Not Even Past: Marking Current Challenges to Indigenous Health Outcomes

Written by Elvis Agyapong

I want to begin this a long way from Winnipeg—in Ghana, where I grew up.

In Ghana, the burial of unclaimed and unidentified bodies has periodically become a public-health concern. When bodies remain unclaimed in public mortuaries for extended periods, authorities may issue notices asking families to identify and claim their relatives. Bodies that remain unidentified or unclaimed may eventually be disposed of through mass burial. This addresses practical concerns such as mortuary congestion and public health, but it also raises difficult questions about identification, documentation, dignity, and family notification.

What happens when someone dies and their family does not know? How far should institutions go in attempting to locate relatives? And what happens to a family when the person they have been searching for has already been buried?

I begin in Ghana because these questions returned to me when I encountered the story of Wilson Hall in Winnipeg.

The circumstances are different, and I do not intend to suggest that the Ghanaian and Winnipeg contexts are equivalent. Rather, the comparison raises a common human question: What happens when a person dies at the margins of society?

Today, I explore that question through homelessness in Winnipeg and, particularly, through the lives and deaths of Wilson Hall and his nephew, Faron Hall. Their experiences show that homelessness is more than the absence of housing. It is also a health and social issue involving relationships with institutions, family, community, culture, and place. And, as Wilson's experience demonstrates, some forms of social and institutional disconnection can continue even after death.

Homelessness, Health, and Social Health

Homelessness is commonly understood as the absence of stable physical shelter. But that definition does not capture its full health and social consequences.

People experiencing homelessness may face greater exposure to illness and injury, difficulties obtaining continuous health care, poverty, violence, social isolation, and disruptions to relationships with family and community. Research conducted in Winnipeg has demonstrated some of these connections. Studies of homelessness and health have identified barriers in accessing appropriate health services and the difficulties of maintaining continuity of care while unhoused.

The absence of a permanent address can itself become a barrier. Recent Winnipeg research, for example, describes the difficulties unhoused people face in obtaining identification and health cards without a fixed address. These documents can then affect access to medication, housing, and other services. In this way, homelessness can reproduce itself through a series of interconnected institutional barriers.

Homelessness is therefore not simply a question of where someone sleeps. It can influence whether a person receives health care, possesses identification, accesses medication, maintains relationships with institutions, and remains connected with systems that are supposed to provide support.

The scale of homelessness in Winnipeg makes these questions especially significant. Recent research based on Winnipeg's Street Census demonstrates both the extent of homelessness and the substantial overrepresentation of Indigenous people among those experiencing it. That overrepresentation cannot be separated from colonial history. Residential schools, child welfare interventions, displacement, discrimination, and other colonial systems have repeatedly disrupted Indigenous relationships with land, family, community, and culture. Recent Winnipeg research similarly connects Indigenous homelessness with the continuing effects of colonial institutions and the severing of relationships among Indigenous people, their families, land, culture, and ways of life.

This is important because Indigenous homelessness cannot adequately be understood simply as the absence of a building. Research on Indigenous experiences of Housing First in Winnipeg argues that “home” is relational, social, and cultural. Connections to land, family, community, and culture can themselves contribute to health and wellbeing.

This broader understanding of homelessness provides an important context for the story of Wilson Hall.

Wilson Hall

Wilson Hall was an Indigenous man who experienced homelessness in Winnipeg. In April 2013, at the age of sixty-four, Wilson suffered a heart attack on a Winnipeg street and later died.

His identity was known. Yet his family was not informed of his death.

Wilson was subsequently buried at Brookside Cemetery. For months, his relatives did not know where he was. According to news reports, Wilson's family eventually filed a missing-person report. It was only after that that they learned that the person they had been searching for had been dead and buried for months.

This distinction is important.

Wilson Hall was not simply an unidentified body.

He had a name. He had relatives. And there were people looking for him.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner later investigated why his relatives had not been located. Reports indicated that the office acknowledged an error: Vital Statistics records that might have assisted in locating relatives had not been checked. Information available through the provincial welfare system also did not reach the investigator.

On paper, that might sound like an administrative error involving databases, records and communication. But the consequences were profoundly human. Wilson's relatives lost the opportunity to learn of his death when it occurred. They lost the opportunity to participate in the immediate decisions surrounding his burial. They lost the opportunity to begin mourning with knowledge of what had happened to him.

Instead, they were searching for a missing relative who had already been buried.

And the location of that burial brings us to Brookside Cemetery.

Number 345

When Wilson Hall was buried at Brookside, his grave did not initially bear his name. It was marked by a small stone bearing a number: 345.

