MMIWG issues final report

Good article from Doug Cuthand:

It’s a shame that the reporting on this important report got stuck on one word and became defensive rather than proactive. According to the 1948 convention, Canada is guilty of committing genocide against the Indigenous people.

Now let’s move on and make changes. We have the blueprints of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the report submitted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and this latest report. Hopefully this is the last report for a while, and we get on with the job of implementing the recommendations.

https://thestarphoenix.com/opinion/columnists/cuthand-genocide-is-a-loaded-word

There’s a specific thread now, Pondering, and pretty much everyone but you feels it’s drift. Maybe respect that?

Or you could just go where everyone else is having the conversation you’re attempting to have here. 

An appeal to all political leaders

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Our Women and Girls are Sacred / Nos femmes et nos filles sont sacrées

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls heard the truths of many families and survivors of violence. We call on all political leaders to accept their truths and move forward to implement our Calls for Justice. We further call on all political leaders to work together to create and implement a National Action Plan with Indigenous peoples at the table to address violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. With political will, good work can begin immediately. Together, let‘s make meaningful change to ensure a safe future for Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people in Canada. 

https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Appeal-to-Leaders_Statement_11062019ENG.pdf

Mr. Magoo wrote:

I don't recall hearing anything about 2SLGBTQQIA when the Commission was formed.  Is this a late addition?  Are gay men also part of the genocide?

An excellent question.  My own (admittedly cynical) take is that, after being lambasted by dozens of Indigenous leaders and activitsts for almost two years (they wanted the Govt to disband them, remember??), the remaining Commissioners decided to increase the appeal of the report by expanding the understanding of the group.  

It seems to me the word genocide has dominated our discussions of the report.  The section of the report on man camps was considered off topic in this thread. The new thread on it doesn't focus on the safety of indigenous women. 

Lest we forget this isn't about the past. It's about the continued fate of indigenous women, It is about the current dangers they face. They are afraid now. 

Maybe I'm being unfair but it feels like it is being intellectualized. I am literally weeping in empathy and sympathy for what these missing and murdered women experienced and for the families left behind in never-ending sorrow. For the young girls right now hitch-hiking to the nearest town to flirt and get drunk with young men who have money while they dream of one who will fall in love. For the ones who are pregnant right now who don't know what to do other than put one foot in front of the other. For the children being abused right now and who will be abused tonight. For the ones who are thinking right now that if they have to do it they might as well get paid. For some that is the choice. Stay home and be abused or go out and get paid to be abused. Which would you choose? 

This report has highlighted the crimes against First Nations but it has also shone a light on the relationship between violence and poverty.

'Chief Verna Polson's Hunger Strike has Ended...'

https://twitter.com/VeldonCoburn/status/1146172973566579497

"The little men of the Crown's Indian corporations - AFN, MNC & ITK - should be ashamed of themselves. Less than a month since the MMIWG Final Report and their mighty moral rhetoric about treating Indigenous women and girls better. Callous, colonial hypocrites."

What's up with this?

Quote:

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday creating a Task Force on Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives.

The task force will be overseen by Attorney General William Barr and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. It will develop protocols to apply to new and unsolved case and create a multi-jurisdictional team to review cold cases.

Trump called the scourge facing American Indian women and girls "sobering and heartbreaking."

"We will leverage every resource we have to bring safety to our tribal communities, and we will not waver in this mission," Trump said. "We're taking this very seriously."

Trump's announcement comes days after Barr said the Justice Department would invest $1.5 million to hire specialized co-ordinators in 11 U.S. attorney's offices with significant caseloads from Indian Country to come up with ways to better respond to missing persons cases and committed FBI resources. Barr said the agency also would do an in-depth analysis of federal databases and its own data collection process.

Why would plainclothes Mounties need to show up to this rally? If they were there for support, wouldn't they have been invited by the group to show up in uniform?

Canada Asked For A Report On Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women And Girls. Now It's Ignoring It.

There are two sets of sirens. One siren, sharp and constant, is punctuated by the other, which is harsh and honking and sounds like goose calls. It’s an ambulance and a fire truck, probably police. It sounds like danger. I’m listening from a hotel window, looking down from the 17th floor onto the dark, cold, desolate streets of downtown Winnipeg, and wondering how the people whose job it is to sound those sirens could have so totally failed 15-year-old Tina Fontaine. By the time her 72-pound body was pulled from the Red River five years ago, wrapped in a duvet and weighed down by rocks, the Anishinaabe girl had been dead for days. There was no need for sirens by that point, because the danger had already passed for Tina—or rather, it had been allowed to pass. The police officers, social workers, nurses and doctors who had interacted with her in her last days hadn’t made a peep.

