All women are entitled to a safe environment, one where there is no fear of sexual violence or murder. In Canada, such human rights to find protection and reserve the right to grow and live in a safe environment are limited to certain categories of women and children in Canada, specifically targeting the indigenous communities.
The loss of thousands of indigenous women and girls implies the loss of thousands of mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, grandmothers and keepers of wisdom that should be safeguarded for future generations. Currently, over 1.4 million people of Aboriginal identity reside in Canada, representing 4.3% of the total Canadian population (“Aboriginal Peoples in
Canada”). Over the past three decades, as many as 4,000 indigenous
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Even today, the laws and justice systems in Canada itself are promoting and maintaining the injustice done to indigenous women and girls.
The fact remains that the laws have never changed. Over the years, Canada has witnessed the forced sterilisation of indigenous women across the country, which was shortly followed by the theft of their children in schools where lots of little girls went missing and were murdered, raped and tortured. The root cause of this occurring violence against aboriginal women, can be traced back to Canada’s colonial past where the RCMP (Royal
Canadian Mounted Police) was created in 1868 to remove indigenous people of their land
(“Royal Canadian Mounted Police”).
Seeing as this pattern of violence against indigenous women by state actors has been in place for so long and is still active today, it seems to have become the norm. A scenario has been created where the law has not only initiated and legalised violence against indigenous women, but it also maintains the violence. This was demonstrated in specific laws such as the Indian act, when indigenous communities where deprived of their status and their homes and were no longer granted access to fundamental human services like housing,
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Canada is making a mistake when looking at the perpetrators (the RCMP) as their source of information and the source of the situation’s analysis. The RCMP states that the problem occurs in the facts that indigenous women tend to be involved in criminality, and they tend to have problems with intoxication. They claim that aboriginal women cannot take the pressure of the city and as a result these women get assaulted. This is the kind of messaging that they are sending to Canadians, initiating that the indigenous communities are really just a group of criminals and addicts performing criminal acts against one another, and so really they are to blame themselves. Police disregards investigation in crime cases too fast and no pertinent actions are taken to find the missing indigenous women.
Canada needs a national inquiry that is expansive in scope, with much targeted investigatory powers performed in partnership with those impacted in the indigenous communities, at the same time with an emergency action plan to protect indigenous women and girls right now. This needs to concern their personal safety, their mental health, their social wellbeing. Established underfunding for housing and education and water
Her book focuses on the myriads of issues and struggles that Indigenous men and women have faced and will continue to face because of colonialism. During her speech, Palmater addressed the grave effects of the cultural assimilation that permeated in Indigenous communities, particularly the Indian Residential School System and the Indian Act, which has been extensively discussed in both lectures and readings. Such policies were created by European settlers to institutionalize colonialism and maintain the social and cultural hierarchy that established Aboriginals as the inferior group. Palmater also discussed that according to news reports, an Aboriginal baby from Manitoba is taken away every single day by the government and is put in social care (CTVNews.ca Staff, 2015). This echoes Andrea Smith’s argument in “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing” that colonialism continues to affect Aboriginals through genocide (2006, p. 68). Although such actions by the government are not physical acts of genocide, where 90% of Aboriginal population was annihilated, it is this modern day cultural assimilation that succeeded the Indigenous Residential School System and the Indian Act embodies colonialism and genocide (Larkin, November 4,
Fleras, Augie. “Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: Repairing the Relationship.” Chapter 7 of Unequal Relations: An Introduction to Race, Ethnic and Aboriginal Dynamics in Canada. 6th ed. Toronto: Pearson, 2010. 162-210. Print.
In a forthright manner, Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lyn Young examine the "discursive practices used by the news media" (897) in relationship to the missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) in Canada. Opening their argument, the authors outline their mode of discussion by stating that their paper will look through a feminist lens at the radicalized and sexualized violence that has become nothing short of an epidemic. By specifically focusing their attention towards to MMIW, Jiwani and Young structure their investigation in a documentary-style discussion, which reveals the ideological and systemic racism and sexualisation embedded within North American culture and media towards Aboriginal women. Their mode of appeal explicitly lays out, in a
The topic for our research paper is oppression against women in the Indian Act. Discrimination against Aboriginal people has been a key issue for many years; however society generally skims the surface of this act and tends to give lip service to it without acknowledging the deeper issue of how these oppressions come with it. In the beginning of our research we quickly made a parallel between the oppression of Aboriginal women and the injustices they face and the breakdown in Aboriginal families and communities. As future social workers working from an anti-oppressive practice perspective the proposed research will help acquire the knowledge in building transformative politicized social work. Our team feels that by focusing on the female gender and how these women throughout history have been oppressed we will be able to perform our roles as social workers from a truly empathetic position; thus our future work with all aboriginal people will be more effective.
