Roundtable offers hope to heartbroken families
National gathering in Ottawa aims to lay groundwork for inquiry on murdered and missing aboriginal women
Aileen Joseph sat in her daughter’s Hamilton, Ont., apartment more than a decade ago and implored her “Why do you stay here?” She didn’t get an answer, and the silence broke her heart.
At 40 years old, Shelley Joseph had four children and no selfesteem, her mother said. She was an alcoholic and fell in with the “wrong people” — including an ex- partner, who would beat her to death in those very same rooms one July night.
Fifteen months later Shelley ’s son, beset with other problems and unable to cope with his mother’s death, took his own life.
“He offed himself in my husband’s woodshed,” Joseph said.
Since 2006 the Six Nations woman and her husband have heard stories strikingly similar to theirs from families nationwide. Late next week, she plans to take her story to Ottawa, where an unprecedented gathering of federal ministers, premiers, indigenous leaders and families like hers will meet for a National Roundtable on the issue of murdered and missing indigenous women.
The Feb. 27 roundtable will be the first time this many leaders with this much influence are meeting to tackle this long- running and multi- layered issue.
Federal Status of Women Minister Kellie Leitch has confirmed attendance along with Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt. Premiers from all 13 provinces and territories will also be there. The Assembly of First Nations, the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, the Native Women’s Association of Canada and four other national indigenous groups will bring about 10 delegates each from across the country. And a few chosen families will have a seat at the table, while many more — like Joseph and her husband — plan to be there to show their support.
The roundtable is designed to set a “national dialogue” on how to address this issue, but also lay the groundwork for a national inquiry into the murdered and missing — a goal being pursued by newly elected AFN National Chief Perry Bellegarde and others.
The Feb. 27 meeting will be a “push for a coordinated action plan and implementation strategy to get to the root causes,” he told the National Post in an interview. “But we’re still going to push for a national inquiry.”
The AFN will be putting forward “specific commitments” on prevention and awareness, community safety plans, and protocols and policing measures and justice responses.
The point of the roundtable is to “co- ordinate actions to prevent, address and end violence against indigenous women and girls” which has led to the 1,181 murdered and missing women counted by the RCMP in its landmark report last May.
“The roundtable itself is a beginning, not an end,” National Chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples Betty Ann Lavallée wrote in an email to the Post. “I hope it will lead to establishing a constructive dialogue, allow us all to explore the issues, sort out fact from fiction, and identify a concrete and coordinated way forward.”
Housing and poverty are high on her radar, as those concerns seem to “underlie” many of the tragedies related to murdered and missing women, she said. At the heart of it all, said Bellegarde, is healing the effects of colonialism.
“It takes one or two generations to get really healthy again but we need to start dealing with getting the wellness centres in our communities to deal with some of the root causes,” he said, adding that he’ll make a pitch for more of those at the national roundtable.
Wellness centres would address the needs of the whole family, he said, hopefully helping to stem some of the domestic violence that affects both men and women.
Aileen Joseph believes access to a good crisis program might have given her daughter the self- confidence to lift her out of addiction and an abusive situation. She’s skeptical a national inquiry will help, but these kinds of services, she said, could go a long way.
For now, she and her husband live with the guilt of not being able to save their daughter.
“It’s always there,” she said. “You can’t forget what happened.”