The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)

Indigenous women in Canada have always been vulnerable, but there’s a stretch of remote road that’s such a hotspot for disappearances, assaults, and murders of women that it’s been called the Highway of Tears. And not much has been done to change that. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 0:11Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the man, this is a bummer edition.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, the zero laughs edition, because we're talking about the highway of tears.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  And there's no other way around it. This is just a devastating topic.

• 0:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah, we should tell people, I mean, the highway of tears is fairly famous. It's kind of been in the, in the news and in pop culture, I guess, for a while. I guess at least since the 90s, but really in the early 2000s, I think is when it picked up. Regardless, it is a stretch of desolate highway that runs from, in British Columbia, up in Canada, from the, the port city of Prince Rupert, all the way into the interior to Prince George. And it's, I think, 720 kilometers, almost 450 miles, and it's known as Highway 16 officially. But the stretches of this highway are so desolate, so remote, and so sparsely populated,

• 1:22Josh Clark?

  that it has become a haven for murderers who pick people up, mostly women, mostly indigenous women, on this road and either make them disappear forever or murder them. And it's, it's endemic in this area, so much so that it's caught national attention. It's just how poorly this group of women are being treated and, and their families as well.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, you know, as you'll see, it's, and you know, there are many reasons for this, but it's a heavily hitchhiked road and that can be very dangerous.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  And so a lot of times, these are hitchhikers, people just trying to get from one place to another. And like you said, they are, you know, either sexually assaulted or murdered or both. And this, these are the people that, you know, like they found bodies. There are, you know, dozens and dozens more than these dozens who have survived attacks and rapes along that stretch of highway. So, you know, it's no secret why it's called the Highway of Tears. Big thanks to Livia for enduring this topic and helping us out with it. And big thanks to Al Jazeera, where she got a lot of information from a six-part series they did in 2021.

• 2:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there's a lot of good sources. The CBC, the Vancouver Sun's a good one. There's, there's been a decent amount of coverage, but it's, it's not the kind of coverage you would get when say like, like a Caucasian girl goes missing, which we'll talk about. It's the kind of coverage about how this group of people have just been totally, basically left on their own to deal with something like this, that they have, they don't have the resources to deal with this. And it's just such a terrible story. The story's so much larger than this collection of murders. But at the core, that's what it comes down to, just women who were treated like disposable beings.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:24Josh Clark?

  And the whole thing starts at the very, at the very earliest, as far as anyone knows, the first murder that's become part of what you'd call the canon of the Highway of Tears murders and abductions, started in 1969. A woman named Lavinia Gloria Moody was murdered on Highway 16. And it went, kind of went along like that for a while. There was, but no one had kind of put together this whole group of people and called it the Highway of Tears, and they wouldn't for years to come. But at the time, there was enough going on that they had coined this term, the Highway Murders. And by 1981, enough women and girls

• 4:09Josh Clark?

  had been murdered or gone missing along Highway 16, that a group of Royal Canadian Mounted Police detectives from all over British Columbia, and I think Alberta, got together and decided to kind of compare notes and see if, if- If they could solve some of these unsolved cases.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. While this was going on, you know, when the cops were sort of slowly coming around to the idea that there was a specific problem along this stretch, the families were getting involved, the families of the missing, the families of those who were found dead. And, you know, they organized their own efforts. One case that really kind of brought everything to even more of a head was the case of Ramona Wilson. This was in June of 1994. She was 16 years old and she went to go meet up with a friend to go to some, you know, end of the year school graduation parties. She never got there and her mom,

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Matilda, was like, the cops don't really seem to care much that this happened. And so the locals got together and they started organizing. They started doing, you know, going on search parties and, and looking out for her. They ultimately, you know, very sadly, discovered her body about 10 months later at an airport. Her clothes were found near her with some rope and some cabling. And so her, her mom and her older sister, Brenda, and, you know, other members of her family in the community got together and said, all right, the least we can do is try and raise some awareness since no one seems to be paying attention. So they got a memorial walk together in June of 95, which became an annual thing.

