Willfully Blind: A Critique of the RCMP Report on Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women
Introduction
Racial discrimination exists in Canada and is deeply entrenched in our history since contact. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report, “Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview” (2014), does not provide justifiable reasons and/or contributing factors for the deplorably high number of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, because it does not address the underlying causality of this violence: colonialism and racism. As the Native Women’s Association of Canada (2010) states, “to address the issue of violence one must understand the history and impact of colonization on Aboriginal people in Canada” (p. 1).…show more content… This spurs the report (and the government), on to “execute some veritable gymnastic feats of the mind, all aimed, once again, at avoiding the problem” (Thornhill, 1984, p.1). The RCMP’s report does not even include the word racism or colonialism, so it is safe to say that it falls exponentially short in addressing the systemic racism problem in Canada. Consequently, this lack of meaningful analysis by the RCMP creates an incomplete and shallow evaluation of the missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada. Ultimately, the shortcomings of their cursory report are made most apparent when we consider the content of the report. In what follows, I will support this claim by presenting why we need to address racism and colonialism in this context; from that standpoint I will then analyze the reasoning, contributing factors and solutions the report advocates and why they are…show more content… This Act has created on going barriers to citizenship, while also being responsible for the trauma of residential schools and the child welfare system (60’s scoop) (Native Women’s Association of Canada, 2010, p. 7). The Canadian government has waged a clear attack on Aboriginal culture and women, yet this is not even a consideration by the RCMP as a contributing factor to the abhorrently high number of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. The Indian Act is “laced with sexist language, racist policy, and belittling the esteem of Aboriginal women through Euro-centric opinions of women in general, and Aboriginal women in particular” (Harry, 2009, p. 4). The Act stripped Aboriginal women of their status upon their marriage to a non-Indian man, yet provided status to non-Indian women who married Indian men. The Canadian government used the Indian Act, and laws preceding it, to normalize the systematic dehumanizing of Aboriginal women. The rhetoric used was blatantly full with the narrative of Aboriginal inferiority. For the government of Canada it was paramount to assimilate Aboriginal people and destroy their cultural identify. Yet again, the Indian Act is not considered by the RCMP’s report an element contributing to