By Andrea Román Alfaro and Jerry Flores
Tamara Lynn Chipman from Moricetown First Nation was 22 when she disappeared in September 2005 along Highway 16 near Prince Rupert in British Columbia, Canada. Immediately after her disappearance, volunteers from her community organized a search. However, almost two decades later, there is still no trace of her. Like Tamara, young Indigenous women have disappeared or been found dead on Highway 16, commonly known as The Highway of Tears, for a long time. Tamara’s disappearance sowed despair in her family and community and exacerbated ongoing tensions between Indigenous peoples and criminal justice institutions.
In Canada, Indigenous women are 400 percent more likely than other Canadians to go missing (Feir & Akee, 2019). This number is comparable to refugees fleeing war-torn countries like Syria, Guatemala and Libya (Zong & Batalova, 2015). The problem is so pervasive that the Canadian government has admitted they do not know how many Indigenous women are missing or have been murdered.
For decades, Indigenous communities and organizations, with the support of human rights groups, have mobilized to hold the Canadian state accountable for its failure to address the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls’ crisis. Finally, in December 2015, the Trudeau government announced the launch of an independent national inquiry which collected hundreds of testimonies of relatives, survivors, Elders and Knowledge Keepers, expert witnesses, officials, and front-line workers. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls published a two-volume report that described the problem of violence against Indigenous women and girls and provided recommendations to address violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada.
Although the National Inquiry’s work was welcomed by a more progressive sector of Canadian settler society, the report did not sit well among certain groups, mainly because it called violence against Indigenous women and girls a genocide. The reticence of public officials, media outlets, and settlers to understand violence against Indigenous women and girls as a systemic problem rooted in colonization made clear the racist and gender violence that sustains the Canadian settler colonial state. Many critics of the Inquiry’s report argued that the disappearances and murders resulted from Indigenous men’s violence and the risky behaviours of Indigenous women. These explanations for violence against Indigenous women and girls are not unique or new.
In our recent Gender & Society article, Building the settler-colonial order: Police (in)action in responding to violence against Indigenous women in “Canada,” we found that Canadian police repeatedly use similar descriptions and explanations when addressing reported cases of violence against Indigenous women and girls. Drawing from 48 interviews with Indigenous peoples in different Canadian cities and 219 testimonies from the National Inquiry, we found that police portrayed Indigenous women and girls as “runaways,” “drunks,” “drug addicts,” and “prostitutes” to make sense of and explain the violence being reported by Indigenous women and the relatives and friends looking for their loved ones. Furthermore, police were indifferent and callous to these reports, giving little to no information on the cases. Many times, relatives did not know cases had been closed or reopened, nor had any lead on what had happened to their disappeared or murdered loved one. Finally, we also found a pattern in how police dismissed and justified violence. Officers repeatedly pathologized Indigenous women and girls and gave up quickly in the search for bodies or culprits. These police responses are so repetitive that they seem like police scripts across Canada.
We argued that police (in)actions—what they say and do not say to others and what they do and do not do when responding to the cases—reproduce violence against Indigenous peoples, particularly affecting the continuity of Indigenous communities and cultures. Violence against Indigenous women and girls like Tamara Lynn Chipman (22), Abigail Andrews (28), Chantelle Alice Rose Bushie (16), Delores Brown (19), Violet Heathen (49), Tina Michelle Fontaine (15), Simone Samarah Ann Sanderson (23), Tabitha Kalluk (38), and many more have severe consequences for Indigenous families and communities. Indigenous women have always been vital in Indigenous nations’ cultural and material survival. Their disappearance and murder limit intergenerational survival and dismantles family and community structures. Our study seeks to contribute to understanding how violence against Indigenous women and girls is perpetuated and the implications it has in sustaining colonialism in “Canada.”
Andrea Román-Alfaro is a Peruvian Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Toronto and a Vanier Canada scholar. Her research focuses on understanding how people make sense of violence and the social structures that facilitate violence. Her areas of interest include violence and society, punishment, criminalization, and healing. Her work has appeared in journals such as Social Justice and Curriculum Inquiry. She is currently working on her dissertation research on the dynamics and politics of violence in Peru.
Jerry Flores is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sociology tri-campus graduate department at the University of Toronto-St. George. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology at UC Santa Barbara in 2014. His interdisciplinary research investigates how institutions like schools, detention centers and the police come together to shape the lives of at-risk Latinas and Indigenous women and girls in North America.
Gender & Society 