First, I'd like to acknowledge that we're on unceded Coast Salish territory.
Second, I'd like to thank the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women for inviting the Aboriginal Women's Action Network to present to you today.
My name is Darlene Rigo, and I am of Ojibway descent. I don't have a traditional name and designated ancestral land that I can lay claim to or an aboriginal lineage that I can trace before my grandmother. I blame racism, violence, and the Indian Act for my family's dissociation from a proud aboriginal identity and lack of belonging to a larger community.
Before I go any further, I must inform you that the Aboriginal Women's Action Network or AWAN, of which I'm a member, is a collective, and there is no best representative among us. I'm speaking to you today because of my willingness and availability to do so.
AWAN is a grassroots volunteer group that was founded in 1995 in response to the silencing of aboriginal women with respect to the issues that affect our lives. Our group began with impassioned talks in women's home. Some of our most pressing concerns include violence, poverty, child apprehension, Bill C-31, and prostitution. We are here not because we are being paid to be, and certainly not because it makes us popular, but because we are committed to trying to save aboriginal women's lives by raising awareness about the realities of them as we struggle to save our own.
As I speak, many of our sisters are homeless, cold, hungry, drugged, violated, abducted, bought and sold, perhaps even murdered just down the road from here. Just east of this hotel is what we call the urban reserve, a neighbourhood infamous for poverty, addiction, prostitution, and violence. In here, in the shelter of this expensive, airy space, we are participating in another study of what may well be an abstract category of otherness, aboriginal women. You have probably heard the statistics and baseless numbers, however distorted by blurred issues of identification and poor reporting.
I'll spare you some repetition. Let's hope that those with the power and influence to make a difference do not just continue to study us to death but confront the often harsh reality of our lives and promote action for real change.
I can also get caught up in research and statistics, but I trust that in this crowd you know the staggering figures, and I want instead to situate my knowledge and my lived experience and that of my mother.
I'll break the code of silence and say it: my grandmother was a prostituted aboriginal woman. Most of what I know about her life came from frightening stories she told me as a child about her mother's early death, from whispered tales from relatives after she died, and tales my mother divulged on her own deathbed just a few years ago. Then my mother insisted that I had to tell our stories.
As I've come to learn, my grandmother, like my mother, regarded being Indian as a source of shame that was never openly talked about. I can only imagine how this must have felt in their times in the 1920s and 1930s. I remember being teased in kindergarten and chased around by little wannabe cowboys with pretend guns. My mother confessed that as a child she couldn't wait to start curling her straight black hair and later dyed her dark roots.
My grandmother's and mother's life stories combined with my own experience have taught me first-hand about the intergenerational nature of violence against aboriginal women. It starts young, with violence against aboriginal girls, and goes far back in history.
My grandmother became pregnant at 12 with my mother, who was taken from her at birth. It remains unclear which of two adult white brothers may have been responsible, but their mother took the newborn home, stole her, according to my grandmother.
Through cruel abuse my mother was taught to hate her own origins, herself, and her own mother, who, she was told, gave her away. Feeling unloved and believing there was something wrong with her, she was dressed up in pretty frocks and kept separate from her younger siblings, but they didn't fare much better. My grandmother had 10 other children who lived in extreme poverty without adequate food, heat, or hot water. She had an alcoholic husband who rarely came home. Leaving her kids, she prostituted herself in an attempt to feed them.
This was a disgraceful, guarded secret, only hinted at in my childhood but later spoken of with judgment, even by my father, who beat my mother and wanted to kill her and abandoned me to this woman's care. Although my mother managed to get away from my father, she married another violent man and he became one of my abusers.
The legacy of trauma, violence, and addiction runs throughout my entire extended family, as it does for many aboriginal women. It's pervasive in Canadian society, and the roots can be traced back to colonialism. But we believe that aboriginal women have dignity and need to be respected.
I'll jump to my suggestions because I don't want you to miss those. I didn't think it would take that long.
We want to put an end to the vicious cycle of the retraumatization of violence against aboriginal women, and we think in order to do so we need to say no to legalized prostitution.
We think that johns, traffickers, and pimps, and not the women involved, should be criminalized. Doing that would give the women quite a bit of protection.
To bring an end to the cycle, we think we need more detox beds, because with the violence, there's addiction that goes along with it.
We need recovery centres designed to give women cultural tools to recover and to educate them concerning the origins of violence in their lives, with consciousness-raising so they can fight to end prostitution.
We want comprehensive and compassionate medical services, a guaranteed livable income, job training, and adequate housing for women and their families.
Aboriginal women are smart, strong, and proud, and as survivors, we know what we want and what we don't want.
We don't want increased hunting grounds that would result from a total decriminalization of prostitution where men have the right to violate and harm us. We don't want one more of our sisters stolen, hurt, and murdered.
We want freedom and real choices. We want to be safe, not safer. We want harm elimination, not harm reduction. We demand the dignity and respect we deserve.