• 5:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there was another woman who really deserves a lot of credit for bringing national attention to this. She's a wet Soaden Nation woman. And in 1998, there was a vigil where she coined the term Highway of Tears, which I can't, I don't think you can really calculate how much that helped this case. It was like, hey, media, here's a nice little tidy package for you to report on. It's even got a catchy name, despite, you know, the actual obvious emotion behind calling it the Highway of Tears. I think it really helped quite a bit. And Florence N'Zil also is credited with starting a walk that covered the entire,

• 6:36Josh Clark?

  again, 450 mile stretch of highway of, of the Highway of Tears for the first time. That walk's been made.

• 6:45Josh Clark?

  Scores of times by now, over the years, by family members and community members and members of other nations who've gotten involved to try to, again, help, ask for resources, ask to get the police involved more, because that's another recurring theme throughout this, Chuck, is that the police have shown, over and over again, opportunity after opportunity, to just not really seem to care.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. She had already been working, you know, to raise awareness when, very tragically, it hit, hit home for her in a more personal way, when one of her family members, a woman named Tamara Chipman, went missing in 2005. And, you know, all this is going on through the, you know, I think it was 1981 when the cops finally started sort of getting together and comparing notes, and that was after at least 12 years since the first known murder. And it took all the way into the 2000s for things to really take a turn. And that was when, very tragically, a woman named Nicole Hoer was killed. She

• 7:53Speaker 02

  was 25 years old, and she was white. She disappeared in 2002. And this is what really brought the national attention. You've heard, a journalist named Gwen Eiffel in the United States coined the term "missing white woman syndrome," which is the idea that it takes a white person to be, you know, the victim of a crime for anyone to kind of sit up and take notice. And members of indigenous communities or marginalized communities are often overlooked and underfunded and under-resourced. And, you know, the cases are kind of swept under the rug. And that's exactly what was going on in Canada for many, many years, and still is to a certain degree.

• 8:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And again, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been called to task time and time and time again for, for not taking this stuff seriously enough, not devoting the, enough resources to it. But also, the media is largely responsible, too. Not, not just in this case, but in any case of a missing or murdered A woman who's not white in the United States or Canada, they get much less coverage and the intensity of the coverage is much less too compared to to white women. And that's not just anecdotal. I was reading at least one um study on it from two thousand thirteen, I think, in the Journal of Law and Criminology. And they were like, yes, we we analyze this stuff and it's absolutely true.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:16Josh Clark?

  So there's like a but there's a bitter gratitude involved because the death of Nicole Hoer, um, she like it did bring a lot of attention to this.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:26Josh Clark?

  And and you just can't, you can't deny that. And so that's good. But at the same time, it's just like, man.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Why does it take that?

• 9:33Josh Clark?

  We've been having to, we've been trying to deal with this for decades. And now this one white girl is becomes part of the the the crowd of of murdered girls and like now it now people care. It's got to be really tough to take. And I know I called her a girl and she was twenty five, so she was a woman. But there's like this, this whole group is made up of women and girls.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:56Josh Clark?

  I know it's not interchangeable, but it's important to say like, some of these, I mean, what the youngest victim was twelve, Monica Jacks, um, we think died in in the late seventies and maybe nineteen seventy eight. Like, there are plenty of girls who were picked up and murdered. There are also plenty of women, too. But um, and not all of them were indigenous. A lot of them were white. But the cops, as they started to get together, um, came up with some criteria that they applied to these cases that kind of um narrowed the the the search. Um, but also brought on new cases that they hadn't they hadn't considered before, as we'll see.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in two thousand five, this is just a few years after Nicole Hoer brought more attention to the issue. Um, the the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, will probably call them that RCMP, maybe Mounties. Do they still go by that?

• 10:53Josh Clark?

