SILENT NO MORE
Photojournalism project gives voice to young aboriginal women’s grim reality.
WINNIPEG — “Do you worry for your safety — whether you may end up like Tina or Rinelle?”
A group of teenage girls — most of them strangers to one another — all raise their hands. “Do you trust the police?” Each girl shakes her head, “No.”
“How many of you have had loved ones disappear or get killed?”
They shoot glances at one another. Then, slowly, arms are raised: one, then two, finally about three-quarters of the room signal to the others that they know this kind of pain.
At least half say someone in their family has been sexually abused. Some talk about what their own mothers endured. Every single girl says her grandparents suffered abuse at residential schools.
There are 12 girls in this classroom, all aboriginal students at Winnipeg’s Maples Collegiate Institute. They range from 15 to 19 — about the same age as Tina Fontaine, whose body was found wrapped in plastic in the Red River last summer, and Rinelle Harper, who survived a brutal assault and was left for dead on the banks of the adjoining Assiniboine River.
The group gathered at the end of a year of mounting outrage over murdered and missing indigenous women — an RCMP report last May logged 1,181 of them — and calls for a national inquiry. On the day the girls met up, Rinelle Harper added her voice to the cause at a speech before the Assembly of First Nations’ Special Chiefs Assembly in Winnipeg.
The issue remains in the spotlight. This weekend, there will be marches in cities across Canada to pay tribute to murdered aboriginal women.
Later this month, federal, provincial and indigenous leaders, including ministers in charge of the Status of Aboriginal Affairs and the Status of Women, as well as victims’ families, will meet in Ottawa for a roundtable on the crisis (there is no current plan for a government inquiry).
But what is too often missing from these discussions is what it’s like for young aboriginal women to just go on, day-to-day, in the shadow of the headlines.
What it’s like to face grim statistics about your future: fifty-four per cent of girls like you will be sexually assaulted, beaten, choked or threatened with a gun or a knife; you are four times more likely to be the victim of a homicide.
The girls at Maples are chosen for a four-day workshop — a partnership between the National Post and the School of Communications, Media & Design at Toronto’s Centennial College — to help them share their point of view.