Author’s Note

On June 21, 2002 Nicole Hoar, a white middle-class woman, went missing on Highway 16 right outside Prince George, British Columbia. She wasn’t the first woman to disappear along the route but she was the first to receive national attention, the search for her urgent, a Canadian effort.

Monica Ignas, Alberta Williams, cousins Cecilia and Delphine Nikal, Ramona Wilson, Roxanne Thiara, Alisha Germaine, Lana Derrick. The disappearances, according to reports, date back to 1969.

Margaret Nooski, Mary George, Tamara Chipman, Aielah Saric-Auger, Beverly Warbrick, Bonnie Joseph, Emmalee Mclean, Madison Scott, Jane Doe, Anita Thorne, Roberta Sims, Frances Brown, Chantelle Simpson, Jessica Patrick, Cynthia Martin, Laureen Fabian, Crystal Chambers, Chelsey Quaw.

Eighteen women, twenty-seven women, more than forty women.
The numbers jump depending on the source. The majority of Highway 16’s—or what locals call the Highway of Tears—victims were Indigenous, a minority of them not yet women but girls.

I first heard of the Highway while studying herbalism in Vancouver, BC, and although I can’t remember the exact context of this encounter, I can still feel the emotions it whipped up. Those emotions intensified upon uncovering each disturbing detail.

I was indignant when I learned of the failings of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Aghast at the prejudice baked into the communities in the North. Another feeling surfacing: my own virtue affirmed. How could they let this happen?

The injustice of it all was heart-wrenching.

It’s this response that Fireweed aims to explore. I found myself drawn to the Highway like a fish to a lure, a sense of urgency thrumming through me, the adrenaline the consumption of true crime can inject. But my response to the Highway wasn’t as simple as this, a voyeur’s thrill at someone else’s gruesome end; the more I dug, the more I was faced with the misshapen truth of my interest in the Highway, the double-edged nature of my concern.

What is it I’m hoping to find when I seek out stories based on lived violence and oppression? If my interest stems from a concern for others, a desire to “do good,” in what ways is this concern clouded by self-preoccupation, a desire to prove my own blamelessness?

In 2016, after fifteen years’ worth of efforts by the Native Women’s
Association of Canada, the government launched its National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, its mission to reveal the root cause behind the staggering rates of violence.

Through the testimonies of families and survivors, a portrait of
colonialism as not a historic term but a persistent lived experience was portrayed, its violence enforced by the following four pathways: historical, multigenerational, and intergenerational trauma. Social and economic marginalization. Maintaining the status quo and institutional lack of will. Ignoring the agency and expertise of Indigenous women and girls.

It is this bleak reality that I chose to illustrate in Fireweed . By narrating the story in a voice like Jenny’s, I sought to lift a mirror to both our fascination with missing women and girls and the ways in which we can (often unwittingly) use the injustices faced by marginalized communities to confirm our own goodness; how by ignoring the agency of these communities, we end up centering ourselves. Jam, marinara sauce, ketchup, blood droplets: throughout the narrative, Jenny’s hands are stained red. By narrating the story in a voice like hers I sought to reveal how our failings can be yoked to our good intentions.

When I started writing the novel I hadn’t yet visited the city where
it’s set, but as a Detroiter, Prince George felt familiar. Home, at a time, to the most pulp and paper mills in the world and located in the northern reaches of BC, PG is a contradiction of wilderness and industry, a place versed in dualities. Each time I went up there,
the “truth” bifurcated. I was asked to hold how one can be both the perpetrator of violence and the victim of it, afforded privileges based on the color of one’s skin and marginalized based on one’s gender and class. How there is nothing more useless than “thoughts and prayers” and also— somehow— nothing more powerful.

On my first visit to PG I met Nicole Fox, who would come to serve
as my unofficial guide to the place. Randy Dakota, Angelique Merasty, Shirley Babcock, Norman Retasket: Fireweed , in many ways, was born out of the relationships I formed there.

In this I include my relationship with the plants—particularly
fireweed. Shooting up along the roadsides, in the charred remains of forests razed by wildfires, fireweed is what we call a vulnerary in herbalism. A wound healer. Fireweed is a novel that exposes our wounds, but it’s also intended to function as a salve: self-awareness as the first step toward effective action. Loosening the strings of the mask of concern we all might find ourselves wearing.