Family, community mourning Commercial Drive ‘fixtures’ Frank and Danse Williams

Family says Frank and Danse Williams were residential school survivors who endured years of trauma before they became a fixture on Commercial Drive, where some neighbours say you would never know their pain by the way they brightened up your day.

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Editor’s Note: This story contains descriptions of child abuse and the trauma caused by residential schools. Emotional support or assistance for those who are affected by the residential school system can be found at Indian Residential School Survivors Society toll-free 1 (800) 721-0066 or 24 hr Crisis Line 1 (866) 925-4419.

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Anyone who has spent time on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive knows Frank and Danse. The Williams brothers were inseparable, often spending their days out front of Home Hardware carving, petting passing dogs, and chatting with their neighbours. That space seems empty now.

Frank “Sonny” Williams and Randy “Danse” Williams have both died, passing away within weeks of each other.

Their sister Merrilee Phyfiher, through a combination of laughter and tears, describes what she is going to miss most about them, and it’s something familiar to so many people who live in or pass through the neighbourhood.

“Randy always had that twinkle in his eye, I don’t know what it was. He lit up everything. And Sonny’s face — it was his smile. His whole face smiled not a little half-assed smile. He’d go all the way,” she says.

“I used to love watching them carve, and hear them sing, and talk about our culture. Even though they were hurting, they still loved our culture.”

‘They were very proud to be Indigenous’

Phyfiher and her brothers are Nuu-chah-nulth. Their mother a member of the Mowachaht First Nation, their father a member of the Ahousat First Nation.

Frank died on April 1. He was 50. Phyfiher says he smoked cannabis he did not know was laced with fentanyl. Danse died after going into cardiac arrest and ending up in the ICU. He passed on May 27 — what would have been his brother’s 51st birthday. Phyfiher lives in San Diego, but was on the phone with Danse during his last moments.

An elder from the friendship centre was by his bedside.

“He sang one of the native songs that [Danse] liked, and we prayed for him. I was just telling him it’s okay to go to sleep because I could see he was having a hard time breathing. They kept him comfortable, but I just told him, ‘Go to sleep, that it’s okay. I told him I was going to be okay,'” she says.

“It’s hard when you have somebody so close, and their heart is breaking so much. I know that’s what killed Randy, was not being with Sonny or me.”

A community memorial will be held for the brothers in Grandview Park on June 23. A temporary memorial outside of the hardware store made up of laminated photos, flowers, and handwritten cards will be replaced with a permanent plaque or maybe a memorial bench.

Ed Wilkerson owns the Home Hardware, and says he can’t even remember when exactly the brothers started spending their days on the street in front of his shop — but describes them as fixtures.

“First one came and then the other came, they’re both carvers. They just asked if they could sit in front of the store and do some carving. I said ‘Sure’ and then they never really left,” he explains.

“Frank and Danse were my de facto greeters at the store. They were very personable. They talked to people as they walked by. They had a lot of clients that came in to get carvings from them. They had their addiction problems, but at the same time, they were very vocal about who they were. They were very proud to be Indigenous. They really enjoyed living, working on the Drive.”

Wilkerson says he never considered asking the pair to move, saying they were members of the community who were making a contribution.

Phyfiher says her brothers had apartments, but the Drive was where they actually lived.

“Even when they were mad at each other, it was funny, because one would be on one side of the street and the other side, but when it was hungry time or drink time, they’d take their things and start drinking or eating. They never stayed mad at each other,” she says.

“Commercial Drive has been their home. I see why a lot of people love them. The people on the Drive are the most amazing because they always made sure the boys ate. They might as well just name it after them — that’s their street. That was their therapy being on the Drive”

‘There’s just too much pain and agony behind that residential schooling that we all endured’ 

Their lives started far from East Vancouver, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. A cycle of trauma and abuse began before they were born, when their father was taken to residential school. When Phyfiher and her brothers were school-aged they were taken from their home.

“There’s just too much pain and agony behind that residential schooling that we all endured in our lives. I remember they grabbed a lot of us kids off the reservation, Ahousat reservation, and they brought us over to Tofino — they had a residential school there. They had all the boys in one area and all the girls in another area, and we could barely see each other,” Phyfiher says.

“During school hours only, I got to see them. We attempted running away, we attempted suicide because we got tired of being beaten up all the time.”

Speaking in their language was punished with brutal physical abuse, but Phyfiher says both of her brothers fought their whole lives to stay connected to their culture.

