Statement of Settler Solidarity In Honour of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

The following statement was delivered by a member of Sudbury Against War and Occupation at a recent event in Sudbury honouring the memory of indigenous women murdered and gone missing in Canada.

Good afternoon.

My name is Clarissa Lassaline and I’m involved with a group of Sudbury folks firmly opposed to war and occupation. The fact that Canada exists as an occupation of First Nations Lands has become increasingly important to our thinking about indigenous struggles and white settler solidarity and responsibility.

Colonialism is not solely a remnant of an historical past. Colonial and racist relations continue to play out every day across Canada. Theft of indigenous lands and resources is ongoing whether on Coast Salish Territory in the West, or Six Nations in southern Ontario, Grassy Narrows up North, or the KI folks in northwestern Ontario being sued by Platinex for protecting their land against mineral expoitation. And the hundreds of land struggles in-between. Often these attempted take-overs are accompanied by the full weight of the guns of the law, like those that murdered unarmed Dudley George as he was protecting along with others a site sacred to his people. Or the incarceration system that killed ailing West Coast Elder and warrior Harriet Nahanee ….imprisoned for standing up against 2010 Olympic expansions on Squamish land.

But theft of indigenous land and resources, criminalization of their dissent and outright murder is not the whole story. Current state and societal practices and politics reinforce and extend a many-faceted violent oppression against First Nations across Canada. The Canadian State and its institutions – including the justice system, its laws and courts, coroners offices and police forces, and the media – continue to actively perpetrate discrimination, violent sexist and racist behaviour and genocide against Native people. The deliberate inaction of authorities in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is not the exception but the norm for sex workers in general. The deliberate inaction of authorities in the violence against First Nations women everywhere across the country is the norm. And a verdict of only 2nd degree murder for the brutal butchering of six indigenous women – that too is the norm. Often the killers are never even prosecuted or brought to justice. First Nations women have gone missing from communities big and small all over Canada, targets of sexual and racist violence and hate crimes, unprotected by the authorities responsible and amidst deliberate widespread indifference.

Yet the position that we - the white settler population - have in these widespread violent practices is far from neutral. Our ways, our mostly middle-class values, power and privileges are imposed and maintained by the Canadian state institutions that act with impunity in our name and on our behalf. We have a responsibility. Responsibility lays with us to stop ignoring what the state apparatus does or doesn’t do, stop collaborating with it, condemn it, demand a better way of doing things for everybody that values the life of everyone equally. We need to learn for ourselves how to decolonize our thinking and practices so that we can begin to work as allies of First Nations peoples, not as their oppressors. Otherwise, violence against indigenous people, particularly aboriginal women and young girls, will continue just because they are aboriginal people.

Miigwech.