In 2014, the RCMP released figures on violence against Aboriginal women for the first time.
• 1,017 Indigenous women were murdered between 1980 and 2012
• This homicide rate is more than four times that of other women in Canada
• Moreover, this is an underestimate of the severity of violence against Aboriginal women, as police often fail to record whether or not the victims of violent crime are Aboriginal

How are Indigenous women constructed in
Canadian discourse?
How has colonial legislation placed Indigenous women outside the protection of law?
How has the marginalization of Indigenous women rendered them prey for those who would abuse them?
How have people organized against violence against Indigenous women?

How are Indigenous women constructed in Canadian discourse?

Victorian Model of
Femininity
• Women unable to hold property
• Male as patriarch and female as obedient wife
• Women as sexually submissive, docile
• Women responsible for the family and social reproduction

Colonial Model of
Indigenous Femininity
• Indian women unable to hold property
• Indian male as patriarch and
Indian female as subservient wife
• Indian women as sexually promiscuous, desiring
• Indian women not responsible for children and social reproduction

How has colonial legislation placed
Indigenous women outside the protection of law?

Indigenous Women in Fur Trade
• Valued as intermediaries who could help traders negotiate relationships with
Indigenous leaders
• Traders routinely intermarried with the daughters of prominent
Indigenous leaders
• These marriages helped place traders within
Indigenous kinship networks

Indigenous Women in Settler Colonialism
• Constructed as a sexual threat, undermining the morality of white men (and producing mixed race children)
• Diffused criticism of white men’s violence against
Indigenous women
• Justified use of Indian Act to impose patriarchal gender norms on women

Defining Indianness through Maleness I
• Women who married non-Native men and any children from that union lost their Status under Indian Act. This meant that they had no access to rights under the Indian
Act and no ability to return to the reserve in the event of marital breakdown.
• Men who married non-Indian women could keep their status, and their non-Indian wives, in turn were automatically granted Indian Status.

Defining Indianness through Maleness II
• A 1951 amendment stripped status at 21 from anyone who had both a mother and a grandmother that married into Indian status (double mother rule)
• In 1980, the government gave bands option of opting out of double mother and marrying out provisions
• 54% of bands opted out of the double mother rule;
18% of bands opted out of the marrying out provisions

Gender and Property
• Disproportionately reserve property was granted to men
• Moreover, provincial family law does not apply on reserve so women on reserve didn’t have legal entitlements to matrimonial property in the case of divorce until 2013

Human Rights Organizing
• Lavalle and Bedard took Indian Act discrimination against women who married out to SCC but lost as the court would not recognize intersectional forms of oppression
• Lovelace took Indian Act discrimination to United
Nations and won international recognition of discrimination

Partial Reforms
• Bill C-31 introduced new status provisions, providing partial non-transferrable (6(2)b) Indian Status to children of mixed (Status and Non-Status) parentage
• However, Indian women must prove the father is an
Indian man
• It also reinstated Status for women who married out and their children (although 6(2)b status). The children of men who married out were not dropped to the lesser
Status category.
• This was challenged by McIvor, although the subsequent solution was only to move the discrimination down one generation

Creating Vulnerability through Law
• Indigenous people marginalized by dispossession
• Indigenous women doubly dispossessed: without access to property rights on reserve if they married on reserve, and excluded from the reserve community if they married out
• Indigenous women normalized as sexual deviants, and thus normalized as victims of sexual violence

How has the marginalization of
Indigenous women rendered them prey for those who would abuse them?

Helen Betty Osborne was abducted and brutally murdered near The Pas,
Manitoba, early in the morning of November 13,
1971. The high school student, originally from the
Norway House Indian
Reserve, was 19 years old when she was killed.

Several months later Royal
Canadian Mounted Police officers concluded that four young men, Dwayne
Johnston, James Houghton,
Lee Colgan and Norman
Manger, were involved in the death .
It was not until December
1987, more than 16 years later, that one of them,
Dwayne Johnston, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Betty Osborne.
James Houghton was acquitted. Lee Colgan, having received immunity from prosecution in return for testifying against
Houghton and Johnston, went free. Norman Manger was never charged.

“While walking along Third Street in The Pas on that cold Saturday morning,
Betty Osborne was accosted by four men in a car. Houghton, who was driving, stopped the car and Johnston got out, attempting to convince Osborne to go with them to "party." She told them that she did not wish to accompany them. She then was forced into their car and driven away. In the car Osborne was assaulted by Colgan and Johnston as Houghton drove. … In spite of her screams and attempts to escape, Osborne was taken to a cabin belonging to Houghton’s parents at Clearwater Lake.”
“At the cabin she was pulled from the car and beaten by Johnston while the others stood watching and drinking wine. Osborne continued to struggle and scream and, because her assailants were afraid they might be heard, she was forced back into the car and driven further from town to a pump house next to the lake. At least some of her clothing was removed by her assailants in the car.
At the pump house she was once more taken from the car by one or more of her assailants and the beating continued. Her clothes, those which had not been removed earlier, were taken from her. Wearing only her winter boots, she was viciously beaten, and stabbed, apparently with a screwdriver, more than 50 times.
Her face was smashed beyond recognition. The evidence suggests that two people then dragged her body into the bush. … The four men then left, returned to The Pas and went their separate ways.”

