Remembering Vancouver's Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance

217 Pages·2015·9.84 MB·English

by  Amber Dean

REMEMBERING VANCOUVER’S
DISAPPEARED WOMEN
Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty
of Inheritance
Between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, at least sixty-five women,
many of them members of Indigenous communities, were found mur-
dered or reported missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. In
a work driven by the urgency of this ongoing crisis, which extends
across the country, Amber Dean offers a timely, critical analysis of the
public representations, memorials, and activist strategies that brought
the story of Vancouver’s disappeared women to the attention of a
wider public. Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women traces what
lives on from the violent loss of so many women from the same neigh-
bourhood.
Dean interrogates representations that aim to humanize the mur-
dered or missing women, asking how these might inadvertently feed
into the presumed dehumanization of sex work, Indigeneity, and liv-
ing in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Taking inspiration from
Indigenous women’s research, activism, and art, she challenges read-
ers to reckon with our collective implication in the ongoing violence of
settler colonialism and to accept responsibility for addressing its count-
less injustices.
amber dean is an assistant professor in the Gender Studies and Fem-
inist Research Program and the Department of English and Cultural
Studies at McMaster University.
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AMBER DEAN
Remembering Vancouver’s
Disappeared Women
Settler Colonialism and the
Difficulty of Inheritance
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2015
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4454-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-4426-1275-4 (paper)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper
with vegetable-based inks.
_____________________________________________________________________
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Dean, Amber Richelle, 1975–, author
Remembering Vancouver’s disappeared women : settler colonialism and the
difficulty of inheritance / Amber Dean.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4454-0 (bound) ISBN 978-1-4426-1275-4 (paperback)
1. Native women − Violence against − Social aspects − British Columbia −
Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver). 2. Women − Violence against − Social aspects −
British Columbia − Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver). 3. Missing persons −
British Columbia − Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver) − Social conditions.
4. Memorials − Social aspects − British Columbia − Vancouver. 5. Collective
memory − Social aspects − British Columbia − Vancouver. 6. Missing persons
in art − Social aspects − British Columbia − Vancouver. I. Title.
HV6250.4.W65D42 2015 362.8808209711’33 C2015-905833-3
_____________________________________________________________________
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for
the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications
Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council, an Ontario government agency.
an Ontario government agency
un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario
Funded by the Financé par le
Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
For Sharon,
who lives on in countless ways
and for
Howie and Drew,
who imagine otherwise
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We inherit not “what really happened” to the dead but what lives on from
that happening, what is conjured from it, how past generations and events
occupy the force fields of the present, how they claim us, and how they haunt,
plague, and inspirit our imaginations and visions for the future.
Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History
When you see, in a photograph or in a hat or in a foot print, the hand of the
state, the other door, the water and what is down there, you have seen the ghostly
matter: the lost beloveds and the force that made them disposable. When you have
a profane illumination of these matters, when you know in a way you did not
know before, then you have been notified of your involvement. You are already
involved, implicated, in one way or another, and this is why, if you don’t banish it,
kill it, or reduce it to something you can already manage, when it appears to you,
the ghost will inaugurate the necessity of doing something about it.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters
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Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Preface xvii
Introduction: Inheriting What Lives On 3
1 The Present Pasts of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside 33
2 Following Ghosts: Different Knowings, Knowing Differently 58
3 Looking at Images of Vancouver’s Disappeared Women:
Troubling Desires to “Humanize” 74
4 Shadowing the “Missing Women” Story: “Squaw Men,”
Whores, and Other Queer(ed) Figures 99
5 Memory’s Difficult Returns: Memorializing Vancouver’s
Disappeared Women 118
Conclusion: Reckoning (for the Present) 141
Notes 153
Bibliography 169
Index 183