That detail has particular significance for me because I have encountered similar markers through my research. As a research assistant working with Dr. Mary Jane McCallum on the Brookside Cemetery project, I have gone to Brookside as part of our efforts to locate graves. During that work, I encountered several graves whose markers contained only numbers rather than names. Seeing those markers physically in the cemetery gives a different meaning to what might otherwise appear to be a simple administrative practice.

A number can identify the location of a burial. But by itself, it tells us almost nothing about the person buried there. It does not tell us their name. It does not tell us their life story. It does not tell us who loved them.

And it does not tell us the relationships through which that individual was known.

This is particularly important in Wilson Hall's case.

For cemetery administration, 345 identified a burial location. But Wilson Hall was not simply burial number 345. He was a person with a biography. He was someone's relative. He belonged to a family and community.

The Winnipeg Free Press reported that the row in which Wilson was buried contained sixteen graves. Many had been paid for through provincial welfare, and half were marked only with numbers. My own experience seeing numbered graves at Brookside gives that description a physical reality.

At the same time, we must be careful about what those markers allow us to conclude. I cannot assume that every numbered grave I encountered belonged to someone who had experienced homelessness. Nor can I assume that every person beneath a numbered marker had relatives who were not notified. A numbered marker alone cannot tell us that.

What makes Wilson Hall's case different is that we know something about the person behind the number. We know his identity was known. We know he had relatives. We know his family had been searching for him. And we know that they were not informed before he was buried.

In Wilson's case, therefore, the number 345 becomes more than a cemetery marker. It illustrates the distance that can emerge between an individual's administrative identity and their human relationships.

And it was Wilson's nephew, Faron Hall, who publicly confronted what that distance meant.

Faron Hall: More Than a “Homeless Hero”

Faron Hall was himself experiencing homelessness in Winnipeg. Yet describing Faron simply as “a homeless man” would tell us remarkably little about who he was.

In 2009, Faron became well known in Winnipeg after rescuing two people from the Red River in separate incidents. His actions earned him the mayor's Medal of Valour and the popular description of Winnipeg's “homeless hero.” Yet Faron reportedly did not regard himself as a hero.

After his death, his uncle Patrick remembered asking him about that status. Faron's response was essentially that he was not a hero; he had simply done what he could.

There is an important contradiction here. The same person whom society categorized according to what he lacked—a home—was also publicly recognized according to what he gave to others. Faron's homelessness did not remove his courage. It did not remove his compassion. And, most importantly for this presentation, it did not remove his family relationships.

We see this clearly in his response to Wilson's death.

When Faron visited his uncle's grave at Brookside Cemetery, he brought a traditional offering of tobacco. There he encountered the small marker bearing the number 345. The Winnipeg Free Press described Faron kneeling at the grave and becoming overwhelmed with grief. He fell sobbing onto the ground where his uncle had been buried. But after spending time at Wilson's grave, Faron reportedly said that he felt better.

That small detail is significant. It helps us understand why the opportunity to say goodbye matters.

The Social Meaning of Saying Goodbye

Grief is not simply an individual psychological reaction to death. It is also relational and social.

Funerals, grave visits, ceremonies, prayers, traditional practices, memorials, and gatherings allow families and communities to acknowledge death. They provide opportunities to recognize the relationships that connected the deceased to the living.

Recent scholarship on homelessness and grief emphasizes how death and loss are deeply entangled with experiences of homelessness. It also shows that grief can reveal relationships of love, care, and community that continue to exist even in circumstances of extreme housing precarity.

This makes family notification more than an administrative responsibility. When notification fails, relatives lose the opportunity to participate in burial arrangements. They lose opportunities to perform cultural or spiritual practices at the appropriate time. They may be unable to gather as a family. And perhaps most painfully, they may continue searching for someone who has already died.

For Wilson's family, the opportunity to mourn came only after months of uncertainty.

Faron eventually reached his uncle's grave. But his opportunity to say goodbye came after Wilson had already been buried.

And less than a year later, the story took another tragic turn.

Faron Hall's Death

In August 2014, Faron Hall himself was found dead in the Red River. It was the same river in which his actions five years earlier had made him known throughout Winnipeg for saving the lives of others. CTV News reported that police had identified the deceased but were still in the process of notifying his family. Because the death was not considered suspicious, police indicated that they would not publicly release his name.

This detail becomes particularly striking when placed beside Wilson's experience the previous year.

When Wilson died, his identity was known, yet his relatives were not notified before he was buried. When Faron died, authorities were withholding his public identification while the process of family notification was underway. That contrast illustrates the importance of notification itself.

But the response of Faron's uncle, Patrick Hall, is even more revealing when thinking about homelessness. Patrick explained that Faron's father had also recently died and that Faron had struggled with the loss.

