Loretta Saunders was a 26-year old Inuk woman. She was a criminology major brave enough to work on a thesis about missing and murdered Aboriginal women. She was a daughter, and a soon-to-be mother. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, and a radiant smile.
She was recently killed in New Brunswick, and found on the side of the highway. Darryl Leroux, her thesis advisor, wrote in a public statement to CBC that “she was aware of being a product of a Canadian society intent on destroying and eliminating indigenous peoples.”
The fact that you may have heard her story already means that demand for inquiry into the missing mothers and daughters across our country is finally being acknowledged by big media and policy-makers.
For years, human-rights advocates and First Nations groups have been calling on our government to acknowledge the ways in which colonialism has led to sexual and aggravated violence towards indigenous groups in Canada.
We need to call people out on sexism and racism, and speak up in our own circles.
Estimates vary, but Amnesty International estimates that Aboriginal women in Canada are at least five to seventimes more likely than non-Aboriginal women to be murdered or go missing. The Canadian federal government has been mostly silent on this issue.
Loretta Saunders’s death may have finally broken the silence and garnered enough international attention to our missing sisters that the federal government will finally have to act.
The United Nations, the premiers of all 13 provinces and territories, and both opposition parties in Ottawa have all called on the federal government to launch a national inquiry on missing and murdered Aboriginal women.
Even if this does occur, a federal inquiry is not nearly enough to prevent this kind of violence. Together, you and I have to work on decolonizing our language, our ways of living, our concept of “other,” and work together to build a healthy environment where indigenous communities are not continually marginalized and segregated.
We need to see the social and economic implications of the choices we all make, including environmental and land rights, as we learn at SFU, an institution located on unceded Coast Salish territory.
There are countless beautiful humans working on these issues already, but our culture needs to change fundamentally in order to make a difference in our rates of violence. We need to call people out on sexism and racism, and speak up in our own circles to demand justice for those that have already passed.
We need to be brave. We need to acknowledge our own privilege, and stop running away from traumatic stories. We need to work on healing our culture so that we stop losing the folks we love.
We need to be a little bit more like Loretta Saunders, and we need to honour her story by sharing it.
