A Column Published every Monday by Kevin D. Annett
January 4, 2016
Stranger in a Stranger Land: Two Tales of Three Exiles and the Disappeared
It seems that one’s old neighborhood and all that it remembers holds the sort of promise that stands like a slightly parted door that never opens. That’s why it was strange and familiar to be outside First United Church again the other day, in the heart of darkness called Vancouver’s downtown eastside.
The congregation evaporated years ago, leaving an administrative husk for tax write-off purposes; but the Hastings Street crowd was still and always the same. Gazing at their bleary and untamed faces reminded me of a startling encounter I had there more than a decade ago – and how it helped me remember that I too can never go home again.
………
April 2003
His name was Les Guerin, and his eyes sought me out through the crowd of misery that shuffled around Gore and Hastings street.
“We gotta talk” is all he said, after introducing himself. Les knew of my new radio program called Hidden from History, but it had taken him awhile to find the courage to speak to me.
The two of us quickly made our way through a Vancouver downpour to an obscure coffee joint on Powell street where there was less of a chance of prying eyes or ears. It was past dinnertime but Les only wanted a coffee.
Without any explanation, the tired looking aboriginal man removed a thick file folder from his satchel and shoved it at me.
Les was a maintenance man at the Musqueam Indian reserve in south Vancouver. For several years he had been gathering evidence that human remains were bring buried on the reserve by Dave Pickton, brother of the eventually-convicted “lone gunman” serial killer of west coast native women, Willie Pickton.
The evidence Les held was pretty convincing, including a professional forensic report that showed that some of the unearthed bones that he’d seen Dave Pickton bury were indeed pieces of the skull and humerus of a young woman. Les had given the report and his statement to the Vancouver police and a half dozen media outlets. None of them ever responded.
“Why Musqueam?” I asked him.
“It’s Eddie John’s territory, that’s why” Les said, his voice lowering.
Ed John is the wealthiest Indian in Canada, and one of the bloodiest. I first heard of the guy when someone claiming to represent him shoved me into a corner and grabbed my neck, and insisted that I stop investigating missing Indian residential school children.
Ed’s a long time inside man with the federal government, and every corporation that offers him a cheque. As “Chief” of the Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council in Prince George, British Columbia, Ed muscled out or killed off the opposition, bribed judges, and forced many of his own people off their lands and trap lines at the behest of resource hungry corporations like Alcan and Interfor. He also runs the local child and drug trafficking network, according to fellow council members Helen Michel and Frank Martin.
“Eddie’s been getting rid of bodies for years, and his word is law at Musqueam. The cops’ll never dig around there without his okay” Les explained.
“So Ed John knows the Picktons?” I asked.
Les smirked and replied,
“Willy and Dave are just the disposal crew, they’re nothing. It’s the Mounties who are doing the killings. Them, and some pretty wealthy dudes.”
Les never did speak on my radio show. He knew better than I did back then that public disclosure changes nothing when the killers are in charge. And like anyone with his finger on a vital nerve, Les Guerin simply vanished one day, along with his file folder.
I still have copies of some of his best evidence, but the sad pages remind me of single embers flung off from a fire, and slowly dissipating. And yet I’m told that a single spark can ignite a conflagration.
…………………….
Prequel: September 1974
I met Peter Sanchez when I was eighteen years old, a year after the Coup, on the mail sorting floor of the Vancouver Post Office. His small Chilean frame made him meld into the cacophony, and so we didn’t speak to each other at first, especially since he kept to himself. But after we’d joined forces to yell epithets at a visiting union bureaucrat at a raucous local meeting, we started talking.
“Your picket lines here are very strange” Peter remarked to me early on.
“Everybody just sits around on lawn chairs during the strike. In Chile, we had to picket from the backs of trucks so we could escape when the Carabineros showed up and started shooting everyone.”
Peter didn’t talk about the military Coup very much, or the torture he’d suffered for months in a dank prison cell. He’d been a Socialist Party official and a union leader, and therefore high on the junta’s hit list. Somehow, he had escaped from prison and made it to Mexico, but he never told me the gruesome details, nor did he have to. For his eyes bore it all, and they never relinquished anything.
While my comfy young radical friends and I spoke endlessly of abolishing exploitation and class privilege, Peter and many like him had actually tried to do it. They had lost, as the world judges these things. And yet somehow, as they fought and died, they had found a new kind of freedom that I could only imagine. Their spirit had hovered over burning shanty towns and bombed factories, drifting over the land they had claimed for the poorest among them, to finally descend from fiery winds onto new soil, seeking other lives in which to breathe and complete the dream.
They found me.
I was still in high school when it happened, but just barely, having learned that nothing would ever have meaning for me while I lived alongside other people’s misery. My own heart and those other winds blew me to the crumbling parts of the city where I was told never to go, to demonstrations, beer halls and late night socialist meetings. And it was in these forbidden places that I met even more survivors like Peter.
They were quiet men and women who took in everything with deep, brooding eyes that were enigmas to me; for they bore a mystery that I felt I could never know, even if I was to live one hundred years. Some of the Chilean refugees had children, and one day at a union picnic in Stanley Park all of them ran and hid under tables at the sound of a helicopter.
Years before as a boy in a United Church Sunday school, I had offended Reverend MacKay by asking why he wasn’t giving beggars our best seats in church on Sundays, like Jesus told us to do. But in Chile in the fall of 1970, a new government had actually tried enacting this heavenly command of making the last first, and the first last. And while some say that Jesus survived his crucifixion, most of his people in Chile did not. When I befriended those who had, men like Peter, everything changed for me.
Whenever I came home to our quiet west side neighborhood after such an encounter, my mind reeling with stories of pure hope betrayed and soaked in blood, my mother would cast ever more worried looks at me. Perhaps she could see that I was discovering not just another savage truth behind the world’s polite mask but the reality of my own little world, and the killing it required. The break with all that I had been a part of was swelling in me, and it terrified her.
“But you’re throwing everything away!” she exploded at me when I tried explaining my politics to her.
“You’ll never get a job or have a good career if you mix yourself up with all of that radical business!”
My eyes were my answer to her alarm. She and I have had nothing very meaningful to say to each other ever since then.
Something on the wind and in me had combined to make strangers of my family and a possible future world my only home. Suddenly, every moment bore a surging responsibility to something greater than me. To try settling down amidst the status quo abattoir that had reddened Santiago’s streets was just not possible for me.
I was free.
Forty years and more have passed since that turning moment. So much has been learned and lost, so much fought for and so little won, but my freedom remains.
Only one other veteran of that time dwells any longer in my life. We tend to avoid each other, as veterans do. For whenever Larry and I meet, our burden is too large, and our eyes say more than can be said, and only to each other. And so finally, I have learned the mystery that I saw in the gaze of the Chilean exiles when I was so young.
Larry and I will chat and remember our old times and even laugh about all the battles, but with the agony of a dream still unfulfilled, as we bear the fate of those who dwell alone in the solitude of their freedom and its terrible ecstasy.
Remembering the Chilean bloodbath that had brought us together, I asked Larry recently,
“Did they ever stand a chance? Do we?”
“Does it matter?” he replied.