Mi'kmaw Elder Wanda Whitebird surveyed the hundreds gathered in front of Toronto Police Headquarters on Saturday afternoon.
“Today is a sad day,” she said. “But as I look around, it certainly lifts my heart to see you all here.”
Whitebird was leading the city’s 10th annual Strawberry Ceremony, part of the National Day of Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, an event aimed at raising awareness to the disproportionately high number of Indigenous women who fall victim to violence in North America.
“Strawberries are important in the way that it teaches us courage and love because it carries its babies on the outside,” said Whitebird. “And if you cut this berry in half a certain way, there’s a heart in there,” making the connection of such a dolent event being held on Valentine’s Day.
The Ceremony included speeches by family members, honour songs, drumming and the ritual eating of strawberries and ended with a march to a community feast at a downtown YMCA.
Last summer, the RCMP released a report that claimed close to 1,200 documented cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women exist, giving credibility to a situation that groups, including Amnesty International, have been trying to draw public and government attention to for years. Despite this, both Prime Minister Harper and Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt have taken little action: Harper dismisses the presence of sociological factors andValcourt believes the problem lies with a fundamental lack of respect for women in reserve communities, not addressing the fact that half of the country’s Indigenous population live in urban settings.
One woman who would be included in the RCMP’s database is Cheyenne Fox, who died in Toronto in the spring of 2013 after falling from a condo in the Willowdale area. While the police were quick to conclude that her death was a suicide, Fox’s family ardently insists foul play was involved. They’re also currently suing Toronto Police Services, saying they neglected to properly respond to several 911 calls that were made in the hours leading up to Cheyenne’s death.
“At the end of the day, at the individual level, it’s about racism,” says Audrey Huntley, part of No More Silence, one of the organizers of the Strawberry Ceremony. “There has to be a lot of work done educating the general public and deconstructing all the stereotypes that people just continue to believe about Aboriginal people,” she says.
She’s direct when asked for ways the city and province can prevent more Indigenous women, trans and two-spirit individuals from becoming numbers in a database.
“We need more shelters. That’s a demand that’s being made across the country, at all the levels of government...That’s something that can happen immediately and hasn’t.”
But Huntley is not one to wait for others to take action: suspicious that the RCMP’s numbers are too low, No More Silence has been building their own database.
“I don’t have any faith that that is a complete figure. I think there will be a lot more if we actually had the time and resources to compile all that information.”
To date, they’ve documented over 100 cases of missing or murdered women in Ontario. And the list is growing.
“We’re in the process of forming...a national steering committee so we can take it to the next level, which is continuing what we’ve done in Ontario for other provinces.”
Despite the painstaking data collection and verification inherent in building a list from scratch, she’s reticent to rely on any government body for support.
“It’s completely independent, completely grassroots, completely community-based and we will never change that.”
The location of the Strawberry Ceremony on the steps of Police Headquarters was a calculated move, meant to urge officers to do more to protect vulnerable members of the city.
“In terms of the police, we simply demand respect and that they are more compassionate in their dealings with family members,” Huntley says.
Ashley, a young woman attending the ceremony, brought her step daughter, one of many who brought children to Saturday’s event. She thinks it’s important for young Indigenous girls to reconnect with their heritage.
“Our education system wipes out the truth of our people,” she says.
Reforms to police and education are only a few in a litany of recommendations that have been made over the years. A briefing note released in December looked at 50 studies and compiled their shared recommendations, highlighting that the time for analysis is over: action is now required.
And while there are many voices calling on the federal government to spearhead a national inquiry, Huntley is not one of them.
“We would not have any faith in any kind of an inquiry whatsoever,” she says. Instead, she wants to see the long list of recommendations implemented.
“There’s already been enough studies so we know the root causes, so the only kind of inquiry I could support would be one led by Indigenous family members and women.”
However, she understands why people, especially the families of victims, are calling for an inquiry.
“They want...to have this issue taken seriously and they want validation for it, just to feel like someone cares,” she says. “I think that’s the importance for them, just to counter that societal indifference.”