“They knew a lot about our culture, more than I did. Every time we met, they always taught me something, a song, a word, something. I learned how to carve with them, bead with them. We did a lot together, just enough to survive.”

‘If we were offered help, as kids, we probably would have been a lot better’

After residential school, they went into foster care. After a while they moved back with their father, but after abuse in that home, they were apprehended again.

“They kept taking us in and out of foster care, because everybody promised us that my dad was going to get help and we were going to get counseling and all our childhood we didn’t even know right from wrong because everything we did was wrong — no matter what it was,” Phyfiher explains.

“Dealing with their emotions was the hardest thing. If we were offered help, as kids, we probably would have been a lot better. Growing up, we didn’t understand what our feelings were. Kids that are abused really do need therapy because they need to understand what’s happening to them and that it’s not their fault.”

The brothers turned to drugs and alcohol to cope, and Phyfiher said they continued to be failed by the government and social services. They preferred the streets to the housing they were placed,units in which their sister says it was too difficult for them to stay away from drugs during periods when they were trying not to use. When Danse was hit by a dump truck and had two broken legs he had to crawl up the stairs to get to his room because there was no elevator in the building. Several years later, when he was stabbed in the neck he was placed in an assisted living facility where he was given food that he could not swallow.

“He went from 165 pounds down to 110 because they weren’t giving him what he needed,” Phyfiher says, adding everyone who dropped off food for Danse on the Drive knew he had trouble swallowing and would make sure to bring him soup or shepherd’s pie.

But not everyone was kind to Frank and Danse. As Indigenous men who lived most of their lives on the street they were targeted for ridicule and racism.

“They felt like they were getting picked on a lot. People saying ‘Oh, they’re nothing, just drug addicts and alcoholics, they’re not going to do anything for themselves,'” she says.

“But they have done a lot more than what people think. They were actually amazing.”

Frank was a counsellor in Victoria and Vancouver, and ran a recovery house in Surrey until the early 2000s. Danse was a keeper of culture, and a gifted artist.

“He was more hands-on with his carvings and learning, our history, our songs. He always talked to elders, no matter where they were from. He said you need to learn from Elders to survive in this world.”

The brothers’ deaths are the most recent of many losses for Phyfiher and her family.

“We went through a lot over the past few years. We lost our first cousin that was close to us, and then we lost my dad, my twin daughter she died of Huntington’s, an auntie, one of my other brothers, and then another cousin, and then Frank and Randy.”

‘These two remarkable men died victims of systemic, anti-Indigenous racism’

Melanie Mark is the MLA for the riding that includes Commercial Drive, her office less than a block away from the Home Hardware. Earlier this month, she spoke to her colleagues at the legislature about the lives and deaths of the brothers, who she counted among her constituents.

“Throughout their lives, Frank and Danse endured what many in this chamber will never know. In spite of that, they loved and were loved, had an eagerness to connect with people and a generosity second to none,” she said.

“Their death certificates don’t say it, but these two remarkable men died victims of systemic, anti-Indigenous racism.”

The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996. The recent discovery of the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves in Kamloops has shone a spotlight once again on the horrific abuses perpetrated in those institutions, and the intergenerational trauma that continues to devastate Indigenous families.

In 2019, 65 per cent of kids in government care in British Columbia were Indigenous. Nation-wide, the 2016 census found 52.2 per cent of children in foster care were Indigenous, despite the fact that only 7.7 per cent of children are First Nations, Inuit, and Metis.

The opioid and toxic drug crisis continues to disproportionately impact Indigenous people in B.C., with the most recent data from the First Nations Health Authority showing 254 deaths in 2020 — the highest number since the public health emergency was declared five years ago While First Nations people make up 3.3 per cent of the province’s population, they account for 15 per cent of deaths. “First Nations people died at 5.3 times the rate of other B.C. residents in 2020,” according to the health authority.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action included “closing the gap in health outcomes” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, including a gap in overall life expectancy. Statistics Canada, in response to this, published data in 2019. Noting that there are a number of things that make measuring life expectancy difficult, the report found that First Nations People die much younger. An Indigenous child born in 2011 could expect to have a life 10 years shorter than a non-Indigenous child.

Mark urged her colleagues in the provincial government to remember the Williams brothers, and to consider “the profound harms that racism inflicted on Frank and Danse and the thousands more who suffered early, heartbreaking deaths, and those thousands who still live amongst us in our communities.”

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