Stitching through Silence: Walking With Our Sisters, Honoring the Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada

Abstract

This article explores the complex relationship between processes of making, memory, healing, and social activism activated by Walking With Our Sisters, a large-scale commemorative installation intended to foster awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada.

Keywords:

• Walking With Our Sisters
• Missing and murdered Indigenous women
• vamps
• Indigenous rights
• Canada
• activism/craftivism

Acknowledgements

Walking With Our Sisters opened in Edmonton, at the Telus Centre Atrium, University of Alberta, October 2, 2013, and is scheduled to travel to more than 30 locations across Canada and the United States, over the next six years into 2019. See http://walkingwithoursisters.ca for tour details and information.

Notes

1. The findings were published in the report, Voices of Our Sisters in Spirit: A Report to Families and Communities, 2nd edition (NWAC, March 2009). Since the 2010 report was issued, the estimated number of missing and murdered Aboriginal women (expanded to reach back as far as 1961) has risen to 1181, a number which is likely to climb higher yet as more thorough investigations are undertaken.

2. A new statistic included in the RCMP's National Operational Overview on Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women of 2014 states that Aboriginal women represent only 4.3% of the total female population, yet 16% of all female homicide victims are Aboriginal. Further to this, it was reported by NWAC that while the overall crime solve rate for cases involving violence against women in Canada is 84%, the rate for cases involving Aboriginal women drops dramatically to only 53% (Native Women’s Association of Canada, Fact Sheet: Violence Against Aboriginal Women).

3. Scholars and artists over the past several decades have begun to refer to this type of socially and politically interested craft work as “Craftivism,” a term coined by Betsy Greer in 2003 to describe a broad range of contemporary practices of making explicitly aligned with political activism, predominantly since the 1960s. The values associated with craftivism have particular relevance to many Aboriginal artists in Canada whose works address social, political, and environmental issues facing Aboriginal peoples, including continued struggles over the right to sovereignty and self-determination and the lingering impacts of colonization. Art practice, in these instances, is often mobilized as a mode of reclaiming “voice” for Aboriginal peoples, as a strategy of resistance, and as a signifier of cultural resilience. See, for example, the exhibition “Decolonize Me” (Ottawa Art Gallery, September 23‒ November 20, 2011). For further reading on art and activism, see Kester (1998) and Cronin and Robertson (2011).

4. Smudging is a ceremony involving the burning of sage or other herbs, which is intended to cleanse negative feelings, energy, or spirits from spaces or people in order to facilitate the process of healing.

5. Claire Bishop (2004: 51–79), for example, critiques the ineffectiveness of many instances of art described as “relational” in this way, arguing that the communicative, participatory, and interactive nature of such projects should not be viewed as intrinsically political in and of themselves. Too often, they consist of “empty” or superficial interactions which have little impact beyond the bubble of art world/institutional space. WWOS, I argue, overcomes this issue by resonating outward into real-world contexts and activities.

6. It should be noted that since the time of writing this article WWOS and related initiatives have been highly instrumental in raising awareness for this important issue, resulting in the announcement in December 2015 of the official launch of a national inquiry into the missing and murdered Indigenous women by the Canadian government.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie G. Anderson

Stephanie G. Anderson is currently a PhD candidate in Art and Visual Culture at Western University, where she also completed her MA in Art History in 2012. She has held curatorial and research internships at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario and McIntosh Gallery in London, Ontario.

[email protected].