A song to dampen the echoes of the past

(This was first published in the lowdownonline.com in October 2014)

By Oona Woods

Twenty years ago Carol Anne Goodman fled on foot — driven by a powerful instinct to protect her unborn daughter.

A few years later, her beloved aunt was murdered by a Montreal serial killer.

Goodman’s instinct to protect women from violence is still running strong.

Currently filming a video on her farm for her song Lost and Found, she hopes to raise money and awareness for missing and murdered Aboriginal women.

“I just felt so strongly that I wanted to get this music out there,” explains Goodman.

Her daughter — now 19 — has just left home to live in Ottawa. Keenly aware that Aboriginal woman are almost four times more likely to experience violence, it is the reason she’s compelled to act.

And rates of domestic abuse against Aboriginal women are more than three times higher than against non-Aboriginal women — a statistic Goodman personally experienced in the context of the aftermath of residential schools. She is not Aboriginal but her children are. She remembers meeting her first husband, a handsome Aboriginal man, when she was her daughter’s age.

“He was very charismatic,” she recalls, now 41. “It was a whirlwind. He was spiritual in a way I was longing for. He told me when we first met that I was going to have daughter and her name would be Tshatshiten, which means ‘I love you’ in Algonquin. I thought ‘no, that’s not what I want,’ but then I had a dream that I was sobbing uncontrollably to my mother across the table and she asked what was wrong, and I said ‘because I chose not to have this child.’ So I took that as a sign. It was a conscious decision.”

Goodman was in her second trimester when she realized what she had taken on.

“He was in the residential schools, I thought he would take care of me, but he couldn’t do that. The first time I got to the reserve I was four months pregnant. It was a real culture shock,” she says. “His father was really drunk and tried to kiss me and was staring at my belly saying how beautiful she would be.”

The exchange gave her the creeps, and a distinct impression her child was in danger of being molested.

“This is what he learned from the residential schools. I just started running, it was like a primal thing. I ran and ran and ran, even though I was pregnant. That was my first wake up call, I was like, ‘there’s something really wrong here’. It was a really difficult seven years. There were a lot of really beautiful moments — and a lot of really difficult moments.”

Goodman had a son a year later but the past continued to wreak havoc on their marriage.

“The relationship became progressively more abusive and I became more and more isolated from my family,” says Goodman. “We moved a lot. We went further and further north until we moved into the woods.”

The relationship lasted seven years and Goodman says he is not doing well.

“The last time I saw him he said voices were telling him to kill me and the kids,” she claims.

When her son and daughter were pre-schoolers, tragedy struck her side of the family. Goodman’s “aunt”, a woman named Anna Yarnold, was murdered in Montreal by serial killer William Patrick Fyfe. He remained at large a year after Yarnold’s murder.

“We always had holidays together, went camping in the summer. My parents were very strict and (Anna) was so easy-going and used to just shower us with gifts…She was an artist, she was really fun and she was very emotional. I felt like she understood me. She lost a son to a drunk driver when he was 18. She kind of fell apart.”

Goodman says Yarnold’s husband was the one who found her murdered body.

“My uncle went looking for her, they were separated but he hadn’t heard from her since the previous day — so he knew something was wrong. He found her in the garden. She had been running away from her home and she had been hit in the back of the head with a rock.”

Yarnold was the only one of Fyfe’s nine known victims who wasn’t stabbed and raped, which kept investigators from tying her death to the other already-connected cases.

There were at least a half-dozen detectives investigating.

“When they released the house back to my cousin and she went though things, like banking statements. She realized the night auntie was killed someone took out money from the bank machine twice after she had died. Because we knew she had been killed at 6 o’clock. They traced images from the (bank) machine and saw that man, but it was a shame, he had killed again by the time they found him.”

Violence against women in society haunts Goodman.

“I know I have felt fear walking late at night, and what I can’t stop thinking about is for Aboriginal women it is more dangerous. My daughter is Aboriginal and it just terrifies me. I’m just hoping Canadians and anyone who hears the song will feel the call, most of us, we’re somebody’s mother or daughter, or parent or we have a loved one who’s female.”

Goodman says it was Joni Mitchell who inspired her to write the song Lost and Found when she read how Mitchell’s high school teacher told her to write about her own life.

“Nietzsche said ‘write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit,’” said Goodman.

And the Wakefield community is on-hand to help her. Local videographer David Irvine said he was happy to film her music video for free.

“When she first approached me a couple months ago it was just a video,” said Irvine. “When I saw the cause on Facebook it just didn’t seem right to charge for it. I just need to do what I can, when I can.”

Goodman says she is overwhelmed by the support she has already received and, once completed, plans to post the video on YouTube and Facebook.

(Here it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5msV9r1EkU)