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Jessica McDiarmid
168 Plays5 years ago
Jessica McDiarmid is a Canadian journalist who has worked across North America and Africa, writing for publications such as the Toronto Star, the Associated Press, Maisonneuve, Canadian Business and the Harvard Review. Highway of Tears is her first book. She lives in British Columbia.
For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern British Columbia. The highway is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.
Journalist Jessica McDiarmid meticulously investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference has created a climate where Indigenous women and girls are over-policed, yet under-protected. Through interviews with those closest to the victims–mothers and fathers, siblings and friends –McDiarmid provides an intimate, first-hand account of their loss and unflagging fight for justice. Examining the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada–now estimated to number up to 4,000–contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in the country.
Highway of Tears is a piercing exploration of our ongoing failure to provide justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and testament to their families and communities’ unwavering determination to find it.
http://jessicamcdiarmid.com/
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Transcript
00:00:00
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You
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
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are listening to Something Rather Than Nothing, creator and host Ken Volante, editor and producer Peter Bauer. This is Ken Volante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast for this episode. Have the happy pleasure and the privilege of talking to Jessica McDermott
00:00:29
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who wrote a very important book, study, piece of investigative journalism called The Highway of Tears, which inquires into the tragedies of missing and murdered indigenous women in British Columbia.
00:00:51
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And that book came out last year and we're lucky enough to have her on the podcast to talk about that book and also to talk to her about her art and her craft and investigative journalism.
Jessica's Early Writing Journey
00:01:06
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Jessica McDermott, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Ken. And yeah, it's great to chat with you. I did some research.
00:01:18
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And just saw your works in research around the world in the continent of Africa. And of course, as I mentioned, the Highway of Tears book. But before we get into some of the recent things that you've written, can you describe what you were like when you were younger? I mean, were you always interested in investigating things or you have a curious mind?
00:01:44
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Yeah, I think that would be fair to say. I was certainly always a writer.
00:01:50
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I think my, my brother went to, he's a couple of years older. So he'd gone to kindergarten and I think I, I could kind of read and write by then, but I would like hassle him when he got home from kindergarten to teach me everything that he'd learned. Cause I was just desperate to be able to read and write. Um, so I was a pretty precocious little kid and was writing novels by the time I was seven or so, they were all about wild horses and evil farmers that would trap the wild horses to sell them to meat markets. And then,
00:02:19
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inevitably there was a young heroine that would rescue the wild horses and then ride them out into the wilds and live with the wild horses forever. Those books sound fantastic. My mom actually dug one of them out probably 10 years ago, but I finished journalism school by then and I was working as a reporter and maybe feeling a little discouraged or like,
00:02:46
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My work had become very much the work of a newspaper reporter and the art part of it had disappeared. And she had dug it out. And I was I was almost heartbroken because it was like, look at what I was doing when I was like so little. And now what am I doing? My life is over. I failed. And, you know, in the way that I often thought 24. Yeah, sure, sure. And
00:03:11
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So let's chat about that a little bit. I mean, you saw this huge artistic, creative, kind of expansive, maybe younger version or vision of what you were creating. And then maybe comparing it to a little bit more of the, I'd imagine, some of the difficult work and digging into details and investigating and trying to put this together.
00:03:34
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What did that moment mean to you? I mean, did it end up informing your approach to your work, to your investigative writing?
From Novelist to Journalist
00:03:43
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Well, I think I've always been looking for the place between the two ideas, one of which started off where I wanted to be a novelist, I wanted to write beautiful fiction, and then ended up in a career in journalism.
