Family members deem money better spent dealing with the issues already identified
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is a letter to Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Dr. Carolyn Bennett regarding the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. It has been published here at the author’s request. The letter was also sent to other federal cabinet ministers and all provincial and territorial premiers.
Dear Minister Bennett,
On March 6, 2018, Chief Commissioner Marion Buller sent you a letter requesting your approval for a 24-month extension and up to $50 million in additional funds for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Transgender and Two Spirited persons. As family members, survivors, and grassroots community supporters of MMIWGT2S, we are recommending that you deny this request. We ask that you, instead, use this opportunity to meaningfully engage Families and Survivors in the important work ahead.
The lack of meaningful community engagement by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls has alienated, excluded, and trivialized the concerns and perspectives of Families and Survivors. The National Inquiry has bulldozed through our communities and with an extension will continue to exacerbate the emotional and psychological burden on the very people it is intended to solace. Despite many efforts – of those listed here in this letter – to engage in the Inquiry’s processes, our grounded knowledges remain unheard, our combined years of experience remain overlooked and we are left to address far too many instances of overwhelming uncertainty and constant re-traumatization.
This Inquiry was intended to bring to light stories and healing. However, we experience it as quite the opposite – this Inquiry has imparted more violence in and on our bodies. This process is haunted by ongoing disappearances, death and any hint of a commitment to justice for missing and murdered Indigenous people by the Canadian Criminal Justice System – it remains very clear to us that our bodies are expendable in this place called Canada.
Families and grassroots communities have been met with utter silence from the Inquiry. The silence is deafening. This silence purposefully displaces our voices and lived experiences. Far from building capacity, this Inquiry has derailed several grassroots initiatives to address the ongoing-targeted violence we face in Canada. In the face of the abovementioned violence, resilient communities continue the hard work of supporting Families and Survivors. They reduce harms, pick up the fragments of broken lives, and help Families bear the toll of a dispiriting process about them yet does not include them. The Inquiry left Families and Survivors to pick up the pieces; endure the pain of reopening wounds; find care for motherless children; and comfort loved ones in crisis, all the while continuing the daily often struggle for existence. Families and Survivors of such targeted violence have had to fend for themselves throughout this Inquiry and many have been further harmed and setback in their own healing.
The Inquiry’s process completely defies its mandate to be trauma-informed and culturally safe. Some Families have taken legal action in attempt to hear from the Inquiry after exhausting all other efforts to engage in the Inquiry’s processes. If the Inquiry were aptly implementing trauma-informed practices, Families would feel loved, cared for, and willing without hesitation to participate; instead, many are reluctant. At times, others have engaged under duress, for fear this would be their only opportunity to share their experiences and speak on the public record. A recurring narrative from communities has emerged: They came, they took stories, they left.
Families and survivors continue to share their experiences but demand that Canada be held to account.
We have been left with few or no supports, little or no follow-up, and without any sense of security of what will become of the information communicated to the commissioners. Caught between the Inquiry’s dysfunction and government inaction, Canadians remain immobilized voyeurs and consumers of horrific stories of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Trans and Two Spirit people.
The stories being shared by Families and Survivors are far more important than the institutions gather them. The time is overdue for Prime Minister Trudeau to honour his words, spoken to Families on October 4, 2017. At the time, he rededicated himself and his Liberal government to ensure Families and communities would be at the centre of this work.
Minister Bennett, we are certain you find it frustrating to continually express the same sentiments over, and over, and over and over without action. For your convenience we have attached the open letter addressed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from August 8, 2017, and the open letter to Chief Commissioner, Marion Buller, in May 2017, regarding a reset of the Inquiry.
Minister Bennett, neither Prime Minister Trudeau nor Commissioner Buller ever responded to these letters. In fact, neither did you. It is time for this Canadian government to act on what Families have been saying for years. Families that are listed as signatories of this letter.
With this in mind, the Inquiry must complete its work in a timely manner. Without extension. Without additional resources. The Liberal government must commit funding towards an action plan to support those who have been doing this work for four decades and address the systemic inequalities that Indigenous persons continue to incur in Canada.
Communities and Families must be truly engaged on terms that meet them where they are at on their healing journey and align with their emotional, spiritual, and cultural needs. Through trauma-informed practices, Indigenous research methodologies and languages Families and survivors are given ownership of their experiences; they are viewed as experts on their own lives and are the best-informed to voice what supports, and actions are required.
The Inquiry can no longer exclude or ignore those who have been routinely kept silent in the margins – as if erased. We are the survivors living on the street, we are incarcerated, and we will not stop working tirelessly to bring justice for their Families and communities. We will not continue to feel left behind, forgotten, and consumed. Below is a preliminary list of actions, compiled by Families, Survivors, Relations, and supporters that, we believe, when implemented, will foster safe, decolonial, trauma-informed methods of engagement, grounded in Indigenous knowledges, ceremonies, and cultures:
1) Establish the necessary mechanisms to comply with known international human rights recommendations. For example: Monitoring bodies to ensure compliance with UNDRIP, and CEDAW, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; Mechanisms to implement recommendations in both Treaty and Unceded territories, as a Nation to Nation initiative free from the current framework proposals made by the Canadian Government; Mechanisms to investigate policing and systemic racism, sexism, and inequalities in the Canadian Justice System that implements a critical review and examination of laws and policies that contributes to systemic harms; Mechanisms that hold Police Forces across Canada accountable and identify racialized policing and systemic violence;
2) Provide the funding and mandate for a recognized and credible group of Families, Survivors, civil society organizations, grassroots advocates, and leaders to implement the 94 Calls To Action, including the 700 plus recommendations documented by the Legal Strategy Coalition on Violence Against Indigenous Women;
3) Establish and launch separate processes for: transgender people; Two-Spirit people; people who trade or sell sex; people who are incarcerated or institutionalized; people who are experiencing various states of homelessness; youth in the care of government (Foster Care, Ministry of Children, Ministry of Social Services, Children’s Aid Societies and group homes);
4) Create and implement community supports explicitly for LGBTQ2S Families and Survivors;
5) Acknowledge and honor LGBTQ2S experiences as separate and unique from those of MMIWG;
6) Provide resources and capacity for Families and Survivors to implement healing in their communities and Nations: community healing gatherings; anti-violence programs and strategies; sweat lodges and healing circles; commemoration of loved ones; language, artist and culture camps;
7) Form a reputable coalition of community leaders, academics, and research institutions to oversee the ethical collection and analysis of data.
The current Government and your office, Minister Bennet, have the decision-making power to address these systemic harms with immediacy. We request that you reject the National Inquiry’s call for an extension and work with us towards ending the ongoing violence directed towards Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Transgender and Two-Spirit people, Families, Survivors, advocates and allies.
Signed,
Family, friends
supporters of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Transgendered and Two Spirited
EDITOR’S NOTE: The signatories to this letter were too numerous and in too many formats to be reproduced by deadline. For a complete list please see the copy of this letter posted online at manitoulin.ca.