• Police focused on Osborne’s Aboriginal friends as murdered
• An anonymous letter to police in 1972 implicated Colgan, Houghton and Manger. Examination of the Colgan family car revealed traces of hair and blood as well as a piece of a bra strap. Another informant told police the fourth man in the car was Johnston.
• The men refused to speak with the police, and the investigation stalled.
• While there was no progress, in the late 1970s, Colgan told a sheriff that he was drinking with of the murder. This information was not conveyed to the police.
• In 1983, an officer renewed investigation. This eventually resulted in charges being laid against Houghton and Johnson (with Colgan receiving immunity in exchange for his testimony). Only Johnson was found guilty.

Police Discrimination
• In the Pas in 1971, Aboriginal youth were routinely stopped by police without cause
(and the same harassment was not experienced by white students)
• Police heard stories about white men throwing Aboriginal men off the bridge into the
Saskatchewan River; but the stories were never investigated
• Police were aware of white youths cruising the town, picking up Aboriginal girls for drinking parties and sex; the police did not stop cars to see if the girls were of age or if they were going willingly, nor did they address it with members of white community or warn members of Aboriginal community, nor did they raise it with the host families of
Aboriginal students and Dept of Indian Affairs who were responsible for the care of
Aboriginal students
• The RCMP failed to check the Colgan car properly in their investigation

Dispossession
• Norway House developed as an HBC fort, and during the fur trade developed an economy based on freighting cargo
• With the decline in the fur trade and the emergence of steam shipping on Lake
Winnipeg, the Cree sought to treaty to secure a place within the developing economy, signing an adhesion in 1875
• Treatying with the Cree provided a legal basis for the development of settler colonial mining, lumbering, and fishing interests
• Norway House remained isolated from development

Dispossession
• The Indian bands around The
Pas signed an adhesion to
Treaty 5 in 1876
• In 1882 the reserve was surveyed, although The Pas
Band claimed the government did not allocate its full entitlement of reserve land
• In 1906, when the railway was being extended to The Pas, the band surrendered 500 acres which now make up a major part of the town site
• The land was divided into lots for sale to those who would settle in the area

Displacement / Isolation
• Norway House Roman Catholic school did not teach beyond grade eight
• In 1969, Osborne had to leave the community to complete her education
• She spent two years at Guy Hill Residential
School, then moved into The Pas to attend
Margaret Barbour Collegiate
• The Department of Indian Affairs arranged room and board for her with William and
Patricia Benson in their home on Lathlin
Avenue.
• One of Osborne’s friends, Eva Simpson, said:
“[W]e tried to cover up our feelings because we were lonesome to go home and yet we knew we had no way to survive if we were in
Norway House so we kind of hung around together. ... [W]e were very lonesome.”
• Osborne did not have had any close white friends

Displacement / Isolation
• The Saskatchewan River separates the town of The Pas from the main part of
The Pas Indian Reserve
• Few Aboriginal persons were employed in town
• Neither community encroached far into the life of the other or felt welcome in it.
• At the movie theatre, each group sat on its own side
• In at least one of the bars, Indians were not allowed to sit in certain areas
• In the school lunch-room, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students ate apart
• Even in their homes there was separation: the intent the government in placing
Indian children in community homes was to give them a home environment, many were treated like boarders not like family members

• The disruption and dispossession of Aboriginal relationships with the land worked to (and relied upon) the displacement of traditional gender relations and imposition of new patriarchal models
• The bodies of Aboriginal people were further subject to gendered regimes of violence, sexualized as deviant and available to fulfill white men’s desires
• The strategies of spatial containment to which colonial authorities made Aboriginal peoples subject also worked through gendered lens
(gendered teaching at residential school, gendered definitions of family in Indian Act, gendered structure of the margins of the settler economy

How have people organized against violence against Indigenous women?

"Hundreds upon hundreds of our sisters and daughters have gone missing or been murdered. Putting a few dollars into the kind of police work that happens anyway is not a solution. We need a concrete national plan of action that will bring real change in our lives."
- Bernadette Smith, sister of 21-year-old Claudette Osborne who vanished from Winnipeg in July 2008.

Pressure from the families and communities of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, as well as supporters, have pressured the police and government to account for the patterned marginalization and neglect of Aboriginal women.
This has resulted in:
A provincial inquiry in British Columbia into the missing and murdered Aboriginal women;
A provincial inquiry in Manitoba into Aboriginal people’s relationship to the justice system;
Increased accountability and reporting from the police.

Communities have been calling for a
National Inquiry into the Missing and
Murdered Women and the development of a national action plan on the issue

Responding to lacking action from the police and government, activists have also launched an online database documenting deaths and disappearances of
Aboriginal women in Canada

Read the CBC article:
“Cindy Gladue suffered her last indignity at murder trial” http://www.cbc.ca/news/aboriginal/cindygladue-suffered-her-last-indignity-at-murdertrial-1.3019500

How does the Canadian court system treat Indigenous women today?
How are Indigenous women, and their bodies, portrayed in the courtroom?
Are there still circumstances in which we can consider Indigenous
Women outside the protection of law?