The Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) has done an incredible job of both raising the profile of the issue of murdered and missing Indigenous women and maintaining that profile, both on a domestic and international level. This was work done by passionate, dedicated Indigenous women all over Canada on behalf of those without a voice. There are few in this country who do not know what the Sisters in Spirit (SIS) campaign is all about and even fewer who are not awed by the accomplishments of those who worked on it. NWAC has shown the families and communities of those murdered and missing Indigenous women that those women were (and in some cases still are) an integral part of our Indigenous peoples and Nations. Without our women, our communities and Nations can’t move forward on our collective goals of nation-building and cultural revitalization. NWAC has proved that despite all the assimilatory policies, discriminatory laws, and racist attitudes of police and governments who allowed this to happen to our women, that we, the women, can and will stand as warriors and defend ourselves. Yet, despite all of the hard work done by NWAC, their provincial and territorial affiliates, and others over the last five years, the Conservatives, in their usual take-no-prisoners style, thought they could “run roughshod” over NWAC and the Indigenous women they represent. The Conservatives, using their token female Minister Rona Ambrose, thought they could hide their treachery under the guise of a grand announcement that was allegedly promoted to help murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada. However, as the details were slowly released to the public, we now know that this announcement had very little to do with murdered and missing Indigenous women and more to do with increasing police powers and capacity. Parliamentary Secretary Shelly Glover (the ex-cop) very clearly told the press that SIS is “finished” – that we should not “mix apples and oranges” and that we all must “turn a new page” and realize that this announcement related to a new program to which NWAC could “apply”. MP Rod Bruinooge (no longer head of the Conservative’s Aboriginal caucus) confirmed on APTN that this was in fact the case. Even if NWAC does apply for funds to this new program, it will be in competition with many others and there is no guarantee they will get a dime. Aside from that, NWAC would be forced to change its name to “Evidence to Action”, can no longer use the well-known name of Sisters in Spirit, can not do any advocacy work, and even worse, NWAC can no longer maintain a database on the ever increasing number of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada – which now amounts to 582. I for one am sickened by this decision of the Conservatives and even more so that the women MPs in the Conservative Party would allow this to happen. They all bear personal responsibility for this Neanderthal decision. The Conservative government might be able to be forgiven for a bad decision once in a while, but not when this decision is one of many which directly attacks the basic equality rights of Indigenous women. Bill C-3 will knowingly and purposefully deny equality to Indian women and their children and Bill S-4 will give them an enpty shell of a legislative promise – no accessible justice. The way in which the Conservatives tried to hide their actual intentions does little for reconciling the relationship between the Crown and Indigenous peoples and only increases the level of mistrust. Despite all the hype around the Conservative announcement, we now know that the proposed amendments to the Criminal Code have NOTHING to do with murdered and missing Indigenous women, but instead increase police powers which I explained in my last blog does not bode well for our people. In case there was any doubt about what this means for our men and now even our women, I would refer you to the newly released report by Correctional Investigator for Canada, and federal ombudsman for prisons, Howard Sapers: “The disturbing reality of Aboriginal overrepresentation in Canadian correctional populations is well-known. Aboriginal people — First Nations, Métis and Inuit —comprise less than 4% of the Canadian population but account for 20% of the total federal prison population. On any given day, approximately 2,600 Aboriginal offenders are incarcerated in federal prisons.” He specifically went on to note that: “In the case of Aboriginal women offenders, the situation is even worse. Aboriginal women offenders comprise 33% of the total inmate population under federal jurisdiction. The Aboriginal women offender population has grown by almost 90% in the last ten years, and it is the fastest growing segment of the offender population. The Office’s work in this area of corrections continues to document the inequitable and differential outcomes for Aboriginal offenders resulting from federal correctional policies and practices.” People really have to think about that. It is not that Indigenous women are more “criminal” than non-Indigenous women, they are over-represented because of “federal correctional policies and practices”. We should be very concerned that our wrongly incarcerated Indigenous women as well. The Conservatives have not only failed to take any action on addressing these justice issues for Indigenous peoples generally, but they