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“Not much in politics produces agreement anymore. The reaction to the national inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women was an exception.
What had become a divisive issue under the previous Conservative government is now one of unanimity on Parliament Hill.
Both opposition party leaders expressed support. The new prime minister identified the inquiry as one of a handful of priorities in re-establishing what he called his government’s “most important relationship.””
– CBC News, MMIW inquiry: ‘This is not an indigenous problem, this is a Canadian problem’.
“That disproportionate vulnerability first entered the public consciousness in 2014, when the RCMP released a report saying that 1,181 indigenous women and girls were killed or went missing between 1980 and 2012. Another 32 were killed in 2013 and 2014.
Overall, an indigenous woman is four times more likely to be murdered than a non-indigenous one. And now, based on data examined by The Globe and Mail, we know that indigenous women are seven times more likely to be preyed on by the kind of killer that doesn’t stop with one victim. Men who prey on women. Men who are usually non-indigenous.
It’s important to know this. The RCMP has never reported the ethnicity of the perpetrators of solved cases in its report, a common non-bias policy in police forces. The Harper government, however, was quick to claim that 70 per cent of the killers were indigenous themselves. It wrote off this unusual epidemic of deaths as a criminal justice problem similar to anything found in the broader population.
The Globe’s findings confirm what most have always felt – that the issue is more complex than that. What is needed now is for the RCMP to release the data it used for its report, so others can study it. The Mounties have yet to do that – the Globe discovered the connection to serial killers using its own database based partly on records collected by outside researchers.
This issue is of too great a public interest for the RCMP to withhold its data. The murder rate of indigenous women is, contrary to Stephen Harper’s famous assertion otherwise, a disturbing sociological phenomenon, one that fully merits the inquest promised by the new Liberal government, and a full disclosure from the RCMP.”
– The Global Mail, Serial killers, indigenous women and the RCMP’s missing data.
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Download the 18″x24″ poster (.pdf), Indian Country 52 #51 – Never Forgotten (MMIW).
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
