Profile: Dennis Saddleman

Beside a campfire under a full moon, in a supporter’s yard near Surrey, B.C., Stephanie English opened the small bundle of her daughter’s belongings for the first time.

Police gave her the bundle 10 years ago. It holds items found with Joey-Tiiah English, a 25-year-old mother of three from Piikani Nation who was reported missing in Calgary in June 2016.

Some of her remains were found weeks later in a wooded area of Calgary’s Crescent Heights neighbourhood. According to facts agreed to in court, she died of an overdose, and a man she had been using drugs with dismembered her body afterward and discarded it.

The man, Joshua Weise, pleaded guilty to indignity to a human body and was sentenced to 18 months in jail. Police searched a Calgary landfill but found no more of her remains, and Stephanie has never been able to bury her daughter in full.

Stephanie opened the bundle Sept. 23, partway through a run from her Piikani Nation home to Vancouver, surrounded by people who understood her grief.

Stephanie ran through a highway tunnel, up and down hills in the Okanagan, stopping in communities that have suffered losses like her own.

She made the run ahead of her ninth annual walk to Calgary, which starts Oct. 2. Her mother, Patsy English, Joey-Tiiah’s daughter and her own daughter followed in a vehicle. It was their first visit to Vancouver.

“This was primarily a spiritual journey for myself,” Stephanie says. “I am really humbled by what was going on; I am still processing what I experienced. I got a lot of support from the community of sisters that know and understand.”

She means families who have lost daughters, sisters, aunts, grandmothers and Two-Spirit loved ones to violence or disappearance, and who, she says, have too often seen police and society fail to solve or stop those crimes.

Stephanie is grateful for the reception she got in Invermere and other stops along the way. She recalls stepping onto the long Fraser River bridge feeling especially heavy-hearted.

For many years, she has carried the weight of running to create awareness of not only her daughter’s case but also the cases of many others. This time, she thought about how more and more people are speaking out.

“I pray that more people will wake up and get out of their silence once they start reaching out for help,” Stephanie says.

She believes the silence many feel over such losses is slowly starting to lift and says Indigenous liaison workers in police services are pushing their colleagues to take these cases seriously. Stephanie says she no longer feels institutionalized racism when dealing with police.

People seem willing to listen, she says, even if concrete actions have not been taken in her daughter’s case. As she ran, her spirits lifted, especially when she saw a pair of eagles and their young flying overhead.

At a small gathering in Vancouver-Hastings, people shared songs and prayers. There, Stephanie met people she calls sisters and brothers in the Sisters in Spirit movement, including Dennis Saddleman, the author of From Residential School to Word Warrior.

At the same Surrey campfire where Stephanie opened Joey-Tiiah’s bundle, she, her mother, her daughter and her granddaughter were gifted blankets with thunderbird, butterfly and star designs.

Much still weighs on her.

Stephanie says governments have not honoured the treaties signed with her people, and she points to a foster care system she calls broken, human trafficking she says is getting worse, and ongoing discrimination against First Nations people.

Above all, she continues pushing to recover the rest of Joey-Tiiah’s remains, which she believes are in a Calgary landfill.

“It makes me push harder with love, the more we get denied, the more I push deeper,” she says.

Stephanie invites all who are able to join her on the annual Sisters in Spirit walk to Calgary. Walkers leave from Range Road 274 and Highway 3 at 6 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 2.

The next day, community members will welcome them at the Awo Taan Healing Lodge in Calgary. From there, the walk continues to destinations in the centre of the city.

Stephanie asks those who cannot join what she sees as a form of bridge-building to keep the participants in prayer.

If this story raises concerns for you, the national support line for families and survivors of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people is available 24 hours a day at 1-844-413-6649. Alberta’s 24-hour Addiction Helpline is 1-866-332-2322.

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