{"id":267308,"date":"2019-06-11T10:30:05","date_gmt":"2019-06-11T14:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/why-are-the-deaths-of-indigenous-women-and-girls-ungrievable\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T22:34:28","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:34:28","slug":"why-are-the-deaths-of-indigenous-women-and-girls-ungrievable","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2019\/06\/why-are-the-deaths-of-indigenous-women-and-girls-ungrievable\/","title":{"rendered":"Why are the deaths of Indigenous women and girls ungrievable?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt is time to call it as it is: Canada\u2019s past and current colonial policies, actions and inactions towards Indigenous Peoples is genocide.\u201d That is the underlying conclusion<\/a> reached by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls as it released its final report on June 3. It is difficult to draw a different conclusion when one considers \u201cthe sum of the social practices, assumptions, and actions\u201d of settler colonialism, as the inquiry rightly points out in its analysis. When colonial policies and practices are considered together, the slow and agonizing death of Indigenous nations and peoples is brought into sharp relief.<\/p>\n

But this has not been the view shared by the larger Canadian society.<\/p>\n

American philosopher Judith Butler has referred to an \u201cungrievable<\/a>\u201d life, \u201cone that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.\u201d The genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada has gone unnoticed precisely because of prevailing apathy towards the lived experience of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.<\/p>\n

In fact, the Canadian genocide of Indigenous peoples has progressed precisely because it has been constructed to thrive unnoticed: not as a great spectacle of mass killing, but rather as imperceptible parts working independently towards the same goal. As Marion Buller, chief commissioner of the national inquiry, remarked, \u201cthe type of genocide we have in Canada is death by a million paper cuts for generations.\u201d<\/a> And the invisibility has been further entrenched by the design of Canadian policies and practices, which have specifically targeted the most marginal, the exploitable, the disposable \u2013 in other words, Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA [two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual] people.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing an Indigenous woman means living under a society and \u2018civilization\u2019 that benefits from your voicelessness, invisibility, disappearance, non-existence, and erasure,\u201d Rebecca Moore, an I\u2019nu woman and member of the National Family Advisory Circle to the Inquiry, says in the final report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Longstanding colonial policies, which still persist today, single-out Indigenous women for discrimination and have served to normalize the violence visited upon them. The University of Winnipeg\u2019s Lakota educator and advocate Leah Gazan told the national inquiry, \u201cThis violence has been affirmed through the Indian Act<\/em>,\u201d the 19th<\/sup> century piece of legislation<\/a> that still governs First Nations communities \u2013 and does not treat the status of Indigenous men and women equally<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As the national inquiry noted elsewhere in its final report, \u201cThe Indian Act<\/em> creates marginalization, alienation, displacement, and isolation of Indigenous Peoples. This is because the Indian Act<\/em> is an ongoing tool of oppression and genocide that clearly aims to eliminate Indigenous Peoples \u2026 Its continued existence perpetuates racial and gendered violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

How the MMIWG crisis has been framed<\/strong><\/p>\n

Public grieving is a political issue \u2013 not just how we grieve, but also for whom. Butler explains<\/a> that the accepted norms around public grieving are influenced by what we see in the media and also through political discourse. These frames established around situations regulate our moral, sensory and emotional responses by \u201cdifferentiating the cries we can hear from those we cannot, the sights we can see from those we cannot, and likewise at the level of touch and even smell \u2026 deadening affect in response to certain images and sounds, and enlivening affective responses to others.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, in December 2014, then-prime minister Stephen Harper was asked by CBC\u2019s Peter Mansbridge about the prospects for initiating a formal inquest or inquiry into MMIWG. Harper replied, \u201cit isn\u2019t really high on our radar, to be honest, Peter.\u201d<\/a> There are many ways to interpret his words, but what is undeniable is the political framing of the issue as irrelevant, ungrievable.<\/p>\n

The media has also played an important role in framing the deaths of Indigenous women and girls as ungrievable. Almost immediately after the release of the national inquiry\u2019s final report, well-known Canadian public figures<\/a> and journalists<\/a> downplayed or questioned the finding of genocide. Former Liberal minister of justice Irwin Cotler expressed his unease<\/a> with the use of the word: \u201cI think we have to guard against using that term in too many ways because then it will cease to have the singular importance and horror that it warrants.\u201d For Indigenous people, there is no other word to describe the unthinkable horror of hundreds of years of colonial violence that continues to this day.<\/p>\n

The impact of the media\u2019s framing of the issue was not lost on the national inquiry as it observed that \u201cthe violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people is \u2018justified\u2019 because the media framing signals to the Canadian public that violence against them is not important. The silencing of violence against Indigenous women and girls is made worse in comparison with the media\u2019s compassionate framing of white women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Canadian apathy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Frames, as Butler notes, shape our perception and moral response by producing \u201ciconic versions of populations who are eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss, and who remain ungrievable.\u201d This differential distribution of grievability, Butler tells us, has implications for why and when we feel compassion and concern for one population, but detachment and indifference for another. In the Canadian context, the framing of Indigenous people as ungrievable is reflected in general attitudes of the non-Indigenous population.<\/p>\n

The apathy and sometimes hostility that underlies the ungrievablity for Indigenous people is generally borne out in findings from the 2015 Canadian Election Study<\/a> (CES) survey, which is nationally representative. It poses several questions that investigate the effect of Canadians towards Indigenous issues, amongst others.<\/p>\n

As figure 1 illustrates, when non-Indigenous Canadians were asked about political and electoral issues that they \u201creally care about,\u201d Aboriginal issues garnered the support of approximately 17 percent of non-Indigenous Canadians.<\/p>\n