The Women's Memorial March is an annual event held every February 14th to honor missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) across Canada and the United States. The event also serves as a protest against class disparity, racism, inequality, and violence.
Originating in 1992 in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada following the murder of Cheryl Ann Joe, a local Indigenous woman, the event began as a small memorial and has since grown into an annual march recognizing all MMIWG. In the Downtown East Side, the March commences at the intersection of Main and Hastings and proceeds through downtown, pausing at bars, strip clubs, alleys, and parking lots where women's bodies have been discovered. The name of each woman is read aloud along with the name(s) of direct family members (e.g., "daughter of..." or "mother of...") before the family and supporters pause to grieve.
Significance Participants in the Women's Memorial March consider it a representation of survival and resilience, symbolizing the reclamation of dignity denied to many marginalized women in Canada. The movement also plays an important role in restoring public discourse in the media, challenging stereotypes and misrepresentations of Indigenous women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside that have historically excused ignorance and discrimination by the police and public.
Dara Culhane,https://www.sfu.ca/sociology-anthropology/people/faculty/dara-culhane.html Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, emphasizes a quote from a flyer distributed at the Women's Memorial March in 2001 at the beginning of her essay Their Spirits Live Within Us: Aboriginal Women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver Emerging into Visibility,"WE ARE ABORIGINAL WOMEN. GIVERS OF LIFE. WE ARE MOTHERS, SISTERS, DAUGHTERS, AUNTIES AND GRANDMOTHERS. NOT JUST PROSTITUTES AND DRUG ADDICTS. NOT WELFARE CHEATS. WE STAND ON OUR MOTHER EARTH AND WE DEMAND RESPECT. WE ARE NOT THERE TO BE BEATEN, ABUSED, MURDERED, IGNORED."
History On January 20, 1992, Cheryl Ann Joe, a 26-year-old Indigenous woman, was found murdered on Powell Street in Downtown Eastside (DTES).
Weeks later, on February 14, her mother, Linda Ann Joe, and family, along with others living in the area, gathered in the parking lot where Cheryl's body was found to grieve. Linda Joe and other women from the community decided to host an annual grassroots event to show compassion and recognize all women in the DTES, as well as to honor the missing and murdered women.
Each year, Vancouver organizers publish a list of names of women and girls who have been murdered or remain missing in the Downtown Eastside. Since the first march in 1992, over 970 names have been added to this list, including 75 new names from 2019 alone.
The Women's Memorial March now draws thousands of people in Vancouver annually and has expanded as a movement to other provinces in Canada. Many cities across Canada now stage similar events to honour and bring visibility to missing and murdered Indigenous women in their communities.
Marches have expanded to other British Columbian cities, including Victoria, Nanaimo, Courtenay, Nelson, Kelowna, Merritt, Penticton, Grand Forks, and Prince George), as well as:
Edmonton and Calgary in Alberta; Saskatoon; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Toronto, Ottawa, Kenora, Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay, Six Nations of the Grand River, Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and London in Ontario; Montreal, Quebec; St. John's, Newfoundland; and Denver, Colorado, Fargo, North Dakota, and Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States.
Cheryl Ann Joe Cheryl Ann Joe (1965 or 1966 – January 20, 1992) was a member of the Shíshálh Nation on the British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast and a single mother of three young boys.
She had lived on the Sunshine Coast before facing challenges with housing, finances, and alcohol, which led her to sex work in the Downtown Eastside. She was trying to earn money to visit two of her children in Alberta who were living with their father.
Joe had planned to become a police officer to help protect the city's vulnerable and would frequently encourage younger women in the sex trade to leave the street and improve their lives.
On January 20, 1992, at the age of 26, Joe's body was found murdered near a warehouse loading dock on Powell Street in the Downtown Eastside.Sterritt, Angela. February 13, 2017. "Relatives of woman whose death sparked MMIW's memorial march want changes in the justice system." CBC News. Within hours of discovering her body, detectives had a 36-year-old suspect, Brian Allender, in custody and charged him with first-degree murder. According to police reports, Allender assaulted Joe for up to two hours before she died.
In 1993, a jury convicted Allender of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison. Allender is currently serving his sentence in Mountain Institution in Agassiz, BC.
Violence against Indigenous women in Canada
By 2009, close to 67,000 Indigenous women aged 15 and above reported being subjected to violence within the previous 12 months. Approximately 63% of these women were aged 15 to 34 years old. Seventy-six percent of the reported incidents were non-spousal violence and were not reported to police, which is often the case with incidents of violence against Indigenous women. Although many of these crimes against Indigenous women were not reported to police or other service organizations, such as shelters, 98% of victimized women told an informal source such as a friend or family member.
