OWNA upset Sister’s funding cut

Five years of research under the Sisters in Spirit initative has essentially been thrown out when it was not allowed to continue, according to the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC).
A $10-million funding announcement Oct. 29 was expected to carry the research into missing and murdered Aboriginal women across Canada through its next phase. Instead, NWAC and the Ontario Native Women’s Association (ONWA) were blindsided when the funding went to the RCMP instead to essentially “reinvent the wheel,” said Lorene Rego, communications officer for ONWA.
“The RCMP will receive these funds,” Rego said. “They will start their own research into missing and murdered women in 2013.
“We have all the research. We have spent five years building the database. We have nearly 600 names.”
The funding was part of the 2010 budget which said it would “address the disturbingly high number of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Concrete actions will be taken so that law enforcement and the Justice system meet the needs of Aboriginal women and their families.”
Rego said the funding was necessary because Aboriginal women are the highest at risk group. Aboriginal women make up three per cent of the population but have been 10 per cent of the murder victims the past 20 years.
“That equates to about 600,000 non-Aboriginal women being murdered,” Rego said, if applying the same statistics to non-Aboriginal women in Canada.
Rego said ONWA and NWAC haven’t given up hope that the Sisters in Spirit could be restored.
Irene Matheson, the federal NDP critic for the status of women, has launched a petition to have the funding restored.
She was in Thunder Bay Nov. 19.
Sisters In Spirit is a research, education and policy initiative driven. Its goal is to research and raise awareness of the high rates of violence against Aboriginal women and girls in Canada.