Oread Daily writes

CAUSE FOR OUTRAGE

I guess it should come as no surprise that missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada don’t get much media play.

Yesterday a group representing aboriginal women in Manitoba rallied in front of the provincial legislature to protest that very fact. The Mother of Red Nations Women's Council marked International Women's Day by calling for more attention to aboriginal women who disappear. The Mother of Red Nations Council says missing white women receive more media attention than missing aboriginal women. The group says all missing women should be the focus of the kind of public concern given to Dru Sjodin, a Caucasian university student who disappeared in Grand Forks, North Dakota last November. "There was front-page press day after day," says council spokeswoman Leslie Spillett. "There's organized search parties and a whole community effort got behind to find where she is and to bring people to justice that may have violated her, and we think that's an appropriate response for the community."

The mother and aunt of Sunny Wood, a 16-year-old aboriginal girl who went missing Feb. 20, joined the group. "We just want to know what's happened to her," says Wood's aunt, Irene Okemow. "It's very frightening right now because we don't know what's happened to her and its very scary. She's got lots of family members back home that are very concerned. " The missing 5-foot-7, 220-pound girl has tattoos on her fingers and was wearing an Exco grey sweater and black boots.

Spillett said the lack of public attention to Wood's disappearance is an example of how native women aren't treated like other women in the province. "There are children - 16- and 17-year-old women - that are disappearing off the streets of Winnipeg frequently," said Spillett. "Where's the search parties? Where's the outrage?" she said. "The message to us is... that we don't count, that we don't matter -- that our lives don't have the same value as others…The Mother of Red Nations is asking (the province) to work with us to develop an appropriate response to the missing and murdered women," she said. "We demand some action." Spillett estimated that 500 aboriginal women across the country have vanished over the last decade.

"If 500 white women went missing from Toronto and Montreal or wherever, I think there'd be absolute panic and outrage," Saskatoon journalist Warren Goulding, author of “Just Another Indian: A Serial Killer and Canada’s Indifference,” said. ``It just hasn't happened." Sources: CBC, Indianz, Winnipeg Sun, Toronto Star

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