[IPSM] Native women: forgotten prey

[Macdonald Stainsby]

Native women: forgotten prey

Researcher finds cases of missing, slain aboriginals across Canada

      By JIM BRONSKILL and SUE BAILEY, THE CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA -- Their carefree grins, candid photos and cold mugshots stare out
from a gut-wrenching gallery.

Untold scores of society's most vulnerable members - young native women -
have gone missing across the country only to be forsaken by a jaded
justice system and neglectful media.

The death and disappearance of aboriginal women has emerged as an alarming
nationwide pattern, from western serial murders to little-known Atlantic
vanishings.

Grim statistics and anecdotal evidence compiled by The Canadian Press
suggests public apathy has allowed predators to stalk native victims with
near impunity.

The record also points to an ugly truth behind the political and legal
lethargy: racism.

Pauline Muskego's daughter, Daleen Kay Bosse, disappeared after a night
out with friends in Saskatoon on May 18, 2004.

She left behind a daughter, now four, who was her greatest joy.

There was no hint that the aspiring teacher and photographer, just 26
years old, would simply abandon her life, says Muskego.

The torment of waiting for answers is only deepened whenever a white
woman's disappearance triggers a flurry of national media attention.

"My daughter's face has never been shown nationally," Muskego says.

Almost everyone has heard that the remains of more than 27 women were
found on a pig farm in British Columbia. Lost in the grisly headlines,
however, is the fact that many of the victims were aboriginal.

The episode highlighted the cases of at least 68 missing women from
Vancouver's downtown east side - an enclave of drug-addicted despair that
is disproportionately home to native people.

They vanished over a two-decade period, often with scant police or media
attention.

But aboriginal women are not preyed upon in British Columbia alone.

Amber O'Hare has been tracing their stories for years. Posters of missing
native women began to haunt her a decade ago as she visited reserves
across Canada working as an AIDS educator.

Again and again, she saw desperate appeals for help finding loved ones -
many of them aboriginal girls and women.

O'Hare would check newspapers for details but usually found nothing.

It was her first glimpse of the lack of public interest that has
contributed to the swelling ranks of murdered and missing native women.

She could not accept the general indifference and scant media coverage.
"So I started documenting them."

O'Hare soon heard from distraught relatives who'd spent years trying to
get help from police.

"I've had e-mails and phone calls from family members who've said that
they've been to the police department three years later and the file's
dusty."

The Toronto mother of two, herself an AIDS sufferer who narrowly escaped a
heroin-addicted street life, began to build an unsettling online
catalogue. Today, she has documented hundreds of cases of murdered and
vanished native girls and women from coast to coast.

O'Hare toiled in obscurity as she built a digital memorial to the losses.

Etched in her memory was the chilling case of Helen Betty Osborne, the
Manitoba girl whose 1971 beating death at the hands of four white men was
a shameful open secret in The Pas for years.

Just one of the men was ever convicted - more than 15 years later.

An inquiry exposed the racism and misogyny that led to Osborne's rape and
killing.

O'Hare's website, www.missingnativewomen.ca, offers stark evidence that
little has changed.

The pages are filled with more than 200 desperate stories.

It's a dispiriting inventory of native girls and women who were killed or
have simply disappeared.

"Most of them are dead, I believe," O'Hare says with flat resignation.


--
Macdonald Stainsby
http://independentmedia.ca/survivingcanada/
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope.
--Brecht.