{"id":93478,"date":"2019-06-18T10:56:07","date_gmt":"2019-06-18T16:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/this-is-genocide-canadas-inquiry-into-missing-and-murdered-women\/"},"modified":"2019-06-18T10:56:07","modified_gmt":"2019-06-18T16:56:07","slug":"this-is-genocide-canadas-inquiry-into-missing-and-murdered-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/this-is-genocide-canadas-inquiry-into-missing-and-murdered-women\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018This is genocide\u2019: Canada\u2019s inquiry into missing and murdered women"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"At
At the Inquiry\u2019s closing ceremony, Chief Commissioner Marion Buller said that \u201can absolute paradigm shift is required to dismantle colonialism in Canadian society.\u201d<\/span>Andrew Meade\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Canada\u2019s just-released national inquiry into thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls calls the crisis \u201cgenocide.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 1,200-page report, titled Reclaiming Power and Place, is the culmination of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls launched in 2016 by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis genocide has been empowered by colonial structures, evidenced notably by the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, residential schools, and breaches of human and Inuit, M\u00e9tis and First Nations rights,\u201d the report reads, \u201cleading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trudeau, who accepted the report at the inquiry\u2019s closing ceremony Monday at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, promised a \u201cthorough review\u201d and an action plan in response to the report\u2019s 231 recommendations. The inquiry spent nearly three years holding public hearings, gathering more than 1,000 hours of testimony from 2,300 witnesses, often the families of victims and survivors. Its recommendations center on supporting Indigenous police services, overhauling current police procedures to address MMIW cases, changing criminal codes and reforming child welfare, APTN News reported.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was really pleased to see that the commission that had come together really explicitly stated that this is an ongoing genocide,\u201d said Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute and chief research officer at the Seattle Indian Health Board. \u201cTo me, that was a powerful and necessary and needed statement.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Canada, as in the U.S., the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls is disputed: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police estimated that 1,200 individuals had disappeared or been murdered since 1980, but the Native Women\u2019s Association of Canada puts the figure for the last few decades at 4,000.<\/p>\n

The report also focused on Indigenous people who identify as 2SLGBTQQIA, which stands for two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and\/or asexual. Indigenous women who align with 2SLGBTQQIA identify markers are sometimes targeted for their sexual orientation and gender identity, \u201ccreating what one researcher describes as \u2018triple jeopardy\u2019 for various forms of interpersonal and institutional violence,\u201d the report reads.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time the word \u201cgenocide\u201d has been used to describe the crisis \u2013 activists and researchers like Echo-Hawk have invoked it when discussing violence toward Indigenous women and girls \u2013 but it rarely appears in government-sponsored reports. The report, as Vice noted, drew on Polish-Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin\u2019s definition of the term. Rather than the \u201cimmediate destruction of a nation,\u201d Lemkin sees genocide as a more insidious force, \u201ca coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves,\u201d as the report quotes.<\/p>\n

Trudeau, the Canadian press pointed out, avoided the term in his speech at the museum, instead saying that violence against Indigenous women and girls is \u201cnot a relic of Canada\u2019s past.\u201d But other speakers refused to let the Canadian government, and non-Indigenous citizens, off the hook. \u201cAn absolute paradigm shift is required to dismantle colonialism in Canadian society,\u201d Marion Buller, chief commissioner of the inquiry, concluded.<\/p>\n

Some think the report\u2019s strong language doesn\u2019t go far enough. \u201cWithout oversight or legally binding laws, these are just lofty words while Indigenous women and girls continue to die,\u201d McGill University social work professor Cindy Blackstock, a member of the Gitksan First Nation and executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, told the New York Times.<\/p>\n

The United States, meanwhile, has no such report, nor does it have a commission for producing one \u2013 despite the fact that Native women in the U.S. are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we look at what\u2019s happening in the U.S., I believe that that genocide didn\u2019t stop at artificial borders between two governments,\u201d Abigail Echo-Hawk said. \u201cI hope that this report and its impact internationally will help elevate the conversation in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

In December 2018, the U.S. Senate held a hearing on the crisis. Outgoing Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., who oversaw it, proposed legislation to repair the Department of Justice\u2019s guidelines for responding to the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women. But her bill, Savanna\u2019s Act, had to be reintroduced this year after Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., blocked it in one of his final acts before leaving office.<\/p>\n

The Canadian inquiry\u2019s recommendations, framed by Indigenous-led services, human rights and trauma-informed approaches, could provide a useful example for the U.S. As the report says, \u201cIt must be understood that these recommendations, which we frame as \u2018Calls for Justice,\u2019 are legal imperatives \u2013 they are not optional.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article was first published on hcn.org.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

of Canada\u2019s inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women and girls is firm in its calls to justice<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":93479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[13],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-93478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-frontpage-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93478"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=93478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}