Thank you.
My name is Marie Sutherland. I'm known as Waseskwan Biyesiw Iskwew. That's my Cree name. I work for the Native Women's Transition Centre, and I also work for two different high-risk groups. I am here to voice, as an elder, the violence against aboriginal women and girls, and the missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls, and to address the root causes of the violence against aboriginal women and girls. I have a few examples.
One is women who are leaving abusive relationships on the reserves and coming to the big city to start a new life. Some come with their children, while some have to fight to get their kids back from their ex-partners. These women are very vulnerable. Some come to the city without money when they're leaving abusive relationships. They're tired of getting beat up and abused, and the abuse is not stopping. Some become addicted to drugs and alcohol and are controlled. Women and girls are forced to prostitute themselves. They get raped and beaten. They go missing and they are murdered.
Every day, there is a woman or girl who has been raped and beaten. I hear those stories every day in the kind of work I do. As aboriginal women, we need help from the government to enforce more police services to protect aboriginal women and girls from violence and murder and from going missing.
Every day, I hear stories about girls being raped and girls being beaten—every day—and instead of the government spending millions of dollars in hearings over the next couple of years, we need your help now, today, to hear us as aboriginal people, and to put some money into the police forces to find who's responsible for the violence, for the missing and murdered women and girls.
We need funds and resources to develop awareness and education programs on the reserves and in schools, programs about violence and the missing and murdered women, because some of these women come from the reserves. They have really big dreams of starting school, but they get grabbed by a pimp and the next thing we see is that they're in the newspaper because they've been murdered.
What I'm asking for most is the protection from violence for the women and children and to find who's responsible for the violence and the murdered women. The government and the police services have the responsibility to provide justice for victims and end the violence.
[Witness speaks in Cree]
That's it: no more violence against aboriginal women.
That's all I have to say. I don't have all the documents because this was given to me as I was leaving from Winnipeg for a different meeting.
Thank you very much for paying attention to me.