CANADA-RIGHTS:
DEADLY ATTACKS ON NATIVE WOMEN SPARK PROTEST
By Mark Bourrie

OTTAWA, Feb. 14 (IPS) -- Activists marched in frigid temperatures here Friday to signal to the Canadian government that it must do more to protect native women, 500 of whom have disappeared or been murdered in recent years, they said.

The demonstrators were protesting in solidarity with hundreds of women who gathered at a farm on the outskirts of Vancouver, thousands of kilometers away, where it is feared that 65 mostly aboriginal women were murdered and buried in the past two decades.

Many of the women who went missing across the country were homeless or sex trade workers, whose disappearances raised little public concern. Police have used few resources to try to find them or the people who abducted the women, said Kukdooka Terri Brown, president of the Native Women's Association of Canada.

"We cannot afford to ignore this issue anymore," said Brown, whose own sister Ada was beaten to death in an unsolved attack in the city of Prince George north of Vancouver in west coast British Columbia province two years ago.

"Our sisters met their deaths in the most degrading and humiliating ways. They were marginalized in life and they are marginalized in death. Racism and violence shapes our lives from birth to death," she added.

"We deserve more and we want more. We need money for research to begin to address the problem. We want numbers and names."

Vancouver investigators are sifting through massive piles of pig manure looking for evidence on the farm, a 45-minute drive from the city center. So far, they have identified the remains of 16 women.

The owner of the farm was arrested last year and a preliminary inquiry to determine if there is enough evidence to take him to trial began in January.

Brown said the accused man had been reported to the police several times in the years before his arrest.

"This is far too common. When aboriginal women are killed or beaten, our own aboriginal leaders do not speak out against violence or make efforts to eliminate it. Neither do other political leaders."

"We have experienced the most extreme forms of sexism, racism and outright violence and hate crimes towards us," she added. "We are not safe anywhere: not in the streets, not in institutions, not in our own communities, and not in our own family structures."

The protest took place just days after a researcher at the University of Manitoba published a paper showing that aboriginal women suffer much more domestic violence than non-aboriginal Canadian women.

Psychologist Douglas Brownridge analysed a 1999 survey by the federal statistics department in which 12.6 percent of native women reported domestic abuse but only 3.5 percent of non-natives did. Three times as many natives told researchers that they had been threatened; five times as many reported sexual assault and seven times as many said they had been beaten.

Brownridge said aboriginal families suffer more from risk factors such as alcohol abuse, unemployment, large families, common-law marriages and lack of education. "But there is something else going on. Even after we controlled for all those factors, there was still a big difference."

The 10-page paper, published in the January edition of the 'Journal of Interpersonal Violence', suggests native culture has grown violent in response to 'European' settlement and policies such as the residential school programme, where native children were taken from their homes to be housed in schools where their culture was forbidden and many were physically and mentally abused.

That conclusion outraged Ken Young, Manitoba's vice-chief for the Assembly of First Nations. "I would be very skeptical about those results," he told the Globe and Mail newspaper. "If they're not based on economic factors or unemployment, why would aboriginal people be different?"

But Brownridge said aboriginal people have been so badly treated in recent generations that it is reasonable to assume that historical wrongs are continuing to have effects.

"Historians have demonstrated that pre-colonial aboriginal society didn't have much domestic violence at all. This is a community, a culture, that has been devastated, most recently with the residential schools. What we're seeing here is the lingering effect of cultural domination."

Bernie Whiteford, executive director of Vancouver's Helping Spirit Healing Lodge Society, a 33-bed transition home, said, "Aboriginal women and children have the right to live lives that are free of violence. In my 11 years running Helping Spirit Healing Lodge Society, I have witnessed extreme violence against aboriginal women and children."

She said transition homes and shelters for aboriginal women and children need more money.

"Aboriginal women do not want to live on handouts from the government or society in general. Their lives are filled with violence, exploitation and shame. They cannot be blamed for their condition."

"But they face many barriers that keep them from self-confidence and success," added Whiteford.