It's different. Métis women often live in the large urban centres or towns. They have to use resources, especially in the area of family violence.
First off, I want to tell you that I think the definition of family violence in our community often needs to be broadened. Aboriginal women, including Métis women, suffer violence from all sorts of places. It isn't always initiated at a family unit level, to start with. When they have to go to shelters, they often go to the mainstream shelters. I've been an advocate for 20-some years for aboriginal women and Métis women in my community, and I want to tell you that when they go to the shelters at a mainstream level, it actually has two effects.
First, the mainstream women often assess their abuse based on the abuse these aboriginal women have suffered, which is often far more traumatic and aggressive. So many of the mainstream women will minimize the level of abuse they've suffered as a result of witnessing what Métis women have suffered. In that instance, I don't think it's always healthy.
But the other effect is that our women are often judged. Racism exists whether people want to admit it or not. Within those institutions, many of the workers will sit in judgment of our Métis women who go into those shelters. They are always watching them and judging them more harshly. If they need child care supports, they're not often given them, because they're afraid these women will abandon their children there, or they're afraid that alcoholism is prevalent in our community. If anybody goes out and comes back to the shelter that evening, they'll literally try to smell them and so on.
For some of our women, that's detrimental. If they're diabetic and have issues related to diabetes and are not eating properly—and often when you're in a crisis you don't—they can have odours that would be mistaken as a drinking issue. They haven't been drinking but in fact actually need support and medical attention to deal with their diabetes. Those women will be judged more harshly than a mainstream woman will be because it's based on the racism and biases people have towards aboriginal women.