Maniwaki: Oppression Of Indigenous Women

The cases are numerous, almost unfathomable. How could it be that as many as 1,181 women and likely more, have gone missing with little to no attention paid until now? Finally, these women are getting some national and international attention, but only after the release of the staggering statistics by the RCMP. I can remember the two young girls in Maniwaki who went missing. (Pierosara, 2009) I remember seeing their faces on billboards on drives up to the cottage. I remember thinking, why haven’t their faces been plastered further into the city, why hasn’t this been on the news? The girls were labeled runaways, troublemakers and delinquents. Why is it that this case did not garner national media attention? The local news barely covered it.
Oppression of women is systemic in our society and is manifested in individualized and institutionalized manners whereby women have suffered severely and continue to do so. Nowhere is this more visible than in the indigenous community. With mounting evidence surrounding the cases of these missing women, and with thanks to the journalistic investigation done by Kines and his partners, the case finally broke and Robert Pickton was arrested. That being said, the Pickton case is only a small portion of that huge number released by the
If it were our white sisters, daughters and friends, surely an inquiry and a solution would have been offered long ago. It most definitely would not have evolved into hundreds of unsolved cases that have occurred over many years. The media in these cases have played both sides of this story and for this reason, upon researching the subject, I feel they played a major role in deciding the fates of these women. In the beginning, the women were further abused and victimized by the press. Written about as vagrants and prostitutes, their role in society meaningless and criminal. Victim blaming continues to be an issue in the media and in these cases in particular, the women’s lives were scrutinized and portrayed so negatively by the press, it was near impossible to create a sense of sympathy or urgency about the issue. As a society, we continue to scrutinize victims as to who they were with, what they were wearing, or what they might have done to cause the violence committed against them. In the cases of indigenous women, this is so visible that we accept it for truth and it is further indoctrinated into our social experience. The rampant levels of violence against indigenous women in Canada are created by social and economic marginalization, which in turn are consequences of colonialism such as dispossession of lands and livelihoods, abuse experienced in residential schools and assimilationist and racist policies seeking