Maniwaki: Oppression Of Indigenous Women

The cases are numerous, almost unfathomable. How could it be that as many as 1,181 women and likely more, have gone missing with little to no attention paid until now? Finally, these women are getting some national and international attention, but only after the release of the staggering statistics by the RCMP. I can remember the two young girls in Maniwaki who went missing. (Pierosara, 2009) I remember seeing their faces on billboards on drives up to the cottage. I remember thinking, why haven’t their faces been plastered further into the city, why hasn’t this been on the news? The girls were labeled runaways, troublemakers and delinquents. Why is it that this case did not garner national media attention? The local news barely covered it.
It was just another case of two young aboriginal girls who had gone missing.
In this case, and many others similar to it, aboriginal people, and women in particular, are vilified in the press. Their culture, their way of life, and their very being are fodder for disapproval and dismissal. Frequently labelled as drunks, drug abusers and street workers, their lives don’t matter. Looking back at cases involving murdered and missing women in Canada is like looking back through a nightmare. You question the validity of the dream and once you wake up, you wonder if it is really true. Going as far back as the 1980’s, the patterns are there to see. Had the police and investigators taken these cases for what they were, instead of what they ‘thought’ they were, the numbers released in 2014 most definitely wouldn’t have been so high.
When slews of women were going missing in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, many of whom were indigenous, the cases were going unsolved. Just more missing women, street worker, vagrants and addicts whose lifestyle are part and parcel to their fate. Vancouver Sun reporter Lindsay Kines cited Constable Anne Drennan, the Vancouver Police Department’s media liaison officer: “Drennan says there is no indication that a serial killer is preying on these women. Detectives also have to investigate the possibility of a suicide or drug overdose that has gone undiscovered, or that the women are killed in a dispute over drugs.” (Kines, 2002). Even after investigative reports by journalists, including one done by Kines and two fellow reporters, were compiled, they were still met with criticism by the police. Their arguments continued to assert stereotypical responses with respect to the view of these women as itinerant workers and drug addicts and hence, culpable in their own murders or disappearance.
Indigenous women are the poorest and most disenfranchised portion of our population and are victims of not only physical or sexual violence but also political and economical violence which make them the most preyed upon portion of our society.
Oppression of women is systemic in our society and is manifested in individualized and institutionalized manners whereby women have suffered severely and continue to do so. Nowhere is this more visible than in the indigenous community. With mounting evidence surrounding the cases of these missing women, and with thanks to the journalistic investigation done by Kines and his partners, the case finally broke and Robert Pickton was arrested. That being said, the Pickton case is only a small portion of that huge number released by the
RCMP.
At what point will a national inquiry or action be taken?
If it were our white sisters, daughters and friends, surely an inquiry and a solution would have been offered long ago. It most definitely would not have evolved into hundreds of unsolved cases that have occurred over many years. The media in these cases have played both sides of this story and for this reason, upon researching the subject, I feel they played a major role in deciding the fates of these women. In the beginning, the women were further abused and victimized by the press. Written about as vagrants and prostitutes, their role in society meaningless and criminal. Victim blaming continues to be an issue in the media and in these cases in particular, the women’s lives were scrutinized and portrayed so negatively by the press, it was near impossible to create a sense of sympathy or urgency about the issue. As a society, we continue to scrutinize victims as to who they were with, what they were wearing, or what they might have done to cause the violence committed against them. In the cases of indigenous women, this is so visible that we accept it for truth and it is further indoctrinated into our social experience. The rampant levels of violence against indigenous women in Canada are created by social and economic marginalization, which in turn are consequences of colonialism such as dispossession of lands and livelihoods, abuse experienced in residential schools and assimilationist and racist policies seeking
to erase identities and cultures. As a result, many women are being forced into dangerous or vulnerable situations such as extreme poverty, homelessness and prostitution. (Kuokkanen, 2008) Is this ever discussed in the media? Not until now, and still it is only a blip on the screen.
It is only because of the release of those incredible statistics by the RCMP and the recent federal election that these cases are now at the forefront of our conscious mind. The continuing institutionalized racism and polarization of our indigenous communities have created a divide where our very way of thinking about these women, has created an ‘us and them’ mentality. Where ‘them’ is virtually invisible and 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. (Gilchrist, 2010)
At some point, in the near future, I am able to envision resources being poured into this issue. The press is finally playing a positive role where the murdered and missing indigenous women are concerned but still have a long way to go. That being said, unfortunately, the first thing we see reported on when a woman is raped or murdered, whether she be white or aboriginal, is an interview with a police officer, reminding women to not walk alone at night. If society is to change its views on the treatment of women, it must take its cues from our institutionalized and paternalized systems of authority. Sadly, their misogynistic thinking only aids in perpetuating the idea that it is a woman’s responsibility as to how she is treated. The message should be more along the lines of: “Men, don’t rape!”, but this is a pipe dream from the mind of a feminist activist.