Power and relationships

We need to consider what the facts signify

I wish to add another response to the recent publication of the book, ‘’The Rosary and the Rifle.’’ (Story of P.E.I. woman’s murder in 1951 told in new book, July 15)

My uncle, Ernie MacAulay, has done an exemplary job of pulling together the facts associated with a complex event that rocked our small community just east of Souris almost 70 years ago. It is heartening to see a male family member use their experience and skills to contribute to an understanding of violence against women and the ways that communities and systems collude to condone violence. Women have been doing this work on their own for too long.

Now that he has done so, we need to consider what these facts signify, not just about this individual case, but about power and relationships on P.E.I.

The story of Mary Ann MacKinnon’s murder has fascinated me ever since I was in my early teens, and I discovered old newspaper clippings while rummaging in my grandparents’ attic. I read that my father’s cousin, Estelle MacKinnon, had been sexually assaulted by a neighbour and former boyfriend, that she and her mother shared this information with the RCMP, the RCMP laid charges, the neighbour awaited trial, and, just before the trial began, he rode to the MacKinnon home and shot my great-aunt dead.

Joey MacDonald then faced another trial where, with the help of an all-male judge and jury, he escaped hanging. Instead, drawing upon an old colonial law, the court banished him from the Island, and lived out his life in British Columbia.

This story told me everything I needed to know about how power worked in my community. Men were dominant and, if you challenged them, you were putting yourself at risk, not only from the perpetrator himself, but from the social and institutional systems that maintain this dominance.

But that was not the narrative presented at the murder trial. Instead, Joey MacDonald was portrayed as a young man overcome by his feelings, driven to ‘’insanity’’ by his attraction to a beautiful girl.

The current Guardian article contains echoes of this false narrative, detailing the shocking nature of the crime and its elements of “passion” without attending the realities of violence against women. Sexual assault is not about experiencing an overwhelming sexual attraction. It is about exerting power over another person. Then and now, men who assault women feel entitled to this power and become enraged when women refuse to submit and/or seek to make them accountable for their actions. It was Joey MacDonald’s rage, not his “passion,” that drove him to murder.

This letter is not meant to focus solely on one man’s actions, or to shame him or his extended family, but to suggest that we use this story to illustrate the reality of what women have silently endured on this Island. Crimes like rape and murder are extremes at the end of a spectrum of behaviours in which men dominate and women accommodate. When we discuss stories of violence against women, we need to be mindful of this context.

I hope that the MacKinnon family’s decision to tell their mother’s story helps them and their descendants. They have suffered enormously. And I hope it helps Islanders acknowledge the realities of the power structures that existed then and continue to operate in the present.

Can you imagine the chilling effect that Mary Ann’s murder had on Island women who were harbouring their own stories of threats, abuse, harassment, and assault at the time? Maybe, 70 years later, her story can have a different outcome, inspiring men to notice and attend to their feelings before enacting them in such devastating ways and to reimagine the legal system as a key means of establishing collective responsibility for ending violence against women.