Canada has failed to address violence against Indigenous women and girls five years after it was declared a national tragedy and a genocide in a report, a First Nations chief said Monday.
Ottawa had accepted all 231 recommendations outlined in the 2019 report by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls aimed at improving security, justice, health and culture for Canada’s Indigenous people.
But so far only two of these have been fully implemented, according to the Assembly of First Nations (AFN).
“It is difficult when you see results like these today,” AFN National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak told a news conference, with the majority of the calls for justice “showing minimal to no progress.”
“This failure is not acceptable to our people. I hope it is not acceptable to other Canadians either,” she said, urging “more political will” and for all Canadians to “stand with us.”
Manitoba Chief Sheldon Kent went further, blaming “racism” for the slow progress. “We need policy change, (but also) we need a change in peoples’ hearts.”
Speaking to reporters in Ottawa, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree said implementing the recommendations will require “a generational effort. It’s not going to happen overnight.”
“Ultimately, I do fundamentally believe that this crisis can be brought to an end, but it will take the concentrated efforts of all levels of government and civil society,” he said, adding that implementation of some of the report’s recommendations will require “systemic changes.”
Anandasangaree assessed that 107 of the recommendations under federal purview have been “advanced,” and 53 others have been “broadly advanced.”
In some cases, he said Ottawa faces “layers of complex institutional resistance to change.”
While others involve practical issues like getting construction materials to the far north to build housing in remote villages.
The national inquiry identified at least 1,200 Indigenous women who were killed or went missing between 1980 and 2012, and concluded that this amounted to genocide.
The commissioners found that Indigenous women were 12 times more likely to experience violence and seven times more likely to be killed than other women in Canada.
They linked the deaths to endemic poverty, racism, sexism and other social ills traced back to failed attempts by early colonizers to force Indigenous people to integrate.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had pledged “transformative change” in response to the report.
Measures promised included increased spending on Indigenous culture and health, giving communities more control over social services, and the creation of a task force to investigate unsolved murders.
But Woodhouse Nepinak said that “the murders and the violence have not stopped.”
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