An Indigenous woman killed by police. Her brother dead by suicide. And their mother’s plea for change

In June, Martin’s 26-year-old daughter, Chantel Moore, was shot by an Edmundston police officer during a “wellness check.” The officer who killed her alleges she threatened him with a knife.

Both Martin and her children are from Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, near Tofino, B.C. Chantel had recently relocated to Edmundston, where Martha was living, to be near her mother and her daughter.

“It feels so unreal,” Martin said tearfully on Tuesday. “How does this happen? I come twice on two different flights with both my kid’s ashes. How does that happen?”

She leaves the room she’s in as she speaks. She hasn’t yet told her granddaughter — Chantel’s six-year-old, Gracie — that her uncle is dead.

“I just don’t want to put that kind of tragedy on her right now. She still cries for her mom. That’s such a fresh wound. And then, to add more to it, she’s going to think that people she loves just keep dying on her. I don’t want her to think that.”

Martin’s grief is the agony of a parent who has lost too much, too quickly. It is also, inevitably, another touchstone in an ongoing and painful national conversation about systemic racism, and how Indigenous and racialized people have been affected by this country’s justice system. It has been a year for such touchstones.

Within days of Martin’s daughter being shot in June, RCMP officers shot Rodney Levi near the Metepenagiag Mi’kmaq Nation, west of Miramichi in New Brunswick.

And in Fort McMurray, Alta., a dash cam recorded the violent arrest by RCMP officers of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations Chief Allan Adam — allegedly for having an expired vehicle registration.

All three cases stoked outrage across the country, and led to calls for a long, hard look at the way police view and treat Indigenous people. Both police killings in New Brunswick have been passed on to Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes (BEI) — Quebec’s independent investigation bureau. The Fort McMurray incident has been referred to Alberta’s equivalent.

Martin was already in bed on Nov. 14 when she got the call. She’d turned her ringer off, but the light on her phone kept flashing. She tried to ignore it, but it kept going off until, finally, around 10:30 p.m., she answered.

It was family member who told her of her son’s suicide. Martin said the relative told her that police had contemplated sending an officer over to tell her but, given the circumstances of Chantel’s death, decided against it.

She had talked with Mike over Facebook the past few weeks. They were making plans for her to come visit when she got a break from the classes that she had begun to take in the aftermath of Chantel’s death — a lifeline to keep her busy, she said.

She hadn’t seen him for about two years. He had been in custody when she flew out to B.C. to mourn Chantel’s death with her family but had been released with conditions shortly thereafter. Martha Martin says she still doesn’t know why her son was in a correctional facility in Surrey when he died.

But she’s quite positive that his sister’s death contributed to his own.

“He was being so strong for me (when Chantel died) and I think that he just didn’t want to show me that he was hurting himself, because he had heard me on the telephone crying,” she said. “Can you imagine what he went through? Because he was just on his own. He had no one with him.”

Chantel and Mike had a bond like no other she’d seen, Martha said. The day she first met him, when Martha brought him home, when she held her younger brother for that first time, she loved him, Martha said.

“After that she said, ‘He’s not your baby anymore. He’s mine,’” Martha recalled. “She just loved him to bits.”

The two shared a personality, she said. They both loved to be with family, both had a bubbly energy. Everyone that Chantel met, said Martha, fell in love with her. Mike was the guy who literally once gave the jacket off his back to a young girl who had none.

When they were younger, she said, they were inseparable.

In the aftermath of Chantel’s death, Martin was left with unanswered questions, many of which had to do with why Chantel’s “wellness check” escalated into a situation that ended in her daughter’s death.

In the case of her son, Martin wants to know how he was able to take his life.

“I’m baffled. And I want answers to how this could happen, that he was able to take his life in the nighttime, and it went unnoticed until the morning. And what can we do to change this so that no other mother receives that call?”

In July, the chiefs of the Wolastoqey First Nation in New Brunswick issued a joint statement calling upon Premier Blaine Higgs’ Conservative government to create a committee to review the justice system in the province in light of Chantel’s death.

In the statement, the chiefs said they were seeking recommendations on how the province could create change “to allow for a system free of systemic discrimination and that no longer fails to serve the Indigenous people of this province.”

Higgs has largely ignored that request, saying such an inquiry would be up to the federal government.

In July, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised action “very soon” to address systemic racism in Canadian policing and other institutions.

For her part, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki has acknowledged, amid some backlash from her members, the existence of systemic racism within her force. It’s resulted in the creation of programs — such as the development of a system to collect data on police encounters with racialized and Indigenous people.

Still not enough is being done, said Gord Johns, the MP for Courtenay-Alberni and a friend of the family. In the months following Chantel’s death and the weeks following Mike’s, says Martha, he’s the only politician who has reached out to talk to her about her children.

“I’ve known Martha for well over 25 years and to watch her go through this incredible grief — it’s unbearable,” he said. “We cannot have another mother lose her children. They’re getting killed by a system that is broken.”

“When you look at what happened to Mike, he’s just another example of a system that is so broken and Mike just gave up hope. We’re seeing generations of young people taking their lives and it’s an epidemic here.”

For Martha Martin, the talking points and rhetoric around change have grown old. It’s change she wants to see now.

“We can talk until we’re blue in the face. I feel like we’re just talking,” she says.

“I know it’s not for nothing, because I know that I couldn’t have lost both of my kids for nothing. And it’s sad that what it takes for us to fight for change is the death of my children.”

With files from Alex McKeen and The Canadian Press

Correction — Dec. 4, 2020: This article was edited to correct Mike Martin’s given name on first reference.