Pubdate: Sun, 18 Sep 2005
Source: Brooks Bulletin, The (CN AB)
Copyright: 2005 The Brooks Bulletin.
Contact:  http://www.brooksbulletin.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2917
Author: Jim Bronskill and Sue Bailey
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/women.htm (Women)

ABORIGINAL WOMEN FAIR GAME FOR PREDATORS AMID PUBLIC INDIFFERENCE

OTTAWA - Their carefree grins, candid photos and cold mugshots stare out 
from a gut-wrenching gallery.

Untold scores of society's most vulnerable members - young native women - 
have gone missing across the country only to be forsaken by a jaded justice 
system and neglectful media.

The death and disappearance of aboriginal women has emerged as an alarming 
nationwide pattern, from western serial murders to little-known Atlantic 
vanishings.

Grim statistics and anecdotal evidence compiled by The Canadian Press 
suggest public apathy has allowed predators to stalk native victims with 
near impunity.

The record also points to an ugly truth behind the political and legal 
lethargy: racism.

Pauline Muskego's daughter, Daleen Kay Bosse, disappeared after a night out 
with friends in Saskatoon on May 18, 2004. She left behind a daughter, now 
four, who was her greatest joy. There was no hint that the aspiring teacher 
and photographer, just 26 years old, would simply abandon her life, says 
Muskego.

The torment of waiting for answers is only deepened whenever a white 
woman's disappearance triggers a flurry of national media attention.

"My daughter's face has never been shown nationally."

Almost everyone has heard that the remains of more than 27 women were found 
on a pig farm in British Columbia. Lost in the grisly headlines, however, 
is the fact that many of the victims were aboriginal.

The episode highlighted the cases of at least 68 missing women from 
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside - an enclave of drug-addicted despair that is 
disproportionately home to native people. They vanished over a two-decade 
period, often with scant police or media attention.

But aboriginal women are not preyed upon in British Columbia alone. Their 
deaths and disappearances remain unsolved on reserves, in cities and in 
small towns across the country.

Victims include not only the most exposed drug addicts but also aspiring 
professionals, university students and devoted mothers with no history of 
street life.

Amber O'Hare has been tracing their stories for years. Posters of missing 
native women began to haunt her a decade ago as she visited reserves across 
Canada working as an AIDS educator.

Again and again, she saw desperate appeals for help finding loved ones - 
many of them aboriginal girls and women.

O'Hare would check newspapers for details but usually found nothing. It was 
her first glimpse of the lack of public interest that has contributed to 
the swelling ranks of murdered and missing native women.

She could not accept the general indifference and scant media coverage. "So 
I started documenting them."

O'Hare soon heard from distraught relatives who'd spent years trying to get 
help from police.

"I've had e-mails and phone calls from family members who've said that 
they've been to the police department three years later and the file's dusty."

The Toronto mother of two, herself an AIDS sufferer who narrowly escaped a 
heroin-addicted street life, began to build an unsettling online catalogue. 
Today, she has documented hundreds of cases of murdered and vanished native 
girls and women from coast to coast.

O'Hare toiled in obscurity as she built a digital memorial to the losses.

Etched in her memory was the chilling case of Helen Betty Osborne, the 
Manitoba girl whose 1971 beating death at the hands of four white men was a 
shameful open secret in The Pas for years. Just one of the men was ever 
convicted - more than 15 years later.

A public inquiry exposed the racism and misogyny that led to Osborne's rape 
and killing.

O'Hare's website, www.missingnativewomen.ca, offers stark evidence that 
little has changed.

The pages are filled with more than 200 desperate stories. It's a 
dispiriting inventory of native girls and women who were killed or have 
simply disappeared.

"Most of them are dead, I believe," O'Hare says with flat resignation.

She researches new cases through phone calls, e-mail tips, obituaries and 
hours spent scanning files in the reference library.

Except for help from a couple of friends, she has until recently been a 
lone crusader. But others with more influence and resources have taken up 
the cause, lending credence to what O'Hare has long known: the number of 
missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada has reached epidemic 
proportions.

Police in British Columbia are probing the disappearance of at least 68 
women from Vancouver over two decades. Pig farmer Robert Pickton has been 
charged with killing 27 of the women, many of whom were prostitutes in the 
city's crime-ridden Downtown Eastside.

An internal federal briefing note obtained by The Canadian Press suggests 
as many as half of the missing B.C. women may have been aboriginal. Exact 
figures are hard to pin down because ancestry is not always obvious from 
the facts known about each victim.

An RCMP-led task force in Alberta is investigating more than 80 unsolved 
murders and missing-person cases - disappearances the police say could 
point to a serial killer.

The bodies of several Edmonton prostitutes have been found discarded in 
farmers' fields, upping the ante for those who gamble their lives as street 
workers. In 2003, many in the sex trade began voluntarily providing DNA 
samples and personal contacts to police.

But reliable information is sorely lacking on the extent to which the most 
vulnerable victims are targeted.

The Native Women's Association of Canada campaigned last year for $10 
million in federal funds to research what it estimates are at least 500 
cases in the last 20 years of murdered or missing aboriginal women. That 
estimate is based on the group's preliminary research, including extensive 
interviews with families.

"There is a growing awareness of this particular problem. It grew out of 
and it grew out of other reports - particularly the Native Women's 
Association." Still, O'Hare's online archive of continues to expand. She 
makes no apologies for exclusive focus on aboriginal women.  "I don't 
consider it racism. I consider it exposing the unexposed."

O'Hare and others point to a virtual news vacuum when it comes to covering 
native cases.

They cite how the disappearance of 25-year-old Alicioss, from a 
middle-class neighbourhood north of the city made national newscasts and 
headlines.

Names Vanished

Native aboriginals are rarely beyond their home provinces . Word of missing 
native women in Nova Scotia comes through a phone call from the reserves, 
said Bert Milberg, an addictions counselor in Halifax. "You don't hear from 
the news. You hear about it from others."

There are exceptions, many cases go almost unnoticed.

Back in Toronre continues to preserve the memory of murdered and missing 
native women.

"I would like nothing better than to be able to close the website down, 
saying all are solved, it's no longer happening," she said.

"Of course, I'm never going to to see that day. But that's my dream, anyway.
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MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman