Another Perspective

"Good morning chiefs, delegates, ladies and gentlemen.  My name is Rinelle Harper. I am a high school student at Southeast Collegiate [Winnipeg]. I’m here to talk about an end to violence against young women. I am happy to be here today to provide you with a few words on behalf of my family."
"I am thankful for the thoughts and prayers from everyone."
"I understand that conversations have been happening all across the country about ending violence against indigenous women and girls."
"But I want to continue on with my life and I am thankful I will be able to go back to school to see my friends and be with my family."
Rinelle Harper, 16, God's Lake Narrows, Manitoba

Rinelle Harper, centre, mother at left, sister right, speaking at the Assembly of First Nations Conference December 9, 2014 - still from video

"It keeps the spotlight, the focus on the issue. And it's going to help educate everybody across Canada about the importance and travesty of the issue. There are root causes that have to be addressed. You've got to have a forum to have that dialogue and to debate what is working and not working."
Saskatchewan chief Perry Bellegarde, Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief-designate-elect

"The federal government has chosen to stand in the way of an inquiry and prefers to keep its head in the sand."
"First Nations might have no other choice but to initiate their own national inquiry."
Quebec chief Ghislain Picard

Courageous Rinelle Harper, an icon of resistance and perseverance; left for dead after a horribly brutal sex attack, she found an inner reservoir of strength to preserve her life. She is reputed to be a shy young woman, and was prevailed upon to appear at the conference of the Assembly of First Nations to speak for herself and for the countless other girls and women who have faced violence and sexual depredation.

Her plight as a survivor, so soon after the horrendous attack she suffered was politicized as a way for the AFN chiefs to maintain confrontation in criticizing Prime Minister Steven Harper who continues to resist pressure to launch a national enquiry into the horrendous statistics released by the RCMP of the disappearance and murder of over 1,200 aboriginal women over the last three decades. Not that previous enquiries hadn't been launched.

The Prime Minister has stated that such deaths do not represent a "sociological phenomenon" but they are crimes for the police to solve. He is not quite correct; while they most certainly are crimes, they do have an absolute sociological component, as part of the dysfunctional social culture in the aboriginal community where girls and women are so commonly preyed upon as a male entitlement.

When Rinelle Harper became separated from her high school friends in Winnipeg, out for a night of socializing and she came across two young men, her shy persona perhaps relaxed with the realization that these were aboriginal men and she had little to be concerned about. But it was those two young men, 20 and 17, who assaulted her, raped her, beat her and threw her into the Assiniboine River to die. And when she crawled out of the river, they beat her again, leaving her to die.

The next morning she was found, insensible, beaten, critically injured, by a passerby. And she has lived to tell her bitter tale. Nowhere in the many press accounts of the atrocity but on one single, revelatory occasion, was it noted that Rinelle Harper's attackers are of First Nations origin. So the new leader of the AFN was quite correct when he spoke of root causes, only he wasn't thinking of the root causes being part of aboriginal cultural tradition.

And when Quebec chief Ghislain Picard bitterly stated that "First Nations might have no other choice but to initiate their own national inquiry", he too meant it as an accusation against white culture and the federal government, but came very close, in fact right on, to the crux of the matter; this is a matter of community, a matter to be brought directly to the First Nations people by the First Nations people to make an effort to correct a cultural dysfunction, one of many.

Neither Rinelle Harper nor any other aboriginal girl or woman should have to surrender their autonomy and gender security to a First Nations dysfunction whereby the men in their community lash out at women and prey upon them. While obviously danger is faced by aboriginal women from non-aboriginal men as well, the fact is that within their own communities they are no safer than they are at large in a broader community where all women are not as safe as they have every right to be.