WUNRN
CANADA - INDIGENOUS IN CANADA
COMPILE THEIR OWN DATABASE ON MISSING & MURDERED NATIVE WOMEN
Mass posters of the faces are not enough. Families of missing and murdered aboriginal women are putting together their own database.
Martha Troian - 9/25/13
There was a time when Colleen
Cardinal could not talk about her family without choking on her grief.
"It
took me a long time to talk about what happened to my sister," said
Cardinal, from Saddle Lake Cree First Nation in central Alberta. “I'm a family
member who lost two women to murder.”
Her
eldest sister, Charmaine Desa, was murdered in downtown Edmonton in 1990. And
Cardinal's sister-in-law, Lynne Minia Jackson, was found in a field in 2004 in
Wetaskiwin, about 45 miles south of Edmonton.
Cardinal's
story is not unique, and this puts her among the legions of family members fed
up with a lack of progress in getting to the bottom of the issue of violence
against aboriginal women in Canada. She is part of a movement to take control
of matters affecting not only her family but also thousands of others. Born of
their determination is a newly launched community-based database of missing and
murdered indigenous women and girls, compiled by the victims’ families
themselves.
Two
grassroots organizations in Canada, No More Silence and Families of Sisters in
Spirit, have teamed up to compile the database, which was launched on September
12. The database will record the date of disappearances and deaths of missing
and murdered indigenous women and girls. It will hold details such as date of
birth, nation, childhood and family background, education and work history,
level of permission for use of data, and primary contact information.
The
need for the database is twofold, organizers said. Andrea Smith, an author,
scholar and Native American anti-violence activist from southern California,
recalled a time not so long ago when the issue of violence against indigenous
women received little visibility. It wasn’t until women raised awareness about
the issue that government funding began to shed light on the problem. But that
didn't come without its own price.
"We
found that government support often becomes a trap. We start to become
dependent on it, and then when we step out of line as we saw with Sisters in
Spirit, we suddenly get defunded," said Smith.
Sisters
in Spirit was the first database of cases of missing and murdered indigenous
women in Canada. Canada's federal government stopped funding the program in
2010. Critics of the cut say it was meant to silence the Native Women's
Association of Canada, the group behind the database.
Smith
has seen this happen in the U.S too. When the Violence Against Women Act was
passed, with it came a mandate that Native American tribes developing curricula
dealing with sexual violence were forbidden to use the word 'colonization,'
said Smith.
"It's
okay to support anti-violence work as long as your framework is about
pathologizing Native communities, [implying] that we're inherently
dysfunctional with mental health issues,” she said, adding that that makes it
all the more crucial for organizations and community groups such as No More
Silence and Families of Sisters in Spirit to resist being co-opted and to seek
ways to fund their own work. Their newly launched database will be a testament
to this. The group does not intend to ask for government funding—or permission.
Previous
attempts have been made to compile statistics on violence against aboriginal
women, as columnist Carol Goar noted in an opinion piece in the Star on September 23. Goar details attempts by the
Canadian Centre for Policy
Alternatives and the Canadian
Research Institute for the Advancement of Women that ran into a shortage of
data. She describes the scattershot crime statistics kept by police, Status of
Women Canada and the resource-hobbled Native Women’s Association of Canada, as
well as individual women’s shelters.
“The
difficulty of collecting data about violence against women has been a barrier,”
Kate McInturff, who authored a study for the Canadian Centre for Policy
Alternatives, told Goar. “However, the data that do exist tell us three things
very clearly: This problem is big, it comes at a high cost, and we are making
little or no progress in putting a stop to it.”
The
online activist group Anonymous compiled an interactive map of missing and
murdered indigenous women in both the U.S. and Canada last February, but that
does not contain much more than a dot marking where the person was last seen
alive. This new database will fill these knowledge gaps, its creators hope.
"All
that we're doing now with the database is taking matters into our own
hands," said Audrey Huntley, co-founder of No More Silence. Alluding to
traditional indigenous knowledge, she noted, "We’ve always known how to
keep track, we've always been amazing counters.”
Dr.