00:04:05
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largely because I think in my sort of early mid-teens, I got more interested in world events, in history, in sociology, and in what was going on around me outside my dreams of running away with wild horses. And I was appalled by what I saw, to be frank. I started learning about things like
00:04:27
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you know, proxy wars during the Cold War. And just, how could this be happening? How could this be over and over and nobody cares. And it was with, you know, all the rage of a 14 or 15 year old. And, and it was through that, that
00:04:43
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I came across a book, I think to put my mom in an interview twice, she'll love this. She got me a book from a chapters bookstore bargain bin, which was written by a foreign correspondent, Canadian foreign correspondent named Oakland Ross, called A Fire on the Mountain. And it was sort of a personal account of many of the global conflicts that he had covered as a reporter. And I was incredibly inspired, really,
00:05:11
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quite literally sort of changed my view on everything. And I was like, foreign correspondent, this is the way to go. So then there was, you know, the long path trying to get there, which
00:05:23
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ends up being feeling often not very literary or artistic. You know, you work for a city news desk and you get sent out on an assignment and you have eight inches to shove in the basic information and that sort of it. Um, but that was, you know, what I learned was that was incredible training because you have to become really gymnastic, gymnastic with your words.
00:05:48
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You don't I realize now, looking back, I wrote very long and very flowery and not all that clearly. And so as uncomfortable as it was to, you know, sort of have somebody take a red pen to two thirds of what you had just done, it gave me this incredible awareness of words that I had never had and this this precision with them.
00:06:13
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And then fast forward again, when I was so lucky to get to the point where I could do a book, I don't, I'm not saying I think I succeeded necessarily, but I wanted to combine those two things. So combine a literary approach, trying to write something that in places is beautiful writing combined with
Blending Literary and Investigative Writing
00:06:41
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a lot of information and facts and, you know, the sort of idea of shining a light on wrongdoing in hopes that it will be solved and put those two together into one place. So my ideal would be, you know, to be a literary investigative journalist. And it's a road that I'm on. I don't think I'm there yet. But, you know, maybe by book three or four, I'll look at it and go, wow, you did it.
00:07:10
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Well, yeah, and I can see, and thanks for describing some of you thinking about that. I have an episode coming out pretty soon with the writer in Oregon, Benjamin Gorman, and I found it quite interesting, and I've had writers on the podcast to talk about those artistic choices, to talk about the tensions,
00:07:32
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that appear in writing. So I want to thank you for talking about those components. And just out of curiosity, in addition to the importance of writing and as far as art forms, are there any other art forms that are significant to you as far as what you enjoy?
00:07:57
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I mean, in terms of what I do and what I'm good at, I'm totally a one-trick pony. It's writing. But I love pretty much all art. I mean, I love music. It's a huge part of my life. I've dabbled badly in many instruments. And I always say I'm an enthusiast, not a
00:08:14
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Not a musician, I'm an enthusiast. And I really appreciate other people's music. Kim, for example, who I know you'll speak to. Same thing with photography. I've dabbled in it, I go through periods where I get really into it, and then it sort of disappears again. And then recently, painting and more visual art has become a huge interest, mainly because of a fellow that I know who does sort of
00:08:45
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impressionist or abstract art. And he did some paintings of New Orleans and Louisiana, which is one of my favorite places ever. And I just love them so much. And so that's becoming a new interest. Yeah. And well, you are certainly a writer if you love New Orleans that much. Right. New Orleans, that's that's a place for writers. It's a writer's place. Yeah, I I went there.
00:09:12
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in 2005 for like summer or spring break during university. And they had been, you know, giving credit cards to students in the student union building. So they gave me one, which was, you know, long lasting repercussions, but it meant that I got to go to New Orleans for a week and just completely fell in love with it. And I've been back many times. I moved there for a period of time and it's somewhere I'll always go back to.
00:09:40
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That's great to hear. And thanks for sharing that. So let's talk about Highway of Tears. Can you tell the listeners about what led you to the story in just how you entered into this project and what your book
00:10:09
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Highway of Tears what it is. I was led to the story because I grew up in the middle of
The Story of 'Highway of Tears'
00:10:18
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it. I grew up in a town called Smithers, which is about halfway along what's now referred to as the Highway of Tears, which itself is about 450 miles of single lane highway through a really remote area in Western Canada.
00:10:35
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Growing up, this was something that happened. There was several girls that went missing from my hometown. There was girls that went missing from the surrounding towns. And so it was always there. And I think a friend of mine, actually, recently had told me that I was talking about this when she met me, which was when I was 19. I was saying, somebody's got to write a book about it. Somebody's got to do something about it. So it was there for a long time.
