Those Johnston Kids have family in Winnipeg. After our brief visit of the RAMWC we went to visit Aunt Maria. Maria is my ex-sister-in-law and mother to Thalia, my niece and cousin to the kids. Maria and I puzzled over how to describe each other in conversation and settled on ex-in-laws, while our kids should call us Aunt and Uncle. Modern relationships are so complex.

We had come in from the wilderness, but unfortunately Thalia had run off to one somewhere. She was gone camping for the week, but we enjoyed a night’s stay with Maria in any case. Short Pants and Baby Girl were looking forward to a ‘real bed’ and seemed to welcome the respite from my camp cooking. They gorged on the Chinese food we had for dinner (for the record, I think my cooking is pretty good). Maria and I stayed up late gossiping and chatting with her sister and sister’s husband. What does that make them to me? Ex-sister-in-law once removed? While the grown-ups talked, Those Johnston Kids watched cartoons with manic intensity. We don’t even have television at home so they were a bit glassy eyed by bedtime.

The next morning we went for breakfast in the cultural centre of Winnipeg, the Forks. The Forks is the area of town where the rivers Assiniboine and Red River meet. Indigenous people have been meeting at the forks of the rivers for thousands of years to conduct trade, perform ceremonies, and gather socially. Today, the Forks is used in much the same way, with lots of gathering areas, restaurants, and performance spaces. It’s pretty cool.

If you go, be sure to visit the memorial for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. We did. It was important and moving. I have other thoughts as well though. First, I am reluctant to call it a memorial because that implies a thing in the past, when it fact the crisis continues today. Indigenous women are valued less than the women of some other races in Canadian society, most pointedly the dominant one. That. Must. Stop. Second, the crisis now has its own title MissingandMurderedIndigenousWomen, which tends to be said all in rush like one word, or MMIW. This is also dangerous from an awareness perspective because it could mean that the issue is on the verge of becoming part of the background noise of society again. Labels and boxes are convenient ways to organize newly discovered issues, but after a time those convenient wrappings also begin to conceal the seriousness of the issue contained. I worry that once the public has contained this crisis inside a box labelled MMIW, it will become easy for politicians to refer to it as a undifferentiated piece of their platform, rather than as the combined horror of individual ruined families and lives. We need to keep this on the minds of the public, but with as many different stories as there are words to tell them.

That was what I thought anyway. Then we went to the culturally appropriate site of the Pancake House for breakfast.

After a gluttonous and decadent first meal, we strolled the Forks for a bit. The kids found a baby sparrow. It was flightless, either due to injury or infancy, and they cooed and fussed over the poor thing for a while. I assured them, as parents must, that the bird would be fine, and that we should return it to its natural habitat to rest. With a bit of time to recover, the bird would wing its way to the sky and freedom. I hoped I was right, but odds are the little dodo was ready to rejoin the circle of life.

We are all doomed to certain death. Against the timeline of the existence, even the longest life is less than an eyeblink, infinitesimal and meaningless. Where a brief spark comes into being against astronomically improbable odds, that life is subject to  the random cruelties of fate and the crushing hand of an impersonal universe. We needed a quick distraction. Candy or trains, or a candy train. We found such a distraction. Oh yes, we did.

We were also reminded that what gives meaning to human lives, above all, is other people. We remind each other with respect, caring, love and even candy, that we are all worthy parts of the same circle. Don’t forget.