Forgetting the dead

Indigenous women refuse to ignore
violence and its victims among them

FINDING A VOICE FOR THE MURDERED AND MISSING:
Maya Rolbin-Ghanie

by COURTNEY KIRKBY

The unimaginable happened to Sue Martin on April 29, 2002. She flew across the country to bury her daughter, Terrie Ann Dauphinais, murdered at age 24 in her Calgary home, the only witnesses her three young children. Martin was given 10 minutes to observe the body—severely bruised, a broken neck, signs of strangling. A month earlier, police hadn’t responded to a call about domestic violence from her daughter. And when they removed the children, they took no precautions to preserve the evidence.

Seven years later, on the case’s 13th detective, there’s still no conviction. “She was treated like a bag of garbage,” says Martin, an indigenous woman from Ottawa. “She wasn’t a bag of garbage. She was a daughter, a mother, a sister, an auntie, a friend.”

Martin will be in Montreal on Tuesday, March 17, for the Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women panel, where she’ll be joined by the presidents of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), Beverly Jacobs, and the Quebec Native Women’s Association, Ellen Gabriel, and Laurie Odjick and Bridget Tolley, a mother and daughter of recently disappeared women. According to the NWAC, 510 indigenous women have disappeared or been murdered since 1980—in their homes or the street, on and off reserves, along infamous highway 16 in Northern B.C, dubbed the “Highway of Tears,” and, just over a week ago, in Waskaganish, Quebec. This summer, a small group of women walked three months across the country—5,000 kilometres, from Vancouver’s Downtown East-side to Ottawa—to demand the Conservative government conduct a full public inquiry. The lack of attention to this Walk4Justice underscored the urgency of the issue for Montreal activist Maya Rolbin-Ghanie, who is organizing next week’s panel.

“There should have been thousands on Parliament Hill to greet them, but there was only a few hundred. So many people just don’t know,” says Rolbin-Ghanie. “There is very sparse media coverage, and often it is focused on the ‘high-risk’ activities in women’s lives, as opposed to securing them justice as human beings.”

?In 2004, the NWAC received some federal funding for Sisters in Spirit, a five-year research, education and policy initiative spearheaded by Bridget Tolley, in partnership with NWAC and Amnesty International. “I started it up because I was working on a public inquiry for my mother,” who died in a car crash with an SQ vehicle in 2001, says Tolley. She didn’t know her mother’s file had been closed until she read about it in a newspaper 13 months after the crash. “It seemed like all [the government and media] wanted to do was forget about the women.”

Amnesty International issued the Stolen Sisters report later in 2004, criticizing Canada for not seriously addressing the frequency of the unsolved cases. The reprimand has since been repeated by various United Nations committees.

“Both Amnesty and the UN told Canada to compile statistics, make them available to the public, train police forces to be sensitive to the needs of indigenous people, and to make real efforts to challenge racism and sexism in this country,” says Rolbin-Ghanie. “The government’s response has been dismal.”

To date, the only province to compile statistics and make

them publicly available is Saskatchewan. In 2008, a provincial committee reported that 60 per cent of long-term, unresolved cases in the province are missing and murdered indigenous women. Martin, who has participated in Sisters in Spirit and raised funds for Walk4Justice, is frustrated with the lack of resources allocated to dealing with this issue.

“How many lives before we say enough is enough?” says Martin.

BEVERLY JACOBS WILL SPEAK ON
MONDAY, MARCH 17, AT THE MCCORD
MUSEUM (690 SHERBROOKE W.),
7 P.M., AND A PANEL DISCUSSION WILL
FOLLOW ON TUESDAY, MARCH 17 AT
THE ATWATER LIBRARY (1200
ATWATER), 6 P.M. BOTH ARE FREE.