  I think so. Whether they like it or not, everybody calls them Mounties.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. They launched what was called the Unsolved Homicide Unit, launched something called Project Epana. The letter E, that was just the, the division of the RCMP and Pana is named after an Inuit goddess who cares for souls in the afterworld. And they, their, you know, their official designation was, hey, we think we have a serial killer, maybe more than one out there on this highway of tears. It's a pretty, like you said, a pretty great place to get away with a crime like that because it's so desolate. Up until recently, there were long, long, long, long, long stretches where you had no cell phone service even. So you couldn't, you know, call anyone if you were in trouble.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Not very many people around and plenty of animals around to take care of bodies and the remains. So they found some commonalities in three teenage girls, Ramona Wilson, who I mentioned, a woman named Roxanne Thiero, 15 years old, from Prince George. This is a very sad case. She was in the, in the foster system and the juvenile incarceration system. And the, she eventually had to turn to survival sex, which is a term for, for women who are forced to resort to sex work to feed and clothe themselves.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  And it's usually means like, instead of getting money, they get food and clothing and, and, you know, items to live and survive. In 1994, she told a friend she was going to meet one of her clients. She disappeared and her body was discovered off Highway 16. And then finally, Alicia Germain was 15 years old. Last seen in 1994 at a Christmas dinner. And she was discovered close to Highway 16. So that's when they came up with their criteria to see if they could sort of narrow this down, right?

• 12:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And just one thing, Roxanne and Leah were, or Alicia, who also went by Leah, they were friends and also colleagues. They, both were sex workers who were engaged in survival sex. Ramona, who was not engaged in anything like that, she, I think she's worked at a restaurant or something, but Ramona, Roxanne, and Leah, all were murdered in the same area between, Ramona was June, Roxanne July, Leah in December of 1994, I think. In all their cases, like, in this area, everybody's like, there's something going on. The cops are like, just give us 11 more years and we'll, we'll come together and

• 13:39Josh Clark?

  come up with this new E-Pana project. And right when they did, those three just stuck out immediately. It's like, there's some real commonalities here. They need to be investigated. But like you were saying, those three criteria that they came up with from this E-Pana project, you had to be female, you had to last be seen dead or alive within a mile of Highway 16. And then you also had to be involved in high-risk activities like sex work, but also hitchhiking. And we should say here too, like, for those of us who, who grew up in towns with bus service and cabs and you could walk places and get to where you're going easily or ride your bike, like hitchhiking almost seemed like frivolous. Hitchhiking is a way to live

• 14:23Josh Clark?

  and survive and get to work in this area. It has been for decades. So it's not like, I think you can view hitchhiking as like, man, why did you hitchhike? In a lot of cases, the women and girls who were picked up hitchhiking were trying to get to where they were going. Like, they, they weren't like just hitting the road. Like, they, that was just part of daily life for them, unfortunately.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, once they narrowed down this criteria, they found more cases that sort of fit that and were lumped into the Highway of Tears murders. Alberta Williams was 24, and she was celebrating at a pub at the end of summer after working there seasonally with her sister. This was 1989. Her body was found about a month after her disappearance. Delphine Nicol was 16 years old, disappeared in 1990 while hitchhiking. Lana Derrick, a 19-year-old college student, disappeared in October of 95. We mentioned Tamara Chipman, that was the relative of Florence and Aziel.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  She was 22, and the mother of a two-year-old boy disappeared while hitchhiking in 2005. And then 14-year-old Aleah Sarek Augur went missing from Prince George in 2006, and she was found deceased in a ditch right beside the highway, Highway 16.

• 15:48Josh Clark?

  And Aleah, I'm pretty sure that's how you say her name, she was the last one to be officially added, like, as far as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are concerned. She's the last Highway of Tears victim. Although, as we'll see, there have been plenty more who would qualify for sure. The problem is EPANA is very much underfunded and not, basically, not really operational right now, so they're not adding people for that reason. But when they looked into this a little more, they basically went back, to their credit, and found that there was about 300 boxes of information and paperwork on all these cases. And so they're like, "We can't get anywhere until we have all this stuff logged in some sort of database."

• 16:32Josh Clark?

