Thank you very much.
I'd also like to start by thanking you for inviting me to come and testify here. I'll introduce myself as well.
I am Marie-Pierre Bousquet. I am Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology of the University of Montreal. I've been working on aboriginal issues since the mid-1990s, and I am more particularly interested in Amerindian societies, and thus a little less in Inuit societies.
I lived in an Anishnabe community in Quebec for a year in 1996. I have continued making frequent stays there since then for my research and other reasons. Since my research discipline, my work is mainly focused on field research, and that's extremely important for me.
I have examined various issues throughout my years in research, but I have focused particularly on intergenerational relations, relations with the land, on the landscape of religious beliefs, on disintoxication, on the passage into adulthood, and I'm also taking part in a research project on the experience of aboriginal women with violence, in a research group to which Mylène Jaccoud belongs.
I have cited all these research themes. They don't necessarily seem related to violence to you. In fact, they are. If I just take the example of relations with the land, the fact, for example, of sometimes staying on the land or getting closer to the land may be a way for women to become more aware of the violence they experience, of finding a certain peace and making decisions. That's just to give you an idea. All the themes I've addressed here are related to social problems. So I'm going to elaborate in particular on the second point stated by Ms. Jaccoud, that is why violence is perpetuated in aboriginal environments.
As you no doubt know, aboriginal women have the sad record of being the most vulnerable population in all of Canada. On a daily basis, they are the women who are most often victims of family violence and spousal abuse by their spouses who, I recall, can be either aboriginal or alloriginal. It's not necessarily a question of the spouse's origin.
There is every reason to believe that violence has always existed, in all societies, but that it is only increasing among aboriginal peoples. This growth is related to a number of factors: the stress of colonization, the pressure of acculturation and the imposition of Canadian ways of doing things. It has also only increased with the collapse of the traditional economy of the aboriginal peoples and with the unemployment related to that collapse, with the shifts to a sedentary lifestyle, with the increased guardianship of subsequent government authorities and with the social responses such as alcohol abuse and drug abuse, which existed before the switch to sedentary lifestyles but which have undergone phenomenal development since that shift.
We can therefore say that the accumulated injuries have created a vicious circle of violence, which partly explains this perpetuation of violence. We can distinguish two general ways of managing violence in the aboriginal communities. The first are the traditional methods of conflict management. The second is resorting to institutions that were originally imposed by the colonial regime, that is to say the police and the law courts.
I have done a lot of work on the issue of traditional methods of conflict management. Those traditional methods have been quite undermined by the intervention, indeed interventionism, of the Canadian government and its law enforcement representatives. By interventionism, I mean here the interference in the affairs of aboriginal peoples with the use, in particular, of a legal system that absolutely did not appeal to the aboriginal peoples and that was not based on their ways of viewing the offence and other aspects.
There nevertheless are still aboriginal ways to assist women suffering from violence, ways that I would call informal resources. One of the most important informal resources, in the research I have conducted for aboriginal women and Amerindian women in particular is the family network. By that I mean the network of over-kinship, that is to say both kinship and affinity. This is a mutual assistance network consisting of people who general kindred relationships, but who are not necessarily very close relations.
Aboriginal women who are victims of violence can also turn to formal resources such as social services programs and safe houses. However, they don't necessarily always know those resources. And they don't necessarily feel very comfortable there either. Why doesn't this situation improve? There are many reasons. My colleague has already mentioned a few. I'm not going to try to classify them, but I think the most important is without a doubt the general apathy toward this problem.
The fate of aboriginal women seems to be—I'm going to say it in English with a very bad accent and I apologize to the anglophones—the dirty little secret of Canada. Tens of Amerindian, Inuit and Metis women disappear and are assassinated without that mobilizing the media or the authorities. So there should obviously be—that's no doubt why you are here—a federal political will, a provincial and local will to change things.
The preferred models that we tend to think of are the police, the law courts and the other agents in charge of maintaining the regulations of society. Those models, preferred by those whom I call “the agents of social regulation” are repression, on the one hand, and treatment or prevention on the other.
As my colleague said, we clearly realized, based on all the research we did, that repression doesn't work at all. Moreover, the programs are very scattered, which makes them highly unproductive and they are also poorly matched with the informal resources that are not really taken into account, which considerably undermines their effectiveness.
In addition, aboriginals still have very little control over the implementation of programs. The communities are not independent with regard to development, and their general state of economic and administrative dependence contributes largely to the problem. The housing and job shortages and low education levels are part of the equation of reproduction and violence. Moreover, as my colleague emphasized, the more a woman has access to a good education and is integrated into the work force, the more chances she will have of breaking out of the circle of violence.
With regard to education, we cannot forget a fact that contributes to the lack of governance, that aboriginals lack training to apply treatment and prevention programs. Furthermore, if they wish to build programs that are more consistent with their way of doing things, they must at times seek private funding and do not always know where to get it.
