[news] 500 missing aboriginal women
Ishaq
ishaq1823 at telus.net
Thu Jul 1 22:34:46 PDT 2004
http://vancouver.indymedia.org/news/2004/03/118906.php
500 missing aboriginal women
Over the past 20 years, approximately 500 Aboriginal women have gone
missing in communities across Canada. Yet government, the media, and
Canadian society continue to remain silent.
This story was "missing" from most of the daily newspapers. It was in
the Victoria Times Colonist and the Calgary Herald but does not appear
to have been in other online newspapers.
Posted by Victoria Status of Women Action Group.
500 Missing aboriginal women
Canadian Press
Chuck Stoody, Canadian Press
Monday, March 22, 2004
Sandra Gagnon of Vancouver, who is campaigning to raise awareness of the
hundreds of women who have vanished under mysterious circumstances,
holds up a picture of her sister Janet. She has been missing for seven
years.
OTTAWA (CP) -- Sandra Gagnon will never forget the last words her sister
spoke to her before she joined the ranks of missing or murdered
aboriginal women.
"I love you and I miss you much."
"Miss you much" was a reference to one of her sister's favourite Janet
Jackson songs, Gagnon recalled.
That was on June 25, 1997. She hasn't heard from Janet Henry since.
Henry's case is among hundreds to be highlighted in a new campaign,
Sisters in Spirit, starting today with events across Canada.
She was 37, a drug user and sometime prostitute living in a rough but
tidy hotel room on Vancouver's squalid Downtown Eastside.
She was also the mother of a daughter, now 19, and she was a cherished
sister, said Gagnon in an interview from her Vancouver home.
"Janet didn't end up there overnight. She had a life at one time. I
never thought my sister would end up on drugs and on the streets."
Henry's life fell apart about a year before she went missing, Gagnon
said, when the man convicted of raping her got a six-month jail term.
"I hate the court system for that."
The Native Women's Association of Canada says it will spend a year
urging Ottawa to spend $10 million to research what it estimates are 500
cases in the last 20 years where aboriginal women have been murdered or
simply vanished.
It will push for a national registry, a hotline, public education
programs and a fund to accurately document cases.
Victims who are poor, addicted and living on society's fringe have too
often been neglected, said Gagnon. She will be among speakers scheduled
for the campaign launch Monday in Ottawa. Events are also planned in
Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and Charlottetown.
"If it were middle class or high class women who'd gone missing I have a
feeling that more would have been done for them," said Gagnon. "These
were mothers, daughters, best friends."
Kukdookaa Terri Brown, president of the Native Women's Association, says
rumours about a pig farm at Port Coquitlam were played down as the
number of missing women from the Downtown Eastside -- many of them
aboriginal -- continued to climb.
Robert Pickton now faces 15 first-degree murder charges as the largest
homicide investigation in Canadian history continues.
Gagnon fears her sister may have wound up there, but has heard nothing
conclusive.
Brown also cites how the disappearance of five native women along a
lonely stretch of Highway 16 in B.C. barely caused a media ripple.
Alberta Williams, Delphine Nikal, Ramona Wilson, Roxanne Thiara and Lana
Derrick all vanished between 1988 and 1995 along what is now known as
the Highway of Tears, she said.
In all, the association says 32 aboriginal women are believed to have
gone missing along the road between Prince Rupert and Prince George.
Yet, in June 2002, the disappearance of a non-aboriginal woman named
Nicole Hoar was front-page news, Brown said.
"We want to keep the pressure on to bring about real change."
RCMP Insp. Conrad Delaronde, of national aboriginal policing services,
says any new measures to complement police efforts will be welcome.
He examined 3,300 records of missing females to cull the number of
missing aboriginal women over age 18.
He came up with 107 across Canada, but said it could be higher.
The Canadian Police Information Centre computer system does not require
officers to denote ethnicity along with physical descriptions, he said.
Delaronde, a Cree with roots on the Skownan First Nation in Manitoba,
said the RCMP take each reported disappearance seriously.
"Our ultimate goal is to ensure there's no discrimination of any form or
bias toward any group of people.
http://www.canada.com/victoria/timescolonist/story.asp?id=737D0C2D-44F0-452A-9BDE-F42E2FAF3DC4
http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/news/index.html
**********************************************************
More from the Sisters in Spirit Campaign
Over the past 20 years, approximately 500 Aboriginal women have gone
missing in communities across Canada. Yet government, the media, and
Canadian society continue to remain silent.
In Vancouver, more than 50 women went missing in that city's Downtown
Eastside. Sixty percent were Aboriginal, and most were young. These were
poor women involved in the sex trade. They struggled with drugs and
alcohol. Some suffered from the effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and
many were victims of childhood sexual abuse. Every one of them grew up
in a foster home. In other words, their lives bore all of the markings
of the violence of colonization.
But these women also had families, hopes, dreams. They left behind
grieving communities -- grandmothers, mothers, fathers, sisters and
brothers, and sadly, young children of their own. These young women had
belonged somewhere and were loved. Questions remain. Why didn't the
police react sooner -- especially when it was common knowledge on the
street that women who went to the Port Coquitlam pig farm did not
return? When the women were reported missing, why did the investigators
focus on their lifestyles-as if to suggest that they somehow deserved
what they got? And why is so little attention given to the reasons why
Aboriginal women live such lives?
In Vancouver, no bodies of the missing women have been found. But even
when bodies are found, there is little effort to find the killers and to
bring them to justice. Many disappearances and deaths of Aboriginal
women simply go unreported.
The Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) has been gathering the
names and stories of Aboriginal women who have disappeared - not just in
Vancouver, but also in Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, Kenora, Thunder Bay,
Fredericton, and so many other communities, large and small, across this
country.
http://generalsynod.anglican.ca/ministries/committees/acip/sistersinspirit/background.html
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