Document Type

Article

Abstract

In 2010 a Canadian artist named Jamie Black created an art installation called the REDress Project. The installation featured hundreds of hanging red dresses—to bring attention to the vast number of Indigenous women who had gone missing or murdered (Indigenous Foundations, 2011). This art installation was part of a growing movement to bring attention to Indigenous people who had gone missing in Canada. Over the next few years, the REDress Project exhibit toured the country, bringing more widespread attention to a problem that had been gaining national interest since the formation of the National Coalition for our Stolen Sisters in 2002 (Harper, 2006) In 2014 the Canadian government published a report titled Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview (Government of Canada, 2014). This report sparked a debate over the validity of the statistics, which reported 1,181 missing or murdered Indigenous Canadian women, of whom 164 were considered active cases, and 225 were designated unsolved (Tasker, 2016). Some argued that the numbers were too high. In contrast, others believed the numbers were too low, citing firsthand experiences of undocumented and misidentified family members and the Walk 4 Justice initiative, which collected 4,232 names of missing or murdered Indigenous women (Tasker, 2016). Disputes about the accuracy of the numbers cited in the National Operational Overview led to a movement to bring attention to the number of cases, lack of statistical consistency, and lack of awareness from non-Indigenous people.

Disciplines

Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social Work

Publication Date

9-19-2023

Language

English

Download

Included in

Social Work Commons

Share

COinS