Victoria Rallies Around Indigenous Community’s Stolen Sisters
Today’s march wasn’t portrayed as a protest by the organisers. But not every protest blares slogans with a megaphone; some only shout minutes of silence in remembrance of the fallen.
About 600 people rallied at Our Place’s community centre in Victoria, then marched to the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, in remembrance of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) who continually disappear in silence and indifference.
This was the fourteenth edition of the Stolen Sisters Memorial March. The turnout was far larger than last year’s, which had in contrast only drawn about 150 people. I noticed Councillor Dave Thompson among the attendance, but I did not recognise any other politician, speaking once again of our elected representatives’ misplaced priorities. In contrast, the organisers of the Palestine solidarity rallies at the Legislature kept their word and came in support, presumably in part as a gesture to mend a recent rift between the communities.
The organisers had advertised this year’s event as a memorial rather than a protest, and discouraged wielding signs other than pictures of loved ones. But not every protest blares slogans with a megaphone, and the march’s political character was inseparable from its statement. Demonstrators carried signs anyway, demanding justice for those who have become statistics in a tally of unsolved cases, such as Carsyn Seaweed, who died in circumstances beyond suspicious but which the RCMP refused to investigate as a homicide, or Frances Brown, whose case remains open six years after her disappearance.
After ceremonial addresses at Our Place, the procession took off, led by the Crazy Indians Brotherhood. Hundreds marched throughout the city, on Pandora Avenue to Government Street then all the way down to the Legislature, the lead chanting and drumming but otherwise in relative quiet. No incident occurred, and VicPD’s only intervention was to request that the vanguard slow down to give time for stragglers to catch up.
At the march’s destination, some leading indigenous women, Tiffany Joseph among them, came forward to speak of their community’s plight. They denounced the deaths and disappearances as social murder, the aftermath of a failed genocide going back centuries, from the early days of the colonisation to the closure of the last residential school. The harm can never be unmade, however, any more than the intergenerational racism and sexism goes away with wishful thinking. There will be a fifteenth march next year and beyond, for as long as the peoples coexist without mutual acceptance and the worst among colonial mindsets remain firmly institutionalised.
