fariyah: Missing Aboriginal Women: Canada’s...

2nd July 2012

Missing Aboriginal Women: Canada’s Secret Shame

Angeline Eileen Pete, 28, reported missing from British Columbia in May. Roberta Dawn McIvor, 32, found murdered near Lake Winnipeg in July. Kimberley Nolin Napess, 15, last seen in Quebec City in August. And two Friday’s ago, Verna Simard, 50, dead after plunging from the sixth floor window of her residence in Vancouver.

These are not isolated, unconnected incidents. The women are all aboriginal, and their deaths and disappearances are the fruit of a rotten, unresolved Canadian legacy. In a country of deep pride but tolerance much shallower than acknowledged, these crimes are part of a secret shame: more than 600 aboriginal women missing or murdered in the last thirty years.

Killed in their homes and in the streets, on and off reservations, by acquaintances and by strangers, aboriginal women are the victims of an unmistakable epidemic of violence. They are five times more likely to die violently than their non-aboriginal counterparts. In northern BC, so many have disappeared on notorious highway 16 that it has been given a chilling name: the Highway of Tears. The Canadian government’s expressions of official feeling scarcely mask a truth written out in their policies and inaction: these women are disposable.

If 600 white middle class women went missing it would be treated like a national crisis. A single such disappearance triggers emergency advertisements on television and radio news. An aboriginal woman’s disappearance, on the other hand, receives no comparable attention…

It is not sexism or racism alone that is to blame. It is an entire system of inhumane relations with aboriginal peoples, upheld by a society that has swallowed the country’s forests, rivers, minerals and their original owners and spit them out as strangers in their own land. Dispossessed and subjected to wrenching poverty, culturally demeaned and lacking access to services and housing, aboriginal women are left exposed and vulnerable to all-too-ordinary predators. Predators who act assuming their victims will not be missed. Predators who believe they will escape with impunity.

Denied justice at every turn, it is little wonder these women’s families and their supporters have turned to public protest. Twenty years ago, the first demonstrations in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside [see video] — ground zero for stolen lives — drew only a handful of women. Objects were thrown at them from passing cars. Now, thousands are marching in cities across the country; a movement has been born. Its demands include a federal inquiry, anti-racist education for police officers, and funding for front-line organizations that offer culturally-appropriate shelter, support and counseling.

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