  So they created the database and they logged it, and it took them like a year. But after they finally got all that stuff in, some of those older cases, the ones between 1969 and 1981, they started bubbling up toward the top and were eventually included, starting with that first one with Gloria Moody, also including Monica Jack. And then there was also Micheline Pare, Galen Weiss, Pamela Darlington, Colleen McMillan, and Monica Ingus, and then Maureen Mozy. And again, all of them were killed between 1969 and 81, all along Highway 16. And a lot of them were hitchhiking as well.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, you know...

• 17:13Speaker 02

  If you look into these cases and people, you know, the volunteers that are working with some of these, a lot of them are run by families of victims. They will say that it's probably more like, you know, 50 people. Advocates say that, you know, the total is way higher than they're saying it is, you know, kind of for all the reasons that we've mentioned so far. And that seems like a good time to take our first break. And we'll be right back.

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• 20:49Speaker 02

  All right, so when we left off, we were saying that the, you know, total number is, could be as high as 50 if you look at all these cases. And not a lot of them have been solved. There are a few exceptions here and there that definitely show that there were serial killers, killer or killers operating. There was one big one in 2012 with Colleen McMillan. She was murdered hitchhiking. She was 16 years old. This was 1974. But they had, you know, in some of the evidence boxes, had her blouse still. And with the improvement in DNA matching in databases and stuff like that, they were able to find a match on Interpol. It was an American named Bobby "Jack" Fowler,

• 21:34Speaker 02

  who had died in prison in 2006, where he was serving time for attempted kidnapping and attempted murder on another woman in 1995. And they found that he had been working as a roofer in Canada when this murder and others took place. And, you know, basically were like, it was probably two other women as well on the list, Pamela Darlington and Gail Weiss.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  And they were both murdered in 1973, but he died in prison before they could officially pin that on him.

• 22:05Josh Clark?

  Yes, and from what I've read about him, Bobby Jack Fowler is the kind of scumbag that you wish you could go dig up and reanimate so you can punish him some more. He was terrible. And when the Canadian cops were like, hey, you guys had somebody incarcerated in your prisons to the officials in Oregon who killed at least one girl here, but probably three total, you should probably look around at your own files. They started finding, I think they've said up to maybe 20 murders that they've pinned on Bobby Jack Fowler. Nothing they can prove, but it's just likely that he committed them. And he'll obviously never be convicted or tried for him because he's dead.

• 22:48Josh Clark?

  But it just, it goes to show you, like, there are human beings out there who will just kidnap rape and murder and just do it over and over again. And the easiest thing to do in the world is if you're going to do that kind of thing is take advantage of a very vulnerable population in a very sparsely populated area, which makes Highway 16 just like the perfect spot.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's another guy. In fact, he's the only living person convicted of one of these murders from someone on the E-Pana list. His name is Gary Taylor Handlin. He, you know, going back to the 1960s, had committed multiple rapes, been in jail multiple times for these rapes. One was a hitchhiker in 1978 and he became a suspect and the youngest victim, 12-year-old Monica Jack that you had mentioned earlier. And also Catherine Mary Herbert, 11 years old, she just was not one of the E-Pana cases. But they caught him by setting up a sting operation in which they kind of created this fake crime enterprise where he was answering to undercover.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Caught playing a crime boss who got him to confess that he abducted and strangled Monica Jack. And this is when he also confessed to killing Catherine Mary Herbert. But that confession was ruled inadmissible, but he was convicted of Jack's murder in 2019.

• 24:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he I hadn't heard of this, but that's apparently a fairly typical sting operation. They call them a Mr. Big operation, where you just introduce a successively higher up criminals in some organization, but they're all cops. And the judge was like, no, the admission to or confession to Catherine Mary Herbert's murder, inadmissible, but he thought that he was basically convincing this crime boss to get him out of the out of being tried or convicted for Monica Jack's murder. So they're like, that's totally admissible. He completely volunteered that. But yeah, I mean, he went down for it. But like you said, he's the only living person who's ever been convicted for one of these dozens of murders.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, we mentioned 2006 is when they stopped officially tagging names onto the official E panelist. There had still been plenty of murders and sexual assaults along that stretch of highway since then. Cody Legebikoff, I believe is how you pronounce that.

