violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people

That code thing in the title looks like one of my passwords at work...I was just about to shout gdpr breach!

This article is one of the only ones available that highlights the statistics about offenders. Obviously in the majority of cases (missing and unsolved murders) we don't know.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-says-7-of-10-female-aboriginal-homicides-committed-by-aboriginal-offenders-1.3028150

all the coverage is curiously lacking in any attempt to identify patterns in what theperpetratorsare doing. Again, men are strangely absent from the story, which is almost treated like an epidemic or natural disaster**

Indeed. I live in Canada and this is in the news very regularly, constantly at the moment. What is never named is male violence. I don't think I have ever heard men referenced in relation to the inquiry. It's really quite bizarre.

Another contentious issue is that the background of the men perpetrating this violence is never discussed. The evidence from solved murders indicates that about 70% are perpetrated by indigenous men, mostly from the women's families and communities (as I would guess to be the case across the board when women are murdered). My cynical take is that this has been buried as it doesn't play into the desired narrative.

I lived in the west of Canada in the 1970s and the contempt for the Indigenous people was palpable.

They had also been seriously damaged by being forceably sent to boarding schools from the age of five to fifteen all through the first half of the twentieth century.

So, that article from reuters.

There are serious problems with indigenous issues in Canada. Not all simple ones either, or ones where there is a clear right or wrong. Some of it is a real morass.

But the way they are using the term colonialism in that article reminds me of nothing so much as the way the word "racism" was used at Evergreen.

mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1T41XF?utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A%2BTrending%2BContent&utm_content=5cf56d2f5f25b20001a151b0&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter&__twitter_impression=true

all the coverage is curiously lacking in any attempt to identify patterns in what theperpetratorsare doing. Again, men are strangely absent from the story, which is almost treated like an epidemic or natural disaster

The subject of the disappearance of indigenous Canadian women has had media attention on and off for about a decade now. I completely agree it is always treated with an air of puzzlement as if it were some mysterious plague or natural disaster.

Fermats

I don't think its an attempt to let men off the hook, at all. The blind spot is quite different.

Maybe part of the reason it's been approached this way is the case that really put this in the public eye was a serious of murders by a serial rapist and murderer. It turned out he had been picking up prostitutes for years, many of them indigenous - Vancouver has a large indigenous population, and murdering them on his farm, and then feeding the remains to his pigs. Just gruesome and also the kind of stuff that is really compelling news. The families of many of the women had been looking for them for years.
So in the mind of the public, perhaps it seemed like this was some kind of crazy conspiracy. And it was the exposure activists needed to start making demands, and the demand was for a public enquiry. But that seemed to be conceived in terms of uncovering a conspiracy in the mind of the public.

Who is doing this though? Is there a pattern?

TBH this is the problem I've had with the approach to this question, both from the government and indigenous groups.

There doesn't appear to be a "who" or some kind of individual or group or anything like that. The best hypothesis seems to be that native women are at a kind of nexus of vulnerable groups - the are more represented among run-aways, drug and alcohol addiction, prostitution, poverty, problems with the law, compared to other Canadian women. Do these along account for the higher rate of disappearances - well, we don't know. I suspect they account for a lot, but not all, of it.

Then there is the problem of police forces investigating. There seem to be more reason to think police forces have tended to ignore these cases, although it's again the case that they are also known to be rather lax at times in pursuing missing persons belonging to those other groups.

There's a real climate though that those kinds of questions aren't appropriate. I find it kind of depressing really, it seems like another case where an identity politics approach ends up looking at the surface issues in a way that obscures the more basic questions, like why indigenous women are so represented in those groups. I'm told this is a regressive POV.

That's the million dollar question, isn't it, Fekko?

Apols, Vice article, but has interesting stats:
www.vice.com/da/article/bn57vd/hundreds-of-aboriginal-women-are-being-murdered-in-canada-and-no-one-knows-why-0000311-v21n5?utm_source=viceadwordsca&utm_medium=cpc

There is a massive problem for all women and girls in Canada, with indigenous women massively over-represented in the statistics. But no mention of who the perpetrators might be (I think given what we know of violent and sexual offending figures worldwide, we can safely assume that they will be male). The fact that the article opens with the story of a PhD student researching the issue, an indigenous woman herself, murdered, her body dumped on a highway, suggests that it's random violence and any woman could be caught up in it. There is (as far as I can see) no suggestion of it being linked to domestic violence and partner murder, or prostitution (the normal risk factors).

But you're right - all the coverage is curiously lacking in any attempt to identify patterns in what the perpetrators are doing. Again, men are strangely absent from the story, which is almost treated like an epidemic or natural disaster. The flack is aimed entirely at law enforcement agencies for poor clear up rates allegedly motivated by racism (which is probably true) - but the actual perpetrators are not in the narrative at all.

And Canada is too busy with the boys these days. Can’t have a boy snagging a nail now can we?

Who is doing this though? Is there a pattern?

That's right Fekko - the levels of violence against indigenous women are horrific. It's an absolute scandal, and one which the Canadian establishment is doing very little to address despite making all the right noises.

The 2SLGBTQQIA are an endangered first nation people in West Greenland, now found mostly on the council estates of Copenhagen because the walrus have gone away.

I didn’t read the link - but do recall that there was a news story a while ago about their being almost an epidemic of of native Canadian women (don’t know that they ‘correct’ term is) who just disappear and are never found (which implies murder).

I’m so angry on behalf of these women and girls. All that their people have gone through and are still going through.

How do you destroy a people? You kill and / or rape their women.

Remember people, when you're talking about a genocide of women and girls, the story isn't complete until you shoehorn in the hurt feelings of Oger, Yaniv, and the rest of them.

Is terms of seriousness, dead women and misgendered transwomen are effectively the same.

Not wishing to derail but it's very much how I feel we see trans playing out in our current western culture; rigid gender stereotypes or gender sex roles create a desire to be the other in some people.

That's interesting fermats, thanks.

Not to mention the fact that 2 spirit isn't even universal across the indigenous peoples of north America. I don't know much about Canadian first nations, but a friend who's an anthropology prof has talked to me a lot about 2 spirit people - often it goes with very fixed behaviour roles associated with sex, and furthermore, with a lack of political power for women (the Iroquois - who I think do extend up into south east Canada, to a contrasting example, have very rigidly designated roles for the two sexes, but still give women considerable, in fact pretty much equal political say - and they do not have a "third gender")

I remember that the indigenous women of Vancouver campaigning for justice last year expressed dismay at Amnesty International's involvement

I read an article about this a while ago in neither of the above and it only mentioned women and girls. May have been NYTimes.

I remember reading that one in particular and that the officer is now a trans man.

Crikey! Very harrowing to read that!

This is one of the linked articles and is an interesting read.

BBC News - Why I failed to catch Canada's worst serial killer
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38796464