00:11:02
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In my mid-20s, I'd gone home for a visit with my family that still lived there in the summertime, and I was going to do all the research I needed to do a book on it then. This might have been the same trip that I read the first novel I'd ever written, and maybe that was the motivation. But I did some interviews with some of the players. I met some of the families.
00:11:26
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But I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't able to do. I didn't have the skills. I didn't have the maturity. I certainly didn't have the time or the resources. But I stayed in touch with people. I kept following it for years and years after as I went and did all sorts of other things and grew up a lot and then reached a point where I was able to go back and do it. So that's what I did. And, you know, the book itself really is
00:11:57
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It's an exploration of what's happened there, which is more than a dozen Indigenous women and girls have gone missing from these really small remote towns. And there's been very little response from the public, from the police, from the government. None of these cases have been solved. And so that's going back over 30 years. And so an examination of that and of the question of how does this happen? Who's responsible?
00:12:27
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What needs to be done? How do we prevent this from happening again? What do we do about the fact that it's still happening all across Canada? I mean, in that region specifically, the last year I was working on the book, there were three Indigenous women girls who went missing. And then across Canada, across the United States, this is an ongoing genocide and we're not taking the sort of action that we should be.
00:12:56
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And I know in having listened to some of your interviews and having listened to the book that there's a lot of, you know, even accessing information, accurate information about the true scope of the problem and statistics and getting reports is extremely difficult. And I,
00:13:25
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heard you describe the cultural differences of the public's response to different races or groups of people when they go missing and indigenous women, those issues being ignored by maybe a white girl who goes missing and family wants all the help they can, gets a lot of exposure and there's progress on it.
00:13:48
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That seems so blatant in the cases that I've read about through your book and in the United States. For you investigating this, what was your response or how deeply frustrating was it to see just that disparate treatment in those cases? Oh, incredibly frustrating.
00:14:14
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like you want to pull your hair out and kick things. And it brought me back to being 15 and looking and saying, how could this happen? And, you know, that's that's for me, a relative outsider. And for for the families and friends and communities of these girls and women, it's it's atrocious. And it's it's still, you know, again, it's still going on now.
00:14:45
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So one of the questions I have, I'm asking a little bit in the way, just to explore this a bit more, is I've asked the question of, you know, what's the role of art? And I would just say, you know, your investigative work in your creation is a work of art, but, you know, the research, what is its role, arts role, you think, in
00:15:11
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uh, disrupting, you know, the very racism that you're steeped in and having to report on it. Yeah. I hope that shining a light on these things, um, presenting evidence to all of the naysayers who say it's, it's not racist here. We're not racist. It's not unequal. You know,
00:15:41
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Art writing and other art forms are a way of presenting that to hopefully chip away at the ongoing denial and apathy that still really pervades our society. I think it's also a way to help people understand and get a little beyond what might be the politics or their prejudices, their lack of knowledge, their ignorance to
00:16:09
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build a bit of a bridge there and show them that when they're making these comments or they're shuffling this stuff off, what they're doing is awful because it's about other human beings. So when they say, oh, well, that girl should have taken responsibility for her actions, she shouldn't have been hitchhiking. You tell that person the girl's story. This is a 15-year-old who was on her way to see her friends.
00:16:40
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And that seems to, that changes people. It has the potential to anyway. Yeah, and thanks for that too. We're speaking with Jessica McDermott and for listeners, we did have something rather than nothing, a podcast episode in the past with Rosalie Fish, which broached the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women
Collaboration and Art's Impact
00:17:10
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in North America and why Rosalie Fish, you know, was a runner, was doing that. And of course the protest symbol of the red paint on her face was something that was striking for me and actually caught my attention and brought me to greater awareness. And so now we have the great pleasure of speaking with Jessica McDermott, who again wrote the book, Highway of Tears.