Tina’s fate is disturbingly normal for Indigenous people in Canada, especially women, girls and Two-Spirit people. We are told that schools, hospitals, social services and police are there to help us, so we ask for their help. Instead of help, we’re often met with indifference at best, outright hostility and racism at worst.

Ultimately, callousness and violence are two sides of the same genocidal coin. Both are why Tina is gone. Both are why I can’t forget her, more than five years later.

Last June, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) released its final report, after nearly three years of research, hearings and community consultations. Titled Reclaiming Power and Place, it was over 1,000 pages long and covered topics including health, culture and justice. The report argued that the “process of colonization has, in fact, created the conditions for the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people” (the latter an acronym encompassing people marginalized because of their sexuality or gender). It ended with 231 recommendations. The most important was to create and implement a national action plan across all levels of government. Others ranged from the need for a universal basic income to calls to assess—and address—the relationship between resource extraction and gendered violence.

quote:

The Liberal government has yet to meaningfully respond to Reclaiming Power and Place. By December, Carolyn Bennett, minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, had only promised to have a national action plan in place by June 2020. In mid-May, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) put out a press release, stating that it had learned that the plan wouldn’t be ready by June 3, and that it was “disappointed,” as well as “frustrated that so little had been done over the past 12 months.”

“There really isn’t much to talk about because they haven’t done much,” the inquiry’s chief commissioner, Marion Buller, told APTN.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian news was dominated by stories about the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, and their objection to a natural gas pipeline proposed by Coastal GasLink. The company wants to build the pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory out west, and has strategically used provincial courts to be able to do so. In February, an injunction against interfering with pipeline construction led to arrests of Wet’suwet’en people on their own territory, sparking months of solidarity actions, including rail-line blockades. As RCMP officers moved in, they walked past displays of red dresses meant to represent the land defenders’ missing and murdered family and friends—a moment of heartbreaking, almost perverse symbolism.

Nine pages of Reclaiming Power and Place explore the relationship between the camps of largely male workers brought in for projects such as the Coastal GasLink pipeline and violence against Indigenous women. Using both first-person testimony and academic research data, it documents the high rates of sexual assault, harassment, sexually transmitted infections and addiction in and around what some call “man camps.” Later, the recommendations aimed at resource development executives suggest that planning for such projects incorporate the potential impact on Indigenous women and girls.

The same consideration is asked of the governments that approve such projects. When and if the national action plan does come, I’ll be noting whether or not Bennett, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Minister of Indigenous Services Marc Miller and their colleagues honestly address this issue.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Reports are what liberals work on instead of actions to solve injustices. We have had enough fucking reports. I was really hoping we had made a step forward when this report was issued almost 25 years ago. Since then we have done Truth and reconciliation and MMIWG, what do we need to study next, for another five years, before we put it on the shelf to gather dust. The Royal Commission got large buy in across the country from indigenous communities and leaders and this document is still relevant. Man camps and MMIWG are systemic racism problems that need a system change not the tweaking of a few laws. Our constitution includes race based discrimination for people unfortunate enough to fall under the Indian Act and that is at the heart of the problems.

The five-volume report was released on 21 November 1996 at a special ceremony in Hull, Québec. The report included Vol 1: Looking Forward, Looking Back; Vol 2: Restructuring the Relationship (2 parts); Vol 3: Gathering Strength; Vol 4: Perspectives and Realities; and Vol 5: Renewal: A Twenty-Year Commitment.

The main conclusion of the report was the need for a complete restructuring of the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Some of the broader recommendations included the proposal for a new Royal Proclamation; which would require the government to commit to a new set of ethical principles respecting the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the state. This new relationship would acknowledge and respect Aboriginal cultures and values, the historical origins of Aboriginal nationhood and the inherent right to Aboriginal self-determination. Implementing many of the recommendations in the Royal Commission would have required constitutional change.

...

When the Report was released the federal government made a commitment to study it and its recommendations. However, the federal government did not call a First Ministers' Conference within six months of the Report's release, as recommended by the Commission. Rather, it issued a lengthy information document outlining government achievements from 1993. When the federal government made a formal response on 7 January 1998, its proposals emphasized non-constitutional approaches to selected issues raised by the Report. The four objectives of the federal response were renewing partnerships; strengthening Aboriginal governance; developing a new fiscal relationship; and supporting strong communities, people and economies. The federal government issued a Statement of Reconciliation in which it expressed profound regret for errors of the past and a commitment to learn from those errors. This was accompanied by a commitment of $350 million to be used to support community-based healing, especially to deal with the legacy of abuse in the residential schools system. Very little response was given by provincial governments, which viewed the report as a federal initiative.

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/royal-commission-on-ab...

I remember watching Royal Canaidan Air Farce cover this when it came out. The news anchor at the time noted the effort and money that had gone into the report and that it will be forgotten in 5 days.