Ethnicity factor can’t be ignored
A reluctance to discuss the ethnicity of those who are behind the disproportionately large number of aboriginal women being murdered in Canada can only thwart those searching for solutions to the tragic situation.
It appears political correctness has been behind an RCMP decision, up to the present, not to make reference to the ethnicity of possible perpetrators. The same reluctance seems to have prompted Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt to avoid revealing publicly all the government apparently knows about the murders.
As the RCMP prepares to release next month a followup report on murdered and missing aboriginal women, it has come to light that some 70 per cent of the 1,182 aboriginal female victims counted by the force between 1980 and 2012 were killed by aboriginal males.
According to a news report last week, a transcript of a March 20 conversation in a Calgary hotel room has the Aboriginal Affairs Minister confiding to several native chiefs: “I will tell you — because there is no media in the room — that the RCMP report states that up to 70 per cent of the murdered and missing indigenous women issue stems from their own communities.”
The reaction to the transcript revelation immediately prompted Grand Chief of Treaty Six Bernice Martial to dispute Valcourt’s assertion. With several chiefs demanding that the minister be fired for blaming First Nations men for the problem, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulsen confirmed in a letter made public Thursday that “70 per cent of the offenders were of aboriginal origin.”
Meanwhile, the New Democratic Party aboriginal affairs critic Niki Ashton charged the government is “engaging in race baiting ... and absolving themselves of any responsibility to deal with this at the broader level.”
Such reactions are off base. If it is indeed the case that aboriginal men are mainly behind the murders of so many aboriginal women, such knowledge is bound to be tremendously helpful in devising strategies to address this devastating situation.
The aboriginal communities calling for a national inquiry have been crying out for workable strategies. How can effective remedies be found if they are not prepared to face the circumstances of those deaths, whatever those circumstances may be? If women in indigenous communities are dying at the hands of their partners or family members, why wait a year or more for a national inquiry to inform the public of such a fact?
It is high time government sat down with the aboriginal communities and considered ways to address the violence.
This is not the only avenue to be taken, given that the numbers suggest 30 per cent of the women may have been murdered by non-aboriginals. But it certainly is an important one, and suggests the aboriginal communities themselves must take greater ownership of the issue.
Not all problems can or should be solved by governments taking a paternalistic role. What has to happen next is a candid discussion about the RCMP’s findings regarding the ethnicity of all those suspected of murdering indigenous women. The editorials that appear in this space represent the opinion of The StarPhoenix. They are unsigned because they do not necessarily represent the personal views of the writers. The positions taken in the editorials are arrived at through discussion among the members of the newspaper’s editorial board, which operates independently from the news departments of the paper.