in Canada, where a devastating national inquiry has determined that the frequent and widespread disappearance and murder of indigenous girls and women is a genocide that the Canadian government itself is responsible for. This chilling conclusion was reported by the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls at a ceremony on Monday with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the families of victims. Many in the audience held red flowers to commemorate the dead.
Marion Buller, the chief commissioner of the inquiry, speaking at the ceremony, said, “The significant, persistent and deliberate pattern of systemic racial and gendered human and indigenous rights violations and abuses, perpetuated historically and maintained today by the Canadian state, designed to displace indigenous people from their lands, social structures and governments, and to eradicate their existence as nations, communities, families and individuals, is the cause of the disappearances, murders and violence experienced by indigenous women, girls, 2SLGBTQQIA people, and this is genocide.”
The inquiry issued 231 recommendations on how to address the deaths. At the same ceremony, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to conduct a thorough review of the report. He said ” Time and again, we have heard of their disappearance, violence or even death being labeled low priority or ignored. We have heard of their human rights being consistently and systematically violated. It is shameful. It is absolutely unacceptable. And it must end. … To the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls of Canada, to their families and to survivors, we have failed you. We will fail you no longer. In the days ahead, let us walk forward together as partners, hand in hand, as we right these wrongs and seek justice for the indigenous people of Canada.”
The report follows decades of anguish and anger as indigenous communities have called for greater attention to the epidemic of dead and missing indigenous women, girls and two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual people. Fifteen hundred family members of victims and survivors gave testimony to the commission, painting a picture of violence, state-sanctioned neglect, and pervasive racist and sexist stereotypes that have led to nearly 1,200 indigenous women and girls to die or go missing between 1980 and 2012. That number could be a massive undercount: Indigenous activists say many deaths go unreported and unnoticed. The national inquiry was convened after the body of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine from the Sagkeeng First Nation was found in the Red River in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 2014.
Marion Buller talking:
We started this national inquiry back in September of 2016. And over—oh, gee, how many years and months now, I’ve lost track—we’ve heard from families and survivors, from coast to coast to coast, about their experiences with the Canadian state—more often than not, the police. But we also heard a lot about shortcomings in the child welfare system, education, health, other areas of government services. Then we had to do our final report to government. We did do an interim report in 2017, but our final report is the one that was just released. It’s about 1,200 pages long.
Our chief findings are, amongst others, the finding of genocide, as you’ve recorded earlier. We have also found that there have been human rights and indigenous rights violations perpetuated over generations. We have also found that governments have deliberately underfunded or improperly delivered services to indigenous people.
All across Canada, we found, as well, that indigenous women and girls are targeted by perpetrators of violence, targeted all across Canada. And so, there have to be changes to our criminal justice system and our judicial system to right those wrongs, to denounce and deter the horrendous amount of violence against indigenous women and girls. We have been told by perpetrators of violence that they target indigenous women and girls because they can. They can get away with it. Even if it gets to court, the sentence will just be a slap on the hand.
We’ve also heard about children be removed from their families. And we’ve made findings of fact about the children welfare system, that children are removed from families not because the parents are incompetent or negligent. It’s because the parents are poor. And the parents are poor because the state delivery of services and because of the genocide that’s been going on in Canada for generations now.
So, policing, criminal justice, child welfare, indigenous rights breaches and abuses, human rights abuses and violations—all of them—I think that’s about the best summary I can give you in a short period of time.
We have still probably one of the most amazing research teams, led by Dr. Karine Duhamel, who is indigenous herself. They did an incredible amount of work to marshal the evidence that we heard, to make sure that we were coming from a very sound and strong position legally and from a research point of view, a social science point of view, as well. We knew—by the time we had finished hearing from families and survivors, we knew what the issues were. We knew the problems that we had to address. But our research team provided a wonderful foundation for us to move forward.
Most of us, myself included, before I started this work, thought that genocide was something like the Holocaust or the Rwanda massacres, massacres of people that have occurred elsewhere in very short periods of time, relatively speaking.
The genocide that has occurred in Canada has been over generations of people—generations of human rights and indigenous rights violations; deliberate underfunding of services and programs to indigenous people; forcibly removing children from their families, children being removed and never being seen again by their own families, by their own communities; forced sterilization of women and girls. The list goes on. But from our perspective and from the legal definition, genocide can be over a long period of time of deliberate state action, that looks different from what we commonly think of as genocide. But it’s genocide, legally, nonetheless.
– The report says Canadian police and the criminal justice system have viewed indigenous women through a lens of pervasive racist and sexist stereotypes. The report says police, quote, “apathy often takes the form of stereotyping and victim-blaming, such as when police describe missing loved ones as ‘drunks,’ ‘runaways out partying’ or ‘prostitutes unworthy of follow-up.’” Declaring this, and with the prime minister of Canada talking about this now as a genocide.
first of all, the truth is out there now. It’s public knowledge now that this is how police services have been treating indigenous women and girls. I think that this has started a movement of police services to rethink their policies and practices. But most of all, I’m hoping that it will mean that police services will start to build new relationships with indigenous communities and indigenous people. You can’t unhear the truth now.
