Hundreds of people gathered in downtown Vancouver Tuesday to honour the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, trans and two-spirit people at the 32nd annual Women’s Memorial March.

The march takes place every year on Feb. 14 to pay respects to those who have been lost to colonial violence and to call on elected officials to prevent further tragedy with meaningful action.

At the intersection of Main and Hastings streets, a sea of red-clad marchers, many holding signs with pictures of their lost loved ones, made their way through the Downtown Eastside, stopping at points where those missing and murdered were last seen or where their bodies were found.

“With over 5,000 women missing from upper Turtle Island, I don’t think we can wait any longer. We can’t wait any longer for the folks who can create change to come out here and be part of these movements,” March Committee member Grace Howse said. [...]

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There’s this tradition of wearing red underwear on New Year’s Eve. This year, let’s try something different...

This red dress thing is not my idea. It’s Jamie Black’s, the artist responsible for the REDress Project.

It’s highly probable that you don’t know the reason behind this project, because very little has been said. The origin is something terrible, and it is really a thing you can find in this Wikipedia article:

“The missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) epidemic affects Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States, including the First Nations, Inuit, Métis (FNIM), and Native American communities.“

For years, an alarming number of indigenous women have been disappearing at a rate around 10 times higher than the general disappearance rate, depending on the area. And we know this statistic solely because Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada finally decided to do something and look into this, resulting in this report, which reads:

“[...] between the years 1980 and 2012, Indigenous women and girls represented 16% of all female homicides in Canada, while constituting only 4% of the female population in Canada.”

There are some documentaries about this crisis worth watching here.

This is not a thing from the past.

It is happening now.

And the effort put into solving this targeted attacks is weak to say the least, especially in the US, where’s there is not even a reliable database. Even in Canada very little is being done (read this article), ignoring the results of their own report.

So, please, if you care, share.

For a better next year.