More than 100 people – mostly women – marched from Victoria Quay yesterday, bringing attention to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis.
Organized by the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, president Judith Sayers spoke about recent high profile cases involving Nuu-chah-nulth women.
She said she’s been working closely with the family of Chantel Moore who was shot by a policeman in New Brunswick, and the family of Lisa Young, who went missing in Nanaimo almost two decages ago – two of many Nuu-chah-nulth women that people lit candles for yesterday afternoon.
“I’ve done so much work for the murder of Chantel Moore in New Brunswick and trying to support her mother out there. We still haven’t found justice and that’s really, really hard on people. There’s no closure. You just feel like something wrong happened and nobody cares,” she said.
Sayers said it’s been nearly three years since the release of the report examining missing and murdered women, and says it’s disheartening to see the lack of movement related to the calls for justice contained in the report.
According to the national inquiry, between 1980 and 2012 Aboriginal females accounted for 16 per cent of homicide victims, while representing four per cent of Canada’s female population.
Between 2001 and 2015 the rate of Indigenous women murdered was nearly six times that of the rest of the country’s female population, according to a Statistics Canada report.
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