Robyn Bourgeois talking:
Having studied previous encounters like this, where indigenous women have gone to the government of Canada, one of the things I’ve been very critical of is that I found like there was a diminishment of the violence sometimes. And I’ve been waiting, you know, for most of my life to hear what has happened to me, because I am also a survivor of this violence—to hear that be described as genocide. I mean, it’s been 40 years. And I think it’s overwhelming, and it’s about time.
I actually think that the most surprising part was genocide. I think we have had a tendency to sort of distance ourselves from that term in some ways. I think about, for example, the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into Indian residential schools, where the term “cultural genocide” was used. And I’ve always been very critical of that, because that prefix of “cultural” implies that it was our indigenous cultures that were destroyed and eliminated, and not so much our nations and our people. And to say that this is genocide, to actually take this U.N. definition, the standard international understanding of what that means, and say, “No. You know what? What happened to indigenous people, indigenous women and girls and 2SLGBTQQIA folks, in this country is genocide,” is profound. This is a significant moment in Canadian history, where we are having the violence experienced here put on par with other genocidal atrocities that we tend to think of in the world, like the Holocaust or things that happened in Rwanda. And I think that’s really, really significant.
I think—I get a sense from at least the folks that I’ve spoken to in the last day or so, that are indigenous, that this is a really—you know, it’s about time that this has happened. And there’s a kind of a sigh of relief. And, you know, we’ve always known this, and we’ve always argued this. And to hear it reiterated and emphasized and amplified, I think, by the final report is such a remarkable thing. I feel like, in some ways, as a survivor, been carrying that burden and that truth with me, it’s been lifted off my shoulders now, because now there is this official document that backs it up.
And I think this will lead to some significant changes in our communities, because it moves this discussion to a whole ‘nother level. There is no longer a place for government officials, for example, like former prime ministers of this country, who said, you know, “This isn’t high on our radar,” or “This doesn’t matter,” where it’s, you know, the acts of single perpetrators and not a systemic problem. And now we have this report that says, no, this is absolutely genocidal, systematic violence perpetrated against indigenous peoples in this country.
When I was a teenager, in my late teens, in the late 1990s, I was sexually exploited through human trafficking. So, I was lured, in the very early days of the internet, by a man who claimed to want to love me and be my boyfriend, and then very carefully groomed me and then forced me to sell my body in the streets of Vancouver. So, it’s actually a little ironic that I’m having this conversation with you right now from Vancouver, where my story begins. And I was very fortunate, despite being drugged for most of that time and being violently raped and abused, that I was able to escape. And I just felt like I had a second chance, and I was going to do everything in my power to make sure this never happened to another woman.
Marion Buller talking:
I didn’t have a chance to speak to the prime minister. It was a very busy day yesterday. Really, it’s over to him to make statements, to devise policies, to advance the report forward. In many respects, our work is done, and it’s in the political arena now. I would certainly make myself available should the prime minister want to talk to me and/or the other commissioners about our findings of fact. But when we gave it to—the report to him yesterday, we were, in many, many ways, handing it over to him.
We had a slightly different system in Canada than you have in the United States, or had in the United States. In Canada, by law, indigenous kids, mostly what we call the southern part of Canada, but south of our territories, but including parts of our territories, as well, by law, had to go to Indian schools. They couldn’t go to schools where nonindigenous kids were. The purpose of these residential schools was, amongst other things, to take the Indian out of the child. It was to educate them, to teach them white ways, and to destroy the culture, the language and the beliefs that the children brought with them.
As a result of that terrible, terrible legacy, the survivors of residential school live with a variety of horrible, horrible issues—post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction issues, mental health issues. And this is passed on through generations. If the children didn’t go, the parents would be jailed. In many cases, children were hidden in the bush, in the forest, by their parents so that they wouldn’t have to go. And many children never came home.
there’s always criticism when you’re dealing with such a challenging and meaningful topic. But we moved past that very quickly. And I think it’s important to look at our final report and what we were able to do. And I think our final report is brilliant.
we don’t say “recommendations”; we say “calls for justice.” And I think—oh, you know, where to start? They’re so interconnected that it’s really hard to say which is the most important. But I think, for a lot of indigenous women and girls, the most important ones are—most important calls for justice will be to be able to drink the water that comes out of the taps in their homes; to have homes that are properly built for the conditions, the environmental conditions; to be able to have a decent life, free of violence; to be able to have their children and to raise their children in the ways that they see fit, that maybe aren’t Western ways, but they’re certainly indigenous ways that have been proven to work for generations. I think, for those women, as well, to be able to have access to proper health services, to be able to live in their own communities regardless of who they marry, to raise their children in their own communities—all of the calls of justice regarding those issues, I think, are going to be the most important to the women who are really suffering right now.
_________
Marion Buller
chief commissioner of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and a member of the Mistawasis First Nation in Saskatchewan.
Robyn Bourgeois
assistant professor in the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at Brock University.
— source democracynow.org | Jun 04, 2019