Our stolen sisters — all of them — matter; it’s as simple as that

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/04/2023 (925 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I remember when Sunshine Wood went missing in February 2004. She was a 16-year-old Indigenous girl who vanished from Winnipeg’s downtown one night.

The news coverage seemed lacking, from what I recall. It was nothing like the steady flow of information that came from North Dakota a few months earlier when Dru Sjodin, a 22-year-old white college student was kidnapped after leaving her shift at Victoria’s Secret at Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, N.D.

At the time, I was working in a Winnipeg coat check where someone had put up a “missing” poster of Sjodin. I don’t know where it came from, or who decided to put it up, but I remember it was there. The kidnapping happened in such close proximity to Winnipeg that it wasn’t completely out of the question that she could be spotted here.

The case was gripping and terrifying, and it seemed there were news reports about the young woman’s kidnapping every day on this side of the border.

And only a few months later, about 2 1/2 hours north, a 16-year-old girl wandered out of the St. Regis Hotel just past midnight, never to be seen again. The contrast between the way the two cases were publicized was striking. Wood’s disappearance received far less attention.

I am glad for the attention Sjodin’s case got; that her name and face were pushed out aggressively, and that society reacted with heartbreak, empathy and action for the family. The search ended tragically, when her partially nude body was discovered in April 2004 near Crookston, Minn. The killer was a convicted sex offender who police suspected and arrested a week after her kidnapping.

My point is not to pit the memory of one lost sister against the other, but rather to point out that Wood and her family deserved more. All our stolen sisters deserve more.

We see this kind of attention imbalance time and time again. In 2020 when American van-life vlogger Gabby Petito went missing while travelling through Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, her case garnered widespread attention in mainstream and social media and by law enforcement. (And again, I am glad for the outpouring so that her family got answers) but while Petito’s case sparked such an enormous reaction, it shows the disparity in resources and attention that young, attractive, middle-class white women receive when they go missing compared with women of colour. For reference, in the past decade there have been 710 Indigenous people who have vanished in Wyoming. None have received a shred of the spotlight that Petito did.

There is even a term — missing white woman syndrome — popularized by the late CBS journalist Gwen Ifill that clearly conveys the disparity. To put it bluntly and call out the deep systemic root of the issue, it is that our society holds white women at a higher value.

Annual data from Statistics Canada shows that Indigenous women, girls and LGBTTQ+ people make up four per cent of the Canadian population, yet they represent 28 per cent of homicides perpetrated against women in 2019. We are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than non-Indigenous women in Canada.

Last June the partial remains of Rebecca Contois, who police believe was a victim of accused serial killer Jeremy Skibicki, were found at the landfill.

Skibicki is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of four Indigenous women, two of whom — Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran — are believed to be buried at a privately operated landfill north of Winnipeg. Investigators have not said where the remains of the fourth, so far unidentified, woman they are calling Buffalo Woman (Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe) might be located.

In Canada there is a discrepancy in the number of missing Indigenous women and girls believed to have been murdered in the past three decades. A 2014 RCMP report concluded that roughly 1,200 have been killed or gone missing, but the Native Women’s Association of Canada puts that number at 4,000-plus, based on their research.

In either case, these numbers are staggering and we need to acknowledge that the issue is a national crisis. As a society we need to demand that Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit folks are protected and have a right to be safe in our communities. We need to stand with the families of our lost sisters — the families who, in their grief, are often left to start their own grassroots movements such as Drag the Red or Camp Morgan, because they’re taking on what won’t be done for them. We need to scream from the top of our lungs that they matter. They’ve always mattered. They always will matter.

Our lost and stolen sisters deserve more.

shelley.cook@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @ShelleyACook