Record turnout for Red Dress Day
Agroup of 150-plus boisterous people participated Sunday afternoon in the official Penticton/Sn’pink’tn commemoration of Red Dress Day 2024.
The event, also known as the “National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirits Plus,” kicked off at 1 p.m. on the lawn adjacent to the SS Sicamous, where kids and adults alike gathered to socialize, craft DIY placards and take in an opening ceremony that included a prayer, a string of smudgings and a welcome from Penticton Indian Band events coordinator Charlene Robards.
The mood, as expected, was somber. Yet there were glimpses of hope all around. There were smiles too from all ages as more people continued to arrive and the group continued to expand.
Ultimately, the 2024 crowd was perhaps triple that of the 2023 event one year to the day prior.
Penticton Indian Band Family Intervention Prevention Worker Serena Jack, a Red Dress Day co-organizer, called the turnout “great” and said the annual happening is crucial for getting the word out.
“It brings awareness to the community,” she said. “Not everyone knows what this is about, and wearing red will help with that awareness because Red
Dress Day goes nationwide.”
Jack believes Indigenous women, girls and two-spirits are, and always have been, targeted.
“They are,” she said. “Our men are busy working and making ends meet for their families. And some of our women are on their own, single mothering as well. A lot of them have young girls in their families.
“We just want to be heard because these voices have been swept under the carpet for so long.”
Also on hand on the Sicamous lawn, crafting a sign that read, “We won’t stop looking,” was
Penticton resident Brooke McLaughlin.
“I’m here today because I have a lot of Indigenous women, and men, in my life who mean so much to me,” she said. “And as a non-Indigenous person on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan, it’s the least I can do.”
McLaughlin emotionally called her attendance part of her own “journey of personal reconciliation... Today is especially important because the red dresses are for the spirits of the lost and murdered loved ones,” she said.
Just after 1:30 the group marched en masse 1.2 kilometers along the Lakeshore Drive pedestrian promenade to Gyro Park, the focal point of the day’s exercise.
Along the route, the crowd, most of which wore red clothing as a symbol of the missing and murdered, passed by a series of empty red dresses hanging from tree branches, utility poles and the like.
It was hard not to be moved by the spectacle.
Once at Gyro, participants formed a giant circle in the middle of the park and a variety of leaders, such as PIB Chief Greg Gabriel and Penticton Mayor Julius Bloomfield, stepped up to the microphone.
Some messages hit especially hard. Like that of Okanagan Nation Alliance Wellness Manager Jennifer Lewis, who re-counted personal experiences that visibly impacted some of those in attendance.
Likewise Joanna Lafferty-Edward, a board member with Ooknakannee Friendship Centre. Lafferty-Edward is a frequent attendee at events such as this, and Sunday she recounted an incident from her early teens that kept the crowd transfixed.
At just 13 years of age, said Lafferty-Edward, she, with a good friend as an accomplice, ran away from her “dysfunctional” home in Merritt, BC. The idea was to escape the “binge drinking” at home and hitchhike to her pal’s house…in Winnipeg.
Just outside of Kamloops, the two were picked up by a man “driving a white van” who would ultimately sexually assault her friend. Lafferty-Edward believes her friend submitted to the rape to save her.
The pair would eventually escape the van, but a chase in a forested area would ensue. Lafferty-Edward remembers seeing a gun and cowering in a ditch.
Unsurprisingly, the words of this respected Elder once again promoted emotional reactions from the crowd.
As the event wound down, there was song and there was drumming and dancing. And there were words of encouragement. Words of hope. And there seemed to be more smiles than frowns.