Two of Ontario artist Evan Munday's earliest drawings of missing and murdered Canadian Indian women and girls. Munday tweets each etching to Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Munday says the project will take at least three years - if he completes one sketch each day - since the total number of victims is more than 1,200.
"One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."
- Joseph Stalin
Evan Munday is my hero. He’s a talented illustrator who has had enough of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's stance on more than 1,200 missing and murdered Indian women in Canada not being much of an issue.
Since Jan. 5, this Toronto artist has been tweeting to the Conservative Party Prime Minister sketches of the victims, with the name of each woman and girl, along with the date of her disappearance or murder. It’s a dicey avocation for Munday, since Harper and his Royal Canadian Mounted Police have taken on a role of what many Canadian Indians feel is akin to Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Schutzstaffe and Gasapo. And although it's very unfair to compare Harper to Hitler, to many Canadians - particularly Indian women who regularly post on social media sites like Facebook groups for the Indians of North America - all too many live in fear and terror of Harper and the RCMP. For First Nations people above the northern U.S.A border, what they feel towards the Prime Minister and the RCMP is more than the typical dislike felt towards a leader. It's something more comparable to deep mistrust, insidious and impending dread, and loathing.
"The really grim idea is that this could take over three years. You could draw a different woman every day and not be done for three years,” Munday is quoted as saying in CTV News.
Evan Munday has what Jewish folks call chutzpah, or to be rather vulgar but right to the point, "balls". He's a lean, mean, etching machine and he means business. He's looking Harper and Harper's horrid political entourage of crooks, criminals and liars right in the face. And Munday's telling them all that ignoring this problem is far from being merely unacceptable. No, Munday is proving through his art, the Harper government is even more than egregious, it's evil.
"I don't know how to do much besides draw, so I was like, I'll illustrate each of these women and try to do kind of a memorial tribute to each of these women and their lives,” Munday said in the CTV News article.
In an opinion piece from CBC News, writer Tanya Kappo has some very stern words for the Prime Minister, whose response to the more than 1,200 missing and murdered was: "Our ministers will continue to dialogue with those who are concerned about this."
What?!
No response at all would have been more acceptable to Canadian Indians than this lame comment!
But the worst part was this zinger, uttered by Harper: "… it isn't really high on our radar, to be honest."
In Tanya Kappo's editorial on the CBC News website, "Stephen Harper's comments on missing, murdered aboriginal women show 'lack of respect'" she writes: The Indian Act. The Indian Residential School. Child Welfare. Theft of land. Theft of children. Theft of identity. Theft of existence. Genocide by legislation,"
"This, coupled with deeply entrenched stereotypes, bears life and death consequences of violence, self violence, community violence, societal violence, and systemic violence."
"More than 1,200 human lives inexplicably gone, stolen. Children left motherless. Mothers left daughterless. And grandmas and aunties, gone."
Kappo continues, If someone grows up believing that others don't have rights, then they treat them as if they don't have rights? Yes, yes indeed. The Conservative government does not believe First Nation people have rights, and make their profound lack of respect painfully clear.
Indigenous Nationhood states, "The most disturbing of all reports is the 2013 report entitled Those Who Take Us Away: Abusive Policing and Failures in Protection of Indigenous Women and Girls in Northern British Colombia, prepared by Human Rights Watch. This report concluded that Indigenous women and girls are not only "under-protected" by the (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), but are, in fact, the objects of RCMP abuse. They highlighted the many allegations of RCMP officers sexually exploiting and abusing young Indigenous girls. There are reports of confinement, rape, and sexual assault on Indigenous girls, and some have led to lawsuits. They also reported on a class-action lawsuit against the RCMP by its own female officers - for sexual harassment and gender discrimination."
Yes, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are Canada's premiere police outfit - but under Stephen Harper, Canada's Conservative Party Prime Minister - the RCMP has reportedly been acting, and reacting, more like an army of thugs - as far as many indigenous people are concerned, an Opednews writer writes.
It's almost as if the RCMP and their big boss, Stephen Harper, have declared war on Canadian Indians. Although many Americans have a perception that Canada is made up primarily of a pristine wilderness, a few big cities like Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto, and a lot of fish and game to catch and shoot, to Canadian Indians, this is a place of hegemony and apartheid. It's not the great white north at all, but the great black north, with the Canadian tar sands making much of Alberta look lunar. And because of the Harper government and the RCMP's long litany of alleged assaults on First Nations women and girls, the Maple Leaf of the country's flag is not bright red, but a sinister black, as in black-hole onyx.
"The threat of domestic and random violence on one side, and mistreatment by RCMP officers on the other, leaves indigenous women in a constant state of insecurity," said Meghan Rhoad, women's rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. "Where can they turn for help when the police are known to be unresponsive and, in some cases, abusive." reads another article, "Canada: Abusive Policing, Neglect Along 'Highway of Tears'"
Interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch during summer of 2013 included 50 Indian women. The integrity of the RCMP was questioned with a plethora of allegations and condemnations by these Indian ladies about the way the RCMP conduct themselves. Human Rights Watch, a world-renowned advocacy group for human rights, undertook a tireless and thorough investigation before issuing its report. In addition, Human Rights Watch conducted an additional 37 interviews with families of murdered and missing women, indigenous leaders, community service providers, and other people who had interactions with the RCMP across 10 communities.
The Conservative Party government has rejected all calls for a national inquiry into murdered and missing aboriginal women. Harper and his political coterie claim that they prefer that this issue be addressed in other ways, namely va aboriginal justice programs and a national DNA missing person's index.
