Activist Communique: 3,000 missing women should be an election issue | rabble.ca

Activist Communique: 3,000 missing women should be an election issue | rabble.ca

How can 3,000 missing women not be an issue for the 2011 election? A prominent issue, in fact?

Is it because the 3,000 missing women are Indigenous and not white-skinned?

As Canadians soon face the decision of who they want to run their country, let me remind you that it was the Conservative government under Stephen Harper that cut funding to Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC).

According to research conducted under NWAC's Sisters in Spirit program, nationally over 580 Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing, most of them over the last 30 years.

I concede that the number is much higher, as Gladys Radek from Walk4Justice estimates over 3,000 women are known to have gone missing or been murdered in Canada since the 1970s, with at least 80 per cent of these women being from First Nations.