Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls

JULY 2016 WHITEHORSE - Aboriginal leaders and provincial premiers say there's no need to wait for an inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women to get to work on the issues behind the problem. "Governments don't have to wait for the outcome of the inquiry," said National Chief Perry Bellegarde of the Assembly of First Nations after a meeting with Canada's premiers and territorial leaders Wednesday in Yukon.

FEBRUARY 2015 More Indigenous women have been murdered since Labrador Inuk Loretta Saunders was found dead alongside a highway in N.B. last February. But Canada still refuses to launch a national public inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, many say because acknowledging the roots of the problem would mean naming colonialism.

FEBRUARY 2016 A three-day meeting started yesterday and continues today in Prince George for the families of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. The gathering comes after the provincial government, the First Nations Leadership Council and Metis Nation BC signed an agreement last June to work together to end violence against Aboriginal girls and women.

It is called the "Highway of Tears": an 800 kilometer stretch of highway in British Columbia where more than a dozen young women have disappeared since 1994. The same thing had happened before in the same place - almost twenty young women disappeared or were killed there between the late Sixties and the early Eighties - but until recently these crimes have received little media attention, perhaps because the majority of victims have been Aboriginal women.

FEBRUARY 2016 The number of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada is "way bigger" than 1,200, the federal Indigenous Affairs Minister says, provoking scrutiny of a commonly cited official figure ahead of a national inquiry into the tragedies.

DECEMBER 2015 In the seemingly ceaseless tragedy of murdered indigenous women, the country has been left with one crystal-clear impression: the overwhelming majority of those women were in some sort of relationship with their killers. This is not true. A Toronto Star analysis suggests 44 per cent of the women were victims of acquaintances, strangers and serial killers.

SEPTEMBER 2006 Published in the Canadian Journal of Communication by Jiwani, Yasmin, & Young, Mary Lynn. Employing a frame analysis, we analyze 128 articles from the Vancouver Sun published between 2001 and 2006. We argue that prevailing and historically entrenched stereotypes about women, Aboriginality,, and sex trade work continue to demarcate the boundaries of 'respectability' and degeneracy, interlocking ways that situate these women's lives, even after death, in the margins.

SEPTEMBER 2003 Published in The American Indian Quarterly 27.3 (2003) 593-606 by Dara Culhane. Anyone passing through inner-city Vancouver on foot, on a bus, or in a car cannot help but SEE, in a literal sense, the concentration of Aboriginal people here. For most urban Canadians, and visitors from elsewhere, this is an unusual and often surprising visual experience on which they feel compelled to remark. Even so, many representations of this and other inner-city neighborhoods in Western Canada are characterized by a marked invisibility of Aboriginal people, and women in particular. This essay describes both the construction of this invisibility in public culture, and an event that symbolizes Aboriginal women's active resistance to these acts of erasure.

MAY 2008 In my article, I suggest that indigenous women are among the hardest hit by economic globalization - the expansion of markets, trade liberalization and cheapening of labour - and that globalization represents a multifaceted violence against indigenous women. I consider this with the help of two examples. First, I discuss the largely ignored case of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada and how the interlocking systems of oppression (colonization, patriarchy and capitalism) are further intensified by globalization. Second, I examine the death of a Hopi woman, Private Piestewa, in the context of militarization, history of colonization and globalization. I analyse these examples in an intersectional framework that reveals the links between colonization, patriarchy and capitalism all of which inform the current processes of globalization.

DECEMBER 2010 Exploring differences in Canadian local press coverage of missing/murdered Aboriginal and White women. More than 500 Aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered in Canada since the 1980s yet press attention to this violence is relatively minimal. This paper compares local press coverage of matched cases: three missing/murdered Aboriginal women from Saskatchewan and three missing/murdered White women from Ontario. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses indicate stark disparities in the amount and content of coverage between groups. The Aboriginal women received three and a half times less coverage; their articles were shorter and less likely to appear on the front page. Depictions of the Aboriginal women were also more detached in tone and scant in detail in contrast to the more intimate portraits of the White women. Drawing on feminist media studies and theories of intersectionality, this paper argues that the simultaneous devaluation of Aboriginal womanhood and idealization of middle-class White womanhood contributes to broader systemic inequalities which re/produce racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism. This paper raises concerns about the broader implications of the relative invisibility of missing/murdered Aboriginal women in the press, and their symbolic annihilation from the Canadian social landscape.

