The illustrious list of people who admired Ms. Kingsley included Canadian senators, political leaders, a decorated lieutenant-general and people around the world moved by her passionate work on behalf of Indigenous and sexually exploited children and youth.
But no amount of love and support was enough whenever those ghosts came for her.
“Sometimes people have the impression there was a transformation, like a cloak, and I just took it off. ‘You’ve overcome so much,’ ” Ms. Kingsley said in the 2002 film Recognizing the Person, which documented her journey from a violent childhood to international renown as a brilliant and charismatic young leader changing thinking and attitudes around the sexual exploitation of children.
“I don’t know if I overcame any of it, to be honest. I think I live with it every single day. There is no destination that you get to when you’re healed and that’s it. It’s like this constant path you’re on.”
That path ended in the palliative-care ward of a Vancouver Island hospital on Nov. 30, where Ms. Kingsley died of a post-COVID-19 respiratory infection at the age of 52. She spent her final month in hospital surrounded by friends from the Nanaimo, B.C., women’s shelter where she had been living after a decade marked by poverty and addiction.
“There is this belief that you have to have your hurts and harms fixed and healed before you can go out and do this work,” says Megan Lewis, who met Ms. Kingsley in the mid-1990s when both were emerging as powerful young voices on behalf of sexually exploited youth. “But Cherry was absolutely an example of someone who fought for other people while continuing to fight the same hurts in herself.”
Ms. Kingsley was called upon many times during her years in the spotlight to tell the haunting story of her escape, along with her younger sister, from a violent stepfather when she was 11. The children walked along the railway tracks for three days from Calgary to Cochrane before being picked up by authorities and put into foster care.
But foster care only launched a new painful chapter, as Ms. Kingsley was placed in 20 foster homes over the next eight years. In the midst of such upheaval, she fled to Vancouver at age 14 with an older couple who she thought were friends – until they turned her out to work the streets as a condition of staying with them.
By the time she returned to Calgary in 1988, she had been trafficked in British Columbia and California and was using street drugs to try to anesthetize herself from the pain. A police officer introduced her to a young law graduate, Kim Pate, who connected Ms. Kingsley to the Alberta Youth in Care Network and hired her for a new peer leadership project for youth with experiences in custody and foster care.
“Cherry’s work that summer started opening up opportunities for her in Canada and globally. She was an amazing communicator and thinker. She was brilliant at putting a human face on the big issues,” recalls Ms. Pate, who went on to a career leading the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies before being appointed to the Senate in 2016.
Former senator Landon Pearson – one of many lifelong fans who helped bring Ms. Kingsley’s message to larger and larger audiences – vividly remembers her speaking at the 1996 World Congress on Commercial Exploitation of Children in Stockholm. Ms. Kingsley’s son Dakota, her only child, was four years old at the time.
“She was part of a panel with various religious groups represented, and they went down the line saying they cherished children, they were committed to fighting against sexual exploitation, and so on. Cherry was fourth or fifth in line and when it came her turn, said, ‘Well, no, they don’t.’ I saw her speak truth to power.”
Surprised to learn that only three of 1,300 delegates at the Stockholm congress had been sexually exploited youths themselves, Ms. Kingsley and Ms. Pearson returned to Canada committed to organizing an event that would do things differently.
They worked with Peers Victoria to put on Out From the Shadows, a week-long symposium in Victoria that brought 60 young people from throughout the Americas to share their lived expertise on sexual exploitation while policy makers and politicians listened.
That “child prostitutes” were in fact sexually exploited children was an uncommon idea in those years.
“Cherry really started to be able to articulate what was wrong with the concept of children being sexually available,” says Ms. Pate, whose close relationship with Ms. Kingsley and her son included times when both lived with Ms. Pate and her family. “Cherry became more and more clear, and Landon provided more international opportunities.”
In 2000, Ms. Kingsley and Melanie Mark spent months together on the road gathering the stories of sexually exploited Indigenous youth across Canada for the report Sacred Lives. The unforgettable trip was equal parts exhilarating and traumatizing as the young women documented one horrifying story of abuse after another, recalls Ms. Mark, now B.C.’s Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport.
