Behind the Counter with Rebekah and Sonja at CJLO radio station.
Montreal, Quebec .
On the February 11th show, Rebekah and Sonja from Behind the Counter spoke with Lucy from the Centre for Gender Advocacy about the solidarity collective, Missing Justice and a march which took place on Valentine’s day, 2016 in Montreal starting at the St. Laurent metro.
The show begins at 1:58 on,
This demonstration was in commemoration of the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across North America, a number that is officially reported around 1,200 by the federal government and estimated to be more in the range of 4000. This number continues to rise every year the march takes place, this being the 7th annual event.
The march incorporated a ‘Red Dress’ installation to continue the work of Jaime Black, a Métis woman who started the REDdress project in 2014, an aesthetic response by placing red dresses throughout public areas as a symbol to raise awareness and a reminder of the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Red dresses and other red clothing articles were placed along the path the marchers took, along with inukshuks to remind them of who was once there. Speakers, musical and other artistic performances took place.
These demonstrations are crucial for retaining any level of government’s attention and placing pressure to remind them, as Lucy stated,
We are watching and we want real change.
Lucy continues to discuss this issue with the government’s practice in launching and conducting inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls,
Governments in the past call inquiry, conduct the inquiry, and claim they have done something to solve the problem when in fact they have written more words on pages and nothing actually gets done.
The public can become complacent and believe effective action has been taken to look into and deal with the problem; in the past people inquiries were conducted on the missing and murdered without meaningful results. The recurring ineffectiveness of government inquiries is a systemic problem that must be tackled internally.
The inquiry is only part of the solution, once the true extent of the devastation is identified and accounted for, concrete and community based solutions must follow to change the patterns in the future. For real, effective change, the federal government needs to revert their strategies from ‘top-down’ to ‘bottom-up’ to allow for community involvement and support. In the past, attempted solutions have been implemented identically across Canada, this act of ‘bestpracticitus’ does not account for the diversity of such a vast country and issue.
So what could the Canadian Government implement for more effective solutions?
•Bottom-up approach
•High community involvement & support
•Diverse strategies
What can you do right now? A few options were discussed on the show. Educated yourself on the Indigenous history and culture and become an ally, get involved and reach out. Check out if there are any Native friendship centres in your area. The Centre for Gender Advocacy in Montreal has began offering critical French classes to teach a way to speak French that is less gender oppressive and more gender fluid. These classes are ‘pay what you can’ and last for two hours. What a cool initiative! The Centre also runs ‘how to be a better friend and ally’ workshops, here are a few suggested steps for being a better friend and ally:
•Listen
•Hear other experiences
•Do not shut down or devalue the conversation; make people feel wanted and believed
•Recognize what micro-aggressions you may perpetuate
•Realize it is okay to make mistakes if you take responsibility and actively work to change/correct these behaviors and opinions.
Many other important projects can be found on their Campaigns and Projects page.
Families of Sister in Spirit is a Canadian organization offering support and events for family, friends and community members with relations to missing and murdered Indigenous women.
If you are in the Waterloo region, The University of Waterloo offers support and information at The Aboriginal Education Center.
I will leave you with a quote from Lucy which echoes throughout the globe,
Privilege is blindness.
The privileged are not impacted and seemingly do not have to care. Once educated and informed, the atrocities which happen every second of every day all around this world cannot be unheard and cannot be unseen.
Take the blinders off.
Thank you, Rebekah, Sonja and Lucy for an interesting and informative show. Thank you also for being generally awesome, altruistic and for interjecting the show with super cool music.
Check out more from Behind the Counter: http://www.cjlo.com/shows?q=node/8355
Follow them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/btccjlo
the ineffective altruist 