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)

BLEAK SCENES ON SASKATOON'S 20TH STREET HAVE ROOTS IN DISCRIMINATION

SASKATOON - It's mid-afternoon on a Tuesday as a 16-year-old girl paces 
20th Street in the heart of The Stroll.

Wearing denim shorts and eating an ice-cream bar, she looks like any 
teenager on a hot summer day - until she starts waving at passing pickup 
trucks.

She is among dozens of native girls and women caught up in a highly visible 
and racially polarized sex trade.

How they got there is a complex question with historic roots reaching back 
through decades of racist federal policy, says Toronto lawyer Mary Eberts.

"What has happened to aboriginal women in this country, by the conscious 
act of the Canadian state, is appalling."

A growing list of murdered and missing native women across Canada includes 
many who wound up in an increasingly dangerous sex trade.

In Saskatoon, the women who sell their bodies and the young girls who are 
exploited - often under pressure from other girls in their "street 
families" or from drug-addicted relatives - are overwhelmingly aboriginal.

The men who cruise The Stroll come from all income brackets. They range 
from transient construction workers to professionals in luxury SUVs. They 
often have wives and families. They are almost always white.

Many are regular visitors to this run-down sprawl of motels, businesses and 
homes near Saskatoon's downtown core.

Some are sadistically abusive, and there's little police can do to protect 
victims as young as 10 who tend to report only the worst beatings. Police 
are widely distrusted here, and many residents fear arrest for outstanding 
warrants.

A local street outreach agency keeps a "high risk of homicide" registry 
that typically tracks up to 100 girls and women considered most vulnerable. 
The grim record includes such identifying information as tattoos and 
previously broken bones to help police investigate if needed.

"The reality of it is that kids turn up dead," says Don Meikle, client 
services co-ordinator for the downtown youth centre.

Saskatoon, like Regina and Winnipeg, has a large aboriginal population 
saddled with crushing rates of poverty, drug addiction, sexual abuse, 
domestic violence and prostitution.

Who Is Responsible For Such Misery?

Eberts says it's a grossly unfair reading of recent history to blame native 
communities alone.

She traces a succession of federal policies that disrupted sophisticated 
aboriginal social systems while forcing whole populations on to small reserves.

Introduced in 1876, the Indian Act limited economic prospects and even 
freedom of movement. It especially undercut traditional roles of authority 
held for centuries by aboriginal women, Eberts says.

"Under the Indian Act, Indian women were not recognized as legal persons. 
They were not allowed to hold land or participate in band governance in any 
way - either as voters or to stand and hold office. And they were not 
allowed to inherit property or serve as executors of estates.

"They were complete legal non-entities."

Moreover, native women who married non-native men lost their Indian status. 
This especially damaging piece of sexist legislation was only partially 
corrected in 1985.

The political approach to the "Indian Problem" was assimilation, beginning 
in earnest in the 1870s with residential schools.

By 1900, thousands of native children had been placed in institutions where 
their culture and language were shunned. Many were punished for speaking 
their native tongue in a system that would erode family structures for more 
than three generations.

Ottawa has admitted that physical and sexual abuse in the church-run 
schools was rampant. But the federal government has so far refused to pay 
blanket compensation.

Today, the residential school experience reverberates in the form of social 
dysfunction. Native leaders say it's a key factor in the sexual abuse, 
alcoholism, drug addiction and domestic violence that have plagued many 
communities since.

Ottawa has committed $5 million over five years to research cases of 
murdered and missing native women - far short of the $10 million over two 
years sought by the Native Women's Association of Canada.

Indian Affairs Minister Andy Scott says "it's a start."

Ottawa is desperately trying to deal with the fallout from years of federal 
meddling in the lives of First Nation, Inuit and Metis people, he said in 
an interview.

"We're stuck with an awareness of the history of our unilateral 
interventions. They haven't been a happy story.

"I immediately look at these conditions and say, 'I want to do something.' 
But I have to resist that instinct because I think we have to be more 
collaborative than that."

There is hope that increasing education and sobriety rates will mean a 
brighter future for many aboriginal kids. But for those pinned down by 
poverty and addiction, life is a bleak struggle to survive.

"To get some money," the 16-year-old girl says with a stoned grin when 
asked why she's offering herself up to strangers on 20th Street.

Already a mother of two, she is obviously high but only admits to smoking 
"a few joints" of pot.

She is living with a girlfriend who also works the streets with two of her 
sisters. Another older sister, in the sex trade as well, went missing a few 
years ago and has never been found.

A 20th Street business owner finally hired a private security guard to 
protect the corner outside her shop for part of each weekday.

His main job is to keep away the young women who appear from early in the 
morning to late at night. Noon-hours are busy as men on lunch breaks cruise 
for sex.

"The politicians have to do something," says the business owner, who asked 
not to be identified.

Police say their hands are tied by lax prostitution laws, while politicians 
do little but say they're concerned, she says.

On the table before her are stacks of newspaper clippings and letters she 
has written pleading for action.

"This place is a breeding ground for drugs, sexually transmitted disease 
and abductions."

She is at a loss to understand why her voice is one of few demanding change.

"There are native people out there who don't want it either. Where are the 
elders?"

Ojibwa elder Walter Linklater, 66, says those who truly follow traditional 
culture can help.

But they are rarely asked by the mostly white bureaucrats who run programs 
in a social-work industry that feeds off native problems, he says.

He beat acute alcoholism in his 30s only when an elder helped him reconnect 
with his aboriginal ancestry.

Many native people will remain lost until they do the same, Linklater says.

"We must go back to our traditional ways.

"We won't give up. We'll go through many tragedies yet before society 
realizes and goes to the elders."

Bert Milberg, a Halifax addictions counsellor who tries to help men deal 
with their anger, says the aboriginal tenet of holding women sacred has 
been forgotten.

"We've lost that, obviously," he said. "Women going missing, women getting 
murdered, women committing suicide.

"It's time to start reversing this wheel."

[Sidebar]

Key dates in the recent history of missing aboriginal women in Canada:

June 21, 2002: Tree-planter Nicole Hoar, 25, of Red Deer, Alta., vanishes 
while hitchhiking along northern British Columbia's Highway 16, west of 
Prince George. Her disappearance garners national headlines. At least six 
young native women went missing between 1988 and 1995 along the same 
"Highway of Tears" with comparatively little public focus. All cases remain 
unsolved.

Oct. 4, 2004: Amnesty International Canada issues Stolen Sisters, a major 
report condemning how racism and sexism taint police and media handling of 
cases involving missing or murdered aboriginal women.

May 17, 2005: Federal government commits $5 million over five years to 
research cases of missing aboriginal women - far short of the $10 million 
over two years sought by the Native Women's Association of Canada for its 
Sisters in Spirit campaign.

May 25, 2005: Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farmer Robert Pickton is charged 
with 12 new counts of first-degree murder, bringing the total to 27. Most 
alleged victims disappeared from Vancouver's drug-infested Downtown 
Eastside between 1996 and 2002. Relatives of a growing list of missing 
women first pressed police to investigate in 1991. Vancouver police agreed 
to review related files in 1998. Of at least 68 women believed missing to 
date, at least one-quarter are aboriginal.

June 17, 2005: RCMP in Edmonton announce they're looking for a serial 
killer. Critics ask why it took so long when at least 12 prostitutes have 
been killed in and around the city since 1988. Several victims were 
aboriginal. Today, police provincewide are jointly reviewing more than 80 
murder and missing-person cases over two decades.
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