Rise

Long ago there was a medicine man,

sitting there with a sacred pipe.

And the tobacco was talking, but nobody could understand.

So another medicine man grabbed some medicine

and put it in his ear.

Once that medicine was in his ear,

he could understand everything.

The vision was that a man was gonna come,

and that he was gonna have serpents in his arms.

And that these serpent represented two governments.

And that this beast was gonna steal the children.

It doesn't seem that far off.

We are in the North End of Winnipeg,

and we're in the industrial area.

It's very desolate. On one side, we have the train yards here,

and it's just a different world.

This is a scary place. I'm 6'4, you know? I'm 250.

When people think of First Nations,

most imagine us living in isolated reservations.

But about half of Indigenous people in Canada live in cities.

Winnipeg is home to the largest

urban Indigenous population in the country.

Many live in the North End,

one of Canada's poorest and most dangerous neighbourhoods.

Here, many families live on less than $23,000 a year.

One in three students drop out before grade nine.

And if you're Aboriginal,

you are nine times more likely to be murdered,

with Indigenous women and girls comprising a majority

of the nearly 9,000 missing person reports filed in the city last year.

_

I've come to Winnipeg to try and understand

why these things are happening,

and to meet some of the people who are fighting against the systems

that continue to fail them.

This is Winnipeg,

Canada's urban rez.

Here's a kind of a 21 block area of

where a lot of the crime in the North End happens.

And so we're kind of entering that area now.

There's at least four or five pawn shops right in this area.

There would be gangbangers hanging out,

you know, selling crack.

Another big problem we have are people getting prescriptions

for narcotics from the pharmacies,

and then selling them on the street.

This is probably one of the busier hotels and vendors on the strip.

Ooh, I like this! Can you strip search me?

Woo, yeah, you can put me on news.

Here, you want some titties?

It's karaoke night obviously.

That is awesome!

So we normally just check it out.

Everything is cool, there's no one causing problems.

We say hi, let's move out, down to the next one.

- They got a dedication for you, too. - Yeah.

How are ya? You waiting for a bus?

_

_

- How old is your son? - _

And is he hanging here in the North End, or... ?

- _ - Oh, you're just coming to look for him.

- _ - The hotels right now are pretty quiet.

You could put in a missing person report if you are...

- if you are concerned. - _

_

_

- Getting in trouble? - _

Are you good tonight?

Are you safe right now? You're alright?

- _ - Oh, good.

- Well, good luck. - _

_

Seeing that mother look for her son really hits home.

Here in the city,

there are lots of ways people can fall through the cracks.

While Indigenous peoples are disproportionately represented

in missing person stats,

women and girls are especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation,

such as prostitution and human trafficking.

Have you guys

personally responded to a missing persons call?

Yeah, there's a lot of them. They pop up every day.

Um, this will be a girl waiting to get picked up.

Yeah, and she doesn't know we're a police car right now, so...

And you can see this is a very dangerous secluded area.

There's not a lot of safety net here for them.

15-year-old Tina Fontaine's body

was pulled from the Red River in Winnipeg.

Just over a month after she was placed in CFS care.

Tina was staying in this downtown hotel

prior to going missing.

Where kids in care often stay

when there aren't enough foster homes

or shelter spaces available.

Fontaine's murder put the child welfare system

in Manitoba into the spotlight.

Aboriginal communities across the country are reeling

with this particularly poignant and tragic loss.

For now, police continue to hunt for Tina's killer.

In Canada, there's an epidemic of disappeared

and murdered Aboriginal women and girls.

Tina Fontaine's case is probably among the most well-known.

In many ways,

Tina's death galvanized the Indigenous community,

and sparked a resurgence of grassroots leadership.

One example of this is the Bear Clan Patrol.

Formed in 1992, the group patrolled the North End

to provide people living or frequenting the streets

with a sense of security.

As the years passed, the patrol faded away.

But after Tina's murder, co-founders Larry Morrisette

and James Favel decided to revive the clan.

I need a large. I need it oversized.

Their mandate is not to police,

but to lend support and impart a sense of safety to the urban rez.

They patrol four nights a week,

despite winter temperatures regularly dropping to negative 40 degrees.

You guys always go out, no matter how cold it gets?

- Oh yeah. - So how long have you guys

- been going on for? - We've been patrolling

for the last nine months, and it took us about

nine months preamble, you know,

to get everything organized so that we can get functioning.

And why did you start?

After Tina Fontaine was found, that was the final straw,

and we decided that we would

try to get the Bear Clan Patrol going again.

The red dress is a symbol

for the murdered and missing Indigenous women,

and it's to remember them.

Hello!

Your door's open!

- _ - Okay,

have a good night.

That's good, she just didn't know.

Well, that's the kind of things we like to take care of.

In a neighbourhood that has a tense history with law enforcement,

the Bear Clan offers something else.

Hello!

Right on!

I think we'll avoid that because they're already working,

and we'll stay out of their hair.

Passing a taped-off crime scene

while patrolling the neighbourhood

wasn't a shock to James at all.

- So, how often of an occurrence is that? - Well,

I mean, it all depends. Around here we see it,

you know, every other kind of week.

Have the police requested that you guys

go to different areas, or... ?

The police and the transit want us to patrol on Main Street,

but unfortunately what they want us to do there

is not in our mandate.

Namely they want us to, more or less,

tend to the street people there.

And not that it's not in our mandate,

it's just the way they want us to do it,

like clear them out of there,

and I'm not... I can't support that.

You come with me, boys.

Yeah, we're good.

So why are we splitting up here?

Just so that everybody can see that we're here.

Yeah, they're accustomed to seeing us at this point,

so we make sure that every... we go through every area.

And just making sure that there's nobody laying down

in the corner somewhere, and

kids aren't being bothered.

And what's the reception been like from the community?

The reason why we started coming here in the first place

was because a community member invited us here

to help find her granddaughter,

and then later on that evening we found two more.

There was a 16-year-old boy that was suicidal.

And Laura Garcia-Stuart, one of our members,

she literally just cradled him in her arms until he calmed down.

And that's the kind of

thing we bring to this is, you know...

The police will come and they'll do their job,

and the ambulance will come and they'll do their job,

but they're doing a job, and there's no caring, you know,

for the people. So what we try to bring to the table

is a little bit of caring.

Like look around, even the train yard over there.

This place kind of seems a bit dangerous to be around.

Well, and again, this is where the girls are hiding out

at 4:30 in the morning, you know. It's not a safe place.

There's got to be a better way.

You got the light?

Lights?

Found something!

- What do you got? - Found some needles.

One, two, three, four... like about a dozen?

Probably from people shooting up.

There's one that's out of its package.

I don't want to take away their clean ones.

Just get rid of their dirty ones.

Alright.

Because they'll be back for them, obviously.