Indigenous Women In Canada

1031 Words3 Pages

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 …show more content…

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, …show more content…

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

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