Abusing Aboriginal Women

"Women are bearing the burden of abuse, but they also have to bear the burden of advocacy to effect change, and this is a men's problem as much as it is a women's problem."
"People would ask: 'What is that?' [moose hide lapel token to end violence against aboriginal women] and we'd say, 'Thank you for asking. I'm speaking out against violence toward aboriginal women and children."
"Our culture was always to protect our women, not to hurt them, so that shift in our behaviour came from the residential schools, and to take our power back means to stop behaving like that and to stand up and protect our women, like healthy warriors."
"We have to have honest conversations in public now, or else this is going to continue."
"It's a way [Moose Hide Campaign] of cracking an uncomfortable subject for people who aren't necessarily steeped in it."
Paul Lacerte, executive director, B.C. Association of Aboriginal friendship Centres

"I want to make sure that it results in an action plan, that provincial, territorial, federal and aboriginal governments commit to creating the kind of socio-economic change that will have to occur to really begin to address the roots of violence against aboriginal women and girls."
Sylvia Maracle, executive director, Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres

"A lot of the time, it's going to start with internal reflection about what we see in our communities. Even if you're not a perpetrator, standing passively by is equally as bad."
Jeffrey Cyr, executive Director, National Association of Friendship Centres, Ottawa

So there is the partial admission from those who most certainly are aware of it, that violence against aboriginal women and children begins in the home, within the tribe, the Indian band, inside the community, the reserve, as an uncomfortable cultural tradition. It can be attributed to poverty, to ignorance, to lack of education, employment, opportunity, but it is a measure of contempt that women live with expressed by males violating their sovereign integrity as individuals equal in status.

Women are not equal in status to males within the aboriginal community; the very fact that should an aboriginal woman marry a non-Indian she must forfeit her place within the reserve, no longer may she live there as an inherited entitlement for she has gravely committed a cardinal sin; men on the other hand, need have no such concerns.

Forums on violence against indigenous women bring out women to express their outrage against their treatment, men see no reason to attend. Paul Lacerte decided to change that, to create a symbol with a square of moose hide whose purpose was to recognize that symbol as a responsibility by men toward women, in a campaign to persuade men to curb their violence directed at women.

ARNOLD LIM / Arnold Lim Photography   Paul Lacerte, executive director of the BC Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres, wears a piece of moose hide representing the Moose Hide Campaign, an initiative signifying a commitment to end violence against women and girls in his community.

A program called Kizhaay Anishinaabe Nin: "I am a kind man" sets out to persuade men to model themselves as leaders within their communities on the very same issue. Which means that finally, enough individual consciences are at play here to realize that the problem of aboriginal male violence against aboriginal females is one that must be addressed and attempts made to change that behaviour from within the community.

The constant calls for a federal enquiry, when such and similar enquiries have taken place over the years, as a means by which the endemic problem can be addressed and reversed only skirts the issue of aboriginal responsibility for an aboriginal-based custom has been avoided and denied for far too long. It is still being denied, in a very real sense, when someone like Mr. Lacerte asserts that the residential school experience is responsible for indigenous men abusing indigenous women.

But admitting the problem exists within the community and the culture as a commonplace dysfunction among many others, is a start. The questions of how widespread it is, what the triggers are, and why men and boys succumb to the brutalization of the women among them is one that they must themselves address. And it's about time.