Empathy

I went to another event involving missing and murdered Aboriginal women. A group of ten people are currently walking across Canada in hopes to bring awareness and justice to the missing and murdered women and children in this nation, and I went to listen to their stories. It’s been my third time as a reporter attending an event in relation to the treatment of Aboriginal women in this country.
Prior to last summer, I had not attended anything like a memory walk for murdered and missing Aboriginal women in Canada; I hadn’t been to any discussions or listened to any stories.
I’ve been well aware of the fact that there is a lot of violence inflicted upon our Aboriginal women – I knew a lot of our Aboriginal women have disappeared or have gone missing. But why hadn’t I taken any further interest in the matter?
Apathy probably played a big part in it.
Apathy; a lack of interest, enthusiasm, concern.
A lack of interest in women who have gone missing, no enthusiasm in women who have been murdered, no concern in the outcomes of the many disappearances and remains of women across this nation.
But why? Sure it was horrible to hear about the murders and disappearances, it upset me. But I went on with my life. I did not attend vigils. I did not look any further into various blurbs/news stories (not even headlines, really) announcing another dead Aboriginal woman in the stories. Not even when Robert Picton was arrested for murdering all of those women a few years ago on his pig farm did I really take an interest.
Not even when I was driving on the Highway of Tears in BC to visit my mother, who told me about the stories behind the highway’s name, did I really think any more about it.
I was apathetic, oblivious really.
It wasn’t until someone who was once very close to me, and who has now drifted so far away I wouldn’t know where to begin to try to reach out to her, had been swallowed up in “the lifestyle,” did I start to pay attention.
She was one of my only real friends as a child, and now she is on the streets somewhere. She is on the streets like she has been for a very long time, since she was released by Children’s Aid. Her story, like that of many missing and murdered Aboriginal women, is all too common.
Broken home, abuse, no real education past the eighth grade, neglect, a need to belong, a need for some sense of stability and security. She found all of that on the streets.
When I started to research more about First Nations women living in the world of prostitution, the more I realized why she went down the road that she did. I had a mild feeling of how it must feel to lose someone you love to that lifestyle. I imagined how frustrating it must be to not be taken seriously when it came to mourning the loss of a person who lived that life and was murdered, to not be taken seriously by the justice system when it came to wanting to solve those murders.
And not all of the women and children who went missing or were murdered were involved in the life style. I started to feel empathy towards these families.
Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
I asked one of the women involved in the walk across Canada if it was harder to get people to really understand what it is like to lose a loved one in a violent way, or to have a loved one disappear without a trace, if they had never experienced something like it before. I asked if it was harder to empathize with those involved in the awareness walks and memory walks if one had never experienced the same kind of loss.
She told me “yeah, I think that it is.”
But she would continue on, anyway.
Like the two previous events I had been to regarding the issue of missing and murdered Aboriginal women and children in Canada, the turnout of local supporters was low. But some locals did show up, and they listened.
One of the local speakers, whose sister was murdered, said that when she comes to these kinds of events to talk, she always imagines a room full of people.
And even though recently a young woman had been murdered here in the city, she said this to rows of empty seats.
What will it take for you to show some more support for this issue?