Highway of Tears

Sayville, New York, Bucaramanga, Columbia, Carbondale, Illinois, Windsor Mill, Maryland, Cork, Ireland, and Green River, Utah.

Welcome to part one of Highway of Tears.

This will be a three part series.

Now, today we find ourselves in British Columbia, Canada, where we roam an ever so deadly road, Highway 16. but no one really refers to it as Highway 16.

It's better known as the Highway of Tears.

It's a deadly stretch of highway that spans 450 miles between Prince George and Prince Rupert.

Several young girls and women have last been seen on the Highway of Tears before vanishing without a trace.

Also, many murdered women have been found here as well.

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Okay, my next story is titled, Almost Becoming a Ghost on the Highway of Tears.

Hi, Danielle and Cassie.

My name is Coventry, and I've been a fan, listener, and a National Park comrade for many moons over the years.

All of my friends and family had been blowing up my phone without knowing just what kind of shit I had gone through in the past day and were all extremely worried the worst had happened.

Did I mention that I never told a soul that I was embarking on this quest home and not the initial road that I had originally taken? Yeah, early 20s aren't the cleverest of minds or times when you're a free bird without a care in the world.

It wasn't until I told my dad the events of that day that he said, Coventry, you were just on the fucking highway of tears.

I had never heard of this highway before.

Gladys Raddick is a Goodson Wet'suwet'en First Nations woman and joined the movement in 2008 after the loss of her niece, Tamara Lynn Chipman, who disappeared on a highway near Prince Rupert in Canada.

And then another young Indigenous girl was later found on the highway near Prince George, which is along the stretch of the highway, Highway 16, and is now actually referred to as the Highway of Tears.

Right.

So Radix started the grassroots movement Walk for Justice with others who had been affected.

So that makes sense to me.

I would say the grand total of people that died in that particular property, a.k.a. bodies hidden, a.k.a. Highway of Tears.

At least 600 people in total.

Facts.

Good point.

Now, when it comes to Picton himself, do you think he was deliberately targeting women he believed authorities would be less likely to search aggressively for

oh fuck yeah that's why because like you said there is like racism and they didn't really care about indigenous people over there aka you know the highway of tears and they also just didn't care about you know sex trade workers they still don't to this day as we've seen with many women throughout history and so they were just like yeah nobody gives a fuck about a junkie all right now it's your turn Okay, throw them at me.

Why did police fail to seriously investigate the disappearance of so many women earlier, despite families repeatedly raising concerns? I feel like before

First, we have on Saturday and on Sunday, we have events... about the Red Dress events for folks that aren't familiar.

These are events that take place to talk about and organize together, have a voice about the murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, especially along the Highway of Tears, and actually about missing and murdered everybody.

So looking really at trying to create the kind of society that would not have the situation where young women and children and men and boys and two-spirited people can be walking along the Highway of Tears and end up either injured or dead or missing.

And so these questions are extremely important, I think, for all of us.

One of the things that I think about as I'm reflecting on the red dress events that are coming is the history and thinking about, for me, coming from the 1960s, and the times when we were organizing for the rights of women, for the rights of everybody, and realizing that we are still in the situation where people can go murdered and missing on the Highway of Tears.

And something that I always find these events very powerful the power of bringing people together to be able to speak about these questions and to be able to work together to bring about the changes that we think that are necessary.

But for me, I often reflect on whether there has been any change.

And I have to remind myself that there has been some change, that we have...

Like Alberta Williams- 100% ...

in this one i- is one of the women from the Highway of Tears.

Right.

But it has noth- you know, it's, it maybe has nothing to do with any of the other women, and, and it's its own, it's like, you know, multi-part story itself.

I was gonna do, like, three of the, three victims, or one of the victims was, it was solved when they found out that it was this serial killer, and then it was caught in a really cool way.

But then it's, none of the women wh- who this was solved f- about were indigenous.

So then I was like, "I'm gonna only do the Highway of Tears with the non-indigenous women," and that doesn't sound right, so I didn't- No ... do that one.

Well, that's ki- I know it's kinda, yeah, that's not the point- Right ... for what that story is.

This was not the last sighting of Jean, however, and the last person to see her live was her cousin, Alvin.

After walking out of the house, Jean headed towards Highway 16, which is now known as the notorious Highway of Tears, where dozens of indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered.

According to Alvin, the two spent time hanging out on a bridge close to Gitsagookla, talking and enjoying the spectacle of the night sky above them.

As the night wore on, a cool air began to move in over the town, and Alvin decided to hop on his bike to head home and grab a jacket.

However, even with this inquiry, no solid evidence has ever come to light, and the Sampar siblings are left wondering what happened to their sister.

The RCMP collected DNA samples from Jean's family to perform a comparison against Jane Doe's found at Robert Pickton's farm, but it appears that no matches have been made.

There are numerous theories in Jean's case, and the strongest is that she is another victim of the infamous Highway of Tears.

Her family told the Vancouver Sun it would be nice for us to have closure.

Welcome to our latest video.

In this episode, we bring you the tragic tale of the Highway of Tears.

Join me.

Let's take a walk and see.

Project E-PANA is a Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or the RCMP, task force created in 2005 with the purpose of solving cases of missing and murdered indigenous persons along a section of Highway 16.

All the victims were female between Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and Prince George, British Columbia.

This road came to be known as the Highway of Tears.

The name for the project, E-PANA, was chosen from a combination of E from E-Division, which is the RCMP division that has jurisdiction over British Columbia, and PANA, which is the name of an Inuit goddess who cares for souls before heaven or reincarnation.