The streets of Prince Albert were filled today with the memories of Aboriginal men and women who have been murdered or gone missing.
Waving signs and holding banners, a few hundred people marched from city hall to the Prince Albert Grand Council to remember their loved ones.
Josephine Wichihin of Sturgeon Lake says she knows the pain of losing a loved one firsthand:
“I did have a niece who was missing as well for years, and another one in the last five years there was one missing. So this is why I’m doing this.”
Ivy Kennedy is an outreach worker from Regina.
The founder of the Women of the Dawn advocacy organization, Kennedy says there are way too many people out there who don’t know what happened to their daughter, sister or mother:
“I believe the community as a whole needs to keep addressing these issues.”
She adds there is no closure for many mothers searching for their missing daughters.
Meantime, Shirley Henderson of the PAGC Women’s Commission says she hopes all women in the north realize that any level of violence shouldn’t be tolerated and there are other people out there willing to help.
She feels First Nations women have made great strides in recent years, particularly when it comes to getting elected politically.
However, she says there is still a lot of work to be done:
“There are more and more becoming chiefs and councillors from what there used to be, but we still have a long way to go. We still have a lot of struggling to do, but more and more females are getting involved in politics and the workforce.”
The PAGC has a full-time member devoted to addressing family violence within the grand council’s home communities.