March 16th, 7PM at McCord Museum (690 Sherbrooke West)
A lecture by: Beverley Jacobs, President of the Native Women’s
Association of Canada (NWAC)
March 17th, 6PM at Atwater Library (1200 Atwater Ave.)
A panel discussion featuring:
Beverley Jacobs, President of NWAC
Ellen Gabriel, President of Quebec Native Women (QNW)
Laurie Odjick, mother
Bridget Tolley, daughter
Sue Martin, mother
On March 16th Beverley Jacobs, President of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, will give a talk on the violence inflicted upon Aboriginal women and girls in Canada from the past to the present and explain the effects of colonization on Indigenous women particularly.
A panel discussion on March 17th will feature Beverley Jacobs, Ellen Gabriel of Quebec Native Women, Laurie Odjick, Bridget Tolley, and Sue Martin, from families directly affected by the disappearance or murder of a mother, sister or daughter.
The aim of these events is to stimulate a broader understanding of and discussion about the reasons behind racialized violence that continues to occur both locally here in Montreal and in the rest of Canada. The general lack of information or proper coverage, as well as an absence of police investigations of missing and murdered First Nations women over the last three decades alone will also be explored as a brutal form of violence in itself, and raised as a cause for concern. The more long-term aim of the initiative will be to pressure the government to stop ignoring recommendations by the UN and Amnesty International, including a request by the UN committee on the elimination of discrimination against women to “urgently carry out thorough investigations” to trace how and why the justice system has failed, and why hundred’s of women’s cases remain unsolved.
Beverley Jacobs, of the Mohawk Nation Bear Clan in Six Nations Grand River is an Aboriginal rights lawyer and president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC). She has worked with Amnesty International Canada as a lead researcher and consultant on their report “Stolen Sisters: Discrimination and Violence Against Indigenous Women in Canada,” as has done work on NWAC’s “Sisters in Spirit” campaign. Jacobs was one of many attendees at the Walk4Justice rally on Parliament Hill in September 2008. The rally was the end of a 90-day walk by First Nations women and men aimed at pressuring the government and sharing personal experiences as a way of raising awareness.
Since September, four First Nations women have gone missing locally, including a fourteen-year old Inuit girl who was abducted from a schoolyard in Montreal. This event will offer an important opportunity for students, as well as the broader Montreal community, to think about the issues and get involved in a more concrete way by learning to hold their government accountable for the profound systemic flaws that continue to victimize a particular sector of the population.
The lecture and panel are brought to you by the Justice for Murdered and Missing Women campaign in collaboration with the 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy. Both events are co-sponsored by the Simone de Beauvoire Institute, The Quebec Public Interest Research Group
(QPIRG-Concordia), The Women Studies Student Association of Concordia (WSSA) & CKUT 90.3 FM.