Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada History Research Paper

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada
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Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada
The missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) is a sensitive issue affecting many indigenous people both in Canada and in the United States. The epidemic has been classified as a Canadian national crisis and a Canadian genocide. Human rights movements and organizations have come together in form of organized matches, council meets and the building of databases to raise awareness about these missing indigenous women. Their efforts have elicited debates on whether the missing women were victims of genocide. Despite the shifting definitions of the what genocide entails, and the denial by the authorities of perpetuating foul play, all evidence towards the disappearance of these women points to genocide.
Indigenous women have continued to be frequent targets of hatred, violence and marginalization. The basis of this discrimination has been their poverty, homelessness, racism, sexism and colonialism. These women are up to 3 times more likely to be discriminated and abused compared to their counterparts. In addition, the violence that these women are subjected to is often more severe than expected. According to The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girl, the homicides for non-Indigenous women reduced between 1980 and 2015, whereas the number of Indigenous women increased during the same period from 9% to 24% (National Inquiry, 2019). Between 2001 and 2015, the number of victims of homicides for indigenous women increased to up to six times that of non-indigenous women (Mahony, Jacob & Hobson, 2017). This number was even higher in Nunavut, the Yukon and in the Northwest Territories. One of the databases that was compiled as a part of a Ph.D. thesis quoted the number of missing or murdered indigenous women from 1946 to 2013 to be 824. According to the RCMP report of 2014, the number grew between 1980 and 2012 to almost 1200 (National Inquiry, 2019). These disappearances continued to raise concerns and with the effort of various non-governmental organizations, an inquiry was formed to look at the causes of the disappearance.
Various entities, alongside the committee of inquiry looked into several cases across the country that involved the death and disappearance of these people. In the cases assessed, the authorities denied any foul play. On the contrary, families of the victims refuted the findings of the police and alluded to the possibility of murder. CBC News analyzed 34 cases and the evidence pointed to suspicious circumstances that included unexplained bruises among other pointers that warranted a further inquiry into the problem. The CBC has created a profile for each of the missing persons in their investigation into the missing indigenous women. Activists claim that most of the cases involving the disappearance over the last half-century were insufficiently investigated due to the biasness of the police. As a proof that the disappearances involved killings of these women, Robert Pickton, a serial killer was arrested for killing 49 women and jailed in 2007. According to families of the victims, Pickton was able to kill so ma...