A missed opportunity for aboriginal women
The following excerpt from The Victim Cult: How the culture of blame hurts everyone and wrecks civilization, appeared in The Taxpayer, in December 2019.
A missed opportunity for aboriginal women
The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the 2019 report released by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls resulted from legitimate concerns and tragic events. The various reports were right to investigate past racist treatment in Canada’s institutions, laws, policies, and practices. Where they erred was to take a broad-brush approach to both aboriginal and “European” culture, romanticizing the first and wholly condemning the second. They were also in error to offer up generalized correlation–causation links.
The two reports in 2015 and 2019 blamed the poor social and economic indicators for aboriginal Canadians on past government policy and discrimination, including residential schools and selected colonial attempts to repress native culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, along with institutional and personal discrimination. However, the shortest distance between an observed effect and a recent action is often the most likely cause, a cause-and-effect link known as “Occam’s Razor.” The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in particular ignored this approach in favour of every other possible explanation, and did so even with the cohort meant to be its focus, aboriginal women.
The final report consisted of two volumes in English with supplementary reports on Quebec and genocide; it totalled over 1,300 pages. The report only addressed the actual murdered and missing women two-thirds into the first volume on page 508 (of 728 pages). There the authors discuss the sexual and physical abuse of aboriginal women. As per other reports, blame is placed on past colonial policy and practices, including residential schools, but also day schools and child welfare placements in the 1960s. A discussion of who actually murdered aboriginal women appears only in the second volume, near the end, and where the authors attempt to disagree with RCMP statistics. Here, some background is helpful. The Department of Justice and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police both report the following:
Between 1984 and 2014, 6,849 women were murdered, and 16% were aboriginal women.
In 2013 and 2014, 26 of 32 cases (81%) involving homicides of aboriginal women were solved, and in all solved cases, 100% of those who killed the women knew the victim: They were current and former spouses, family members, or an acquaintance.
For non-aboriginal homicides involving women, the solve rate was 83%; 93% of the killers were known to the women, a rate and proportion of known killers not far off the percentages for aboriginal women.
As of 2014, of the 1,750 women reported missing in Canada, 10% (174) were of aboriginal ancestry.
The National Inquiry report took issue with the RCMP report, arguing that the data was “inaccurate” and “misleading” because the 100% figure was based on the years 2013 and 2014. As the RCMP note, the statistics are consistent with the previous decade. In addition, as even the inquiry report acknowledges, the RCMP polices 40% of Canada’s aboriginal population compared to 20% of the general population.
As a result, RCMP statistics on the murders of aboriginal women are at least as comprehensive as other police departments whose data would be more fragmented and less indicative of a trend. The murder of women, aboriginal and not, is most often an act by someone who knows them. It is a depressingly similar statistic for all women, aboriginal and otherwise.
Abuse on reserves
The two recent reports on aboriginal life in Canada erred in another way, this time by omission. In 2014, Atlantic Monthly delved into the subject of the rape culture in the Alaskan wilderness, a frank piece about the horrific rate of sexual assault on Alaska’s native-American reserves. That same year, Statistics Canada reported similarly disproportionate data for First Nations girls and women in Canada and based on self-reporting by females who live on and off reserves.
This issue has generally been under-reported in Canadian media. When I asked editors and publishers at nearly every major magazine and newspaper in Canada about this in 2015—i.e., if they would investigate the issue more deeply—all demurred, noting the controversial nature of such a topic, or that it was best left to aboriginal media themselves to investigate and cover.
Neither position was one most media outlets would take if the subject matter was abuse by Catholic priests or a Hollywood mogul such as Harvey Weinstein. Editors would be unlikely to respond that only Catholic newspapers or the entertainment media should cover such stories.
I found a few exceptions: In 2016, the Toronto Star reported that the Ontario Federation of Friendship Centres estimated that 75% to 80% of girls under 18 on reserves may have been victims of sexual assault. In 2016, CBC Radio interviewed “Deborah” from Vanderhoof, B.C. (Her last name was not provided.) She told the CBC that her mother, sister, and other female relatives had died of alcohol and drug abuse as a result of the sexual abuse they had suffered as children. Their abusers got away with it, she said, because “there’s a really strong no-talk culture on First Nations reserves where people know things are going on.” It’s actually dangerous to speak out, she noted, recalling that when she tried to obtain legal help for two young girls who were being sexually abused, someone tried to burn down her on-reserve house.
A few women have also gone public with their stories. One of the rare ones to do so was Freda Ens, who was 59 when she told a reporter in 2016 that she had been repeatedly raped by male relatives while growing up in Old Masset Village, a Haida community in British Columbia. Ens urged other victims to come forward; otherwise, she said, “We are covering it up.”
The rural location of many reserves is part of the problem. Los Angeles reporters will cover Hollywood scandals, and the political media in Canada will cover developments in provincial capitals and Ottawa. But an investigative story about possible sexual assaults on remote reserves requires time, resources, contacts on the ground, and people willing to tell their stories. That is often the weak link between newsrooms in urban centres and rural areas in general, but it might be especially problematic for reserves.
However, none of that explains why First Nations bodies such as the Assembly of First Nations have not called for a full inquiry as per the other issues such as residential schools or murdered aboriginal women, or why politicians eager to look at the colonial record are not just as diligent to investigate contemporary abuses on reserve and draw direct links where they exist.
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was a $92-million exercise. On the very subject the inquiry was tasked to investigate, it had an opportunity to be frank about who murdered most aboriginal women—their spouses, boyfriends, and acquaintances— but chose not to, in favour of blaming dead colonialists and accusing the living of genocide. Also, the 2019 inquiry, media, and politicians overlooked a major issue on reserves—sexual assault—and thus ignored the nearly 250,000 aboriginal women who live in such communities.
From The Victim Cult: How the culture of blame hurts everyone and wrecks civilizations. Published by Thomas & Black. Copyright 2019 by Mark Milke. Foreword by Ellis Ross. Buy The Victim Cult at bookstores, autographed and direct, at Chapters.Indigo, at Amazon.ca and Amazon.com. Photo credit: Pixabay.