Violence Against Aboriginal Women

The issue of violence against Aboriginal women is my chosen subtopic that strongly contributes to the history of Aboriginal women’s struggle for rights and identity in Canada. To search relevant newspaper articles for this topic, the databases that were used were Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, as well as Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies. The reason these two databases were chosen was because Canadian Newsstand offered articles from multiple newspapers in the country, therefore providing me with diverse news in different provinces other than Ontario. The article I obtained from Canadian Newsstand was Canada Called on to Stop Violence Against Aboriginal Women from the Leader Post newspaper in Saskatchewan. Lexis Nexus provided one article I

It is a commonly known issue in Australia that as a minority group, the people of Indigenous Australian ethnicity have always been treated, or at least perceived, differently to those of non-Indigenous disposition. This can be applied to different contexts such as social, economic, education, or in relation to this essay – legal contexts. Generally, Indigenous Australians face issues such as less opportunity for formal education, less access to sufficient income, more health issues, and higher rates of imprisonment (Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service

In Canada, there has been an on going concern in the matter of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Although many First nations individuals have many barriers placed upon them by society, the government and many other institutions. Indigenous women face many of these barriers very harshly. Aboriginal women are vulnerable to many different forms of abuse because of not only being female but also due to issues such as poverty. First nations citizens have been faced with extreme difficulties throughout every aspect of their lives. These difficulties ultimately include the discrimination they face daily from police services, lack of resources in order to assist their need, etc. There have been many problems which have lead up to the social problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women which include the historical upbringing of our First nations population, and unfortunately through recent factors as well. Theories like the feminist theory assist in the debunking of this problem and give us a brief insight into the situation. To this day, the very serious issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women is a key issue, which has been left with many cases unsolved. This in part clearly demonstrates the lack of efforts put in place by Canadian police in order to combat this problem. A case, which raised serious problems in North America, is the case of Lisa, a young Metis woman who at the age of fifteen disappeared walking home from a shopping trip, to which she was never found.

Throughout history, women have been the victims of oppression in society. In specific, Aboriginal women have suffered through racism, sexism, domestic violence, and over-representation. Through the implementation of the Indian Act, Aboriginal women have been forced to abandon their culture in order to assimilate into Canadian society. The effects of colonization has changed the way Aboriginal women are treated; emotionally and physically, and therefore are the source of oppression today.

Imagine a normal day. You wake up, you get ready, you probably see your mom, wife or sister. You say goodbye and head on your way. Once home, you sit down with them and talk about your day. When sad they comfort you, they love, support, care for you. Now imagine you wake up one day and they have disappeared without a trace. Gone. You are heartbroken. This is a sad reality for many Indigenous families, many women are vanishing without a trace. Between 1200-4000 Indigenous women have been missing or murdered in the last 30 years. These women are often targeted and treated as being worthless leading to little support from police and the public. After being immersed into this issue I learned lots, but I was left feeling sad,

Aboriginal women face disproportionate challenges throughout their incarceration which impacts their successful community reintegration. Over the last ten years, inmate assaults involving Aboriginal women have exponentially grown, almost doubling, while use of force incidents have more than tripled. Rates of self-injury involving incarcerated Aboriginal women are seventeen times higher than that of non-Aboriginal women. To agree with Baldry, Carlton, and Cunneen, using Indigenous women as a focus point is beneficial because their "experiences embody and exemplify the intersections between colonial and neocolonial oppression and the multiple sites of gender and disadvantage and inequality that stem from patriarchal domination." Cunneen highlights that Indigenous women actually live in "many prisons"; the prison of misunderstanding; the prison of misogyny; and the prison of disempowerment. Patricia Monture insists that one way women can resist oppression and facilitate social change is by telling their own stories. The Task Force for Federally Sentenced Women developed a report called Creating Choices, which attempted to relocate the power to make choices in womens' lives out of the hands of prison officials and back to the women themselves because, according to the findings of the Task Force, it is only when people are treated with respect and when they are empowered can they take responsibility for their actions and make meaningful decisions. Monture-Okanee reflects on the irony of the final report

Abigail Andrews. Amanda Bartlett. Amber Guiboche. The list of missing and murdered Indigenous women goes on (CBC, 2016). With an independent national inquiry now underway, hope is in the air to expose the social and historical factors to decode the systemic causes of violence that these women experience, and the impacts of institutional practices and polices.