00:17:35
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and also have a nice correlation here, Jessica, I want to ask you about. After interviewing, you'll be interviewing the incredibly gifted, wonderful artist, Kim Gucci, singer, and also created the design for the book cover. I was wondering if just to make that connection, can you talk about
00:18:00
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your work with Kim and how it relates to the book? Sure. So I met Kim in 2016. There was a memorial walk down the length of the highway organized by Brenda Wilson, who's the sister of one of the murdered girls from Smithers. And so I walked the highway with Brenda and two other women
00:18:26
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did the whole distance and then in all the various communities as people were able, available, they joined in. So on the last day, which was day 17, I believe, Brenda had put out a call for the last leg to have some volunteers come and cover some of the miles. So Kim had come with some friends and done that. So we had met then and then
00:18:50
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stayed in contact. And she was coming to Smithers to play some musical events and stayed at my mom's house where I was also living at the time. And they became friends. And over the years, you know, I was really honored to meet her mom. And we became close. And when it came time to there was discussions about the cover of the book, I felt really strongly for a long time that I wanted
00:19:19
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art, as opposed to so many stories about the Highway of Tears, you see the picture of the mountains and the lonely little road going through the forest. And I knew I didn't want that. And I thought that art by a local First Nations artist would be really spectacular. And I don't know that I even knew Kim really did much visual art. I mean, she was much more out there as a singer and songwriter.
00:19:49
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But she had brought a piece of artwork as a thank you to my mom for letting her stay one time. And I saw it and went, wow. Oh, sure. Well, that courage for weeks. I was so scared to ask her.
00:20:03
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And then sent her like a shy little Facebook message and said, oh, you know, what do you think? Would you do this? And she said, yes. And I was incredibly excited and honored. And then she I only was just found this out recently and she'll tell the story more, but we didn't really work together on what the art would be. She was in touch with the publisher and a designer for the publisher.
00:20:28
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And so I was sort of frantically going through edits and stuff and they had this whole other process going on. And then I got I got the PDF of it. My editor sent it and said, you know, this is what they've come up with. What do you think? And I just like sat there and cried with happiness and sadness. And I mean, it's such a powerful image and I was just so blown away. It is a beautiful image and
00:20:57
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Yeah, thanks for sharing that. The book, Highway of Tears, the covered, put together by Kim Gucci will be a future guest on something rather than nothing. Truly a beautiful image, beautiful artwork. One question I ask all guests, Jessica, is what is art? Interesting question.
00:21:22
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And it's really fun to actually get to talk about some of these things and, you know, think about them. Um, so I had put some thought into this because you had warned me and you know, I think it's a universal language. It's sort of like mathematics. It's a way that we can communicate and that we can reach across all the divides that we build up between us. Um,
00:21:51
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you know, as we share and we reflect the world as we see it and we absorb the world as other people see it, you know, and ultimately it's something that brings us together and makes us feel less alone in the world. That's a powerful thing. Yeah, that's wonderful.
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah, I ask each guest that and I think it's a fun one to answer because I think everybody thinks about art and then when they're reminded that they think so much about art, it kind of gives you permission to answer the question. I had mentioned to you, I think maybe before the podcast, how influenced I was by a book called The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer.
00:22:40
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And it was just her kind of unabashed, if she felt she wanted to extend like the question and find out something, she would ask the question and just got beyond not asking the question, though it's not an easy process, right? So there is a little bit of bravery both in asking and answering questions and I appreciate your indulgence in it. I enjoyed thinking about it because I thought, you know,
00:23:09
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I get I get really wrapped up in day to day things and what I'm doing and what I'm working on. And and so often there's not enough time where you're metaphorically or maybe literally wandering wandering through a forest and looking at light coming through the trees and droplets of water on leaves and just letting your your brain go and thinking, you know. Yeah, that's the art part of it. Yeah.
00:23:38
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It's a good, good, good process, a healthy process. So, um, uh, so Jessica, um, I want to, I wonder if you just indulge me in just going back a bit, uh, just to make sure, um, we kind of convey a little bit more of the story of Highway of Tears in Missing Murdered Indigenous Women, uh, MMIW, um, women and girls, uh, of course, um,
Challenges in Investigative Journalism
00:24:06
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And I think a lot of people are learning about this, and I know there's been some swells of interest both in Canada and the United States at times, gauging from public awareness or interest that has been growing and waning. I find it such an important and such a glaring issue that I haven't been able to look away from it since I encountered it.