have taken giant steps backwards in addressing equality issues for Indigenous women – specifically those issues that put their very lives and freedom at risk. How could the Conservatives think that they could sell their $10 million dollar announcement as beneficial to Indigenous women? Well over half the funding will go to police and justice services which are government services that are already well funded. The police and justice systems themselves are the very reasons why some of these missing and murdered Indigenous women never had their cases taken seriously. They are the very reasons why some of our Indigenous women languish in jail longer than non-Indigenous women. Yet, the government is taking what little funding NWAC had to combat these grave injustices and giving it back to the government which is already well-funded and has significantly more capacity than NWAC. It wasn’t our well-funded police and justice services that did all the research and leg work to identify and raise the profile of missing and murdered Indigenous women – it was NWAC and the SIS initiative. It wasn’t the police and justice services that comforted the families and took action on their behalf – it was NWAC and SIS. Now the Conservatives want to take the glory for this work and unceremoniously fund and staff the police and justice services to take it from here. They want to be able to tell the world they addressed the problem – but once again this means taking control over our lives. Assuming Howard Sapers’ report is accurate, the very thought of police and justice services “taking it from here” should scare all Indigenous peoples, not just our women. It is certainly not like NWAC and SIS were politically motivated – what did they get for standing up for the lives of their women? There were no Senate seats to be had or huge contracts for those who marched in the streets for our women. It is almost like NWAC and SIS are being punished for giving police and justice services a black eye on the international stage. It is once again, Indigenous women who are taking matters into their own hands. All they were doing was standing up as the women warriors they are, to try to save the lives of our women. How very chauvinistic, presumptuous, and ethnocentric for the Conservatives to treat our women as helpless victims and ride in on their “white” horse to save the day. It was Indigenous women who brought this issue to light and did all the work – it should be Indigenous women who lead the way in developing and implementing the solutions. Liberal MP Todd Russell made a great point on APTN. He questioned the Conservatives for agreeing to a public inquiry when the salmon went missing from the Fraser River in BC, but don’t care enough about Indigenous women to have one for them. Given that Minister of INAC John Duncan has been vocal against what he refers to as a “race-based fishery” – or as we know it – the constitutionally protected Aboriginal and treaty right to fish – it is no surprise that the Conservatives would look to create links between declining fish stocks and Indigenous peoples and ignore the shameful link between police and justice neglect and murdered and missing Indigenous women. Is it really any surprise that Parliamentary Secretary Shelly Glover came off so harsh in the media forcefully stating that SIS was over and proudly reaffirmed that the bulk of the money would go to policing? Her experience has been largely limited to policing after all. But who is there looking out for Indigenous women? It certainly isn’t Shelly Glover. NWAC is, and should continue to be the lead on this issue – so long as they get back on track and stand up for themselves. The fact that President Jeanette Lavell of NWAC would endorse such a “deal” with the Conservatives knowing that it would essentially kill SIS is the biggest surprise of all. As you know, in my last blog on this topic I was highly critical of the fact that NWAC was losing sight of their ultimate mandate in exchange for a rotten deal from the Conservatives, which, since I wrote my last blog, appears far worse than first reported. I know that it is not NWAC who is killing SIS or legislating inequality for our women in Bill C-3 and S-4, but standing alongside the Conservatives while they do so is just as bad in my books. SIS has become THE symbol of justice and equality for our Indigenous women. NWAC used to stand for those principles as well. NWAC needs to take the risk we all take when we stand up for ourselves and get back to their fundamental mandate of equality for Indigenous women. NWAC has to trust that people will rally around a just cause and a true leader. When the fate of our women is in police hands, we have over-representation of our women in federal prisons at a rate even higher than that of our men, longer prison sentences, deaths in custody, starlight tours, and hundreds of murdered and missing Indigenous women. Yet, when the fate of our women is on our own hands, we have Sisters in Spirit, country-wide attention, international attention, support groups for the affected families, awareness campaigns, unity marches, and direct action. Why the hell should any of us want to “turn the page” on Sisters in Spirit and hand it over to the police and the Conservatives’ brand of Neanderthal politics to look out for us? Stand up for yourself NWAC and your warriors will stand beside you.
