Memorial walk for one man stirs memories of others lost from Onion Lake Cree Nation

A memorial walk was held Sunday to remember Serayne Kematch, a young man from Onion Lake Cree Nation who disappeared without a trace from Alcurve, Alta., last year. The last official sighting of Kematch was April 10, 2024 on a gas station’s video surveillance camera. He was heading north in the ditch and the camera lost sight of him as he went up a small hill. The store where Kematch was last seen is just 24 km south of Onion Lake along Hwy 17, which roughly follows the border between Saskatchewan and Alberta. In spite of searching for days by his family, Kematch’s remains weren’t found until months later, on Oct. 28, 2024, by some ranchers in some scrub just a few kilometers north of where he was last seen. His uncle, Marvin Meesto, said that is an area the family searched. He said the case was not properly investigated. He believes his nephew was murdered and his body moved to the location it was found. “There’s no way anybody could have missed a body laying there,” Meesto told APTN News. “When you’re doing a search, you train your eyes to find anything that might be out of place and there’s no way they could have missed his body there.” “What the coroner said was that he might have died of exposure and that there was no foul play. I don’t believe that one bit.” Meesto said the coroner also told him that Kematch “had one broken rib – the tenth one down” but they were unable to determine how he died. Meesto said RCMP have told him the investigation into what happened to Kematch remains ongoing. “I still have to touch base with them and see what they’re going to do. I wouldn’t mind having them come back and do more investigating, because there was no investigating done at all,” Meesto said. “They said they talked to people but they didn’t get any answers. We received a lot of tips and we gave the names to RCMP.” Kematch was the son of Meesto’s sister. He took him in after she died and raised him for 17 years until he moved out on his own. Meesto said they had a father-son relationship. Dozens of people joined Meesto near the Alcurve Hall Sunday morning and donned pink shirts provided by Meesto, some bearing the letters MMIW and a picture of a woman’s face with a red handprint-others with a picture of Kematch, wearing his graduation gown and the words “Justice for Serayne.” Onion Lake is a Cree Nation with 7,085 members, but only 3,722 live on the reserve according to the band’s website. They have a number of companies that work in the oilfield and pipeline business. The community is also plagued by violence associated with gang activity and drugs according to the band council. The community opened a number of addictions treatment beds in April of last year You didn’t have to go far in the crowd of pink shirts, to find others with stories of loved ones who are either still missing, or lost to murder. Janet Trottier recounted the deaths of two women from Onion Lake in 2007 and 2009. One was her cousin, Jeanette Marie Chief, 48, and the other, Violet Heathen, 49.  Both were murdered by the same man from Red Deer, Alta., Gordon Alfred Rogers, 60, who pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder at his trial in 2017. The women both went missing from a Lloydminster hotel. The Red Teepee at Onion Lake Cree Nation. Photo: Leanne Sanders, APTN A monument and tree dedicated to Chief is one of several which form a ring around a steel teepee at Onion Lake, painted red in honour of the lost, where the walk concluded. Onion Lake councillor Laurie Ann Jimmy also took part in the walk. She still doesn’t know what happened to her son. Brian Jimmy, 29, has been missing from Lloydminster since June 20, 2020. Her husband and other sons put in the concrete pad that the Red Teepee stands on. The monument was dedicated a month later, in July 2020. “When they talked about missing and murdered Indigenous women, I didn’t want to take away from that because that is a really important movement across Canada,” Laurie Ann Jimmy said. “But, when you look around here-you’re not supposed to count in our culture-but there’s more men that are missing than women.” Jimmy said before he went missing, Brian told her he planned to come home for Father’s Day. She hugged him and that’s the last time she saw her son. Jimmy said the last information she got from the RCMP in 2020 was that Major Crimes investigators had changed the investigation from a missing person to a homicide. Jimmy said she’s heard nothing from the RCMP since. Meesto said he’s angered by the lack of effort by RCMP into the search and subsequent investigation into what happened to Serayne. “There wasn’t enough effort put into the investigation. They should have been out here,” Meesto said. “At times there was just me and my family searching, and there was no one with authority walking with us, searching with us. It was all done by ourselves.” Tags: Brian Jimmy, deaths, Gangs, Gordon Alfrend Rogers, Jeanette Chief, Marvin Meesto, missing, Murder, Onion Lake Cree Nation, red teepee, Serayne Kematch, Violence, Violet Heathen Continue Reading