They held a funeral service for Tina Fontaine yesterday and how sad it was was.
"Our sweet girl is now reunited with her daddy and the angels," long-time family friend Sandra Longford said during the eulogy. Longford went on to sing Never Alone, the same song she sang at Tina's father's funeral just four years earlier.
And my sorrow over the death of yet another young aboriginal woman, is only matched by my hatred for her bestial killer, and my contempt for Stephen Harper.
"It's very clear that there has been very fulsome study of this particular … of these particular things. They're not all one phenomenon," said Harper. "We should not view this as a sociological phenomenon. We should view it as crime."
The bestial leader who would show us yet again why he is unfit to be a Canadian Prime Minister.
The callous Con who can't seem to recognize the difference between a crime, and an epidemic of mass murder.
Yes, of course these murders are crimes. But they are not only crimes. To want to dig deeper, and to ask why things like this are happening, month after month, is not to deny individual criminal responsibility. It does not exonerate the perpetrators or diminish the victims. The Prime Minister is wrong: The murder of Tina Fontaine, and the murder of more than 1,000 aboriginal women over three decades, is a sociological phenomenon. And it is an epidemic.
Or recognize that not only is it a sociological phenomenon, it's a sociological CATASTROPHE.
Canada’s native community, particularly the on-reserve Indian community, is not just suffering from an epidemic of missing and murdered women. It is suffering from an epidemic of criminality, an epidemic of violence, an epidemic of victimization, an epidemic lack of education, an epidemic of joblessness, an epidemic of substance abuse and an epidemic of hopelessness.
And that Tina Fontaine's death is, as Heather Mallick calls it, just the latest instalment in a serial TRAGEDY.
The call for a federal inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous girls and women isn’t the result of nearly 1,200 females crying out from wherever their graves may be. It isn’t history leaking blood, it is a continuing serial tragedy, and pretty little Tina Fontaine, her corpse hauled out of the Red River on the weekend in the bag her killer had stuffed her into, is just the latest instalment.
That poor child was a victim of that sociological catastrophe, before she herself was murdered.
“She had barely been in the city for a little over a month and she’s definitely been exploited, taken advantage of, murdered and put into the river in this condition,” Winnipeg homicide unit officer Sgt. John O’Donovan told reporters. And then he said what police are generally too brisk to say: “She’s a child. Society would be horrified if we found a litter of kittens or pups in the river in this condition. This is a child. Society should be horrified.”
And by reducing what happened to her, and has happened to so many other native women to random acts of violence, Harper is only diminishing the problem, and playing to those who would deny it.
Or the racists who enjoy the degradation of others.
But then why should we surprised when Stephen Harper hasn't an ounce of empathy or human decency? And would rather fit everything into the hollow narrative of his Great War on Crime.
Where his solution is always harsher laws and longer sentences...
Which may give him a kinky thrill, and pleasure his rabid racist base, but can only make the problem worse.
Native Canadians make up just 4 per cent of the population, but more than 23 per cent of the inmates in Canada’s federal prisons, according to the Office of the Correctional Investigator. According to Statistics Canada, the number of aboriginal people in custody is disproportionate from sea to sea to sea.
If that's possible.
And all I can say is that I don't know how we are going to heal this gaping wound in our country.
But what I do know is that we can't deny it, we can't look away, we can't give up no matter how helpless or hopeless we feel...
Because it's just too sad and horrible.
And until we do heal that wound, that ghastly epidemic of human suffering, more women like Tina Fontaine will die, we will not be a decent country, and we will live in shame forever.
So we need an inquiry not only to save other women, but also to save the rest of us, and the very soul of this country.
And what I also know is that we will never fix that sociological catastrophe.
Never be decent.
Until we rid our Canada, our Kanata, our home and native land, of this bestial leader...
Please click here to recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers.
harper hates the First Nations for the same reasons that all Canadian elites and ordinary Canadian bullies hate them: They stand in the way of the white-nationalist project and total capitalist hegemony. The former is why non-elites hate them and the latter is why the elites hate them.