• 25:15Josh Clark?

  It sounds right.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Killed three women and a 15 year old girl between 2009, 2010. So that was after the official list. Two of those victims were indigenous. And the cops caught him when they just pulled him over for a speeding violation and found blood on him. And they found the body of 15 year old Lauren Dawn Leslie. And then, you know, realized that they could link him to, and I believe he was convicted to of killings of three other women, Jill Stacy Stachinko, Cynthia Francis Moss, and Natasha Lynn Montgomery.

• 25:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and so all three of them were from Prince George, which is the easternmost town considered part of the Highway of Tears. And Cody was 19 when he killed the first of them, Jill Stacy Stachenko. He's not the youngest serial killer in Canadian history, but he too, like the other guys, was a scumbag and still is. He was sentenced to no less than 25 years, four times, but it appears that his sentences are concurrent. So he's serving 25 years for four murders and the judge reminded him that he could apply for parole as early as 15 years in. So that's four years from now that this guy might be able to get out after being convicted

• 26:34Josh Clark?

  of murdering four, three women and a girl. I don't like that.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you mentioned Florence Nazile earlier, having organized her own walk. This was in 2006. They called it the Highway of Tears Awareness Walk. And they walked two weeks. They walked through snowstorms, they walked through some terrible weather and conditions, and eventually ended at the Highway of Tears Symposium in Prince George. And again, this wasn't something organized by the cops or anything. It was organized by indigenous groups and victims' families themselves, but they did have 500 delegates from the Mounties there, as well as some representative from the Canadian government there. And it was basically a symposium where they had recommendations on what they could do,

• 27:22Speaker 02

  not only to help solve these crimes, but to prevent more of this from happening. We'll get to what's happened since then because they have done some things that seem like they should probably help. But also, how to support these families, how to support these communities a little better because it was not well-funded and any kind of work was very sparse up until that point.

• 27:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so Brenda Wilson, Ramona Wilson's sister, she works for Caria Sikani Family Services, and she's the one employee of the Highway of Tears Initiative, and she frequently has to work for free because they're like, "We're out of money again. Wait till next quarter for the check to come in." And obviously, she's extremely dedicated, but that's a kind of a par for the course thing. Like, just the funding is just not there. And if you follow, like, government funding, it usually goes to stuff that people care about, or like, a lot of people care about. So if you don't get funding, it's a kind of a big slap in the face in addition to, you know, really tying your hands from doing the work you're trying to do.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, you know, there's a lot of distrust for the Mounties there, and for good reasons in a lot of cases. We'll see, there's a woman named Gladys Radek, who was an aunt of Tamara Chipman, one of the victims, and she leads a cause called Tears for Justice, the number four. She has a lot of distrust of the police because, as a teenager, she ran away and was hitchhiking, and was picked up two different times by RCMP officers who raped her. So, I mean, as far as the RCMP is concerned, they're like, "We're gonna investigate this stuff, and we're gonna treat anyone within our ranks who does something

• 29:08Speaker 02

  like this, just like we would any common criminal." But the fact that that stuff happens, period, and that there are like, a human, there's a Human Rights Watch report that came out in 2012 that documented police abuse against Indigenous women and girls. And that's like, literal abuse and sexual assault that cops are taking part in, at the worst, then all the way down to just being hostile or uninterested in what happened to these crime victims and families.

• 29:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because as the Canadian government has said many times and has recognized and apologized for, Canada's history of how they've treated their indigenous populations, like putting them in residential schools, apparently in the 60s, there was a second wave of that kind of thing. But rather than residential schools, they took kids from their family homes and put them in with foster families. And so there was a lot of breakup of the culture and families in the indigenous tribes in the area. And as a result, like poverty began, violence really set in, deaths of despair, like suicide and alcoholism and drug overdoses, and just

• 30:20Josh Clark?

  an inability to take care of themselves. And then you couple that reality with somebody coming to the police and saying, my daughter hasn't come home since Friday. And they're like, Friday, huh? What was she doing last? Well, she went to a party. Then she's probably just on a week-long bender. Just give her a few days. From all the stories I've read, I would say 90% of the families said that that was the first response they got from police.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And not only that, but they've been shown to get rid of information. So in 2015, Elizabeth Denham, she is the Commissioner for the Information and Privacy for British Columbia. She put out a report that said officials removed like 150 emails about the Highway of Tears from their database, which was a violation of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

• 31:16Josh Clark?

