(Photo: Janna Pratt joins marchers on 22 July 2005 in Saskatoon to draw attention to the plight of missing Indigenous women. Troy Fleece, The Canadian Press)"According to Canadian government statistics, young Indigenous women in Canada
are at least five times more likely than all other women to die as a result of
violence.""Helen Betty Osborne was a 19-year-old Cree student from northern Manitoba. She dreamed of becoming a teacher. On November 12, 1971, four white men abducted her from the streets of The Pas. She was sexually assaulted and brutally murdered. A judge said later: "... the men who abducted Osborne believed that young Aboriginal women were objects with no human value beyond sexual gratification ... Betty Osborne would be alive today had she not been an Aboriginal woman.""
In October 2004, Amnesty International issued a report on violence against Aboriginal women in Canada.
To Help Break the Silence click here.
For six things you can do to help stop the violence against Aboriginal women click here.
For a copy of the report click here.
For the summary report, click here.
And to see the recommendations, click here.
Only 423 people have written to their MPs on this issue. Let's do better. Let's show politicians that we care enough to have ourselves heard.
Colleen
4 comments:
Hi CG. I'm curious: how and why did you take up the Indian cause?
Hi SP!
It began when I was 11 and my family moved to northern Quebec.
There was a Cree reservation about an hour north of us as well as a mine of some sort. There was one white girl living with her mother at the mine. The school board sent a school bus to pick the girl up and bring her to school every single day. The chief's son lived with us to attend school because no school bus would be sent for the Cree kids.
We'd go up to the reserve on weekends when our boarder would return home to his parents. That's when I'd see the other Cree kids and start asking questions about where they went to school. My parents wouldn't give me a straight answer saying only that there was another school for them.
Of course, today I know what that other school was and what happened there and what the level of education was. And I wonder what happened to the chief's son after we moved away.
I also saw the living conditions on the reservation and the single outhouse that served them.
And that is when my blood started to boil -- in my, at the time shy, way.
Thanks for asking.
C
Wow. That's a story you need to commit to paper (although I suppose you already have).
School segregation for Indians? I'm sorry to say I had no idea it took place.
Thanks for sharing.
The joy of growingup in a relatively dysfunctional household is that the distance and denial I employed to survive means that I remember little of it today. So, while there is grist for the writing mill, I am unable to commit it to paper.
As for the residential school system, it has had a profound effect on Native peoples. Children were, quite literally, torn from the arms of their mothers and sent away to schools were they were taught to be farmers and domestics only. Where they were beaten for speaking their languages and otherwise physically, mentally and sexually abused. Children would be returned to their parents during summer vacation and, over time, were unable to communicate with their parents or, in many cases, value their parents lifestyle. They learned the message that being Indian was bad.
It sounds like something that could have only happened in the far past, but it happened in our lifetime.
Today, the Canadian government is offering some reparation for the abuse suffered. Money offered on a point system based on level of abuse.
See: http://ideaschangetheworldallthetime.blogspot.com/2007/03/residential-school-resolution.html
or
http://www.irsr-rqpi.gc.ca/english/
That this system continues to haunt Native peoples would be a gross understatement.
I believe this system was also in effect in the U.S.
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