ReplyDeleteIn all countries there are moronic losers who need to identify with something bigger than themselves to make them feel important. Something exclusionary as well though. Canada as a bastion of British values, or (if you're not British) of European values. For some of these folks, non-white immigrants are fine so long as they learn to conform entirely to the British and/or European traditions of Canada. Other white nationalists reject the idea that Asians or Africans will ever be a real part of "Canada" and see them more as internal enemies. The fact that the First Nations have a claim on this place that is older than theirs drives them to distraction. We can't tell them to go back where they came from, so instead, we're supposed to insist that their own cultures are garbage and that they MUST assimilate to our culture. (But we wouldn't accept them anyway, and that's why so many of these sorts of Canadians believe we should kill as many of the First Nations as we can.)
Corporate Canada (and its political and media mouthpieces) see the First Nations as a barrier to capitalist land rights. Every time mining or logging or hydro-electric projects are delayed by First Nations' constitutional rights, they become enraged. Our treaty obligations to them are an expense. And an expense that also sustains them as a barrier to capitalist development.
Why not instead starve them out of their reserves and drive them into our towns and cities where we can continue to starve them through unemployment and deliberate racist abuse until they die prematurely from poverty and stress? Or addiction? Or suicide? Or simply rape and murder them?
While we're at it; why don't we pretend our treaty obligations to them are null and void, like the Globe & Mail did when it dismissed our treaty with her Nation as having been written in the early 20th Century? Why not insist upon the right to unilaterally alter our treaties with the First Nations the way harper does? Enough with polite legal fictions about treaties and rights and constitutions and the rule of law! Let's show them who's boss!
That's why an Inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women is so unwelcome. This inquiry would rip the mask off of this process. It would expose the hatred of much of Canadian society towards the First Nations. These northern Klansmen are forced to have to lie about themselves to the rest of Canada, including to us namby-pamby "Indian lovers." They hate US because we force this project to have to be semi-stealthy. An inquiry would just mean extra work for their denialism. They're afraid of the truth and therefore they're afraid of the idea of an inquiry.
Stopped reading after "white nationalist" and "hegemony." Canada under Harper has set new records for immigration the last four years and few are white.
DeleteTina Fontaine's father was murdered by two natives. 89% of native women are killed by someone they know (usually other natives). Violent incidents are much more likely to occur on reserve per capita.
Why is it Harper's fault that natives are killing each other? Natives that want to be safe should move into non-aboriginal neighbourhoods #sad but true.
"Government meddling has destroyed our people and we want thw government to get involved and do something about it!!!"
Anonymous,
DeleteYou have to learn to STOP reading shit and to continue reading stuff that will expand your mind.
1. I directly address your concerns about "white nationalists" in the comment.
2. The immigration rate hasn't changed in over 20 years. It was higher in the early nineties.
3. harper oversaw a massive expansion of the TFW program which treated immigrants like disposable goods.
4. 84% of white deaths by violence are caused by other white people. Does that mean anything to you?
5. Can you process the possibility that a government can, potentially, both meddle in your affairs AND provide services for you? Can you process that the FN protest government neglect AND government meddling? Which is to say, funding social services for FN communities LESS per individual on a per capita basis, while at the same time, inventing all sorts of bureaucratic hoops for them to jump through to get necessary services? Have you ever heard of people being "over-policed" and "under-policed" at the same time? Which is to say that they are harassed by the police when in public, but when they call for help, nobody comes?
I think you should be less proud of your ignorance and engage in a little critical thinking.
hi thwap....Great comment, and powerful as always. And you're right all those factors have combined to create that open wound. Which could produce such horrors as the residential school system, inspire the South Africans to create their apartheid simple, and still cause an epidemic of misery, ;poverty, poor health, and suicide. But despite the enormity of the situation I refuse to surrender to hopelessness. So I'm hoping that when we finally do get an inquiry, as we surely must, we can use it to examine what led to such a slaughter of aboriginal women, and try to come up with ways to end this shameful situation, and
Deletefinally improve the lives of our beautiful First Nations...
hi anon 4:04...It doesn't really matter who kills who, it's the killing that is the problem, and the poverty and the social conditions that help create such a violent situation. You can't treat this as merely a criminal issue, because if you don't tackle the social catastrophe that creates it, it will just go on and on. I don't think this should be a partisan issue. I think it's in all our interests to solve that problem, and all we need are good ideas and the political will to make them reality....