  Right. Which was, obviously didn't foster any further trust with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And I guess in response, in 2018, the Commissioner of the Mounties, Brenda Lucky, actually issued like a formal heartfelt apology for the problems that the families have been facing and the lack of support they've been getting from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which has been few and far between. But I think when it does, when something like that does happen, it goes a long way. And I think the families are kind of like, okay, let's, let's get back to work with the Mounties again.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what this represents though is a larger population seen not only in Canada, but the United States and all over the world where minority communities are. Although they represent, you know, sometimes a small part of the population, they make up a much larger part of people in prison, of people who were killed by police. And that's certainly the case in Canada. I think, you know, part of the reason that EPANA has gotten mixed, not only results, but mixed reviews over the year for their work is because they've just been, you know, they came out with a bang and then they've sort of been slowly waning over the years. I think they went from 60 assigned officers down to six by 2022.

• 32:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And there's a guy, Staff Sergeant, named Wayne Clary, who said, you know, we probably aren't going to be able to make any more arrests in these cases. That most of them are stranger-on-stranger violence. So there's basically no motive other than to sexually assault and kill. It's really hard to track somebody down, especially when you don't have many leads. So we're probably just going to have to get used to the fact that these murders are going to go unsolved. But from what I was reading, there's a lot of families who are like, this wasn't a stranger. We know the guy who did it. He lives over there and they're not getting listened to.

• 33:14Josh Clark?

  And then also there's a report from 2016, an analysis of 32 cases. Did you see this part about where the police had said that there was no foul play in these murders of Indigenous women? And this analysis is like, that's kind of a weird thing to say because some of them were found nude, some of them had unexplained injuries. In some cases, the coroner contradicted the idea that there was no foul play. And yet, they have been logged as no foul play and therefore they're not being investigated because they're not considered murders.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know, along the lines of what I was talking about before, this is not just a Canada problem. There's an official name for something like this, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, M M I W G. And that has happened, you know, all over North America and other places in the world. There's some estimates that say Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely than the general population to go missing or to be murdered. In Canada, and 10 times more likely in the U.S. And there have been people trying to bring attention to this as well. There's an artist named Jamie Black who made these really powerful installations. That is, sometimes the most powerful ones are very simple, and that's the case here,

• 34:35Speaker 02

  where it would hang empty red dresses in public places. And it really caught on, and since 2010, Canada has recognized May 5th as Red Dress Day.

• 34:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Let's take our second break, and we'll come back. How about that?

• 34:50Speaker 02

  All right.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe, or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

• 35:42Josh Clark?

  You know, eating is a huge part of our lives. It fuels us, it brings us together, and it's one of life's great pleasures. But once a meal's over, we don't think much about what happens next, unless something starts to feel off. Because what we eat and how our bodies respond to it is complicated.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  That's right. From the very first bite, food kicks off a chain reaction, signals Moving between the gut, the brain and the immune system, the constant back and forth we can't see and often don't fully understand. So we want to introduce to you Eating Interrupted, a new podcast from iHeart Ruby Studio. It's hosted by longtime journalist and Crohn's patient Cynthia McFadden. Eating Interrupted explores everything from food allergies and intolerance and why they seem to be on the rise to how digestion changes as we age and what it's really like to live with a chronic GI condition.

• 36:26Josh Clark?

  Through personal stories and expert insight, listen in to unpack what it means when your body doesn't always respond to food the way you expect and what science is now revealing about why. Listen to Eating Interrupted on the iHeart app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 36:48Josh Clark?

  Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  That's Alan Goya, planning engineer at AT&T, and he's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, redefining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  It was going to rival anything that was already built, and that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 37:14Josh Clark?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 37:21Speaker 05

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 37:30Speaker 05

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 37:37Josh Clark?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.

• 37:41Speaker 06

  Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

• 37:54Josh Clark?

  Okay, Chuck, so you said the magic word, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. It's a thing. And Canada launched an inquiry into that group, and some people in the Highway of Tears community gave testimony for it. They released a report in 2019 and they said, look, let's just cut to the chase here. It's not like Native American tribes were living in poverty and destitution and engaged in sex work and alcoholism and drug addiction before we Euro Canadians came along and just completely disrupted their culture. So this is actually this, this problem of missing

• 38:38Josh Clark?

  and murdered Indigenous women and girls. It's, it's part of a larger, bigger picture, a history of being exploited and left vulnerable and not protected by the people who were supposed to protect them. This is not new.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, this is horrific to, to look at, but one of the, um, one of the problems is they found that whenever they have a very large group of only men around in a desolate area for one reason or another, um, sexual assaults and murders happen. And that is the case in these isolated parts of Canada where their fossil fuel industry is. So, um, what'll happen is they'll, they'll, you know, go to work on a pipeline or something and they have what's called a man camp with like a thousand dudes on site, working out in the middle of nowhere together. And historically speaking, not just here, but kind of everywhere

• 39:36Speaker 02

  this has happened, uh, dating back to the 1800s, uh, when this happens, um, there are going to be, uh, sexual assaults and murdered and disappeared women and girls nearby.

• 39:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there's reports that show like an actual correlation, like a man camp shows up, sexual assaults of Indigenous women goes up in the area too. And unfortunately, this part of Northern British Columbia that the Highway of Tears runs through, that's like the central area for Canada's resource extraction. So there are a lot of man camps there and there's plenty more coming. Um, so that in and of itself is a problem. Um, and it's not just in Canada. Apparently, um, North Dakota, uh, underwent an oil boom back in the 2000 aughts. And, uh, as more and more people were brought in as laborers, sexual assault of Indigenous women there went up too, because they're also pretty vulnerable here in the United States as well.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this happens everywhere, all over the world that that is the case. It's not just North America. They've taken some steps. I mentioned earlier some of the things that they're doing that seem like they would help out. One is we've got to stop people from hitchhiking, or at least reduce the rate of hitchhikers. They don't have any other way to get around sometimes, like you mentioned. So in 2017, British Columbia Transit moved forward on something that came out of that 2006 summit, so 11 years later, that launched three new bus routes along Highway 16. But that didn't work for very long because that worked in

• 41:18Speaker 02

  conjunction with Greyhound. And just two years after that, and like 5,000 people were now using the service, Greyhound cut back on the routes there because they weren't turning a profit. And so all of a sudden hitchhiking was back on the map again.

• 41:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yeah, and just a lot of people just don't have cars. And if you do have a car, it's probably being used by somebody else. I remember, what was that movie, Smoke Signals, I think? They talk about the rez car, where it's just like a car everybody just kind of shares, and it just gets handed from person to person when you need it. So yeah, hitchhiking is going to be a lot more convenient in some cases. Cell phone, you said also, cell phone service is a big deal too, right?

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, just not being able to call 911 very simply is a problem. So in 2021, I mean, just four years ago, it's astounding that it took this long. The provincial and federal governments said, all right, we'll chip in four and a half million bucks out of what will eventually cost 11 and a half million total to get Rogers Communications to put, to get coverage all along this highway with cell phone towers. And I think by the end of last year, the good news is nine of those 11 towers were up, and hopefully soon, the entire 450-ish mile stretch, you'll at least be able to call the cops.

• 42:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that was a big one of the 231 calls for justice that came out of that symposium in 2015. And for, I mean, that's lightning fast if, if like for this kind of stuff that it happened that, that fast. So just two more to go, everybody. Let's get it done in 2025.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 43:02Josh Clark?

