"What words do you have to describe your strength in healing through all of this, or your kids' strengths in healing?" (WLMN Interview Question, 2:50, R. Davey)

Well, it's been a long process. My son is seventeen years old, and still, after sixteen years of him being deceased, he's just now starting to heal. Same with myself. Grief and loss can really affect people hugely if we don't take the time to take care of ourselves, to find healing, and to reach out. I was definitely one of those people that didn't take the time. I self-destructed, and it was the beginning of my own downward spiral in my life.

Now, sixteen years later, with a teenage son that's ready to be eighteen, raising him all these years without a father has definitely been difficult. There are always days, moments, times when his presence is missed. It's all those firsts, those special occasions: birthdays, Christmases, the date of his death, his birthday, my son's birthday, graduations, any big moments that my son celebrates. His lack of presence is always felt and it's always seen, and I guess it's going to be like that for the rest of our lives.

I've definitely been actively working on my own healing and recovery, and how I've been doing that is through culture and ceremony. I really had to reconnect to my own Indigenous roots in order to find strength and healing. I find strength in my ancestors, in the ceremony, in the Elders and the Knowledge Keepers that I have an opportunity to sit with. It's been a turning point in my life, and it's been life changing to actually embrace my culture and spirituality, because my entire life up until two years ago I had been completely disconnected. I didn't have anything to believe in, and I didn't have a purpose. Today I am not in that same boat. Today I live with purpose. I now use the hard lessons that I've had in life, with James's loss, raising my son, other grief and losses that I've struggled with, and I've turned that into my motivation and my passion and my purpose in life. I do a lot of work now to help other people in their healing journey.

"Is there a memory or message or part of the story that you want to make sure is absolutely included?" (WLMN Interview Question, 5:52, R. Davey)

Well, when James was first murdered and I first heard about it, I went to Edmonton. I wasn't living in Edmonton at the time, and there was just a lot of negativity, I guess, surrounding his death. There wasn't a whole lot being done. Police weren't searching for who did it. There was a newspaper news story basically saying "another homeless man, Native homeless man found dead," and that was it. Kind of swept under the carpet. Nobody cared.

Then I went into Edmonton, and I had to actively pressure the police into searching for his murderers, and it was a challenge. I had to speak with Edmonton Police Service, and I went through all the chains of command. I was upset. I went to the crime scene and still saw all of his blood all over the concrete, and that upset me too. I remember contacting the City of Edmonton and just being upset, because why haven't they cleaned it up yet? I thought, if it was more of a prominent area in Edmonton like Whyte Ave or Jasper Ave, it definitely would have been cleaned up. But because it was kind of in the inner city of Edmonton, it was still there after days, and they hadn't been searching, from what I could gather, as far as who did it. I remember explaining to the detective, "Well, there was broken bottles, there was broken concrete," and I remember just kind of saying, "Well, I'm not a detective, but it looks pretty obvious as to what happened here."

The next day when I contacted them again asking for answers, suddenly that was the story: that there was a fight that ensued, and he was basically beaten by two other individuals, all in a drunken fight, a drunken rage. They were all known to each other, other homeless guys, and they basically beat him to death. He didn't have an opportunity to fight back, from what the medical examiner told me. It was an ugly scene, an ugly death. His whole face had to be reconstructed for the funeral.

One of the things that really stood out to me about that, the lack of attempting to find the perpetrators, was that regardless of whether James was homeless, whether he was drinking at the time, he was still my son's father and I still loved him. He struggled a lot with addictions, and at that time there wasn't a lot of help for people with addictions. One of the things I really had to let the world know was that he was loved and he did have family. I wasn't with him because I didn't want to be with him. I was apart from him for safety reasons, for myself and my children, because of what he did when he got drunk and the rages he would go into. I had to protect myself and my children.

I remember reading letters from jail from him, and you know, how much he loved me, how much he loved our son, how happy he was in the time that he had with us. One of the things he said was that if he didn't live good with us, if not for the times that we did live good, he wouldn't have known what love and living good like that felt like. He was always very grateful, and he did try to go to treatment several times. He went to AA meetings a lot, but a lot of it was because I was pressuring him into doing it. I was threatening to leave him, so I don't feel like he was really doing it for himself, and I think that's probably why he wasn't successful no matter how many times he went.

There was definitely a lot of healing for me that I had to work through after his death, like all the shame, guilt, shoulda-coulda-woulda's, if only I did something different. Ultimately, at the end of the day, I know I made the right choice for my children's sake and for my own sake. It's just unfortunate that that is the way it turned out. But yeah, just to remember that he was a good person. A lot of people struggle with addictions, you know, like Doctor Gabor Maté says, it's not asking what's wrong with somebody, but "asking what happened to somebody," and we begin to understand why they are the way they are.

"What do you hope this project will help people understand?" (WLMN Interview Question, 11:38, R. Davey)

I think that empathy piece is the biggest thing, and also just understanding that, on the surface, we might see the problems. We might see the trouble. We might see the addictions. We might see the violence. We might see all these things. But underneath all of that is somebody that is loved. Somebody that has a mom, has a dad. Somebody that has a family that cares about them. Somebody that has children, children that are left to go on in life without a parent. So I guess just maybe humanizing people that have been murdered and missing, and understanding that they do have people that love them. The people that love them are left to continue on in this world with that void within them, and that void never really goes away. But through a lot of hard work and healing, they can live a little bit of a better life and come to terms with it and have a little bit of peace, peace and serenity in their lives eventually. Not without going through the devastation of grief and loss, and that huge piece of loss and hurt that people go through after experiencing such a traumatic or devastating loss.

I think one of the things that I really would just kind of like to say is that as Indigenous people, we have struggled through a lot of grief and loss and trauma historically. With awareness campaigns like this, and people that are helping to tell our stories and share our stories, we can then start focusing on our strength and resilience. We can start gravitating more towards the beauty and strength in our culture that has been carried on and passed onto us, not just the intergenerational trauma we talk about, but also just highlighting our strength and resilience as Indigenous people, so that we can create a better life for the seven generations ahead of us and just start working on healing together as a whole.