00:24:31
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And so anytime I have a little bit of a space on the podcast to just kind of convey, you know, the story, I think it's worth it, even though it is a difficult one. One of the difficulties I'm sure you encountered in writing that book was I believe you said that all the cases that you covered within the book are still unsolved. Is that correct? Yeah, there's there's some
00:25:00
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They were never really included on the Highway of Tears list, though they took place in the area that have been solved. But the ones that I focused on are all unsolved cases. And amongst these cases, I mean, the book goes into depth and really personalizes both, you know, you make strong connections, Jessica, with the people that you're talking to and
00:25:29
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You really do justice in a very difficult story to tell. But you make these connections. Now, in general, these are cases where girls, young women, were just going somewhere, or maybe walking, or along this highway, this long stretch, and would simply
00:25:59
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disappear and there wouldn't be much attention paid to it or invest true investigation or any of that process Pretty much with each of these cases and that correct Yes, yeah, I mean circumstances Surrounding disappearances vary a lot case by case as does
00:26:23
Speaker
I think the investigations, though, as you pointed out, because they are still open investigations, they're not solved, we don't really know exactly what was or wasn't done. But generally speaking, yes. And I thought structurally, it was probably tough for you to tell the story because you didn't
00:26:48
Speaker
You just had to tell what happened. And it's so caught up in frustrating manifestations of racism, of people not knowing, people not caring, and just trying to bring attention to these cases that are not solved or just not followed up upon. I really want to thank you for your courage.
00:27:13
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in doing that work. And I know how difficult, because I'm sure you really wanted to get the story right. And as a reader, as far as what I know, I felt you got the story right and tried to honor the story. I had a different question. And it's one I've asked guests recently, can you mention who or what made you who you are now?
Influences and Personal Growth
00:27:45
Speaker
Yeah. I'm not sure who I am now. I am always changing. And I think that's one of the many really exciting things about being alive is that it's a journey. You never stop and you never stop evolving. But to answer your question a little bit, actually answer it. You know, I think it's a
00:28:13
Speaker
probably a mix of, I mean, certainly my family has had and has a profound impact on me. There are people who believe in right and wrong and believe in doing the right thing, sort of no matter the cost sometimes.
00:28:37
Speaker
Um, you know, the principle is a really important thing and also kindness and compassion and humility is a really important thing. Um, I think the worst thing you could do in my family is ever talk highly about yourself. It's like a Scottish thing or Irish thing. You will get cut down in five seconds. Um, but, but certainly my family and then also, you know, they supported and encouraged my, my writing and my,
00:29:06
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need to always be seeking and always be moving. You know, a lot of people when I was, well, still now, actually, but I left home quite young, did one year university and then that was boring. So I moved to Ireland and then I went to university and then I went to, you know, and I've sort of been bouncing all over the world as much as possible for my whole life. And nobody has ever said, you know, when are you going to settle down or you're doing it wrong or anything like that. There's always been huge support for
00:29:36
Speaker
for my life adventures and then also my pursuits in writing. And then I think experiences. Growing up, I read, as I've said, I read a ton and a lot of my world was what I read. I felt like authors who had been dead for 50 years were my best friends and certainly my role models.
00:30:01
Speaker
that that was really informative when I was younger and still is now. Though now I can be out in the world and I actually know some writers and stuff like that, which you don't really when you're growing up in a very small town in northern BC. But yeah, I think those two factors are enormous. And then everything that you experience as you live changes you. And I think I'm lucky to say so far, I feel like things, even bad things, increase my understanding.
