In the National Post, Chris Selley points out some odd blindspots in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls:
“The violence the National Inquiry heard amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples, including First Nations, Inuit and Métis, which especially targets women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people,” the report declares. Among the first headlines was one noting that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “avoided” using the G-word in his remarks on its findings, settling for “shameful” and “unacceptable.”
The inquiry’s legal analysis concedes it is a novel deployment of the term. It seems far more comfortable alleging a historical genocide against “Indigenous Peoples” that involved specific targeting of women — for example through forced sterilization, which is acknowledged as a genocidal technique in the 1948 UN convention — than it does a genocide against Indigenous women and girls specifically. But the insistence upon the term speaks volumes about this peculiar inquiry’s tortured birth, and about some of its more perplexing recommendations.
Indigenous women have certainly been targets for violence and discrimination in particular ways throughout Canada’s history. Today they suffer disproportionately from violent crime, relative to Indigenous men, in a way that non-Indigenous women do not. The rate of self-reported sexual assault among Indigenous women in the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) was more than triple that of non-Indigenous women. An astonishing 61 per cent of Indigenous women aged 15-25 reported violent victimization in the previous 12 months — nearly six times the rate for Indigenous men the same age.
But if Indigenous victims of violence even today can be said to be casualties of colonialist genocide, then the subset who are by far the most “especially targeted” — which is to say dead — are men. Between 2014 and 2017, Statistics Canada reports there were 139 Indigenous female homicide victims, and 428 Indigenous male victims — three times as many. (Similarly, non-Indigenous men were murdered two-and-a-half times more often than non-Indigenous women.)
[…]
But the obsession with half the Indigenous population leads to some bewildering recommendations, especially on the justice file. On the one hand the report inveighs against mandatory minimum sentences as a cause of Indigenous overrepresentation in the prison system, and calls for more robust applications of Gladue principles for all Indigenous offenders, which is to say more alternatives to incarceration; on the other hand it supports legislation that would require judges to punish violent offences more harshly if the victim is an Indigenous woman, and to automatically classify homicides occurring after “a pattern of intimate partner violence and abuse” as first-degree murder. This would almost certainly have the effect of increasing the incarceration rates of Indigenous men and women alike.
