Violence against Aboriginal women has to stop

Three weeks ago, 16-year-old Rinelle Harper from the Garden Hill Nation in northern Manitoba was brutally attacked and thrown into the icy waters of Winnipeg’s Assiniboine River. Scarcely clothed, bloodied and freezing, she somehow managed to pull herself out only to be attacked again and left for dead, police said. She was found the next morning — breathing, but just barely — by two construction workers who called 911. After a week in a hospital children’s ward, she was discharged.

This violence against Aboriginal women has to stop.

Back in February, the lifeless body of 26-year-old Loretta Saunders, an Inuk woman from Labrador, was found dumped on the side of the Trans-Canada highway in New Brunswick.

In June, Marlene Bird, a 47-year-old member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation, was found unconscious in a Prince Albert, Sask. parking lot. She had been burned, mutilated and left to die. In the end, she survived, but had to have both her legs amputated and serious facial reconstruction as a result of her injuries.

Then in August, 15-year-old Tina Fontaine from the Sagkeeng First Nation was found dead — her body stuffed into a plastic bag and dumped into the Red River.

Each of these girls and women has their own story. My intention is not to brutally reduce them to their deaths or injuries, but rather to highlight some common threads that are undeniable. All are Aboriginal. All are female. All were attacked, treated as sub-human and expendable; reduced to bodies stuffed into plastic bags, dumped into bodies of water or onto the side of the highway like garbage. Some — like Harper and Bird — survived. Others didn’t. But together, they all fit a larger pattern of disproportionately high levels of violence against Aboriginal women in Canada.

According to a recent RCMP report, there were 1,181 cases of missing and murdered Aboriginal women between 1980 and 2012 in Canada. They account for 16 per cent of female homicides and 11.3 per cent of all cases of missing women in Canada.

Put differently, they are around five times more likely to be murdered than non-Aboriginal women and girls. And yet Aboriginal women and girls — First Nations, Métis and Inuit — account for a mere 4.3 per cent of the overall Canadian female population.

So, the question is this: Why are Aboriginal women so over-represented in the Canadian statistics for missing and murdered women? In order to deal with this crisis, don’t we need to know?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government insists we do not need any more studies on the issue. He has so far refused to heed the calls of human rights and civil liberties organizations, indigenous groups and federal opposition parties to hold an inquiry. The Conservative government believes that this is a criminal rather than a sociological phenomenon.

Of course it’s a criminal affair. But it goes deeper than that. This issue slices into the social tissue of gender-based discrimination, impoverishment, unemployment and economic marginalization of Aboriginal populations in this country. The disproportionate levels of violence against Aboriginal women is also linked to the segregation and racism of the residential school, where some young people were ripped from their families, communities, language and culture and suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of school and church authorities.

You simply cannot divorce the criminal from the social. To deny that there is a link is willful blindness.

Many Canadians find it hard to square our ideas about Canada as a good, just and safe country with the kinds of things that happened to Rinelle Harper, Loretta Saunders, Marlene Bird, Tina Fontaine and so many other Aboriginal women. These contradictions may be why an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women seems so daunting. But they are precisely why an inquiry is so desperately needed.

Original Article
Source: montrealgazette.com/
Author: Celine Cooper