Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls

Duncan, Catriona (2016) "Yes, and Back Again by Sandy Marie Bonny," The Goose: Vol. 15: Iss. 1, Article 58.

Since the invasion of North America by white male colonizers, Indigenous women and girls have been constructed as homogenized and dehumanized "Indian princesses" and "savage squaws." These constructions, albeit false, have real consequences, resulting in disproportionate rates of male violence against Indigenous women and girls in the context of a contemporary for-profit rape culture. In 2015, the Canadian federal government announced a long-awaited inquiry into violence against Indigenous women and girls. This article recommends an expressly Indigenous feminist framework in order to comprehensively address the issue of male violence against Indigenous women and girls in a national inquiry.

Canada has had a long-standing problem with both societal and institutional racism against Indigenous peoples, especially within the justice system. Numerous national inquiries, commissions, and investigations have all concluded that every level of the justice system has failed Indigenous peoples. More recent inquiries indicate that racism against Indigenous peoples is particularly problematic in police forces in Canada. Yet, despite the evidence, little has been done in Canada to act on the recommendations. This has resulted in the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples, numerous deaths of Indigenous peoples in police custody, and the national crisis of thousands of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. This article seeks to highlight the lesser-known problem of police-involved racialized and sexualized abuse and violence against Indigenous women and girls as a root cause of the large numbers of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in Canada. It is argued that an in-depth look at police-involved disappearances, sexual assaults, and murders of Indigenous women should be included in a national inquiry into the high rates of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. It is hoped that such an investigation under the national inquiry will result in evidence-based analysis and recommendations for legislative and policy-based changes that are consistent with the human rights protections afforded Indigenous women and girls and with the calls for action by Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, various United Nations human rights bodies, and the families, communities, and nations of the Indigenous victims.

This article explores the complex relationship between processes of making, memory, healing, and social activism activated by Walking With Our Sisters, a large-scale commemorative installation intended to foster awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Stephanie G. AndersonStephanie G.

CMAJ March 15, 2016 vol. 188 no. 5 First published February 29, 2016, doi: 10.1503/cmaj.160117

Morton, Katherine. Canadian Journal of Sociology (Online)41.3 (2016): 299-325.

(2016). Gender and state violence: films that do justice to the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous people in Canada. Feminist Media Studies: Vol. 16, No. 5, pp. 918-922. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2016.1213573

This article was first presented at the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action (FAFIA) / Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) / Canadian Journal of Women and the Law (CJWL) Symposium on Murders and Disappearances of Indigenous Women and Girls, which was held at the University of Ottawa on 30-31 January 2016. Thanks to FAFIA, the NWAC, and the CJWL for sponsoring the symposium and to Muriel Stanley Venne, president of the Institute for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women, for drawing her concerns around Project KARE to my attention at the symposium. Thanks also to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding The eQuality Project, a seven-year partnership initiative, the work of which this article forms a part.

This issue came together after a symposium, jointly organized by the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law and the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action, in partnership with the Native Women's Association of Canada on 30-31 January 2016, explored the prospect of a national inquiry. Indigenous women leaders, family members of missing and murdered women, academics, and activists, joined by six human rights experts from the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, came together to explore what an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women could accomplish. In the spirit of what Pamela Palmater in this issue calls "Shining Light on the Dark Places," this issue of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law brings together some of the presentations from that symposium. We hope that in sharing some of the reflections of the symposium that we contribute to an ever-widening circle of narratives that brings us closer to ending a violence that is surely a slow genocide in progress. The contributions offered in the following pages are intended as part of a social movement to end this violence. A momentum is building; that much is clear. The violence against Indigenous girls and women must end; all of our lives depend on it.

Our examination of coverage from 2006 to 2015 in eight major daily newspapers identified more than 30,000 stories that referenced issues relevant to Indigenous individuals and communities. Through a more in-depth search for coverage of Indigenous individuals and communities between 2014 and 2015, we located nearly 2,500 articles. Many of these articles dealt with murdered and missing Indigenous women, which is the particular focus of this study. In this report, we present the findings of the quantitative and qualitative media analyses we conducted. The empirical analysis provides an evidence-based foundation for our exploration of issues identified by previous research and reflections on the coverage.

The following thesis focuses on media depictions of Canada's missing and murdered Indigenous women, a list that carries upwards of 1,200 names. The news coverage of these stories is reminiscent of television crime dramas in their depictions of minority victims of crime, specifically in regard to victim blaming.

In cities and towns across Canada, Indigenous girls are being hunted, harassed, and criminalized by local law enforcement agents and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. These normalized outbreaks of state control, often punctuated by the use of deadly force, are not isolated incidents in an otherwise just and fair social order. Rather, they are reflective of Indigenous girls' daily realities embedded within the structure of an ongoing settler colonial social context that has strategically invented the criminal justice system to secure and maintain settler sovereignty. As such, this paper aims to redirect our critical analysis of the policing and caging of Indigenous girls through the geopolitics of settler colonialism. In the wake of mass protests against colonial state violence throughout 2014, resistance decrying the justice system and insisting that #BlackLivesMatters and that Indigenous lives matter, I argue that we have an urgent need to listen to the stories that Indigenous girls have to tell. These are not just any stories, but narratives that profoundly destabilize the hubristic portrayal of Canada as a humanitarian nation cleansed of settler colonial rule.

The violence perpetrated against these women can be traced back to the beginning of Canadian colonization. European settlers initiated the marginalization of Aboriginal women, a phenomenon which continues to this day and leaves these women extremely vulnerable to acts of violence. This paper analyzes the systematic oppression of Aboriginal women in Canada throughout history, within the contexts of colonialism and neocolonialism. It is argued that this marginalization of Aboriginal women, beginning with colonization, has resulted in extreme and disproportionate violence against them. Only when this historical present is acknowledged can appropriate action be taken to bring these women out of the periphery of Canadian society.

Murdered and Missing Women: Performing Indigenous Cultural Memory in British Columbia and Beyond - Volume 55 Issue 2 - Peter Dickinson

Late in 2014, I had a lengthy conversation with Stefana Fratila, a graduate student in political science at the University of British Columbia, who was working on a essay that examined media coverage of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.

Hanging on the walls of Kattie Lee Fontaine's living room are two striking portraits of her cousin Tina, who was just 15 when she disappeared from the streets of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in August 2014.

A new documentary by a team of Los Angeles-based filmmakers - including Avatar star Zoe Saldana - is hoping to shed light on the disappearance and murders of as many as 4,000 indigenous women across Canada.

A team of filmmakers including Avatar star Zoe Saldana are producing a documentary probing the disappearance of Canada's indigenous women. Gone Missing began life last year, when producer-director Leslie Owen happened upon a news story that highlighted 1,200 instances of murdered and missing women.

"Our most tragic issue and our top priority is missing and murdered Aboriginal women. We first denounced sexual abuse and sexual assault back in 1989. In those days, we didn't have support from the male leadership of the Aboriginal community, from our own people. It was taboo. Slowly, we got support.

Last Sunday morning, 23-year-old Krystal Andrews called her fiancé to tell him she was on her way home from a friend's house. But the mother of two young children never made it. After Andrews was reported missing, her body was found on Monday in a remote spot in God's Lake First Nation in northern Manitoba.