[Indigsol] No More Silence Network:

[Indigenous Peoples' Solidarity Movement -Ottawa]

No More Silence Network

BASIS OF UNITY
February 2008




WHO WE ARE


The No More Silence Network (NMS) is a Toronto-based organization striving
to work at the grassroots level, comprised of Indigenous women and allies.
Our mandate is to develop an inter/national network to support the work
that is being done by activists, academics, researchers, agencies and
communities to raise awareness around state-colonizer complicity in the
murder and disappearances of hundreds of Indigenous women on Turtle Island
(North America).


Our members are engaged in a variety of activisms, including anti-poverty,
immigrants’ rights, land reclamation struggles (as in Six Nations and
Tyendinaga), Palestinian solidarity, transgender rights and anti-violence
work. We are of diverse ages, ethnicities and sexual orientations, and
work in a range of professions, including education, research, media and
the NGO sector.


WHAT WE DO


1) educate ourselves and others about Canada’s colonial reality past and
present and the resulting genocide;
2) explore and act on strategies to end inaction, impunity, injustice, and
deliberate ignorance on the part of the Canadian State surrounding the
deaths and disappearances of Indigenous women in this country and
internationally;
3) work together as Indigenous women and allies in the struggle, thereby
fostering new forms of solidarity and a practice of decolonization amongst
all people living on Turtle Island.


Since our inception in 2004, we have worked with Indigenous women from
London, Ontario in mutual efforts to raise public consciousness around the
disproportionate violence experienced by Indigenous women on Turtle
Island. Through the diverse activisms of our members, we have also
established connections with Indigenous women and allies working on
related issues in Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Sudbury, and intend to
expand this network to include other cities in Canada. Likewise, we have
forged solidarity ties with Indigenous women activists in Chiapas and
Oaxaca, Mexico.


Our activities include an annual February 14th rally in Toronto in
solidarity with the women of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to mark and
memorialize the deaths and disappearances of women from that neighbourhood
as well as the many other Indigenous women missing across the country.
While mindful of the over-policing of Indigenous communities alongside the
need for a complete transformation of the police and justice systems, we
hold our event at the Toronto Metropolitan Police Headquarters in order to
highlight the current levels of impunity of the law enforcement system in
investigating the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women.


THE PATH WE ARE ON


We envision a decolonized world where women, particularly Indigenous
women, are not harmed, and where the State does not sanction their murder
and disappearance. We are engaged in a collective process of
decolonization and the work of supporting Indigenous land claims and
sovereignty struggles. We are committed to building radical new
relationships that do not replicate the hierarchical power dynamics that
have characterized mainstream white, middle class women’s movements in
North America.


VIOLENCE AGAINST INDIGENOUS WOMEN


While we acknowledge that Indigenous men also experience disproportionate
levels of violence and imprisonment, we choose to focus our activism on
the violence and impunity experienced by Indigenous women, because
hundreds of Indigenous women have been murdered or disappeared over the
past 20 years with impunity: the investigations of these cases are given a
very low priority and thus are exceedingly shoddy, the perpetrators are
almost never charged, and on the rare occasion when they are, they receive
light sentences.


Amnesty International’s Stolen Sisters Report challenges the Canadian
government and justice systems to do more. Amnesty’s Report confirms that
the exact number of murders and disappearances is unknown because police
have not kept adequate records. And in cases where they have kept records,
ongoing irregularities, gaps in information, and insensitive and racist
treatment of the families is the norm.


Some facts


Indigenous communities in Canada have been displaced through widespread
violations of their land and resource rights – including the erosion of
more than two-thirds of their land base – since the formation of Canada
[Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996 Report].


Indigenous people in Canada in urban settings (the percentage of
Indigenous Canadians who are now living in urban areas is more than 60%)
are at a disadvantage compared to non-Indigenous people, as there is a
lack of economic support and appropriate services.


The Indian Act, residential school system and 60’s scoop have all
contributed to destroying the social fabric of Indigenous societies. The
residential school system, which continued into the 1970’s and 1980’s (the
last school in Canada was closed in 1996), kept children from their
communities and subjected many of them to physical, sexual, cultural and
spiritual abuse. All of this has resulted in Indigenous women bearing the
brunt of an ongoing cycle of violence at 5 times the rate of
non-Indigenous women [Stats Can Survey, 1999; Bonita Lawrence, 2004].


OUR POLITICS


As members of No More Silence, we believe all people living on Turtle
Island have a great responsibility vis-à-vis Indigenous communities. We
must: 1) decolonize our thinking and practices; 2) act to restore justice
to Indigenous communities, in part by supporting Indigenous struggles for
sovereignty and land claims; 3) speak out against the colonial violence
affecting all Indigenous people, particularly women, trans-gendered and
two-spirited people; 4) call for an end to the impunity of all Canadian
State actors and institutions implicated in this violence, including the
police, the RCMP, coroners’ offices, and the courts; 5) call for the
progressive transformation of Indigenous/settler State relations; and, 6)
recognize that Indigenous communities are over-policed and
over-represented amongst prison populations. Instead of calling for more
law and order type policies, we look to traditional Indigenous systems of
justice as a way of holding accountable violent perpetrators.


We maintain that Indigenous peoples in Canada have been the targets of a
genocidal policy, which is at the centre of ongoing colonial relations
between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian State. Colonization
(historical and current state-sanctioned acts and modes of thought to
dominate peoples) and racist treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada
through land usurpation, the education, health and justice systems, and
policing has resulted in appalling levels of violence against all
Indigenous people, with specifically gendered impacts on women and girls.


No More Silence - Basis of Unity 					    nomoresilence at riseup.net
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