Beyond Invisibility: A REDress Collaboration to Raise Awareness of the Crisis of Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women Natalie Marie Lesco St. Francis Xavier University, [email protected] ABSTRACT This article describes the impact of a case study of the REDress project on a university campus in Nova Scotia, Canada. The REDress project is a grassroots initiative that operates at the local level to empower Aboriginal women through an evocative art exhibit: the hanging of empty red dresses symbolizing missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and the emptiness of the societal response to the violence committed against them. Using a participatory-action research model (PAR), which guides the exploration of the kinds of ideas instilled within this community-based initiative, my research demonstrates the potential this project has to mobilize local Indigenous women’s perspectives and voices, in order to break the silence to which they are often subjected through structures of oppression. This process relies on the establishment of meaningful connections with members of the StFX Aboriginal Student’s Society and creating a transparent research process, while also encouraging action in the form of awareness building. The project makes a political statement that resists the ascribed invisibility of Aboriginal women by honouring the lives of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. As a community-based initiative, the REDress project demonstrates the beginnings of reconciliation by cultivating meaningful relationships that provide hope for the future. Keywords: reconciliation, indigenous, women, REDress ISSN 2369-8721 | The JUE Volume 8 Issue 2, 2018 68 of Aboriginal communities and their expulsion onto reserves, coupled with the denial of Aboriginal rights and equity within the Canadian justice system, has created socio- economic disadvantages for Aboriginal peoples. Poor infrastructure, the effects of intergenerational trauma such as violence in the family, and the breakdown of community structures on some reserves has pressured many Aboriginal people to leave their families and reserves in search of a better way to live issing and murdered. These are two (NWAC 2010). For women, this usually involves words that describe the moving to urban areas where there are multidimensional condition of violence M significant challenges in fighting stereotypes that Aboriginal women experience as a and finding work, making women more consequence of ongoing processes of susceptible to forces of exploitation, such as colonialism. Approximately 1,181 Aboriginal drug use and prostitution (Oppal 2012). It is women have been reported as either missing or through these types of activities that Aboriginal murdered between 1980 and 2012, and are women are framed as being at fault for their “three times more likely than non-Aboriginal own living conditions (poverty, addictions, women to be killed by a stranger” (NWAC 2015; abuse). As a result, until recently there has been RCMP 2014). Aboriginal women represent 16% little public or policing response to the crisis of of all female homicides that have occurred in missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Canada while making up only 4% of the national population (RCMP 2014). This disproportionate Current government efforts to mitigate the relationship is a consequence of the effects of colonialism are ineffective, as they are dehumanizing colonial processes of the drawn from preexisting policies which are Canadian state that have been occurring for extensions of colonial ideologies. This decades. paradoxical approach will not affect existing paternalistic attitudes or actions of indifference To be human, and yet socially constructed as towards Aboriginal women unless there is less than human, is a contradiction that has systemic change and reconciliation. It is from shaped much of what Aboriginal women within this marginal position that Aboriginal recognize as their identity within the confines of women have been constructed as vulnerable the Canadian state. This dehumanization, in and weak, strongly contrasting the traditional which women are framed as object rather than roles they previously occupied within many subject, is a reality that plagues many Aboriginal societies (RCAP 1996). Aboriginal women throughout the country (Archuleta 2006). There is a long history of In order to reclaim their voices, Aboriginal colonization in Canada, and its detrimental women have come together to combat the effects are still visible within our society today. gendered and racialized policies and systems The explicit attempt to strip Indigenous women that have rendered them invisible within the of their identity and destroy Aboriginal cultures Canadian state. An example of this is the in order for assimilation to take place has REDress project, a grassroots initiative that subordinated these women to the boundaries operates at the local level to empower of society. The ways in which Aboriginal women Aboriginal women through an evocative art are represented in our society today contribute exhibit: the hanging of empty red dresses. The to the ongoing exposure to violence in their placement of red dresses in public spaces lives. serves as a political statement against the invisibility of Aboriginal women and The present position, in which Aboriginal simultaneously honours the lives of those women live in marginal, racialized, gendered women who have gone missing or who have and vulnerable spaces, must be understood been murdered. As a community-based within its historical context. The displacement initiative, the REDress project, organized by The JUE Volume 8 Issue 2, 2018 69 both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students, and non-Indigenous students worked together created the space for the beginnings of to raise public awareness of the systemic reconciliation, cultivating dialogue and discrimination that Indigenous women face. In producing meaningful action oriented toward doing so, I determine the narrative the REDress collective awareness campaigns. project offers in response to the issue. The REDress Project The REDress project was created by Jamie Black, a Métis artist based in Winnipeg, in attempt to bring the crisis of missing and murdered Aboriginal women to the public’s attention. The initial aim of the project was to collect 600 red dresses that would not only reflect the staggeringly high rates of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, but that could also be used to create a display in the Winnipeg museum. Solo exhibitions have also been held at various universities and communities throughout Canada. Figure 1: Dresses hanging in Nicholson Hall, 2016 The importance of visual representation is (Source: Natalie Lesco) described by Black as “an aesthetic response to the more than 1000 Missing and Murdered Methodology Aboriginal Women in Canada” in which the aim The principal methodology used in this study is to “draw attention to the gendered and was participatory-action research (PAR), racialized nature of violence crimes against involving participant observation, ethnographic Aboriginal women and to evoke a presence fieldwork, interviews and a focus group. through the marking of absence” (Black 2014). It Information was collected according to is the continual negative representations of Geertz’ (1973) concept of thick description. By Aboriginal women through media portrayals compiling detailed observations, I described that Black describes as a major catalyst for the information as it happened as objectively as negligence towards the missing and murdered possible, uncovering underlying patterns that Aboriginal women crisis in Canada. For structure the event and the ways in which example, missing Indigenous women are often culture is symbolically expressed. presented to the public through posters using mug shots to identify potential victims. This As a component of my undergraduate approach criminalizes the women, thereby honours thesis research, the study and the restricting their public profile within boundaries project commenced in September 2015 and that ultimately disadvantage them (Pratt 2005). ended in May of 2016. The REDress project was By countering these destructive narratives with presented in four different locations on the St. the use of powerful symbolism—the colour red Francis Xavier University (StFX) campus in order encompassing ideas about “blood, sexual to attract the attention of students from various energy, and violence”—the REDress project academic backgrounds. StFX is a small seeks to return a sense of humanity back to the university of around 4000 students, located on victims (Marrouat 2011). Mi’kmaq territory in the small rural town of Antigonish, Nova Scotia. This independent project examines the ways in which Aboriginal women are both While the dresses were on display, I spent empowered and limited through localized much time monitoring the project with the grassroots social movements. By participating other members of the organizing committee, in the organization and production of a StFX using our meetings and general interactions as university-based REDress project (See Figure 1), a component of PAR. Importantly, this I documented and analyzed how Indigenous particular methodology involves the researcher The JUE Volume 8 Issue 2, 2018 70 creating and sustaining a critical awareness Six organizational meetings were held with research participants in order to attain a between January and March. These were more decolonized way of understanding both informal meetings used to structure