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Submitted by Penni Mitchell on Tue, 07/12/2011 - 07:32
It turns out that you can decimate entire nations by undermining the power of their women. It helps if you’ve got superior firepower, too, but as far as the colonizing of the upper half of Turtle Island is concerned the elimination of Aboriginal societies was successful in large part because of the sexism that was infused into them under the laws of European colonists.
The Indian Act of 1870 was a masterful piece of work. It banished not only the potlatch ceremonies by which Aboriginals shared community wealth, but under new rules laid out it allocated rights over reserve affairs to male Indians. After all, that’s the way the Europeans did things, and it worked just fine.No more tracing your lineage through your mother’s side of the family. No more women speaking up at gatherings where decisions are made.
To speed up assimilation further, the federal government forced the removal of children from their families under residential school laws. Languages were banished, religions demonized and the bond between mothers and children was severed. It worked well. Aboriginal women went from being central forces in their communities to having little value.
Today, there is no clearer symbol of the lost power of Aboriginal women during colonization than the 582 missing Aboriginal women who are counted in the database of the Sisters in Spirit project. Their lost lives are the imprint of the racialized and sexualized discrimination and violence delivered under the enforcement of colonial laws. The status of Aboriginal women—who are five to ten times more likely to be assaulted than non-Aboriginal women—is denigrated further when law enforcement agencies show little concern for Aboriginal women who are victims of violence. And when Aboriginal women come into conflict with the law, they are imprisoned at a much higher rate than non-Aboriginal women.
In other words, there are trust issues here. The treatment of Aboriginal women at the hands of law enforcement authorities is part of a larger problem that has to be fixed. The culture in which law enforcement officials work and the ways crimes are prioritized must be corrected if Aboriginal women are to stop disappearing.
You might expect the federal government, which just set aside $10 million to beef up efforts on the missing Aboriginal women file, would have consulted the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) when it set out to put some resources behind the problem of missing Aboriginal women.
But it didn’t. And you might think the Harper government would want to keep Aboriginal women involved by continuing to fund the Sisters in Spirit initiative begun under NWAC. After all, Sisters in Spirit provided the impetus for the national campaign that has led to a national profile for an issue that, five years ago, didn’t exist outside of Aboriginal communities.
Again, Ottawa didn’t. In fact, Ottawa excluded Sisters in Spirit from receiving a nickel of the $10 million, and it set up a new law-and-order campaign to be run by the RCMP to address the missing “persons” problem.
Does this sound familiar? A campaign of law and order is what led to Aboriginal socities' unravellings and the subsequent abuse and poverty caused. More law enforcement isn’t the solution. Laws—for example, those that stipulate who is Indian and who is not—are part of the problem. It isn’t that Aboriginal women don’t want these 582 crimes solved. But giving more firepower to a policing institution in which Aboriginal women have no say isn’t what NWAC had in mind. And it’s not the justice Aboriginal women seek.
Sisters in Spirit has identified gaps and procedures in law enforcement that need to be changed in order to improve results in the cases involving missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls. By squelching the voices of these experts and not funding their groundbreaking work, the government is pushing Aboriginal women aside once again.
Giving more resources to the RCMP, an institution dominated by white men who carry guns, isn’t going to fix this.
Until a few hundred years ago, Aboriginal women served as advisors on matters of war, oversaw the equitable sharing of food and were valued as negotiators between traders. They served as peacemakers and translators. Their voices were heard. Today, Ottawa owes it to the Aboriginal women at Sisters in Spirit to listen to their voices, involve them in the process and treat them with the respect they deserve.
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