“I was 25 at the time, and had the honour to be Cherry’s handler,” Ms. Mark says. “She called me her medicine. I was in Japan with her, Ottawa, all across Canada – and everywhere, she lit up the room and always left people in tears.”
That same year, Ms. Kingsley received the Governor-General’s Award after being nominated by then-MP Ethel Blondin-Andrew, who – like so many others influenced by Ms. Kingsley – felt a personal bond with her.
Victoria filmmaker Peter Campbell says he read news of that award and instantly knew he’d just seen the happy ending to his next project. The resulting 2002 documentary, Recognizing the Person, captures Ms. Kingsley’s sharp insights, quick wit but also pain as she and the film crew undertake an epic cross-Canada road trip to reconnect Ms. Kingsley with the people and places of her past.
Mr. Campbell plans to use some of that footage for a video tribute to Ms. Kingsley for her funeral at Alkali Lake next spring on her home Secwepemc First Nation territory.
But even while she dazzled international audiences, Ms. Kingsley continued to struggle in private. “She was expected to be all together, but without the day-to-day supports she needed for that,” Ms. Pate says.
No one recognized that more than Ms. Kingsley.
“Everyone thinks when you quit drugs, life is great, right? Like drugs are the problem,” Ms. Kingsley said in 2005. “All of a sudden I quit drugs, I’m straight now and my life still sucks – only now I’m really grimly aware of it.”
Anyone who has seen what it takes to support friends and family with mental-health problems knows how hard that work is, Ms. Pearson says. “There was no one to do that for Cherry. I don’t know if there was anything that any of us could have done that would have replaced what she didn’t have in the first place.”
Disowned by her mother after going into foster care, Ms. Kingsley’s only family connection for many years was her sister Terry-Lynn Murray, who had run away with her down the railway tracks when they were children. But in 2002, their mother’s sister, Marcelle Hines, spotted a Reader’s Digest article on Kingsley’s Governor-General Award and reached out to connect Ms. Kingsley to more of her family.
Ms. Kingsley leaves her son Dakota, 29, as well as Ms. Murray and two younger half-brothers, Eric and Cyrus Nelson, and older half-sister Leanne Lewis. Ms. Lewis was put up for adoption as a newborn and didn’t find Ms. Kingsley and the rest of her birth family until 10 years ago, when Ms. Hines went looking for her.
Ms. Kingsley’s life had taken a hard turn for the worse by the time the sisters met, Ms. Lewis says, adding that they had few chances for time together.
“But at least she spent her last month in hospital. I’m grateful that it gave her that clarity at the end,” says Ms. Lewis, who is raising funds for Ms. Kingsley’s tombstone and funeral service through GoFundMe. “She wasn’t on street drugs – she didn’t overdose. Her son was able to visit her that month. Her brain was clear.”
The difficult circumstances of Ms. Kingsley’s last years have many friends wondering whether there was more they could have done.
“Lots of folks fell away,” notes Ms. Pate, whose last contact with Ms. Kingsley was in the summer. “I remember her once saying, ‘I’m getting older – I’m no longer the exceptional youth who has been in care.’ But she also didn’t like to let us know when she wasn’t doing well.”
Ms. Pearson now questions whether her efforts to help Ms. Kingsley publicly share her story helped or harmed her.
“I felt there was so much good in her – I wanted to help her try to be what she could be,” she says. “But was it the wrong thing to help her get that profile? On the other hand, she really did change things. Out of her story, there’s something good – even though it’s not for Cherry.”
Another high-profile supporter, retired lieutenant-general Roméo Dallaire, remembered Ms. Kingsley as an extraordinary young woman, but “already so martyred by the cultural displacement from her First Nation roots, and abused by an apathetic social milieu she was thrown into,” he said in a written statement.
“Cherry Kingsley was a noble warrior, a proud mother and a brave soul,” Lt.-Gen. Dallaire wrote. “Let us cherish her memory with the respect and honour it so rightfully deserves.”
Published in The Globe and Mail on Jan. 2, 2022
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