"In May, the RCMP issued a detailed statistical breakdown of 1,181 cases since 1980. The report said aboriginal women make up 4.3 per cent of the Canadian population, but account for 16 per cent of female homicides and 11.3 per cent of missing women," according to a post last August by Huff Post Politics.
"As the RCMP has said itself in its own study, the vast majority of these cases are addressed and are solved through police investigations, and we'll leave it in their hands," Harper said in the Huff Post Politics article.
"When told of the prime minister’s comments, Manitoba Minister of Family Services Kerri Irvin-Ross, went quiet on the phone and then said, 'There have been a number of people asking for a national inquiry. It’s a national issue - the loss of aboriginal girls and women in Canada - and we need to understand what’s happening,'" Huff Post Politics says.
When asked her if she was surprised or flummoxed by Harper’s comments, she said she was shocked, the article adds.
Having the RCMP conduct its own investigation into these heinous crimes is appalling. With Human Rights Watch alleging through innumerable accounts in their 2013 study that the RCMP has been tied to brutal savagery against First Nations women, an outside, independent, non-governmental team of investigators should be spearheading such an investigation, not the RCMP.
If the Conservative Party-led government is not a modern-day regime of corruption, cover ups, covert intrusions, and terror, then what is it? Is Canada a free society? Is Canada a good place to live, for its First Nations residents? What human rights do they have if their right to live isn't even respected? How can the Crown continue ignoring the fact that the Harper government is a horrid vampire to a cross-section of its people. And these are the people whose ancestors have been on Turtle Island the longest. They should be given the utmost respect, not this type of terror and hatred.
In office since Feb. 6, 2006, Stephen Harper's approval ratings are up while Justin Trudeau's Liberals are down, according to polls conducted in the fall. "The governing Conservative Party has taken a slim lead over the Liberals, according to a new poll that also found a “sizable” improvement in public sentiment toward Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The Abacus Data poll is the latest to find an increase in Conservative fortunes ahead of the looming federal election, scheduled for next October. Mr. Harper’s government has rolled out new announcements this fall ahead of next year’s anticipated balanced budget," according to The Globe and Mail.
Journalist Eric Granier writes in CNC News: A year ago, some observers were wondering when Prime Minister Stephen Harper would step down in order to avoid defeat in the next federal election. Now, pundits are debating whether the PM can win a record fourth election when Canadians are next called to the polls.
What has changed?
The fortunes of the Conservative Party have improved, as the Tories move into a close race with Justin Trudeau's Liberals after trailing by a significant margin for most of the last two years. Much of that rosier picture can be credited to an increase in Canadians' approval of Harper.
Granted, it is important to keep things in perspective. The Conservatives still sit behind the Liberals in most polls and are a great distance from where they need to be to win a majority government. Nevertheless, that is a far cry from where the party stood a year ago, when the Conservatives were in more danger of being overtaken by the third place New Democrats than they were a threat to the Liberal lead.
Recent polls have shown higher approval ratings for Harper than he has experienced at any point since Trudeau arrived on the scene in April 2013. December polls by Forum Research, EKOS Research, and Angus Reid Global all showed gains over where Harper stood in the spring of 2014, worth anywhere from two to 10 points, Garnier writes in his CBC opinion.
As for Canadian Indians, who make up 4.01 percent of the population, have a deep ambivalence, even a hatred, of Harper and his government. On a plethora of Facebook groups in Canada and the United States, virtually no rah-rah letters praising Harper and the Conservative appear. Virtually every posting is a condemnation. Every cartoon disparages Harper's environmental infractions and his washing-of-hands approach to dealing with the problem of more than 1,200 missing and/or murdered Indian women and girls.
Harper's a miserable and mean-spirited task-master who has even threatened to withhold food, water, or health care as a bullying tactic to force Canada's indigenous citizenry to fall into compliance with new government laws and policies.
In an Internet offering from late November by blogger Pamela Palmater{ Harper's implementation of the illegal C-27. Minister of Aboriginal Affairs Bernard Valcourt has threatened to cut off funds for food, water and health care if First Nations do not get in line and abide by this new legislation -- despite the fact that it was imposed without legal consultation and is now being legally challenged. How many First Nations children will have to die for Harper to sit down and work this out with First Nations?
Bill C-27 (formerly C-575), the First Nation Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA), is the classic deflection tactic by Harper's Conservatives to distract Canadians from the extreme poverty in many First Nations and Canada's role in maintaining those conditions. The solution to chronic underfunding of essential human services like water, food, and housing lay not in more legislation, but in addressing the problem: the underfunding. Presenting accountability legislation as the solution implies that First Nations are the cause of their own poverty -- a racist stereotype Harper's Conservatives use quite frequently to divide community members from their leaders and Canadians from First Nations.
Yes, Canadian Indians have a very different view of their country than the affluent hunters and fishermen from the United States, who make trips to the Great White North to be outdoors-men. Under Harper and the Conservative Party, it's a brutal and oppressive world to them. As indicted by Harper and his government's refusal to do anything to stop the murders, kidnappings, torture, and savagery of First Nations women and girls, it seems as if Evan Munday is fighting a battle with a bow and arrow and his adversary has machine guns, drones, and nuclear weapons.
I wonder if Harper has even bothered to open and view one of a sketching that Evan Monday drew. I wonder if he cares anything about this matter. It seems as if he could care less.
But Munday's work will not go unnoticed. I am sure there are many Internet and print magazines that will be overjoyed to publish his art. And the families of the missing and murdered First Nations women and girls, I'm sure, appreciate his hard labor as an artist.
It's an ugly job, but someone has to do it. Evan Munday, you're the man!