strawberry ceremony
Yesterday Peter and I, along with friends Esther and Philip, attended the 9th Annual Strawberry Ceremony in Honour of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, held at Police HQ downtown. I took a few photos for our team blog, and posted/retweeted a lot more on Twitter; it was a good event, and very well attended.
According to the Save Wiyabi Mapping Project, over there are 900 missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and the United States; the Native Women's Association of Canada asserts that, in Canada alone, there are nearly 600 missing and murdered Indigenous women. (That link is primarily about the RCMP disputing that claim, and includes some very politically correct, ass-covering statements RCMP spokesfolks gave in response. Count me among the unsurprised, especially given that US-based organization Human Rights Watch recently released a report finding RCMP complicit in, and perpetrators of, the abuse of First Nations women in British Colombia.)
Yesterday marked the 23rd anniversary of the first solidarity march for Indigenous women in Vancouver, BC; it was, as I said above, the ninth year for Toronto's Strawberry Ceremony.
Lauren Chief Elk, an organizer, activist, and co-founder of the Save Wiyabi Project, has written a lot about this. Here are two of her recent essays, which I strongly encourage you to read:
The Missing Women You Don't Hear About, via Salon.com.
There is No "We:" V-Day, Indigenous Women, and the Myth of Shared Gender Oppression, via ModelViewCulture.com.
Seriously. Read them both. They will make you think, hopefully for a long while after you've finished.
...
Two aspects of yesterday's ceremony and march will stick with me for a while. The first was the presence of individuals holding signs bearing names, dates, and occasionally photos. (See the aforelinked team blog post for photos.) Several dozen people carried black silhouette-style signs cut in the shape of women's profiles, with names in white lettering on one side, and dates on the other. The dates were usually preceded with the word MURDERED.
Each of these sign bearers had lost someone to violence: a sister, a daughter, a grandmother. More than that, though, this was a ceremony in honor of Indigenous women; those marching were survivors of their individual griefs and losses, and the collective oppression and violence of a system set entirely against them. CPT was there in solidarity, and I sang along with the women's honor song because I knew a version of it from Mi'qmaki Territory, New Brunswick, but I was there as a witness. That's what solidarity's about, I think. Witnessing, lending support, but not through taking the floor away from the people whose time it is to speak.
(Digression: Arundhati Roy has said that "There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard." In CPT we often talk about "amplifying voices," and when I give presentations I make sure to emphasize what this means: I am not seeking to speak for anyone. I am seeking to hold up a figurative microphone to those who are already speaking. This is a way I can use my privilege to empower others. It's a thing I'm still figuring out, time after time. But I use that quote by Roy as a guide.)
During the ceremony at Police HQ, several women spoke. Two specifically said how long it took them to "find their voices," to share the stories of women in their lives who'd been taken by violence. For one woman, a mother who raised her grandson and adopted another, it took over two decades from the time her daughter was killed to when she could start to speak about it. It struck me that every single person there holding a sign or a banner was a person who was speaking. If there is such a thing as the "voiceless," it is the women whose names and dates were on those signs. Their daughters, and mothers, and sisters, and brothers and fathers and sons, because there were many men there too, they were all speaking for them.
The question is, are we listening?
According to the Save Wiyabi Mapping Project, over there are 900 missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and the United States; the Native Women's Association of Canada asserts that, in Canada alone, there are nearly 600 missing and murdered Indigenous women. (That link is primarily about the RCMP disputing that claim, and includes some very politically correct, ass-covering statements RCMP spokesfolks gave in response. Count me among the unsurprised, especially given that US-based organization Human Rights Watch recently released a report finding RCMP complicit in, and perpetrators of, the abuse of First Nations women in British Colombia.)
Yesterday marked the 23rd anniversary of the first solidarity march for Indigenous women in Vancouver, BC; it was, as I said above, the ninth year for Toronto's Strawberry Ceremony.
Lauren Chief Elk, an organizer, activist, and co-founder of the Save Wiyabi Project, has written a lot about this. Here are two of her recent essays, which I strongly encourage you to read:
The Missing Women You Don't Hear About, via Salon.com.
There is No "We:" V-Day, Indigenous Women, and the Myth of Shared Gender Oppression, via ModelViewCulture.com.
Seriously. Read them both. They will make you think, hopefully for a long while after you've finished.
...
Two aspects of yesterday's ceremony and march will stick with me for a while. The first was the presence of individuals holding signs bearing names, dates, and occasionally photos. (See the aforelinked team blog post for photos.) Several dozen people carried black silhouette-style signs cut in the shape of women's profiles, with names in white lettering on one side, and dates on the other. The dates were usually preceded with the word MURDERED.
Each of these sign bearers had lost someone to violence: a sister, a daughter, a grandmother. More than that, though, this was a ceremony in honor of Indigenous women; those marching were survivors of their individual griefs and losses, and the collective oppression and violence of a system set entirely against them. CPT was there in solidarity, and I sang along with the women's honor song because I knew a version of it from Mi'qmaki Territory, New Brunswick, but I was there as a witness. That's what solidarity's about, I think. Witnessing, lending support, but not through taking the floor away from the people whose time it is to speak.
(Digression: Arundhati Roy has said that "There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard." In CPT we often talk about "amplifying voices," and when I give presentations I make sure to emphasize what this means: I am not seeking to speak for anyone. I am seeking to hold up a figurative microphone to those who are already speaking. This is a way I can use my privilege to empower others. It's a thing I'm still figuring out, time after time. But I use that quote by Roy as a guide.)
During the ceremony at Police HQ, several women spoke. Two specifically said how long it took them to "find their voices," to share the stories of women in their lives who'd been taken by violence. For one woman, a mother who raised her grandson and adopted another, it took over two decades from the time her daughter was killed to when she could start to speak about it. It struck me that every single person there holding a sign or a banner was a person who was speaking. If there is such a thing as the "voiceless," it is the women whose names and dates were on those signs. Their daughters, and mothers, and sisters, and brothers and fathers and sons, because there were many men there too, they were all speaking for them.
The question is, are we listening?