Missing and Indigenous women Social Sciences Essay

Missing and Indigenous Women during the Colonial Period
Name
Your student number
Course Code
Course Directors
TA’s Name
The date
2351
Missing and Indigenous Women
The colonial policies and structures in Canada have resulted in violence towards Indigenous women. Colonialism is defined as a situation where the government is the culprit behind genocide via structural violence (Woolford & Benvenuto, 2018). It is a unique type of violence that is not easily understood based on the global definition of genocide as a crime (The National Inquiry, 2019). The approach used when making the legal requirements to determine individual accountability, rather than state accountability, is a reason why the legal and traditional perspective of genocide cannot be linked with colonial genocide (The National Inquiry, 2019). Aboriginal women have been symbolically annihilated from the Canadian social landscape, and their depictions are scanter and less enhanced in tone when compared to White women (Gilchrist, 2010). Aboriginal or Indigenous women and girls have borne the brunt of colonialism and discriminatory Canadian laws and policies, leading to more suffering as they are murdered and are victims of abuse without any legal protection.
Background
Aboriginal women comprise 2% of the Canadian population. A vast majority of them are victims of homicide, physical violence, and sexual abuse. Indigenous women and girls are often stereotyped as “a “squaw” who is dirty, lazy, degraded, and easily sexually exploited have profoundly shaped the experiences of Aboriginal women since colonial contact” (Gilchrist, 2010, p. 384). This has dehumanized these women and has rendered them more vulnerable to the gross sexual, psychological, and physical violence that they continuously face. Indigenous women aged between 25-44 have a higher chance of going missing or being murdered in comparison to other women in Canada (The National Inquiry, 2019). According to Ambler (2014), 60% of the murders and 70% of the disappearances occur in urban locations.
Furthermore, 87% of the murdered or missing women and girls are also parents to one or more children (Ambler, 2014). This is a troubling result, especially since studies have revealed that if the mother goes missing, then it is highly likely that the daughter will also suffer from the same fate in the future. In some family lines, several people have been murdered or gone missing. This leads to a negative impact, especially on children who are forced to live without their mothers (Ambler, 2014). Race and religion are often conflicted with culture, and women tend to suffer more. For instance, Muslim girls are often banned from wearing hijabs as a safety issue, because it might be a reason to harass them (Ramachandran, 2009). Even though Canada has many policies that seek to protect the populations, they inherently negatively affect women and girls, particularly the minorities.
The violence that affects Indigenous women is comparable to a race-based genocide that targets women and girls. The genocide is supported by colonial structures, which can be seen from actions like the Sixties Scoop, India act, breaches of Indigenous and human rights, residential schools, which resulted in the rising rates of death, suicide, and violence among Indigenous populations (The National Inquiry, 2019). The colonial policies that were applied by the government were often focused on obliterating the local Indigenous populations. Different records of various injustices have been made during the 1700s, where colonial troops took part in biological warfare. This entails distributing blankets that had been infected with smallpox in the Indigenous communities as a way of reducing the populations of specific First Nations (Woolford & Benvenuto, 2018). During the 1750s, locations such as Nova Scotia offered scalping bounties via legal proclamation to encourage and reward the killing of Indigenous populations like the Mi’kmaq (Woolford & Benvenuto, 2018). Many Indigenous populations were murdered or persecuted, such as the Beothuk, which was entirely wiped out by the late 1820s.
Besides the murder of Indigenous populations, many of the colonial policies were egregious and resulted in mental and bodily harm to Indigenous individuals and also led to deteriorating conditions of life among them. During the 1870s, colonial troops used approaches like denying food to specific communities to cleanse them in certain regions like Alberta and Regina (Kepkiewicz & Rotz, 2018). In the early 1880s, the government also introduced policies that supported residential schools, which were put up for the Indigenous children who were also forcibly removed from their families to face beating, starvation, disease, solitary confinement, and assault (Kepkiewicz & Rotz, 2018). During the early 1990s, government doctors were blamed for including Indigenous children in inhumane experiments and exposing them to diseases like tuberculosis, which resulted in a mortality rate of between 30 to 60% of all children who attended the residential schools (Kepkiewicz & Rotz, 2018). These issues only aggravated the inequalities.
Cultural Genocide
The colonial context is that Canada differs from the Srebrenica genocide that occurred in Serbia, where the state was directly involved. In Canada, the genocidal actions are not a result of a group linked to the state. Instead, it entails the direct application of government laws and policies. These acts of genocide are due to the policies that are maintained and established by the Canadian state and are based on the rules of customary international law (Stevenson, 1999). Colonial states such as Canada have been responsible for supporting cultural genocide. The holocaust model, which is a basis in the definition of cultural genocide, entails a limited type of genocide, which involves calculated time-intensive ass murder, which is panned within a national state and also supported by authoritarian regimes (Stevenson, 1999). Even though colonialism involves man aspects of genocide, such a limited definition of genocide does not include the lived experiences among Indigenous women across the country and fails to provide real meaning for genocide (The National Inquiry, 2019). There are three main variables of colonial genocide, which are the ideological need for destruction, geographic and temporal scope, and nature.
Even though most typical genocides that are under judicial scrutiny have focused on physical destruction that arises due to lethal force like in the case of Rwanda or the Holocaust, the Canadian colonial policies have often been based on both lethal and non-lethal approaches which seek to obliterate and assimilate Indigenous populations. Since the Indigenous groups and people are products of Canada’s nascent nation-state, they are expected to follow the demands of the colonial governments whose goals were to secure long-term access to Indigenous resources and lands for the settler community (The National Inquiry, 2019). The colonial policies during the time allowed for physical destruction, and they also supported elicit obedience and subjugation via coercive and violent assimilation and absorption. These laws were executed sporadically, with varying intensity and against the Indigenous populations, and over different geographical and temporal territories.
Canadian genocide was not a quick process. Unlike the traditional approaches of genocide, like the Rwandan Genocide, Armenian Genocide, and Holocaust, which occurred for three months, eight years, and 12 years respectively, the colonial destruction of Indigenous women and girls was something that took place for many centuries. The goal to destroy the Indigenous communities in Canada was executed intermittently and gradually, usin...