DeleteExcellent summary of the situation, thwap.
ReplyDeleteIt's about time we look at this systemic racism without filters. Harper was pretty quick to roll out an anti-bullying bill (one that was really a fig leaf to introduce draconian spying privileges to policing authorities) in the wake of two teenage girls' suicides. Just another example of contrasts from the Harper regime: 2 young white girls vs 1200+ aboriginal girls and women (many already driven to street life because of the inequities suffered on and off-Reserve).
I was surprised but happy that that cop called it as it is: "Society would be horrified if we found a litter of kittens or pups in the river in this condition. This is a child. Society should be horrified."
This same society would also have been horrified if a stray dog had been tied up, tortured and set ablaze as that First Nation woman in Prince Albert was back in the spring. Left for dead, she survived her horrendous attack but barely and now without legs. It certainly wasn't headline news and it really seemed that nobody cared if the culprits were caught. Just another drunk, homeless, aboriginal woman who was obviously too stupid not to be a victim by just breathing/living out in the open.
We hashtag our compassion on the world stage when Nigerian girls get kidnapped, Indian women get brutally raped and activist Afghan or Pakistani girls get attacked for wanting to be educated but where is the tipping point for us to finally react with similar outrage and compassion for the atrocities girls and women in our own backyard suffer on a daily basis?
hi Beijing...yes I agree, thwap's comment was brilliant. And yes the cruelty and the indifference with which some aboriginal people are treated is disgusting. When I was a boy, before I came to Canada, I thought native people WERE Canada, and I still feel the same way. So it distresses me to see, as Mallick noted, that some Canadians were more concerned about the stray dogs of Attawapiskat than they are about the dreadful living conditions of the people who live in that poor little place. And yes, we have hash tags for so many, but not for them. But as I told thwap, let's get that inquiry and make it a new beginning...
DeleteHis statement seemed borderline sociopathic, especially in light of the fact that he has a teenage daughter almost the same age as Tina.
ReplyDeleteAs for the epidemics in Indigenous communities, I think you've forgotten suicide, especially among youth. I forget the exact, horrific figures, but I think only transgender people have a comparably high suicide rate.
hi lagatta...Harper is clearly sociopathic, which accounts for his complete lack of empathy. He has admitted as much himself. But the reason he is acting to beastly is because he doesn't want any sociological considerations to get in the way of his brutish and insane Great War on Crime, and his black and white view of the world.
DeleteAnd you're right, suicide especially among the young is a major part of that sociological catastrophe, and I should have mentioned it. I have written about it many times before, but you can never write about it enough...
Until we rectify all of our relationships and dealings with FN to equal status .as Canadians we cannot continue to view ourselves as tolerant and welcoming of people of all races. As long as we continue the institutional and social racism against FN we cannot embrace multiculturism with sincerity. We cannot truly call ourselves civilized. There has been very little education on FN history and abuse.For those Canadians who have studied and researched on their own it has been a study of systematic, step by step, genocide. For those who have yet to learn about the real history of Canada and FN,but want to learn, I have only one thing to say . Read it and weep.
ReplyDeletehi Pamela...everything you say is true. Until we rectify this shameful situation we cannot consider ourselves a good country or even a civilized one. It is to read and weep. But as I said, we're still a young country, we can solve this problem, so I'm hoping an inquiry will be a new beginning. And from all that death will spring new life...
DeleteGod bless you tina, you have impacted my life, If i get to meet you in the next life I'm gonna hug you, I know your a guardian angel know watching over and protecting young people!!!
ReplyDelete