That would be nice, yes.
I've been cut off every time I've tried to get to indigenous women, and I think it's just very important to really acknowledge that indigenous women make up a huge percentage of the women we reach at Stella. They are the women we see the most in prison, and they are the women we see dying at the fastest rate. We are constantly having vigils for women who have preventable illnesses they died from because they couldn't access health care. We have been in situations in which one of our outreach workers on the street called 911 for an ambulance for someone who was having a health emergency. The 911 operator asked if it was an indigenous woman, and they sent the police instead.
We have women who are currently missing. We have women who have committed suicide since this law has been put in place. We have women who have been subject to incredible violence, and I think it's very important that we ask ourselves why it is that, as a society, we're starting to accept that the criminal justice system is colonial, racist and violent towards indigenous people. It is part of a genocidal project against indigenous women, but somehow we think that, when it comes to sex work, it's different and all of a sudden the system is helpful. It is not helpful for indigenous women. We need all kinds of other things that are not criminal. We need people who are not police officers in the lives of indigenous women, and we need to stop this unwanted contact with police and this hostility from the system.
I just really want you to consider that, if we actually have a commitment as a country to end the genocide of indigenous women, then we need to have a commitment to making sure that no indigenous woman is targeted by police, either as a criminal or as a potential victim, on the basis of the fact that she is selling sex to make money.
If we are outraged that we have people in our society who are in desperate poverty, who need to do anything they can do to survive, then we need to act on the poverty; we need to act on the exclusion, and we need to act on those things. We do not need to criminalize poverty or to criminalize being indigenous in a city away from your community. Those things should not be crimes, and this law is a way to criminalize being an indigenous woman, especially in an urban setting.
If there's one take-away from this testimony, it is that it's possible to be committed to ending violence against indigenous women and it's possible to have a critical analysis of how indigenous women continue to sell sex and to support the criminalization. Those things are coherent, and they all come together as one package.