Ever since the first contact settlers had with indigenous or Aboriginal people, there has always been discrimination against these groups since they are seen at the bottom of the social class scale. This was the first time in Canadian history where a certain social group were marginalized; the white people who first settled in Canada looked at indigenous people and didn’t believe that they belonged to there society. However, in todays society we have laws that prevent decriminalization, but that does not resolve the problem since many indigenous people are constantly being murdered, assaulted, raped and treated as second class citizens. The underlying problem that help’s illustrate why there so many missing and murdered indigenous woman is due to the lack of support from the government. Many first nations people live in poverty, also Canadians are not properly informed about the deaths and missing rates of indigenous woman in Canada.

I am writing you today as a young woman concerning the lack of attention towards the violence against women in retrospect to the Native American population. The fear of being a victim of assault as a young women is prominent within the society in which we live today. However, there is some relief in the fact that there are resources available at my disposal if I was to experience assault. Yet, there is a large portion of women that do not have that reassurance, and the likelihood of them experiencing assault is even greater than my own. This portion of the women population is Native American women. I will admit that the severity of the issue in concerns with the native population is something that I just recently became aware of. et I have

“These folks have been victimized twice. Once when their daughters, their sisters, their mothers have gone missing. And then, a second time when the justice system has utterly failed them in the pursuit of the justice they so rightly deserve. There can be no solution until we get to the truth in the heart of the matter, that this is a complex issue. The sources of this violence against Aboriginal women and girls is complex, but it… there’s no possibility of finding those solutions unless we actually have the truth on the table. And the resistance from this government time and time again, to have the courage and the leadership to approach this conversation and find that truth… is yet a third victimization of these families” (Pope C. & Smiley M., 2015)

In the article “Domestic violence against indigenous women is everybody’s problem” domestic violence is depicted as a serious social problem that involves “unspeakable acts of violence” that leaves victims experiencing fear and despair (Taylor 2014). More specifically, the social construction of domestic violence will be discussed with an emphasis on Aboriginal women and a typology of intimate partner violence. The social construction of domestic violence has serious implications for victims of domestic abuse because there is a failure to address the processes that perpetuate the violence. Instead, domestic violence is addressed through the illusion of social support. What is evident is that domestic violence is a social problem that requires comprehensive services, particularly for indigenous women, to address the complexity of the interaction between the individual’s social location and the causes that lead to the violence.

Aboriginal women is sexualized, assaulted, and mistreated in today’s society, and the novel portrays this inequity. Lisa’s friend, Erica, was in Terrace, when Lisa witnesses her being harassed by a group of white men. The men were teaching Erica how to “fuck a white man,” when Lisa intervenes. The men call the girls “a squaw, “cunt”, and “bitch” (Robinson 250). The

Women no matter where they are in the world are too often victims of violence. They face higher rates than men both if it is sexual assault, stalking, or severe spousal abuse and usually the results are that women will end up extremely injured or dead. With young women suffering the highest rates of violence, Aboriginal women in particular face an increased risk of violence compared to non-Aboriginal women. Aboriginal women in Canada are three times more likely to experience crucial and severe violence compared to non-Aboriginal women. Most of these women end up missing and murdered. The predicaments of missing and murdered Aboriginal women has brought tremendous pain and suffering in homes, in families and throughout Aboriginal communities. Many sources and factors have contributed to hindering solving this issue. Media and discrimination have long been known to have played a huge role in this tragedy.

She argues that women face many institutional and societal barriers. In this regard, I will give examples of the institutional and structural barriers such as “The Indian Act” which have significantly affected Indigenous women in Canada in many ways including social, economic and political. While comparing feminists and Indigenous feminists, I think that Native women are different in several ways including social, cultural, historical, political and economic; therefore, Indigenous feminism is a way of practicing the values that they have been taught and inherited from their

In April 1995 Pamela George, an Ojibway women, was brutally murdered in Saskatchewan. Her murderers Steven Kummerfield and Alex Ternowetsky, young middle-class white men, were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to merely six and a half years in prison. George’s story is one of the many Indigenous women who have been murdered or missing over the past years. There are over 580 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women, close to half are put aside and left unsolved. Only 53% of these cases have lead to charges of homicide (Klement 8). Drastically, statistics indicate that Aboriginals are faced with more hardships throughout their life compared to the average Canadian. Indigenous groups, particularly women, suffer from a lower rate of education, higher suicide rates and an array of health risks. This paper will examine the role settler colonization history has played in perpetuating conditions for violence to indigenous women, many of which are still experienced today. This will be accomplished by first assessing the history of settler colonization and its negative repercussions. Secondly, it will use Sherene Razak’s concept of “spatial segregation,” to illustrate how state institutions have facilitated violence through space, race and the law. Lastly, this paper will use evidence from the film “Finding Dawn” to further demonstrate how violence towards indigenous women is institutionally produced.