However, in Western government, “native peoples are in the way because they are thought to undermine the state- whichever state they find themselves in- because of their struggle to maintain their own ways of life” (Wolfe, “Tribes”). Because they present economic challenges to land use and resource exploitation, indigenous peoples share sufferings under political oppression, deracination and racism and are, as in the case of Australian Aborigines, the “poorest of the poor.” Destroyed by a “rhetoric of hate,” genocide and mass murder are the tools of nation states to control the unwanted obstacles in economic development (Niezen 55).
Feminism and Indigenous women activism is two separate topics although they sound very similar. In indigenous women’s eyes feminism is bashing men, although Indigenous women respect their men and do not want to be a part of a women’s culture who bring their men down. Feminism is defined as “The advocacy of women 's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.” In theory feminism sounds delightful despite the approaches most feminists use such as wrong-full speaking of the opposite gender. Supposedly, feminism is not needed as a result of Indigenous women being treated with respect prior to colonization. Thus, any Native woman who calls herself a feminist is often condemned as being “white”. This essay argues that Indigenous women may
Despite the decreasing inequalities between men and women in both private and public spheres, aboriginal women continue to be oppressed and discriminated against in both. Aboriginal people in Canada are the indigenous group of people that were residing in Canada prior to the European colonization. The term First Nations, Indian and indigenous are used interchangeably when referring to aboriginal people. Prior to the colonization, aboriginal communities used to be matrilineal and the power between men and women were equally balanced. When the European came in contact with the aboriginal, there came a shift in gender role and power control leading towards discrimination against the women. As a consequence of the colonization, the aboriginal women are a dominant group that are constantly subordinated and ignored by the government system of Canada. Thus today, aboriginal women experiences double jeopardy as they belong to more than one disadvantaged group i.e. being women and belonging to aboriginal group. In contemporary world, there are not much of a difference between Aboriginal people and the other minority groups as they face the similar challenges such as gender discrimination, victimization, and experiences injustice towards them. Although aboriginal people are not considered as visible minorities, this population continues to struggle for their existence like any other visible minorities group. Although both aboriginal men and women are being discriminated in our society, the women tends to experience more discrimination in public and private sphere and are constantly the targeted for violence, abuse and are victimized. In addition, many of the problems and violence faced by aborigin...
After watching Finding Dawn, my impression of the film documentary had hit me hard, especially due the fact that I am a female and strikes me to empathize with women who have who are treated like a ghosts by the government. No one wants to be have that treatment to them. You have to have no ounce of humanity in you to ignore the issue, specifically indigenous women, who have to put their lives at risk in order to survive because of a systemic discrimination that constantly ignores this part of society that where recognition is lacking.
According to LaRocque (1994), there is a distinct connection here between the effects of colonization and the decreased well being of Aboriginals, with the greatest impact noticed upon Aboriginal women.
Thesis Statement: Given the struggles aboriginals have had to face in Canada, the Canadian government should take action to solve the hundreds of cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women, as it will strengthen the relations between aboriginals and Canadians.
From 1945 to 2010 Canada treated the First Nations people unfairly when it came to their rights to the land and use of its bountiful resources. In order to make things fair, the Canadian government issues treaties, which were meant to initiate the regulations of the land and its resources whatever they may be, and to verify the rights, obligations, and ownership of the land; But sometimes these treaties are broken. A well-known example of aboriginal injustice happened in the year 1990 from July 11th – September 26th. The Oka Crisis, as it was called, was a 78 day confrontati...
Violence causes a great deal of suffering and harm in the world today and yesterday (Cross 2013). Peace and conflict researchers are undeniably justified in their selection of inter and intra-state violence as objects of study because the social context for both the performance and understanding of violence is of central importance (Cross 2013). However it is surprisingly rare to find a definition of violence (Moore 2003). Thus uncertainty prevails as to whether violence is limited to physical abuse or includes verbal and psychological abuse (Moore 2003). Agreeing with Moore (2003), Galtung (1969) said it is not important to arrive at a definition of violence because there are obliviously many types of violence. Violence is not
History is not strictly the past. History is a part of life. It is in us," states Coates 65. One can apply this approach to Indigenous women's narratives in order to show how experiences are concreted and continued with the ignominy of colonialism. Putting personal stories within a broader historical perspective, for instance, can underpin how the difficulties hovered at Indigenous women institutionalizing these problems and prompt readers toward considering deeper roots for these issues.
Colonialism is not the only factor in the oppression of the rights and freedoms of the Indigenous peoples. It is also the bills and laws that have or attempted to have been passed by the government of Canada; effectively removing Indigenous communities from their deserved lands, in an attempt to further advance the non – Indigenous populations development in Canada.
Does the implementation of government policies in order to decrease negative environmental effects violate individual rights? This question can’t be answered with just a yes or a no, at least without taking a look at moral reasoning behind the answer or the topic of the environment itself. Published in the International Journal of Academic Research was a piece written by Adrianto Surjono (2011) which stated, “Responding to the global environmental degradation, the international world agreed on the importance of Sustainable Development.” According to Surjono’s research, in recent time the environment and its sustainability has become a worldwide concern. With that being said, even with the environment and its sustainability