00:30:30
Speaker
of myself, but also other people. Uh, and I'm really, really grateful for that. Yeah. And I, I think, um, in here, in hearing you talk and talking about, you know, your family and the support that was there. I mean, I think it's just, it seems to me that that's just really pivotal. I've enjoyed that and, you know, within my life and you know, where you have the support to discover, be whatever, you know, who you are and what paths you want to follow that can make
00:30:59
Speaker
a world of difference just as far as what you see as possible in the world. So I can hear how important that is to you. It is, you know, and I do, and I so credit my parents, like neither of them were world travelers or writers or, you know, they were both from small towns that always lived in small towns, mainly in Northern BC. And so
00:31:22
Speaker
I mean, I used to sort of wonder if I was like dropped by a store or something. But, you know, they were my mom tells me now that when when I had gone to Africa, a lot of people and, you know, her friends and stuff would say, oh, how could you let her go? Aren't you worried? And, you know, my mom's response was something like, you know, keeping her here or discouraging her from doing what she needs to do would be far worse than, you know,
00:31:50
Speaker
supporting her as she goes to live in Sierra Leone for a year. And, you know, we trust her judgment and we know she has a head on her shoulders. And so we're, we're happy about it. You know, I think she sometimes had gritted teeth when she said that, but, uh, but certainly that was the message I got. I mean, that, that they were ever even really worried as, you know, they told me years later after I got back. So that's, I mean, that's huge and it wasn't a natural thing for them. And I just, yeah, I am so grateful to them for
00:32:19
Speaker
for that and many other things too. Yeah, that's so important. Jessica, a couple more questions. Just as far as listeners, there's other aspects of your work within investigative journalism and things you've written. Could you just give a little bit of a summary of some of the other type of research and articles you've written in journalism?
00:32:47
Speaker
I so we worked before setting off on on working on a book. I was at the Toronto Star for for a couple of years. And, you know, a lot of that job was newspaper report, like pretty straight up newspaper reporting. But but you certainly got the opportunity to, you know, we say like write the hell out of something once in a while. And that was pretty great. And then prior to that, when I was in West Africa, I did some freelancing for the star and for some other places. And, you know, it was largely
00:33:17
Speaker
features, this one was breaking news, but a lot, you know, features where you go and spend a lot of time with certain people and you would try and relate this really different world and really different lives to North Americans. And I did a lot of
00:33:34
Speaker
fiction and nonfiction there that was sort of based there. I mean, none of the fictions, a lot of the nonfiction hasn't been published either. And if I go back to it, I can see why, but yeah, it was really an exploration of a really different place and different culture and different history and yeah. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I know you've done, I've looked on your website, you've done a
00:34:01
Speaker
a lot of different work in your experiences. There seems to
Reflections on Existential Questions
00:34:06
Speaker
be a lot to it. I'm wondering if your experience answers the big question of the podcast of why is there something rather than nothing? Can you help me out? You know, I don't know. And maybe this does sort of relate because I think it's one of those questions that
00:34:29
Speaker
is unanswerable. Everyone will have a different answer. There's different explanations. There's different beliefs. Ultimately, it's always a mystery, and that's sort of the beauty, and that's sort of the parallel to what is truth, and who are we, and all these questions where it's a matter of perspective. And I think that the
00:34:54
Speaker
The magic in the world comes from learning about perspectives and developing your own and coming to understand others. And so it would be terrible, actually, if this question was answerable. It's the quest to figure it out that actually becomes the meaning. I really like your answer. I never answer my own question, but I will say that one of the things I like about
00:35:23
Speaker
Buddhist philosophy on this question. They just say throw it out. Don't bother answering it. It's useless to look at. And I like that kind of dynamic to the question itself. And I think it's a great one. I really enjoyed your answer. Jessica, can you tell the listeners where they can connect with your book, with your material, what you would like to share with them so
00:35:52
Speaker
they can find you on your platforms. Yeah, so I have a website, which is just jessicamicdermit.com and it links to various work and it links to where you can get the book. And I would just encourage everyone to go to their local bookstores, especially now, because Amazon's doing very well and local businesses are struggling. So please go to your local bookstore.
00:36:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Or the library. Or the library, right. I think I might have encountered your book through the library and they lend out audiobooks because I listen to your book. And yeah, just thank you so much, Jessica. I mean, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you. And again, I want to thank you for your hard work and advocacy and your sharing of the story of The Highway of Tears and
00:36:50
Speaker
Also very excited to kind of connect this conversation to the next conversation with your friend and collaborator, Kim Gucci. But Jessica McDermott, thank you so much for being on the podcast. You're welcome. Thank you so much for having me and for the work you're doing. Oh, thank you. Take care now. You too. Bye.
00:37:18
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing.