Tina Fontaine; 15 in 2014.
Trudy Gopher; 19 in 1997.
Kimberly Lynn Cardinal; 34 in 2019.
Cindy Gladue; 36 in 2011.
These names represent but a miniscule fraction of the estimated thousands of Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people gone missing or believed murdered over the last several decades in Canada.
They are names which were uttered solemnly and with pain in Red Deer on Friday, May 5, Red Dress Day, or what’s more formally known as the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit people (MMIWG2S).
At City Hall Park, about 100 people gathered to smudge, pray, absorb song and poem, grieve, walk, and remember the many who’ve been stolen.
For Teresa Cardinal, whose cousin was Kimberly Lynn, the trauma and the grieving are part of every single day.
“There’s no real for sure number of how many women have been murdered and are missing, and that’s scary as an Indigenous woman to realize. That grief we carry around is tough. I just lost my mother this year from a fentanyl overdose, and that was really hard, so I’m here today and I attend every year for her, but also my cousin who was murdered. It’s scary we have to do this; it’s mind-blowing,” she said to rdnewsNOW.
“I’ve worked in different spaces where I haven’t felt safe to be who I am and express my culture, I’ve experienced not being allowed to smudge. We still experience so many micro-aggressions. We need so much support and healing in our schools and communities, and you can see that by the alarming rate at which our sisters are dying.”
(rdnewsNOW/Josh Hall)Cardinal, who came to Red Deer in 2013 but is soon leaving, says Indigenous women are trying to make change, stand up, be heard and have an impact. But that’s difficult to accomplish, she points out, when ongoing harms are not acknowledged as they should.
“People are always asking what can they do to help; fund our healing programs, give money to heal our people, support our kids,” she says. “Create safe spaces and experiences for Indigenous people to go and do, and wake up to the crisis of addictions and other harmful things. We just lost two little ones in our community because of that.”
Bee Henry, who organized the Red Dress Day event, believes action looks like calling friends and family out for saying problematic things, and petitioning governments and municipalities to implement the TRC’s 94 Calls to Action into their policies.
Henry, facilitator for the Red Deer Native Friendship Society’s Gender-based Violence Prevention Project, spoke Friday on the duality of the occasion.
“This is a day where we’re encouraged to find healing through sharing and opening the door for conversation, but it’s very challenging for people to hold that space for this kind of agony. It’s very much a bittersweet moment of creating that visibility which is very necessary but being confronted with the visibility of the fact there is so much loss and absence in our communities,” they explained.
“Since 2019, when the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was completed, there has been a lot of positive change. This year, I think there’s a lot more visibility for the movement and people are more interested in taking positive action. People are reading into the calls to action more seriously, and the provincial and federal governments are taking more steps toward reconciliation in this area.”
That includes a unanimously approved motion in the House of Commons this week which declared the deaths and disappearances of Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people as a Canada-wide emergency.
(rdnewsNOW/Josh Hall)The motion also calls for funding to support a new system which would alert the public when a disappearance occurs. It was presented by NDP MP Leah Gazan, who represents Winnipeg Centre, and is also a member of the Wood Mountain Lakota Nation in Saskatchewan.
“This has been decades in the making, and although change is tremendously slow, this is a win,” says Henry of the national emergency declaration. “It’s important for the federal government to recognize and take forms of accountability for missing, murdered and exploited Indigenous people. So in declaring MMIWG2S as a national emergency, this will also help pull individuals who aren’t aware of the issue to take further action and look into it a little bit more seriously.”
Calls for Justice 15.1 to 15.8 of the National Inquiry asks Canadians to learn how violence against Indigenous women and girls is part of longstanding colonial policies, rather than a result of individual choice.
Despite a declining homicide rate among Indigenous women by 2020, Statistics Canada says, the rate was still nearly twice that of non-Indigenous men and more than five times that of non-Indigenous women.
READ MORE: Autopsy confirms identity of eight-year-old’s remains found on Samson Cree
The Town of Sylvan Lake has proclaimed Red Dress Day for May 8, with red dresses to hang in Lion’s Park, inside the Municipal Government Building, at the NexSource Centre, and at the Wellness & Community Connections Centre.
“Today, on Red Dress Day, the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP) lifts up all Indigenous peoples and communities across Turtle Island as we remember and honour the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people, and calls on the federal government to implement a red dress alert,” reads a statement from the CAP.
“On Red Dress Day, we remember and continue to draw strength from the resilience and courage of our loved ones who have been lost to violence. On Red Dress Day, we honour their lives and commit ourselves to the important work of ensuring that no more Indigenous women, girls, and 2S+ people are lost to violence.”