Tag: women
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Funding for Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: A Let Down by ALL Parties
This blog is a very difficult one to write. While I will be dealing with a current political issue, it is about more than that. It does not give me any sense of pride or accomplishment to bring to light serious problems within our Indigenous Nations. I consider myself an advocate for Indigenous peoples and Nations in North America. Their struggles for cultural revitalization, strong identities, the healing and empowerment of our peoples, and our collective goal to re-assert our sovereignty are absolutely fundamental to our survival and success as Indigenous Nations. Part of this means recognizing where we are going wrong and having the courage to shift paths. In this battle that must be waged between our peoples and our colonizers (Canada and the provinces), there can no deal-making, settling, or backroom political deals for less than what is necessary to ensure the well-being of our peoples now AND into the future. There is no job, grant, contract, position, or level of public fame that is worth giving up our rights and responsibilities as Mi’kmaq, Cree, Mohawk or Maliseet peoples to our future generations. There was a time when we as Indigenous peoples knew this instinctively and wouldn’t give all the colonizer’s enticements a second thought. Today however, the bright spirits of our peoples have been dimmed by the dark cloud under which our generations have lived for a very long time. Multiple generations of our peoples have been living under colonial rule and suffering the losses of our lands, identities, traditions, values, and world-views, as well as our sense of responsibility to ourselves and each other. This has been compounded by the historical and current physical and emotional harms imposed by our colonizers. These actions are well-known and include assimilatory laws, policies, and state actions like residential schools, day schools, the Indian Act, discriminatory laws, the 60’s scoop, overrepresentation of Indigenous children in foster care and our men in prisons, deaths in police custody, starlight tours, racial profiling, and many other CURRENT state actions. Taiaiake Alfred, an Indigenous scholar and thinker speaks about the various stages of de-colonization in which we find ourselves in his book Wasase. This makes our collective recognition of systemic colonizing forces and assimilation much more difficult to counter, but not impossible. He stresses the fact that we MUST “move from the materialist orientation of our politics” and act to restore the “spiritual foundation” of our peoples that will restore our strength and unity. Alfred explains that the underlying problem today is that: “We are separated from the sources of our goodness and power: from each other, our cultures, and our lands.” Further, he argues that by “emulating white people” in order to gain acceptance and meet colonial ideas about success has not brought our peoples or our Nations peace, happiness, well-being, or any sense of the “good life” espoused by liberals. It is in this light that I have considered the issue of murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada and the relevance of the funding announcement that has been made. Some have celebrated this announcement by the Status of Women Canada for $10 million dollars over two years, which in fact has now been made 3 times, by different politicians without a single dime being spent to date. Now that Canada has provided more specifics about where this funding will be allocated I am, quite frankly, shocked that NWAC would support such an announcement. NWAC was originally formed to advocate on behalf of Indigenous women in Canada with a specific mandate to “enhance, promote, and foster the social, economic, cultural and political well-being of First Nations and Metis women”. Equality was one of their main focuses. In fact, if you read their submission to Parliament on Bill C-3 (status) they indicated that this Bill needed to be amended to address the full extent of gender inequality in the Indian Act. Their submission regarding Bill S-4 (matrimonial real property) advocated for much more meaningful legislation that would provide real access to justice for Indigenous women. Even NWAC’s latest report on the murdered and and missing Indigenous women in Canada highlighted the fact that “Violence is perpetuated through apathy and indifference towards Aboriginal women, and stems from the ongoing impacts of colonialism in Canada.” Specifically, NWAC noted that the Indian Act “has created ongoing barriers to citizenship for Aboriginal women and their children”. Yet, despite an acknowledgement of the actual sources of the social problems currently experienced by Indigenous women, NWAC stood publicly in support of this $10 million dollar funding announcement which did more to fund police services than any root causes of violence against Indigenous women. According to those involved in the legislative process for Bills C-3 and S-4, NWAC has flip-flopped and now also supports those bills. While none of the print or TV media services have provided an exact breakdown of where the funding dollars will be distributed, it appears from what I have read that the majority of the funds will go to “law enforcement and the justice system”. This includes a new National Police Support Services Centre for Missing Persons, a national tip website, enhancement of the Canadian Police Information Centre, amendments to the Criminal Code (no doubt without consultation), and