The trial date for Robert Pickton, who was charged in December 2003 with 15 counts of murder in what is now the largest serial killer investigation in Canadian history, will not be set until at least December, CTV News reported this week. Of the total 22 bodies found on Pickton’s pig farm just east of Vancouver, as many as half are thought to be aboriginal women.
Pickton appeared in court on June 28, where the Canadian government and the defense agreed that a trial date should not be set until investigators have more time to analyze their findings. Pickton’s next court appearance is scheduled for December 20.
The Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), an aggregate of organizations representing First Nations and Métis women in Canada, estimates that 500 aboriginal women have gone missing over the past 30 years in Canada. Most are still unaccounted for.
"The current media focus is on the missing Vancouver women but there are missing Aboriginal women across Canada," writes Priscilla Campeau of Athabasca University in an article for the college’s women’s studies program. According to Campeau, dozens of unsolved cases involving missing or murdered aboriginal women are being investigated nationwide, and "countless" others are never investigated because the victims led transient lives.
Pickton’s upcoming trial will be highly scrutinized in light of recent revelations in the case of former British Columbia provincial court judge David Ramsay, who pled guilty last month to sexually abusing four aboriginal women, three of whom were minors. The girls had appeared before him in family court.
NWAC launched the Sisters in Spirit Campaign in March as part of its attempts to increase public awareness about the rate of racialized violence against aboriginal women. "We didn’t want to just look at domestic violence because it’s not just aboriginal men beating aboriginal women," said Sherry Lewis, executive director of NWAC. "There is racialized violence that’s going on at a far more horrific rate than a lot of the other violence."
The Mother of Red Nations Women’s Council has called for more media attention to missing Aboriginal women. Council Spokeswoman Leslie Spillett told the Oread Daily that all missing women deserve the kind of coverage and public concern afforded Dru Sjodin, a white university student who disappeared in North Dakota last November.
Lewis said that on the "Highway of Tears" between Prince Rupert and Prince George, five Aboriginal women went missing between 1988 and 1995 with little or no media attention, yet "one non-Aboriginal woman goes missing and all of a sudden there was a media frenzy. "
Amnesty International reports that police have sometimes responded with thorough investigations of missing persons reports, but that family members of missing aboriginal women are too often left in the dark about what, if anything, is being done to find them.
Despite this history of neglect, some positive steps are being taken to address violence against aboriginal women. Besides the Sisters in Spirit campaign, which receives Cnd $22,000 annually in government funding, NWAC is pursuing "a number of court challenges in the Canadian justice system with regard to the oppression of Aboriginal women," said Lewis. The Aboriginal Women’s Council of Saskatchewan is working with Child Find Saskatchewan, the Prince Albert City Police, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) on the launch of the Woman Find Project, which will create identification kits to be kept as part of a database intended to help police locate and identify missing women. And the Alberta RCMP recently announced a task force to investigate 83 cases of murdered and missing women dating back to 1982.
Government response has also been encouraging. In a May 21statement, Minister of State Jean Augustine confirmed a Cnd $20,000 grant to NWAC to develop a proposal for a project to document the circumstances around the disappearance of missing or murdered aboriginal women nationwide, and to create a national registry and toll-free hotline.
Amnesty International’s report, which documents a number of cases in detail and identifies the circumstances that put so many indigenous women at risk, is due out in August. Beverley Jacobs, author of the report, said it will give a "human face to the aboriginal women who are either still missing or who have been murdered."
Reform within the justice system is another important objective of the report.
The day Pickton’s trial date is set will be a "very significant day for women and for aboriginal women specifically," said NWAC President Kukdookaa Terri Brown. "After many years of lobbying, every level of government will finally be faced with the reality of the situation. "
