, age 46 and mother of 5, who was working alone as a manager in a Mac’s Convenience Store in Taber when she was murdered and left in a field 20 kilometres away.  Hers is the last name written on the partially blank side which waits symbolically for many more.  Once the case was closed, I couldn’t add more names in spite of pleas from other victims’ families to do so.  And then there was the issue of the missing women.  I had neither the resources nor the space to add their names and instead, I simply chose to remember them as “one of the disappeared” written repeatedly on one side of the sculpture.  What began as a personal project ended up being a highly public one with a lot of pressure to make it as representative as possible before the top of the case was lowered and fastened.

Artists are used to working alone, exhibiting or selling our work and then going back into the studio to make more.  There’s usually some contact with the public at an art opening and then it’s back to the studio alone.  With LEST WE FORGET, I was so deeply involved with speaking publicly and privately about it, I created nothing else during that two year period.  I was unprepared for the depth of victims’ families’ emotion and trauma.  These experiences threw me into a deep depression which took years to recover from. Once the sculpture was installed at the Law School, I painted flowers and landscapes for several years as a way to deal with the sadness I’d experienced as a result of LEST WE FORGET.  One thing for sure:  I never built another memorial.

Because LEST WE FORGET was one of Canada’s first memorials of this nature, it received national attention even before it was placed here.  While on a cross country tour to promote gun control legislation, Suzanne LaPlante Edward  - the mother of Anne Marie Edward, one of the Montreal 14 – visited my studio a few weeks before its installation here.  She quietly walked up to the sculpture and gently touched her daughter’s name and then left.

Soon after, the extended family of one of the murdered aboriginal women, whose names follow the Montreal 14, also visited my studio to view the sculpture.  The victim’s 18 month old son with a rose clenched in his little hand, was held up by his father to a spot beside his mom’s name and photos were taken.  Ten years later, I happened to visit LEST WE FORGET during the December 6th ceremonies and spotted a card and a rose placed at its base.  It was from her son, then almost 12 (now he’d be 24).  How many other families and friends visit this memorial to honour their loved ones? 

The question is:  Has anything changed for the better since 1994? 

I’d like to think that more women are reporting sexual assaults or at least sexual harassers.  We’ve seen some high profile cases like Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby. But then we read about what happens to women when they decide to take their abusers to court.  Case in point is Judge Camp who repeatedly called the young female complainant “the accused” and suggested she keep her knees together, one of many offensive remarks.   When I was assaulted in 1971 by the son of a lawyer, I absolutely knew that I didn’t stand of chance of seeing him punished for what he did to me.  If I were a young woman, would I come forward today?  I’m not sure. Obviously, so many women lack faith in the justice system and therefore, like me, they try to forget the pain but suffer the consequences for attempting to bury their suffering.  I also remember Retheah Parsons and Amanda Todd – not only victims of sexual assault but also of cyber bullying.  That wasn’t happening twenty five years ago!  And I just heard that one human trafficker can earn $280,000 annually with just one girl, the preferred age being 14. It’s all too overwhelming!

So many positive initiatives have developed over the years. There are many more shelters now although I hear that 10,000 women and their kids are turned away every year in Alberta.  The police receive rigorous training in dealing with domestic violence victims, 7% by the way, are men. In Calgary, there are two courtrooms designated for these cases. For years I was artist in residence for the Prairieaction Foundation which brings together the researchers, the help agencies, the funders and the government to look for new solutions to interpersonal violence.  With more than 8 million dollars raised, they fund the RESOLVE centres at the Universities of Calgary, Regina and Manitoba where annual conferences reveal new research by Canadian and international academics and experts. In fact, there’s a RESOLVE conference happening in Calgary in early October and anyone can register for it. 

In conclusion, I want to say that that I hope that LEST WE FORGET’S presence in the this Law School continues to increase sensitivity for the victims of interpersonal violence.  Thank you to Alice Wooley and Jennifer Koshan for inviting me to speak to this group of promising law students.  You have wonderful leaders here!