Speaking after Faron's death, Patrick said: “I just know where my nephew is. He's in a good place now. He's home. He's not homeless anymore. He's with his relatives.” I do not use those words to romanticize Faron's death or to suggest that death provides a solution to homelessness. Instead, I think Patrick's choice of one particular word is historically revealing:

Home.

He did not use home here to describe a physical house. Home meant relationship. Home meant family. Home meant belonging. And, in his understanding, home meant reunion with relatives.

That language resonates strongly with scholarship on Indigenous homelessness. If home encompasses relationships with family, kin, community, culture, identity, and place, then homelessness cannot be reduced simply to whether someone possesses a permanent address.

Faron's life illustrates this complexity. He was homeless, but he was also a nephew who mourned his uncle. He was homeless, but he was also a man who entered the Red River to save strangers. He was homeless, but he belonged to a family that mourned him when he died.

And this brings us back to the fundamental problem raised by Wilson Hall's burial: Being unhoused does not mean being without relationships.

Brookside Cemetery as a Historical Archive

Brookside Cemetery therefore provides more than the setting for this story.

For historians, cemeteries can function as archives. Grave markers, burial registers, cemetery sections, names, dates—and sometimes the absence of names—can reveal something about relationships between individuals and the societies in which they lived.

My own experience working at Brookside has made this especially apparent to me. Searching for graves using archival information and then entering the physical cemetery to locate them demonstrates the difference between knowing that somebody was buried somewhere and actually recovering that person's place within the landscape. Sometimes there is a name. Sometimes there is a recognizable marker. And sometimes there is only a number.

Wilson Hall's grave provides one example of why that distinction matters. The number 345 documented where his body had been placed. But it could not document who he was to Faron. It could not document the family that had been searching for him. It could not document the grief produced when that family discovered that he had already been buried. And it could not communicate the relationships that had constituted Wilson's life.

Faron reportedly wondered how many other First Nations people had travelled to Winnipeg, disappeared, died, and been buried without their families knowing. The newspaper could provide no answer. Neither can I.

And that limitation is important.

As historians, we must distinguish between what the evidence makes us wonder and what the evidence actually allows us to claim. The numbered graves I have encountered at Brookside raise questions. Wilson Hall's documented experience may begin to offer an explanation for at least one of them. We cannot conclude that every numbered grave at Brookside represents someone whose family was not notified. But we can ask what Wilson's experience reveals about the vulnerabilities surrounding homelessness, institutional communication, death, and family notification. We can also ask what becomes invisible when historical records reduce individuals to administrative categories:

Homeless.

Welfare burial.

Unclaimed.

Number 345.

Eventually, Wilson's grave received something different. A name. Arrangements were made for a proper marker identifying him as Wilson Hall, together with his birth and death dates.

Changing a numbered marker to a named grave could not reverse what happened. It could not return the months during which his family searched for him. It could not allow his relatives to participate in his original burial.

But symbolically, the difference between 345 and Wilson Hall matters.

A number locates a body. A name identifies a person. And relationships give that name meaning.

Conclusion

I began in Ghana with the problem of unidentified and unclaimed bodies and the difficult questions surrounding public health, identification, burial, and family knowledge. Wilson and Faron Hall bring those questions into the history of homelessness in Winnipeg. Their experiences demonstrate that homelessness extends beyond the absence of housing. It affects health. It affects access to institutions. It can affect relationships with family and community. And Wilson's experience demonstrates that institutional disconnection can sometimes continue after death.

But I do not want the final image of either man to be simply one of death.

Wilson Hall was more than grave number 345. And Faron Hall was more than Winnipeg's “homeless hero.” Both were members of a family. Both belonged to networks of relationships. Both were mourned.

There is something especially poignant about the Red River in Faron's story. It was the place where he became publicly known for saving the lives of others. And it was ultimately the place from which his own body was recovered.

Yet even here, the language used by his family brings us back to belonging. His uncle said Faron was finally “home.”

For historians of health and medicine, these stories encourage us to think beyond hospitals, diseases, and medical treatment when discussing health. Health also has social dimensions. It involves dignity, connection, belonging, family, grief, memory, and the ability for communities to care for their members in life and mourn them in death.

My experience at Brookside has also taught me something about the historical record. Sometimes what remains is a name. Sometimes it is a burial register. Sometimes it is a grave. And sometimes what remains is simply a number.

Our responsibility as researchers is not to invent the lives behind those numbers when the evidence does not permit us to do so. But neither should we forget that there were lives behind them.

Wilson Hall gives us one opportunity to see the person behind such a number.

He had a name. He had a family. He had people searching for him. And he had a nephew who eventually stood at his grave to say goodbye.

Perhaps, then, Wilson and Faron Hall leave us with two simple but important lessons:

A person without a home is not a person without belonging.

And:

Every person is more than a number.