Even though women are increasingly accessing positions as chiefs and spokespersons for their nations, the fact nevertheless remains that power remains largely in the hands of men, whether it be at the head of band councils or at the head of Quebec municipalities where aboriginals live. The political discrimination of women for Quebec societies was introduced through relations with Euro-Canadians and amplified through the legal violence?? suffered by Amerindian women since the 19th century. I won't go into the history of the Indian Act, which you must surely know, or the debates to which that act still give rise, but I would like to emphasize that the maintenance of legal discrimination against women, which violates their rights and freedom to identify themselves and their descendants as Amerindians, is part of that violence and at times helps give people living in the communities arguments for excluding women and maintaining violence against them.
That also contributes to a segregation of their problems, as a result of which aboriginal women clearly understood, when they decided to create their associations in the early 1970s, that they had to attack on their own, without separating the two subjects, both the injustices of the Indian Act and the problems of violence. I'm thinking of the aboriginal woman from Quebec, for example, who belongs to the Quebec Native Women's Association. From the time the Association was established, the two themes have always been completely linked. Moreover, it is time that everyone share their awareness of that fact.
Although the aboriginal women's associations have made it possible to achieve progress in taking the abuses this population suffers into account, the community levers are still inadequate.
A good example is the promotion of models of conduct in which the leadership of women is not rightly valued. In the aboriginal communities, women are generally viewed in a paradoxical manner as keepers of the culture and as being responsible for transmitting that culture. So one could say at the outset that this is a highly valued hot, very prestigious role, but at the same time it's difficult for them to enter important positions and to make their voices heard. So they also work very hard to show that being a woman and aboriginal can be associated with pursing an education, getting involved politically and socially and the embodiment of values such as sobriety, care for others and so on. So it would undoubtedly be necessary to encourage and develop these models of conduct and access for women to leadership.
Lastly, it should be borne in mind, even though it's obvious, that aboriginal cultures must be taken into account. The perpetuation of violence also depends on factors that are observed in aboriginal environments, such as the rule of silence, which is a big problem—if only in detecting violence before confronting it—fear of informing and the fact that people can find violence and acceptable. I lived in an Anishinabe community for a year, and I can tell you that, by the end of one year, I wound up finding violence normal—in talking like that when people tell each other village gossip—and that scared me. So this is part of that environment.
Aboriginal women generally live in a close relationship with those who make them suffer, and they are often afraid that, if they speak out, they will break up their social environment and the support they have. These factors, which maintain a status quo, must be considered in environments that very much operate in isolation. Together with that is the fact that the current response to violence against aboriginal women are inappropriate and inadequate.
It also should not be forgotten that the history of relations between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the police in the aboriginal communities is a charged history that is past on in aboriginal circles, of particularly harsh action taken against aboriginal people, interventions that were considered unjustified, imprisonment for minor offences, and the removal of children from their parents. Moreover, the history of relations with the law courts isn't any better. That history weighs on the quality and effectiveness of services provided by police and the justice system in aboriginal communities. In addition to that is the fact that many services won't be adapted to aboriginal cultures, quite simply as a result of a total and absolute lack of knowledge of aboriginal cultures—that strikes me every time.
There are of course aboriginal police officers, aboriginal social workers, substance abuse and crime caseworkers who are aboriginal, and other qualified staff. Their advantages that they know the actual situation on the ground, but there aren't always enough of them, far from it. In addition, they very often have close ties with the assailants or their victims and are not always well trained, particularly in detecting violence that isn't necessarily physically predictable. So they often tend to apply the term violence to what corresponds to very visible marks of blows—we've seen that in particular in the research we're conducting right now. However, the violence isn't limited strictly to that form; it can be non-verbal but can be verbal as well. We also noted that, for non-physical violence in particular, non-aboriginal staff are not necessarily better trained than aboriginal staff.
My colleague has already noted some courses of action, and I'm going to focus particularly on two of them. It's important to start by emphasizing that it is hard to talk about women without talking about men. First, that doesn't reflect the views of women or what they want in the matter, and if women are also suffering from violence, is because the men are suffering too. The spouses, family members and children are all part of this circle of violence. They are all affected by the resulting trauma, either because they are responsible for it, because they are its targets or simply because they have experience and reproduce it. Everyone needs support, and the care and attention in the social environment must be comprehensive.
The development of traditional approaches should also be encouraged. By traditional approaches, I also mean simply aboriginal approaches, that is to say innovative models, that the aboriginals would like to experiment with if they consider them more appropriate to their way of being.
Allow me to finish by emphasizing one fact. As a result of my specialization, I am particularly interested in culture, but the cultural difference of aboriginal women must absolutely be taken into account in helping the manage these problems.
That cultural difference exists and is lasting. It is there despite 500 years of living together. We must, in particular, involve and sensitize not only aboriginals, but also Allochtones in this matter, to help address and destroy prejudices that have lasted as a result of ignorance and that perpetuate the systemic violence against aboriginals.
Thank you.