Janet Smylie, a Métis physician and research scientist, is helping design the
database, whose methodology draws upon both traditional and western practices.
The team has created filters in order to conduct database searches, and soon
names of missing and murdered loved ones will be added. Families of missing and
murdered women and girls are encouraged to contact No
More Silence and Families
of Sisters in Spirit if they would like to add loves ones’ names.
"As
soon as we get information, it will go public," said Bridget Tolley,
co-founder of Families of Sisters in Spirit. Unlike the Native Women’s
Association database, the product will be available to the public, and more
important, Tolley said, to family members.
"Why
have a database when nobody can see it?" said Tolley. "People have a
right to know."
Without
funding, the Native Women’s Association of Canada was forced to close its own
database in 2010. By the time it did so, the association had reported close to
600 indigenous women and girls gone missing or murdered in the country over
several years. Since then many more have vanished or been killed, and according
to Tolley their names are not being recorded in a central location.
Earlier
this year the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) questioned the Native
Women’s Association total, saying that of the 118 names shared with the RCMP’s
National Aboriginal Policing Services, only 64 of them could be confirmed in a
police database. An RCMP spokesperson also said there are concerns over the 500
possible victims recorded in the association’s database. Indigenous communities
find this hard to believe given that these deaths are still occurring.
"In
Toronto in the last few months, there have been three violent deaths of
indigenous women, and sadly there wasn’t much societal response to that,"
says Huntley.
Cardinal
also comes from a family torn apart by adoption, severe physical abuse and
alcoholism. It's a history she details in Stolen Dream, a documentary
produced in 2012. Her second film, The Sixties Scoop: A Hidden Generation, to
be released in 2014, will examine the adoptions of indigenous children that
took place from the 1960s through the 1980s. She said she can now talk about
her past because she understands the historical context of colonization in
which it occurred.
The
combination of personal and political has led Cardinal to work with Families of
Sisters in Spirit. She sees the need to pick up where that group left off,
given the lack of not only information but also the political will to gather
it.
“I
think the only people that can keep track of our women and what's happening to
our women, is our women," Cardinal said.
________________________________________________________
CANADA -
WALKING IN THEIR SHOES/MOCCASINS EXHIBIT HONORS MISSING &
MURDERED INDIGENOUS WOMEN
Christi
Belcourt, via Facebook - Walking With Our Sisters, an exhibit of beaded
moccasin vamps, opens to honor missing and murdered indigenous women throughout
10/2/13
- Walking With Our Sisters, the stirring moccasin-vamp exhibit honoring
murdered and missing aboriginal women in Canada and the United States, opens in
Edmonton, Alberta, on October 2, beginning its six-year, 32-stop journey
through dozens of cities.
The exhibit, as The Globe and Mail put it in an October 1 story, “is both a memorial and a call to action” that poses the question, “Why are indigenous women so vulnerable to violence, and why isn’t more done about it?”
It all started in July 2012, when Métis artist Christi Belcourt reached out on Facebook to gather collaborators for the art project, which would honor the 600 aboriginal women who have been documented as missing or murdered. Her goal was to assemble 600 pairs, but her call generated 1,723 pairs of vamps, the upper beaded part of the moccasin.
Strict protocol has been followed in setting up the exhibit, in line with Elders’ instructions, “as if the women are standing there,” Belcourt wrote on the Walking With Our Sisters Facebook page.
“We have created a sacred space,” she wrote. “We will pray together to acknowledge the lives of the women. Everything is about the women and about the families. The volunteers and organizing committee in Edmonton have ensured that everything that is done, is done with the utmost respect.”
Tanya Kappo, Cree, Sturgeon Lake First Nation, and one of the founders of Idle No More (she was first to use the hashtag that brought the movement viral), is the exhibit’s keeper. She is overseeing ceremonial protocols and connecting with local communities.
“The vamps have this intense energy around them that I can’t explain,” Kappo told The Globe and Mail. “It seems to grow as more people see and interact with them.”
The exhibit is scheduled to crisscross Canada and the U.S. through 2019, according to the Walking With Our Sisters website, with a stop in Michigan in 2016.