The Highway Of Tears has been northern B.C.'s reality for decades, and the systemic victimization of aboriginal people has been our reality for more than 100 years.
Now, CBC Radio is set to present the spectrum of issues we summarily call the Highway Of Tears (HOT) in a virtual reality experience at the Prince George Civic Centre. The popular morning news magazine program The Current will tell this story to all of Canada by hosting a town hall discussion on the topic of missing and murdered women. Before the public meeting, there will be a showing of a documentary done by The Current's staff.
"We are taking our virtual reality project about the Highway Of Tears on the road to communities where the discussion really matters, so we thought we would come there first," said host Anna Maria Tremonti about why Prince George was selected as the starting point.
"On the very first edition of The Current we did a documentary from Joan Weber - who is now our senior documentary editor - on the Highway Of Tears," Tremonti said. "That was the very first day we went to air: Nov. 18, 2002. In the run-up to that, she had pitched the story and I had said what is the Highway Of Tears? I didn't know what it was."
She wasn't alone. While local media had for many years been discussing - case by case and as a whole - the growing list of young women who were being killed or going missing along local roads, the national media was slow to respond. That 2002 radio segment was in many ways ahead of its time. It even predated the film documentary Highway Of Tears by international superstar documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (winner of two career Oscars and six Emmy Awards), a piece widely considered the first global coverage of the northern B.C. crisis.
Now, there is a second documentary, this one by director Matt Smiley and narrated by Nathan Fillion, which is available on Netflix. The New York Times has done stories, American television networks have done features, the Vice News website did a mini-documentary and the most recent broad-based documentary is the book released this summer by longtime private investigator Ray Michalko.
"Of course today the Highway Of Tears is now a shorthand, it has become a symbol, for something even bigger that a lot of people are grappling with," said Tremonti. "So we are using a 'virtual reality documentary' which is about four minutes, where you get a sense of that road and how that road is isolated. And you will also hear from Matilda Wilson, who is (HOT victim) Ramona Wilson's mother, but we are not using it in the typical way of virtual reality in which you experience it and that's it. We're going to make it available for people to watch on little devices, and then we are going to have the discussion in the town hall. We are using it as a starting point leading to the discussion."
It will then form the online presence The Current will create for this experience.
"We want to use it as a jumping off point for the inquiry into missing and murdered women," Tremonti said. The inquiry has not yet gotten underway, but the formation has started. "We will have other discussions in other cities. As the inquiry moves forward, as new voices come out, our coverage and our town halls will change. We won't replicate the same kind of coverage each time we take it somewhere."
The Current invites the public to come to the Civic Centre on Thursday from 1-5:30 p.m. for viewing the documentary and taking part in the preliminary discussions. At 7 p.m., the public discussion will be held. It is free to attend, but seats must be reserved on the Eventbrite website.