the development of a list of best practices for police. An undetermined amount of funds will go towards culturally appropriate victim services, awareness materials for schools, and community safety plans. The Parliamentary Secretary Shelly Glover (not surprisingly given her extensive police background) explained that the funds were meant to “address issues of crime and safety”. Even Minister for the Status of Women Canada, Rona Ambrose repeatedly characterized Indigenous women as “victims” and their communities as “unsafe” during her press statement. The Conservative government’s solution to that situation is increased criminal laws and expanded powers for police. As with all issues currently facing Indigenous peoples, the state reduces them to one of criminalization. Whether it is equality for Indigenous women, the treaty right to fish in Mi’kmaq territory, protecting land claims in Caledonia, or standing guard for the sacred resting places of our ancestors in Oka – Indigenous peoples are characterized as criminals, forced to spend a disproportionate amount of time and money in the courts, and are constantly portrayed in the media as welfare-dependent deviants that pose safety and financial concerns for Canadians. This funding announcement amounts to little more than the promotion of our Indigenous peoples and Nations as criminals and by providing funds to police for services – as if this will bring the problem under control. Indigenous peoples are already over-represented in prisons and I don’t know how many more can fit into our current prison system – but then again – the Conservatives want to spend millions building new prisons, so that may help silence the rest of us. Some readers will find this blog harsh and may even suggest that my comments are naive or out of touch with reality. Some will even say that in politics, some deal is better than no deal. I can assure you all, I am far from naive and I can see enough “reality” to know that what awaits Indigenous peoples and their Nations on the other side of this colonial fog is never-ending compromise and eventual assimilation. Some will say that something better than nothing – but why? Why is something better than nothing and how do you define “something” and “nothing”? If “something” is defined as funding for a staff position at a national organization for one year, a research project that will end in another report, or school materials that will promote a negative view of Indigenous peoples, then how is “something” better than “nothing”? This is especially true if “nothing” is defined as our dignity, our pride, and respect for both our rights and responsibilities to both our ancestors and future generations? To my mind, what it means to be Mi’kmaq or Mohawk has been defined as nothing, worthless, criminal, and even pagan for far too long. Out of our “nothing” has come brave battles to protect our lands, treaties to protect our rights, and the survival of our peoples against all odds. Our “nothing” has spawned generations of passionate volunteers and advocates who work day in and day out to effect change for our peoples. Our “nothing” has resulted in the Oka stand-off that was televised all over the world and was a source of extreme pride and revitalization for Indigenous identities in North America. I would rather have lots of that “nothing” to share with my children than all the “somethings” that would lead to their eventual assimilation. Our children are not committing suicide, becoming involved in gangs, and relying on drugs and alcohol to drown their pains because they are concerned about whether they will get a management job at Irving Oil, a labourer job at the Tar Sands, or a seat in the Senate. These children are lost because they have no sense of who they are, their vibrant history, their special languages, their unique cultures and worldviews or how important their roles are to restoring the power of their Nations. They have no idea how incredibility special they are as Indigenous peoples. Our children have seen enough sell-outs in their time. They need mentors, visionaries, and real leaders to stand up for them and help guide them along so they can lead the way for our future generations. Our ancestors made incredible sacrifices so that we could get through this long, dark period. They foresaw that the seventh generation would lead their Nations out of colonization and revitalize our systems of government, laws, practices and beliefes in ways which have meaning in modern times. We have a responsibility to stand on our traditional values and principles and stop trading our children’s future for trinkets. NWAC is not the only national Aboriginal organization to have lost sight of what was envisioned in the 1960’s and 70’s for these organizations. While NWAC’s actions in bringing this issue to the forefront are commendable and indeed necessary, their follow-up actions don’t match their words. It is of no value for NWAC to opposed BIll C-3 for lack of equality and then accept it later on. Similarly, there is no amount of funding that will affect real change in violence against Indigenous women if it is all directed towards policing and not at the root causes of this inequality (like those noted in NWAC’s report). Our collective reaction to and rejection of the 1969 White Paper which called for our assimilation once and and for all is a testament to the real collective action of which we are all capable. Criminilizing our Indigenous men will never bring about equality for our Indigenous women. Shame on Canada for continuing to criminalize our peoples and on NWAC for settling for it.