[Greeting]
A week ago, the body of 15-year-old teenager Tina Fontaine was pulled out of Winnipeg, Manitoba’s Red River. She was found already wrapped in a bag. [ON CAMERA - LONG SIGH / STARE INTO DARKNESS ITSELF]
Tina is the most recent in a long string of missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada. For those of you who don’t know, Aboriginal women have long been grossly over-represented among missing and murdered Canadian women, from the Highway of Tears murders, to Robert Pickton’s killing spree in the late nineties and early 2000’s, to name a couple of the more high-profile instances.
Why?How? WHY AND HOW is this the case? [ON SCREEN - LOTS OF HAIR-PULLING] Aboriginal women are among the most vulnerable groups in Canada, with statistics showing that they have less access to proper housing, education, and employment as well as being more vulnerable than their Non-Aboriginal peers to violence both in and outside of the home.
Unfortunately, this is but one part of a larger tetris-like-wall of interconnected problems faced by Aboriginal Canadians today - think of an impenetrable fortress constructed entirely of garbage, sadness, and oppression.
Many of these contemporary problems - addiction, alcoholism, high instances of sex-working among women, high instances of suicide among teens - can be traced back to the harmful and inhumane colonial practices from way back then. These practices include but are not limited to genocidal acts, the establishment of the reserve system (oh, you live here on this fertile farming land? Nope, now you live on a swamp), and the widespread kidnapping of thousands of children for institutionalization in the Indian Residential Schools across the country, the last of which only closed in 1996, leaving generations traumatized and without the tools to cope with their pain and rage. UUUUGGGHHHHHH. [CUT]
Earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded to news of Tina’s death by saying it was a horrible tragedy BUT “We should not view [the murder] as a sociological phenomenon. We should view it as a crime.” [ON SCREEN - QUOTE APPEARS WORD BY WORD], and said that crime is what we have police for.
Mr. Harper also made a point of noting that the government has passed legislation focused on counteracting violent crime against all Canadians, not just Aboriginal women. This weird response is his boilerplate answer whenever he’s being pushed to dedicate resources to investigating this issue. Specifically, it’s designed to address renewed calls for a national inquiry into Canada’s missing and murdered aboriginal women, which understandably rise dramatically whenever another body is found.
The Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) has been at the forefront of this fight, and upon hearing Harper’s latest rebuff of the notion of an inquiry, NWAC Executive Director Claudette Dumont-Smith, called Harper’s remarks “insensitive,” “irresponsible,” and asked ”Why are there so many aboriginal women that are murdered compared to other women? Doesn’t he think that racism and sexism and colonialism play a part in all that?” [ON SCREEN - QUOTE APPEARS WORD BY WORD]
On the one hand, I get it, Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister and as such his responsibilities extend beyond protecting just one minority - he has to worry about everybody. Pushing legislation that protects only one of the myriad of diverse groups in Canada could set a dangerous precedent and politically, could make the remainder of his term just plain difficult.
On the other hand, when one subset of your country’s citizens is being murdered at an alarming rate, there at least needs to be a conversation that extends beyond saying “well, these other guys are taking care of it sooooo let’s talk about something less controversial (please).”
Another reason Harper has cited for not considering a probe is that the issue has already been studied and reported on ad nauseam, referring to an Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report released earlier this year. This very report found 1,181 aboriginal women have either disappeared or been killed over the last 30 years. Approximately 1,000 of the women in these cases were murdered.
Now, whether Harper is saying that the above statistic isn’t indicative of a systematic problem - in which case, WHAT?! - or that a national inquiry simply isn’t the most effective tool to use to dissect the matter isn’t really clear. Unfortunately, the man has a long and storied history of being non-committal on this issue.
Regardless of whether we call it a sociological phenomenon, leftover colonial sentiment, or just plain racism, this issue is ripping through a group that has already spent generations being systematically abused and ignored by the Canadian government. While steps have recently been taken (see: Truth and Reconciliation Commission) to improve the relationship between the Canadian government and its Aboriginal groups, the fact that there is a clear disconnect between how the Prime Minister views this issue and how the affected group(s) views this issue shows that we have miles to go before we sleep.
In a way, I can see Mr. Harper’s point; we’re talking about crime, and crime is the RCMP’s wheelhouse. Of course it’s for them and local police forces to solve and involve themselves with the day-to-day fact of Aboriginal women in their jurisdictions being kidnapped and murdered. In that report published by the RCMP in May, they stated that almost 90% of the murders were solved through police investigation, which is about the same success rate they have solving any murder, but I think the focus needs to shift from what is being done to what needs to be done, and I think this is what groups like the NWAC are desperately gunning for.
Maybe a national inquiry isn’t the most incisive tool to use towards building the kind of Canada where it isn’t commonplace for Aboriginal women to be murdered and abducted at astonishing rates, but Prime Minister Harper needs to at least open a nationwide conversation about what such an effective tool would look like, like a swiss-army knife of social justice and anti-oppression. Or something. I don’t know.
[Exit greeting]
Petition for national inquiry: http://www.nwac.ca/nwac-petition-national-inquiry-needed
RCMP Report:
http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/pubs/mmaw-faapd-eng.pdf
Report of the Special Committee on Violence Against Indigenous Women:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/content/hoc/Committee/412/IWFA/Reports/RP6469851/IWFArp01/IWFArp01-e.pdf
Toronto Star Coverage of Tina Fontaine
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/08/21/native_teens_slaying_a_crime_not_a_sociological_phenomenon_stephen_harper_says.html
Globe and Mail Coverage of Tina Fontaine
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-rejects-calls-for-aboriginal-women-inquiry/article20166785/