  Um, there's also like a little bit of a, certainly I wouldn't call it a tussle or anything, but there's a, um, a, a growing kind of disagreement on how to approach this. Um, up to, uh, basically, I guess, 2023, the approach was exclusively, this is a horrific situation. This is tragic. This is super sad and it doesn't need to be portrayed any other way. It, it, that's just what it is. And the, uh, Carrier Sakani, um, Center, remember they, uh, run the Highway of Tears Initiative. They're like, what if we just kind of alter this a little bit? What if we make this more of a hopeful thing? Um, for a very long time,

• 43:44Josh Clark?

  there's some famous billboards along the Highway of Tears. It had pictures of three of the victims, Ramona, Delphine, and Cecilia, who isn't included in the canonical, um, victims, but she was Delphine's cousin. They went missing within six months of each other. Um, and I think Cecilia's never been found again. Their pictures around this billboard and on the billboard, it said, girls, don't hitchhike on the Highway of Tears. Killer on the loose. Well, um, that was helpful for years and years and years, but Carrier Sakani's like, you know, there's a way that some people who don't understand our way of hitchhiking and why we do it, could possibly see that as like, there's some sort of victim

• 44:25Josh Clark?

  blaming in there. So what if we just kind of remove that and make this whole more hopeful message? And they unveiled, I think, four billboards that kind of changed things a little bit, right?

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, they say, "We are hope. We are strength. Keep Highway 16 safe." And, you know, there are obviously critics of that messaging because they're saying, "We don't want to say that there's hope because right now with the way things are going with the Mounties and the investigations, like, there is no hope. So why say that if it's not hopeful?"

• 44:59Josh Clark?

  Right. Yeah. And I think the billboards coexist and the critics of that were like, "Okay, these billboards can coexist. That's a great billboard. We're fine." But it was when they proposed, I think, yeah, Carrier Sikani proposed, "Hey, let's rename the highway of tears officially the highway of hope," when activists and supporters like Gladys Raddick were like, "No, we are definitely not there yet. A lot of these cases are not solved. There's not much traction still. Like, that's ridiculous and we're not going to do that." But hopefully someday it will, it will reach that status, you know?

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:38Josh Clark?

  So until then, that's the highway of tears. Here at Stuff You Should Know, we say rest and peace to all the victims and we hope peace can come to all their families who have to live with this and the ongoing frustration of not getting the help they need. And since I said all that, it's time for listener mail.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  I'm gonna call this Mushroom Fruit. And this is from Mike. "Hey, guys, I'm a mushroom farmer from St. Louis and thought I needed to write in and give Josh some bad news. Listening to the catacombs episode and the mushroom, guys, is the fruit of its organism. The plant that it is grown from is called mycelium. Furthermore, not all fungi produce fruit, AKA mushrooms. If you or your family use mushrooms in supplement form, like mushroom powder or something like that, be sure to look for 'Made with fruiting bodies only' on the packaging or something of that nature. A lot of manufacturers are using myceliated

• 46:39Speaker 02

  grain without any mushrooms to make these products. That's like going to the grocery store for apples and leaving with most of an apple tree." There's a lot more to that discussion, but at the moment and with the current data, I say that if it advertises mushrooms, then it needs to have mushrooms. Include, I've included some pics of the farm. And my fur babies. If you come to St. Louis, please come to the farm for a tour. And there are some great pictures of these beautiful fruiting mushrooms. One terribly lazy, looks like golden, long-haired golden retriever type, laying with a candy cane lovey, and a awful terrible tabby cat laying on a box, as cats do.

• 47:24Josh Clark?

  Very nice. That was a very mean email. Who is that, Mike?

• 47:29Speaker 02

  That's Mike.

• 47:30Josh Clark?

  But I get your point, Mike, and I appreciate that because I've been studiously avoiding any mushroom supplement that has the word "fruiting" on it. So maybe I should just bite the bullet. You know, I can put a piece of like electrical tape over that part and just take the supplements as needed.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, bite the mushroom.

• 47:47Josh Clark?

  If you, if you want to be like Mike and get in touch with us and turn my stomach, you can do that. Send us an email to [email protected].

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.