AUGUST 2008 The anger, grief, courage, compassion, and hope we hear in these voices inspire and compel us--to remember those who are missing and to work for healing and justice. Responding to the profound tragedy, more than 300 women and men gathered in August 2008 at a conference entitled "Missing Women: Decolonization, Third Wave Feminisms, and Indigenous People of Canada and Mexico". Here, personal stories and theoretical tools were brought together, as academics, activists, family members of missing and murdered women, police media, policy-makers, justice workers, and members of faith communities offered their perspectives on the issue of racialized, sexualized violence. Torn from Our Midst includes images and voices from the conference, together with additional reflections, both academic and personal, on the effects of violence and the possibilities for healing. The purpose of this volume is to raise awareness about missing and murdered women and to challenge communities to be courageous enough to look at the heart of this issue, to recognize the systems that allow such atrocities, and to seek justice and healing for all.

NOVEMBER 2007 'The missing white girl syndrome': disappeared women and media activism. Gender & Development: Vol. 15, Media, pp. 491-502.

OCTOBER 2013 All Canadian women deserve to live free of violence. For women with vulnerable life histories, violence is a daily threat and a common occurrence. More must be done to prevent violence and to hold offenders responsible when violence has been done. This dissertation is a plea for resources and attention; to turn apathy into pragmatic, concrete action founded on solid evidence-based research. Thesis submitted by Maryanne Pearce to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctorate in Laws degree, Common Law Section, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa.

MAY 2008 This paper was presented at the 7th Global Conference on Violence and Contexts of Hostility, Budapest, Hungary, by Yasmin Jiwani. To date, Canada is one of four nations that have refused to ratify the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous peoples. Yet, an Amnesty International Report reveals that over 500 Aboriginal women in Canada have gone missing over the last two decades. More recently, Robert W. Pickton, a serial killer, has been alleged to have murdered at twenty-six of the women missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, many of whom were Aboriginal. This presentation draws on examples culled from seven years (2000 to 2007) of press coverage in Canada's daily newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail, to illustrate how symbolic and discursive violence was used to mediate representations of the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. I pay particular attention to historical constructions of Aboriginal women as prostitutes and discuss the legacies of colonialism that have systematically violated their rights and entitlement to land. Drawing from this historical backdrop, I examine how the national press coverage repositions Aboriginal women as criminals, victims of sexual crimes, militant rebels and as inassimilable others. I underscore themes of culpability that were invoked in these accounts to make sense of these women's lives and realities, thereby pre-empting notions of societal responsibility or intervention. I conclude with an examination of how these representations have enabled the Canadian state to maintain its position of limited involvement in alleviating the conditions of Aboriginal women 'over here' all the while attempting to rescue women 'over there' in Afghanistan or elsewhere.

FEBRUARY 2009 This paper by Wendee Kubik, Carrie Bourassa and Mary Hampton examines the multiple oppressions faced by Aboriginal women as a result of Canada's sexist and racist colonial past. We explore the destructive affects of colonization on gender relations and societal structures and argue that Aboriginal women suffer higher rates of poverty, ill-health, violence and sexual exploitation than non-Aboriginal women as a result.

OCTOBER 2012 Published in An Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis Framework, p. 133 by Natalie Clark Thompson Rivers University, Faculty Simon Fraser University, PhD candidate nclark@tru.ca

How the death of Tina Fontaine has finally forced the city to face its festering race problem. by Nancy Macdonald

JUNE 2015 Published in the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies by Amber Dean. The CMHR and the Ongoing Crisis of Murdered or Missing Indigenous Women: Do Museums Have a Responsibility to Care? Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies: Vol. 37, Caring for Difficult Knowledge: Prospects for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, pp. 147-165. doi: 10.1080/10714413.2015.1028834

JUNE 2012 Published in The Arbutus Review Vol. 3, No. 2 (2012) by Jodi Beniuk. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which Indigenous women are Othered by the proceedings of the Missing Women's Commission of Inquiry (MWCI). First, I give a basic overview of Beauvoir's theory of women as Others, followed by Memmi's analysis of the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. I use these two theories to describe the way Indigenous women are Othered both as Indigenous peoples and as women, focusing on the context of the twenty-six who were murdered in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES). The original murders were the result of the cultural reduction of Indigenous Women to their bodies. The negligent police investigations, as well as the misogynistic attitudes of the police, also demonstrate how Othering can operate within these institutions. I claim that the violence against women in the DTES was due to their status as Other. Notably, the MWCI, which is supposed to be a process that addresses the Othering-based negligence of the police, also includes instances of Othering in its structure and practice. From this, I conclude that we cannot rely on Othering institutions or legal processes to correct Othering as a practice. In the context of the MWCI, I suggest building alliances that support those who face this Othering as violence in their everyday lives.

SEPTEMBER 2005 Officials have been slow to investigate or have ignored the 500 women who have been gone missing in the last 20 years. "Men who murder native women are the least likely to get a life sentence without parole." Written by Lauren Carter in Herizons; Fall 2005; 19, 2; CBCA Reference