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"STOLEN SISTERS": DISCRIMINATION AND VIOLENCE AGAINST ABORIGINAL WOMEN AS REPRESENTED IN CANADIAN FILMS
- University of Ottawa Press
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Kerstin Knopf "STOLEN SISTERS": DISCRIMINATION AND VIOLENCE AGAINST ABORIGINAL WOMEN AS REPRESENTEDIN CANADIAN FILMS INTRODUCTION he 2004 Amnesty International report "Stolen Sisters—A Human Rights Response to Discrimination andViolence against Aboriginal Women in Canada" isashocking account ofcases ofhorrific sexist violence against Aboriginal women in Canada; violence fostered by racism and discrimination, aswell as the systemic social and economic marginalization of a majority of this group. This "human rights tragedy" as Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, terms it (Neve, online), is happening in a First World country, and thus is all the more despicable. These social phenomena are factors that contribute to the Fourth World status of Canada's Aboriginal people. There is indeed an increasing optimism in relations between Canada and its Aboriginal population at the turn of the century and an overall improvement ofthe state ofAboriginal Canada,partly as a result of successful land claim settlements (e.g., the Nisga'a Treaty), the partial political autonomy of a large group ofArctic inhabitants (the creation ofNunavut in 1999),the financial compensationpackagefor residentialschopl 360 T survivors, and concessions to Aboriginaldemands for a self-controlled media system (the creation ofAPTN in 1999and a number of radio stations). In spite of these cautious improvements, the situation of manyAboriginal women is still appalling, and the report reveals cases of sexually assaulted, missing, and/or brutally murdered Aboriginal women that come to the fore again and again. Systemic mishandling of such cases by the police and loopholes in the Canadian justice system account for an alarming number of unsolved missing women and murder cases, not to mention acquitted or not appropriately convicted perpetrators. Apart from media coverage ofsuch cases (predominantly in the Aboriginal media1 ); the topic of the insufferable poverty of,and sexist and racist violence against, Aboriginal women is increasingly contextualized in literature and film,in examples such as plays by Yvette Nolan (Blade) and Marie Clements' The Unnatural and Accidental Women, recently turned into the feature film Unnatural andAccidental by Carl Bessai. Other films that address this issue in its themes are the feature film Conspiracy of Violence, Christine Welsh's NFB documentaryFindingDawn,and "Suspicious Love,"onepart of Moccasin Flats, a television series produced by Laura Milliken andJennifer Podemski.At the ImagineNATiVE film festival in Toronto 2007,two short films premiered that also dealt with the violent death of an Aboriginal woman: Ervin Chartrands Sister and Peter Brass and Helder Mauricio Carvajals The Valley. Tying together this socio-political situation in Canada with its contextualization in film, this article is organized in two parts. It first gives an overview of the distressing situation of Aboriginal women in Canada based upon Amnesty Internationals report and then discusses how this topic is reflected in Audrey Huntley's documentary Go Home, Baby Girl, Nathaniel Geary s feature film On the Corner, andJennifer Podemski s short dramatic film Laurel. THE REPORT AS AN INDICTMENT OF CANADA'S HUMAN RIGHTS TRAGEDY Drawing upon a 1996 Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (DIAND) statistic, Amnesty Internationals report notes that "Indigenous women between the ages of 25and 44 with status under the Federal Indian 361 STOLEN SISTER [34.237.245.80] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:10 GMT) KERSTIN KNOPF Act, arefivetimes more likely than other women ofthe same ageto die as the result of violence" (Amnesty International 2004, 23). The Native Womens Association of Canada (NWAC) estimates that "over the past twenty years more than five hundred Indigenous women may have been murdered or gone missing in circumstances suggesting violence" (Amnesty International2004,24).This situation isneither newnor unknown, as Aboriginal womens organizations have for a long time called attention to violence againstwomen and children in predominantly non-Aboriginalcommunities (23). But only after a considerable number of cases of sexist and racist violence against Aboriginal women were made public and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), United Nations human rights bodies, and NWAC rigorously called on the Canadian government to address this issue together withthe social and economic marginalization ofAboriginal women (2-3,23) did this issuereceivemore government and public attention. In line with these concerns, Amnesty International's report examines four factors that, according to them, foster a heightened risk of violence against Aboriginal women: 1. The social and economic marginalization of Indigenous women, .along with a history of government policies that have torn apart Indigenous families and communities, have pushed a disproportionate number ofIndigenous women into dangerous situations that include extreme poverty,homelessness and prostitution; 2. Despite assurances to the contrary, police...