Aboriginal women fed up

There is no single statistic to define the growing problem of violence against Aboriginal women in Canada and abroad, but it’s safe to say that our sisters have had enough.
Operation Thunderbird, or #OpThunderbird in the twitterverse, is a movement that seeks to shed light on systemic violence against Aboriginal women in Canada, stemming from the abduction and rape of an Aboriginal woman in Thunder Bay on Dec. 27, 2012, according to the main operating site of Operation Thunderbird.
The incident is being investigated as a possible hate crime. And it came in a time when Canada was still barely coming to terms with the conviction of Robert Pickton, believed to have murdered up to 49 women, many of them indigenous.
One of Pickton’s victims was my aunt.
“Operation Thunderbird began [when] a group of committed activists started speaking about their desire to help bring justice to marginalized indigenous women everywhere,” the site’s ledger reads. “We looked at our worlds and saw women missing, abused, murdered with impunity, beheaded, raped, dismembered, disrespected, unheard and forgotten by the media and legal institutions like trash.”
One of the big things that OpThunderbird has been able to produce is a map to show, visually, the sad case of “unsolved missing, murders of indigenous woman…[as well as] unidentified found human remains. There are also categories to report solved murders and hateful or racist verbal assaults,” the crowd-map site reads.
The map indicates the number of indigenous women who have been murdered or gone missing (as well as both indigenous and non-indigenous women who have been sexually assaulted), and was created to raise awareness of the lack of interest in the loss of Aboriginal women by law enforcement.
Another initiative intended to help Aboriginal women developed in the form of a crowd-funded project called Arming Sisters, developed by Patricia Stein, a Lakota activist working from Cairo. She’s the OpThunderbird’s politics and social sciences educator, originally from North Dakota. Her goal, as indicated by her public IndieGoGo campaign page, is to arm women, “not with weapons, but with the courage and knowledge to fight back.”
Stein said 330 out of 1,000 indigenous women in any given district would be assaulted, with one in three being raped, two in five experiencing domestic violence, and three in five being physically assaulted. The project, if it meets its financial goals, will seek to bring self-defense courses to women in 20 of the largest indigenous communities in Canada and the United States.
“Should this goal be completed, we will directly reach 2,000 women, and thousands more as they share their knowledge,” the IndieGoGo campaign reads.
So why have we, in the 21st century, come to a point where women still don’t feel safe in their own communities? Women have always had a hard lot. I won’t deny that I feel fine going for a stroll in the evening without a thought of hesitance, but I think the issue goes beyond male privilege.
Stein said in her video that indigenous women are specifically being targeted, as 88 per cent of assaults are by non-indigenous men.
“Targeted to flawed laws, racism, and deep rooted corruption in the institutions set up to protect and serve the public,” said Stein. “Up until recently, when the Violence Against Women Act was reauthorized including tribal provisions, tribal governments had no authority to properly address cases.”
This particular act only affects women in the United States, and Stein said a “signed bill, regardless of borders, will not bring down the rate of assault for years to come, or delete the racism and corruption from society.”
Aboriginal people are a tough bunch. Our ancestors survived cultural and actual genocide; we endure ongoing systemic racism stemming from Canada’s archaic Indian Act of 1867, and struggle every day just to survive in some cases.
It’s a dangerous world out there for Aboriginal people, but it’s even more dangerous for Aboriginal women.
I recall visiting The Forks in Winnipeg one summer with my mother and another female relative – they had just parked when a (white) man approached them and started yelling racial slurs at them for allegedly “stealing his spot.” They were outside the car dealing with him; I was inside the van wondering what the commotion was.
From where I stepped out of the van on the right, my mother and aunt were on the left side dealing with the man. As I made my way over to the confrontation, the man slowly backed away from us and, I’m sure, decided the parking spot was no longer worth fighting for. He was more willing to cuss out a couple of indigenous women than deal with a 6’0 Aboriginal man.
That’s just one of the countless, more subtle examples. And I’m very grateful to have been able to act as a guardian for my mother in public situations – it’s not the quintessential solution to the bigger issue, but it’s what I can offer to help my family.
I praise Aboriginal women for gathering resources, engaging in movements set to create positive change for future generations. It’s important for the marginalized to speak up, it’s important for women to start feeling safe in a society they’re very much a part of. Operation Thunderbird seeks to make it condemningly difficult to avoid justice—not just for victim of the December 27 hate rape, but for all women.