From Bracebridge Examiner

By Laura Finney - Oct 03, 2013 

Racism and prejudice affect native women

WEDDING MOCCASINS:

Laura FinneyArtist Nathalie Bertin stands beside some of her work that was on display including her painting "Wedding Moccasins" in the centre, which was created for the event.

GRAVENHURST - According to the Native Women's Association of Canada there are almost 600 murdered and missing aboriginal women in our country.

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"Every missing and murdered aboriginal woman was somebody's sister, somebody's mother, somebody's daughter," said the association's interim president Dr. Dawn Lavell-Harvard. "That was a worthwhile life that has been snuffed out because of indifference, because of racism, because of police who don't take action and don't take things seriously."

Lavell-Harvard was at the Gravenhurst Opera House on Sept. 19 as the keynote speaker during the Muskoka Women's Advocacy Group's annual DIVA (Domestic Intimate Violence Activist) night.

This year the theme was "DIVAs in Spirit," and focused on native women.

Joy McCormack, executive director at MWAG, picked the theme after hearing aboriginal activist Ellen Gabriel speak during the first Canadian National Shelter Conference last September.

"When I heard Ellen speak in Montreal last year, I was profoundly impacted with what she had to say," explained McCormack. She said there has not been enough done for the missing and murdered aboriginal women. "For that reason we organized this show tonight, and we hope this will have a profound impact on you as well."

Gabriel was supposed to attend the event, but unfortunately due to an injury was unable to come. An edited video of her talk was shown.

"Injustice for indigenous peoples is an injustice of Canadian society, it should not be tolerated, it should be changed," she said.

Both Lavell-Harvard and Gabriel cite history, and the patriarchal colonists as responsible for many of the problems still faced by natives today.

Lavell-Harvard said Europeans had troubles with the equal status held by women in many native communities.

"They couldn't allow for empowered indigenous women," explained Lavell-Harvard. "This was a threat to the patriarchal order of the non-aboriginal colonizers."

She said the colonists were not only sexist, but also racist, believing natives to be savage.

"If aboriginal people were subhuman and were inferior, and in a patriarchal society where women are considered inferior ... imagine what it is like to be an aboriginal woman in such a context," she said.

According to Lavell-Harvard, these beliefs are responsible for the way aboriginal women still treated.

"We are not surprised 200 years later, after generations of racism and prejudice against our women, that the violent victimization against our women is two and a half times higher than non-aboriginal women."

She said there is a myth that violence against native women is only caused by native men.

"Our women are more likely to be victimized by a stranger than a non-aboriginal woman, and this is important because it challenges the fact that this is a brown-on-brown violence crime," she said, but admitted violence from their own community members also does happen.

"Unfortunately lateral violence is true. In a society where our men have been oppressed, where they have been made to feel the lowest of the low ... they become emasculated," she said. "Sometimes the only way at feeling they have some measure of power and control in their world is to feel that they have at least power and control over their women and children."

She also said police do not take native women seriously because of prejudices.

"In this country, when our women go to the police, they are often told that we know what aboriginal women are like, you were probably all drunk and partying," she explained.

She also said many disenfranchised native women are disregarded because they are on the street, on drugs or are prostitutes, and blamed for living high-risk lifestyles.

"They did not choose high-risk lifestyles," said Lavell-Harvard. "Our women are born into high-risk lifestyles because they are born into communities living in poverty, living with oppression."

Gabriel agreed.

"I'm tired of not being taken seriously because I am a woman, I am tired of not being taken seriously because I am indigenous, and I'm tried of being criminalized because I am Mohawk from Kanesatake," she said.

During the talk, Lavell-Harvard shared a story about a time when she was mistaken for a prostitute. And she is not the only one.

Many of her aboriginal female friends have also been mistaken for prostitutes.

"Apparently being young and indigenous in this country is equated with being for sale," she said.

She also talked about human traffickers and how they target young aboriginal women. In Thunder Bay, there have been stories of women going missing on international boats. Unfortunately, she said, stories like this do not get investigated and gave the examples of Robert Pickton and the highway of tears in British Columbia.

"People knew that the indigenous women were going missing, and nobody cared until it was non-aboriginal women that started to go missing and all of a sudden there was a public outcry," she said.

The evening also featured musicians from the Wahta community and an art show with work from indigenous women artists, including Nathalie Bertin.

She painted "Wedding Moccasins," which was created specifically for the event and as a reference to a national project called "Walking With Our Sisters," a travelling art instillation to raise awareness about the murdered and missing aboriginal women. It will be in Huntsville February 10 to 14.

The DIVA night coincidently occurred on the same day that Stephen Harper announced there would be no national review of violence on aboriginal women, when he was questioned by members of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

When Lavell-Harvard brought this up, the crowd booed.

This Friday, Oct. 4 will be the eighth annual Sisters in Spirit vigil to remember those lost and to ask for national action. There will be more than 190 peaceful vigils across Canada.

There will be one in Bracebridge at 12 p.m at Memorial Park and again at 4 p.m. outside MP Tony Clement's Huntsville office.

In addition, at 1 p.m. Nipissing University's Muskoka campus in Bracebridge will be screening Beyond the Shadows, a film about residential schools.