Following accusations that she had abducted her son and staged their deaths, a well-known Canadian author entered a guilty plea.
Credit: BBC
In the summer of 2022, Dawn Walker, a Saskatchewanian indigenous woman, was reported missing, leading to a public hunt for her.
Two weeks later, she and her kid were discovered safely in the US state of Oregon.
Walker, 49, claims that she ran away from marital abuse and that’s why she vanished.
She was later accused of nine crimes by the police, including identity theft, passport forgery, and kidnapping of parents.
In the case, she had first entered a not guilty plea.
However, Walker pled guilty on Thursday to three crimes in a Saskatoon court, including passport forgery, possession of a counterfeit document, and parental abduction in violation of a custody agreement.
Prosecutors and attorneys for the defendant have requested a 12-month conditional sentence from the judge, which would entail community service and an 18-month probationary period.
The final punishment will now be decided by Judge Brad Mitchell.
Dawn Walker- An Author and A Lawyer
With a career spanning more than ten years, Walker, also known as Dawn Dumont, is a well-known author and advocate for Indigenous people in Canada. Her most recent book, The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour, was shortlisted for Canada’s oldest literary award, the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, while the police investigation into her carried on. In the most recent election in Canada, she campaigned as a federal member of parliament for the ruling Liberal Party and also holds a law degree from Queen’s University in Ontario.
Walker declined to discuss her ongoing legal matter when responding to written inquiries from the BBC earlier this year, but she did state that her experiences as an indigenous woman whose family has suffered racism and colonial brutality have had a significant impact on her life’s work.
She stated,She has always worked to help those who walk with her and the generations that will come after me and to call attention to ongoing injustice against First Nations people. National and international attention is required to address racism and the legacy of colonialism, particularly in the province of Saskatchewan. Walker also talked about her brief incarceration, observing that most of the ladies in her immediate vicinity were likewise Native American.
She told the BBC, she has also witnessed that they were manhandled once they were in the institutions, with numerous of them unfit to pierce attorneys or internal health and medical care.Statistics Canada from 2021 show that the rate of incarceration for Indigenous women is fifteen times advanced than that ofnon-Indigenous women. Despite making up only 5 of all Canadian women, indigenous women reckoned for half of all womanlike captures in civil incarcerations last time.
Why did Walker fake her and her son’s own death?
Saskatoon Police first received a missing person’s report for Walker on July 24, 2022. Officers at the time stated that she had not been seen for two days, on July 22. Fears that Walker and her child had been hurt were stoked when they claimed that her Ford F-150 and some of her possessions had been discovered at Saskatchewan’s Chief White Park. Following a two-week investigation that involved searching the South Saskatchewan River, authorities declared on August 5, 2022, that Walker and her child had been located safely in Oregon City, more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away.
By monitoring her bank transactions for groceries, petrol, Netflix and Airbnb rentals, they had been able to track her. Following her detention, Walker was charged with two charges of identity theft, one of which was a misdemeanor and the other a felony by US officials. After that, she was turned over to Canadian police, who filed more accusations against her and halted her US legal proceedings. Along with being momentarily imprisoned, Walker also had custody of her child taken away.
