'Our women are in danger'
Native group compares Edmonton-area's murdered prostitutes to serial killings in B.C.
Ryan Cormier
The Edmonton Journal
Thursday, July 08, 2004
EDMONTON - The federal government and police must take violence against aboriginal women more seriously, says the Native Women's Association of Canada, pointing to 10 unsolved murders in the Edmonton-area as the most immediate concern.
The association's president, Kukdookaa Terri Brown, estimates that hundreds of Canadian aboriginal women have been murdered or gone missing in the last 20 years, a situation she calls a crisis that police, governments and the justice system have been unresponsive to because of underlying racism in the country.
In the past 16 years, 10 murdered women, at least half of them aboriginal, have been found in rural areas around Edmonton. None of those murders have been solved. Police say all were sex-trade workers, including Rachel Liz Quinney, who was found on June 11.
With the latest discovery, police have raised the possibility that one person may be responsible for two or more of the murders. That has prompted the association to compare Edmonton's case to the one that started on the streets of Vancouver and led to the grisly discoveries of human remains on Robert Pickton's farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C. Pickton is accused of being Canada's worst serial killer.
"This is very much eerily a copy, or almost the same, of what's been happening in Vancouver," said Brenda Jones, a researcher for the Alberta chapter of the association.
"Our women are in danger, they're in jeopardy and they're at a point now where their lives are being taken. They are our forgotten sisters, they are forgotten voices and they need to be heard."
The association started the Sisters in Spirit campaign in March to shed light on the issue. It has asked the federal government for $10 million to set up permanent regional offices, conduct research on how many women are missing and to create a national registry and hotline. The association said 22 aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered in Alberta in the past two decades.
One was the aunt of Joanne Ahenakew, vice-president of the association's Edmonton chapter.
Bernadette Ahenakew was 22 when she was found strangled on North Clover Bar Road, about two kilometres north of Highway 16, in October 1989. She left three sons behind.
Bernadette Ahenakew was born into a poor family of 13 children and lived in many foster homes.
"Her story is all too common in aboriginal communities," said Joanne Ahenakew, adding that she doesn't believe police have done enough to find her aunt's killer.
"We get our yearly phone call from the RCMP to tell us there's nothing new, and that's it," Ahenakew said. She stressed that not all aboriginal women who go missing or are murdered are part of the sex trade, though Bernadette Ahenakew was working as a prostitute.
Joanne Ahenakew said that more resources need to be put into correcting the problems that result in aboriginal women moving from their communities on to city streets.
Brown said the police took too long to raise the idea of a serial killer in Edmonton, something she said was obvious to the native women's association two years ago.
She said more investigative efforts are given to non-native victims, not because of racism specifically among police, but in Canada in general.
RCMP spokesman Cpl. Wayne Oakes said all murders are investigated with equal effort, regardless of who the victim is.
Strathcona County RCMP assembled a 30-member task force after the discovery of Quinney's body. That task force works with Project Kare, which is investigating the disappearance or murder of 78 women from the Prairies and territories who had "high-risk" lifestyles.
Not all victims should be burdened with the "high-risk" lifestyle tag, said Brown. "We need to remember that these women were someone's mother, someone's auntie, someone's daughter or niece.
"It is sad that some of these women were marginalized in their lives and we must not make the same mistake in their deaths."
