Do You Know Who's Disappearing, Murdering Indigenous Women?
Murdered and missing indigenous women will be the focus of the first caucus meeting of the recently formed Senate Liberal caucus this month, making the greatest hope for thousands of Canadian women a reality.
Thousands of Canadian women gathered in February on Valentine’s Day, not to celebrate Hallmark-style love, but for another Annual Memorial March for Missing & Murdered Women.
Thousands of Canadian women will gather again this week in vigils across the nation to honor the life of a young student, who was completing her thesis about missing murdered indigenous women and disappeared Feb. 13, the day 23,000 native women delivered a petition to Parliament demanding a national inquiry that they say, again fell on deaf ears.
Now, Senate Liberals will risk their lives in attempt to tackle this mysterious crisis targeting indigineous women.
“This is an issue that has shocked the conscience of Canadians.” - Sen. Art Eggleton
Loretta Saunders was an Inuk university student writing her thesis on missing and murdered aboriginal women.
Cheryl Maloney, a native leader in Nova Scotia and president of Nova Scotia Native Women’s Association, is organizing a vigil on Parliament Hill at noon Wednesday, March 5 to honour Ms. Saunders and other missing and murdered indigenous women. Delilah Saunders-Terriak, Ms. Saunders’s younger sister, has also called for vigils across the country this month. They are receiving offers of help.
“[Loretta Saunders] broke the stereotype of what people can accept as missing and murdered aboriginal women,” Ms. Maloney said about the young disappeared student. “It’s easy for people to say, ‘Okay, they were on drugs.’ ‘It’s okay, they were a sex trade worker.’ That’s not the whole story of who is going missing and murdered.”
Ms. Saunders, 26, was a Saint Mary’s University student, studying criminology. She had dreams of being a lawyer. Her hopes were to return to her Labrador community as a role model.
The first women’s memorial march was held in 1991 in response to the murder of a First Nations Coast Salish woman on Powell Street in Vancouver. Out of a sense of hopelessness and anger came an annual march on Valentine’s Day to express compassion, community, and caring for all women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Unceded Coast Salish Territories. Twenty-three years later, the women’s memorial march continues to honour lives of missing and murdered women.
Repeated demands for an inquiry regarding missing and murdered indigenous women, including as recently as Friday, have fallen on deaf ears. Ms. Maloney had hoped Ms. Saunders’s story and her quest to shine a light on the crisis that captivated so many Nova Scotians would do the same across the country. Her hope may become a reality this week.
Thirty-two Senators, once part of Canada’s Liberal caucus, were banished by the Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. Now, freed from party discipline, these Senators plan to “make Parliament work better for Canadians, to make it respond to the needs of Canadians, rather than the needs of political parties and their leaders.”
The Independent Senators plan to open some of their caucus meetings to the public and turn them into forums on public policy issues often overlooked, said Sen. James Cowen, leader of the Senate Liberal caucus.
Their first open caucus meeting, slated for March 26, will focus on murdered and missing Indigenous women.
“This is an issue that has shocked the conscience of Canadians,” said Sen. Art Eggleton, who also referred to the ongoing search for Loretta Saunders, an Inuk university student from Labrador who went missing in Halifax.
Eggleton said the caucus would be inviting speakers to discuss the issue.
The Senate Liberals will also ask Canadians to submit questions for the Senators to use during the Senate’s question period, post their expenses on a separate website, make all votes free of party discipline and start an ongoing “national conversation” around equalization, where richer provinces help poorer provinces pay their bills.
“This is about patterns,” said NDP Halifax MP Megan Leslie. “If you are an indigenous woman and you are five times more likely to be murdered than I am, then there is a pattern.”
But what is different with Ms. Saunders’s case, she said, is that “we are paying attention and the collective ‘we’ care about this.”
“People have actually said her death won’t be in vain,” said Ms. Leslie. “What the reason is I don’t know exactly. But I am thankful.”
The Assembly of First Nations, that has repeatedly called for a national inquiry, noted that Ms. Saunders’s death provoked an increased awareness in a larger Canadian audience.
Ms. Saunders went missing on Feb. 13. For two weeks, her family, many of whom live in Labrador, were in Halifax searching for her. Last Wednesday, her body was found dumped in a wooded median of the Trans-Canada Highway in New Brunswick.
Blake Leggette, 25, and his girlfriend, Victoria Henneberry, 28, who were subletting her apartment for the past month, have been charged with first-degree murder.
They were arrested near Windsor, Ont. on Feb. 18 and initially charged with stealing Ms. Saunders’s car. Police believe Ms. Saunders was killed in her apartment.
Ms. Maloney hopes Ms. Saunders started something with her research.
“I think it’s up to Canadians and Canada to step up and finish her thesis and finish this story,” she says.
Sources: APTN National News, The Globe and Mail, YouTube
Poster art: Ange Ela, aka Angela Sterritt, Facebook for the 2014 Annual Memorial March for Missing and Murdered Women
Follow Deborah Dupre on Twitter @DeborahDupre
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Whistler Blowers, Insiders
And Canada’s aboriginals are only a fragment of the oppressed original peoples around the world: US, Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia. Even the polar cultures of Europe. Pretty much entirely fed by the culture of Western Europe and its descendants. A scourge upon the face of the earth.
Genocide.
Deborah, good article. FYI, it is actually more than JUST Canadian women that are ‘disappearing’.
My wife and I have traveled pretty-much all of North and South America. I retired 5-years ago, and we still travel the U.S. a bit. That said, we have friends in many places, and in keeping tabs with several of them, one common theme really sticks out. PEOPLE ARE DISAPPEARING in what appears to be ‘possible abductions’.
There are several ‘hot spots’ for this. My wife has family in Tennessee in the U.S. She says that there are ‘frequent’ reports of abductions, as well as quite a few ‘unsolved murders’ in several towns in the center of the state. They have yet to ‘pin’ it on anyone, or any certain group. I have asked if it might be related to drugs, smuggling, or other ‘nefarious’ causes – she says that there are no state or local reports to indicate it was drugs, sex trafficking, or other ‘crime-driven’ events.
The victims range all over the place, but are most-often young children 5-16 and ‘smaller stature’ women between 21-30 (the women most often are caucasian). There is nothing brought up in the news about the disappearances as a trend, only on a ‘case-by-case’ event basis. She says it’s like they don’t want to talk about it in public.
The same thing has happened in Ohio, Texas, Colorado and Alabama that I am aware of.
Not sure if this ties into your story – but those involved in your story might want to look at other places, to see if the problem is the same problem, or not.
Thank you very much for your very interesting personal account of what you’ve learned is happening in other places. Trafficking is such a secretive and lucrative crime, many people working to halt it are covertly persecuted.
I know one person falsely imprisoned for working on it and exposing it. I also know that organizations operating solely on this are routinely intimidated, harassed and threatened.
I do not know how common it is or what tribes conduct the practice but I do know that criminals elements of the tribes in Eastern Washington still conduct the practice of stealing and enslaving the women of neighboring tribes. I witnessed this first hand in the late 1980′s.
A girl with us was stolen, when we tried to get her to leave with us she said she could not or we would all be killed. They owned her now. This was my buddies girlfriend.
Later on he found her again and she had been traded to a neighboring tribe and still considered herself “owned” even though she had my buddies baby by that time.
It’s some crazy stuff that goes on on the reservations.
While this would only account for some disappearances. In understanding the culture of this behavior and knowing that women are still considered property among some tribal members one can draw the conclusion that if a woman is not valued as a human being among her own people. How much less would her life mean to a depraved sociopath, drug addict, biker, etc.