WFN widow still looking for justice, launches nationwide study

It’s been nearly a year since Bonnie Watts was evicted from the home she shared with her late husband and she’s still not backing down from the people who sent her packing.

She still wants Westbank First Nation to reconsider the policies she believes tears at the fabric of families.

She still wants restitution. And she's going to pursue it all while exposing stories of this kind throughout Canada, with the help of a grant funding a nationwide study.

“I have had time to step back and think it through,” Watts said in a recent interview. “(What was done) is a hostile act against love. What could be more pathetic than a hostile act against love?”

Watts was evicted from her home April 6, as a series of events relating to her First Nation heritage, her husband’s death and the laws of the Westbank First Nation rolled out.

READ MORE: iN PERSPECTIVE: Bonnie Watts explains her eviction from WFN in her own words

READ MORE: 'I'm not a victim:' Widow evicted from Westbank First Nation vows to keep fighting

READ MORE: MEMBERS ONLY: Widow evicted from Westbank First Nation home after husband dies

READ MORE: Woman evicted by Westbank First Nation taking eviction story to national stage

In September 2017, after 10 years of renting a home on Westbank First Nation land, Watts’s husband Mike entered a residential lease agreement with an option to purchase a home. Mike, a WFN member, and Bonnie, a member of an Ontario band, lived there together until he passed away on April 27, 2018.

Among other things, Mike’s will directed the primary residence at the time of his death be leased to his wife for 49 years or until her death.

Watts continued living on the property and paying rent to the band but on June 15, 2018, she was advised the lease option agreement could not be transferred because it was a community property.  A formal notice to end tenancy was delivered to her on Nov. 28, 2018.

According to the Westbank First Nation housing regulation, if the lease to purchase agreement has been in place for less than 10 years at the time of the death of a tenant, the property does not form part of the deceased’s estate and must be vacated within 60 days of the member’s death, Justice Dennis Hori wrote in a B.C. Supreme Court decision not allowing Watt’s court action to block the eviction.

She was forced to move.

She's still waiting for the $15,000 she said the band owes her for improvements on the house. There's more than that at stake, she said.

Watts often considers what her late husband Mike would have said about the band turning its back on her, his widow.

“I knew my husband very well and he was a good man and a lighthearted man, who believed in getting along,” she said.

“He wasn’t confrontational, but he was strong. He would be absolutely ashamed of them.”

She believes her husband would have felt betrayed by the WFN.  

“They didn’t recognize a marital union, a legal and binding contract or a legally registered will,” she said. “If you don’t recognize that, it’s a pathway to ignoring to what people are doing in self-determining their own lives.”

She said the approach is pitiful in how it treats native women and because Mike was instrumental in getting a self-government agreement, it's especially galling.

“He worked on it for 10 years — he was one of the 10 people who got it through parliament,” she said. “He was in charge of a lot of PR work around self-government and was involved with treaty negotiations. The vision in self-government was to create more freedom and get out from under the Indian Act, which was confining. What this did is replicate the approach the Indian Act took. What’s the difference if it was native or non native?”

Although she’s been through heartache and trauma in the aftermath of being widowed, kicked out of her home and then isolated from the community she was once so close to, there have been some positives in the months that have passed.

She’s learned that she’s not the only person to have faced loss of this kind and has been tapped for speaking engagements, raising awareness and understanding.

“This kind of thing has been happening quite frequently, so we are starting to deal with this phenomenon against native women,” she said. “I am an active participant in a native women group… and we are gathering the stories of others who have had similar life experiences."

With newly secured grant funding, these women will gather the data on this issue for a nationwide study, and Watts said it will be used in an eventual constitutional challenge.

"The WFN government is going to be the benchmark for the problems facing (native women,)" she said. "They are not getting off the hook, they will be exposed."

“Typically as native people we work things out from family to family, we don’t call people into court when we have disputes, but there was no choice with this,” she said, adding later that the whole thing has been a "spiritual assault."

“We are not laying down and rolling over. We are not accepting it as an appropriate response.”

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