Police response In Canada, Indigenous women constitute 4% of the female population and 16% of female murders.
In 2014, the RCMP reported that over 1,200 Indigenous women were missing or had been found murdered in the last 25 years, while Indigenous women's groups self-reported this number to be over 4,000. This discrepancy is due to a lack of evidence and attention from authorities.
Between 1983 and 2003, over 61 women were filed as "missing persons" from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and over half were Indigenous women. As families and friends tried to draw attention to the matter, Philip Owen, the mayor of Vancouver from 1993 to 2002, refused to offer a reward or further investigate the missing women, stating that he believed public funds should not be used to create a "location service for prostitutes".
Culhane states that authorities used categorizations of Indigenous women related to sex, drugs, crime, violence, murder, and disease as excuses to ignore and take little action in investigating the root of these disappearances. The justification was that these women inflicted harm on themselves by living in the Downtown Eastside and living the lifestyles that they did. Vancouver's missing women became a public issue as more women disappeared, and academics, advocates, journalists, and the women's families came together. It became publicly recognized that a serial killer might be active in this neighborhood in 1999.
Public discourse and the media In the immediate post-war years, violence experienced by Indigenous women in Canada was kept out of mainstream public discourse. It was not until the 1960s that these incidents were given attention in the media. News stories rationalized the violence by focusing on poverty, disease, crime, and sex work in the Downtown Eastside. The photos of the victims used in the media were often mug shots from previous arrests, presenting these women as criminals. In her article, "Indigenous Women as Newspaper Representations: Violence and Action in 1960s Vancouver", Meghan Longstaffe says that media outlets used racist and stereotypical language which reinforced negative representations of Indigenous women.
In her thesis, "You Will Be Punished: Media Depictions of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women", Caitlin Elliot observes a pattern where reporters used sensationalized and made a spectacle of the injustices occurring, with undue focus on crime while avoiding topics of sex and race prejudice and colonialism.
The use of tropes and stereotypes has been a tactic of settler colonialism since before the 19th century. Negative tropes regarding Indigenous femininity, sexuality, and motherhood pit Indigenous and white women against each other and protect white men from punishment and accountability for abuse against Indigenous women. The "Skid Road Girl" was a trope that appeared in the media as the experiences of Indigenous women faced in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside became more publicly recognized. Due to the surplus of single men, drug use, and crime in the area, "skid road" became a commonly used symbol of the Downtown Eastside. The "Skid Road Girl" referred to women living in this neighborhood and came with negative connotations referring to poverty, addiction, violence, and corruption. According to Elliot, these categorizations informed the idea that violence was a natural consequence of living in this area, and victims were at fault for their own suffering.
According to Longstaffe, Vancouver journalists "combined postwar discourses about "skid road" with stereotypes about Indigenous women to create a specifically female version of this narrative." Headlines such as "Skid Road 'Killed My Girls'" and "Where Were You Going, Little One? Bubble of City Glamor Burst in Bundle of Death" characterized victims as young and helpless. Vancouver Sun Journalist Simma Holt used statements such as, "[She] was drunk, just another cut and bruised Indian girl, and nobody took much interest in the complaint" and "The way she died is typical and so common, society has accepted it just as it does minor traffic accidents." In an attempt to bring awareness to the inaction of the police, the language used in these reports normalized the violence Indigenous women were experiencing and allowed the public to turn a blind eye to the matter. In Dara Culhane's words,The annual Valentine's Day Women's Memorial March gives political expression to a complex process through which Aboriginal women here are struggling to change the language, metaphors, and images through which they come to be (re)known as they emerge into public visibility.
Case studies
Some specific cases which illustrate the depth of the problem of violence against aboriginal women in Canada were highlighted in a report by Amnesty International in 2004. They include the murder of 19-year-old Helen Betty Osborne, who was killed November 12, 1971, after a night out with friends in The Pas, Manitoba, a town of 6,000 which was segregated between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. She was accosted by four non-Indigenous men at 2 a.m. while walking back to her house. Osborne refused to have sex with the men and was then forced into their car, where she was beaten and sexually assaulted. She was then taken to a local cabin, beaten some more, and stabbed to death.
The police assigned to the case failed to act on specific tips that pointed to the four likely perpetrators. The car used during the crime was not searched until a year later (1972). By 1972, police concluded that they did not have enough evidence for the case. Only 20 years later did an inquiry by Manitoba Justice conclude that the murder was fueled by racism and sexism. Charges were eventually brought in October 1986 when new evidence was released. Dwayne Johnson was found guilty in 1987 and sentenced to life in prison. Among the other men, one was acquitted, and the others were never charged.