Aboriginal Tragedy

"The number of [aboriginal] women in the Ottawa area is the same number of native women in Canada [missing]. If you heard that 600 women were murdered or missing in Ottawa do you think we'd have to have demonstrations to get an inquiry?"
NDP Leader Tom Mulcair

Well, it depends. If they represented women who are not considered to be a blessing to society because they are street workers, society seems not to care an awful lot. And if they were both aboriginal in origin and street workers, well then, the level of interest in their well-being would be abysmally low. On the other hand, women themselves would likely become involved and howl their outrage, sex-trade workers or not. With those numbers.

The Canadian Press / Fred Chartrand

But that was a rhetorical question and no response was really expected; the question speaks for itself. And there may be another angle to this sordid, horribly sad, dreadful story of the place of women in society, even a society as socially advanced as Canada's. Violence against women is endemic. In any population, anywhere in the world  women suffer disproportionately to men. Women can behave fairly odiously but those numbers are fairly small in comparison to men who resort to violence.

And wait, there's another angle worth looking at too. Only that one is extremely sensitive; get too close and you can be burnt, badly. Because that other angle is that women in aboriginal societies are even more vulnerable and oppressed than elsewhere within the country. Simply because violence and poverty and societal backwardness prevail there more commonly in a culture of deprivation and cultural alienation.

The estimated 600 cases of missing and presumably murdered aboriginal women in the country dates back to the 1960s. It is known that young girls and women often turn to a degraded lifestyle to survive, to be able to care for themselves, or because they are drug- or alcohol-addicted, homeless and drifting in a society too busy to notice or even care. Because no other avenues seem open to them; human detritus in a horribly wanting system.

 Carol-Ann Moses was one of the hundreds taking part in a rally on Parliament Hill by the Native Women's Association of Canada on Friday honouring the lives of missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls -- Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press

If an inquiry were to be held, it would find the entire system of balancing the needs of First Nations communities with those of the rest of Canada prepared to pay handsomely enough to alleviate the strains that First Nations tribes all too often live under on reserves with high unemployment, impaired lifestyles impacting on physical and mental health, inadequate educational opportunities and high suicide levels. Funding is high but claimed, by the recipients, to be inadequate.

Partially so because of the manner in which it is allocated and the manner in which tribal societies insist on living with the memory of their heritage which seems to restrain many from entering the current era, and wresting themselves out of the dependence syndrome of welfare entitlements. No one is happy. And women and children all too often end up being the unhappiest of all, the most vulnerable, the most stricken by ill fate.

So, have an enquiry. Yet another close peer, a diligent scrutiny into the inadequacies of attempting to cope with an intolerable situation where two 'sides' appear in constant conflict with each other, achieving in the end nothing of value, but burnishing the grievance of being hard done by. On Parliament Hill this week First Nations people came out to rally on behalf of the missing. It was the eighth such gathering.

Named the Sisters in Spirit vigil, it was one of 216 such gatherings held across the country and abroad. Similar events took place in Australia, Malaysia and Peru. For what has occurred to Canada's First Nations occurs elsewhere as well.