Identify It As Disinterest

"There appears to be considerable opportunity for greater efficiency."
"[Many aboriginal communities are] accustomed to 'being told what to do', so it represents a significant adaptation to get used to a community-driven process."
"[Progress is] often followed by a period with no progress."
"There does not appear to be agreement about what constitutes a safe community and how that would be measured."
Aboriginal Community Safety Development Contribution Program report

Artist: Theresa Marshall   Mi'kmaq World View

The federal government and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada have come under a huge amount of criticism for failing to agree to mount an national enquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women. Opposition parties in parliament are calling for just such an enquiry, and so are aboriginal groups and the government denies there is any need for yet another enquiry in light of those which have already taken place.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police last year published results of their own investigative audit which found that First Nations accounted for 16 percent of murdered women and girls and eleven percent of missing females between 1980 and 2012, though aboriginal women represent four percent of the Canadian population. They are obviously over-represented in these statistics.

JOHN WOODS / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo  Bernadette Smith, the sister of Claudette Osborne who went missing in 2008, lays placards, of 94 women who have been murdered or are missing in Manitoba, at the Manitoba Legislature in Winnipeg in 2009. 

In 2010, the federal government announced its intention to invest $25 million over a five year period to address the issue of missing and murdered aboriginal women with $5.7 million earmarked to aboriginal communities to assist them in the development of safety plans. The simple truth of the matter is that aboriginal women are unsafe in their own communities where violence against women and girls is prevalent.

First off, those First Nations communities where it was believed that such a focus would be of greatest benefit were given workshops. Leaders were to be tutored to help in the identification of linked priorities to be addressed. In October of 2010 following a number of violent incidents, including three murders and 47 arson events, the northern Ontario Eabametoong First Nation asked for help.

"We are desperate for outside help", band chief Lewis Nate pleaded at that time. Government support enabled the community to draft a proposed safety plan and an initial report before the Senate committee on aboriginal peoples cited the initiative's success. A more recent evaluation of the program found the administration cost high as a result of "trial and error" relating to the requirement for continuing support from program staff.

In other words, the band council itself proved incapable of, or unwilling to take over the supervision and implementation of a program to help the band overcome its violent tendencies to make the band a safer place to live for all its residents. They kept calling on outside sources from government agencies to intervene. The initiative was meant to empower aboriginal communities, to motivate them to address their own safety issues.

The result has been a "modest" number of workshops actually held and resulting safety plans developed, according to the progress report posted on Public Safety Canada's website. Only nine First Nations managed to develop community safety plans, despite workshops having been held in 25 of those communities. The intention was to guide First Nations to identify the root causes of violence, to develop "community-driven" responses, and to implement "holistic, aboriginal healing models".

Because, after all, this is precisely what First Nations communities demand. The government remains committed to improving collaboration between departments meant to serve aboriginals, and to create increasing supporting materials to help in guiding their communities in the development of safety plans. But, it would seem, the communities themselves appear disinterested in helping themselves.

They seem, on the evidence, to feel that government itself should solve their cultural-social problems for them. While keeping their hands off traditional aboriginal values, practices and way of life. But training aboriginal facilitators in high-risk communities to solve their own problems? Doesn't seem to work.