Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Once we got started, I discovered that investigating a murder isn’t that hard. It just involves a lot of talking to as many people as you can. In the course of about a year, I got tons of information about Norma’s life. I was able to find and get her Bible and give it to her mother after fourteen years. She had this Bible that she made a lot of notes in throughout her young life that was really important to her. From talking to people, I found out that she used to stay in a rooming house in the Downtown Eastside with a man, and he was still living there. He was reluctant to talk; I never did get him to open the door to his room, but I stood outside and we talked through the closed door, and after three visits he slid the Bible out. (It also involved a six-pack of beer, but I never told my executive producer about that.) I was able to give Norma’s Bible back to her mother, and that was a beautiful thing. All kinds of things like that happened. If you just start talking to people, it’s amazing how much stuff will come out and how suddenly you will unearth things. I put down a lot of tobacco during that year. I had also learned on the Traces of Missing Women trip to feast the women on the other side, so I continued that practice. I made sure to give them water to drink. I hadn’t done this on the research trip, and it was startling when at the sweat to close off the journey Wanda received a message that the women were thirsty and that I had neglected that piece—they weren’t an...