I recently came across this article on the murder of Loretta Saunders while researching something completely different, and it serves as a disturbing reminder of the painfully current nature of the violence against First Nations women described by Jiwani and Young and in Missing Sarah. An Inuk student at St. Mary’s University, Loretta Saunders was investigating the deaths of several Aboriginal women in her area when she went missing. Her body was found near a New Brunswick highway, and her death has been ruled a homicide. She was an Aboriginal women murdered while investigating the murders of other Aboriginal women. According to the article, over 800 Aboriginal Canadian women are considered missing or murdered– a number that is truly astronomical and horrific. Their deaths are often blamed on the individual responsible, as with Robert Pickton in the case of Vancouver’s missing women, and while of course they are guilty, their convictions do not speak to the full issue of violence against First Nations women. Violence that is this widespread and common doesn’t come from a random string of “disturbed” or “deviant” individual perpetrators; its root is systemic.

“She wasn’t what society expected for a missing aboriginal girl. Canadian society, and especially our prime minister, has been able to ignore the reality of the statistics that are against aboriginal girls” says Cheryl Maloney of the Nova Scotia Women’s Association (quoted in the aforementioned news article). Here, Maloney calls attention to what Jiwani and Young also get at in their article: there is a certain script in place for what missing Aboriginal women are supposed to be like, and Loretta Saunders did not fit into this script. But neither did any of the other missing women, because complex, real humans do not fit neatly into any boxes. These women are not worth mourning because they are someone’s wife, sister, or daughter; they are worth mourning as the diverse group of women whose lives were and are just as valuable as anyone else’s– and which were cruelly cut short because of a society that is capable of producing such racist and misogynistic ideas that their disappearances would become commonplace.

“There’s got to be a certain irony in speaking English, French and Latin. Why couldn’t they have appended Ojibway? And Ojibway history?” – Carl Beam page 34

As I did the reading prep for our class visit to the Museum of Anthropology, I kept noticing how often language (and the loss thereof) turned up in residential school survivors’ stories and art. Many of those interviewed mentioned the particular pain of losing their language, linking it to loss of culture and community. As Chief Robert Joseph recalled, replacing Aboriginal languages with English was an integral part of the Residential School’s mission, and the punishments for resistance were harsh: “I didn’t speak any language other than Kwak’wala. I started attending Grade 1 and the teacher was just brutal.She gave instruction in English, and if you didn’t respond correctly, you’d get cuffed in the ear or both ears, you’d get strapped on the back of the hand or on the palm of the hand, or you’d have to stand in a corner for two, three, four hours and just be left there.”

This reminded me of the work we have been doing in Geography on global culture and language; I believe Dr. Ley mentioned that a language disappears from the world every two weeks. English’s place as the second most spoken language on Earth is neither accidental nor innocent– it is the result of a long history of violence and brutal colonization. As we learned in Sociology, language is perhaps the basis for self-consciousness, and we use to to create our conscious thoughts. When one of the most basic and deeply-held aspects of self and communal identity is ripped away, there are bound to be consequences.

I’m not sure how to end this post, but I’d like to continue this discussion in another post or in my final paper, if anyone has something to add I’d love to read your comments.