Originating in 1992 in the Downtown Eastside following the murder of Cheryl Ann Joe, a local Indigenous woman,[1] the event began as a small memorial and has since grown into an annual march recognizing all MMIWG.
[3] Weeks later, on February 14, her mother, Linda Ann Joe, and family, along with others living in the area, gathered in the parking lot where Cheryl’s body was found to grieve.
[3] Each year, Vancouver organizers publish a list of names of women and girls who have been murdered or remain missing in the Downtown Eastside.
Many cities across Canada now stage similar events to honor and bring visibility to missing and murdered Indigenous women in their communities.
[1] Joe had planned to become a police officer to help protect the city’s vulnerable and would frequently encourage younger women in the sex trade to leave the street and improve their lives.
[2] As families and friends tried to draw attention to the matter, Philip Owen, the mayor of Vancouver from 1993 to 2002, refused to offer a reward[7] or further investigate the missing women, stating that he believed public funds should not be used to create a "location service for prostitutes.
"[2] Culhane states that authorities used categorizations of Indigenous women related to sex, drugs, crime, violence, murder, and disease as excuses to ignore and take little action in investigating the root of these disappearances.
[9] In her thesis, "You Will Be Punished: Media Depictions of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women", Caitlin Elliot observes a pattern where reporters used sensationalized and made a spectacle of the injustices occurring, with undue focus on crime while avoiding topics of sex and race prejudice and colonialism.
The “Skid Road Girl” was a trope that appeared in the media as the experiences of Indigenous women faced in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside became more publicly recognized.
According to Longstaffe, Vancouver journalists "combined postwar discourses about "skid road" with stereotypes about Indigenous women to create a specifically female version of this narrative.
Vancouver Sun Journalist Simma Holt used statements such as, "[She] was drunk, just another cut and bruised Indian girl, and nobody took much interest in the complaint" and "The way she died is typical and so common, society has accepted it just as it does minor traffic accidents."
In an attempt to bring awareness to the inaction of the police, the language used in these reports normalized the violence Indigenous women were experiencing and allowed the public to turn a blind eye to the matter.
[2]Some specific cases which illustrate the depth of the problem of violence against aboriginal women in Canada were highlighted in a report by Amnesty International in 2004.
[10] They include the murder of 19-year-old Helen Betty Osborne, who was killed November 12, 1971, after a night out with friends in The Pas, Manitoba, a town of 6,000 which was segregated between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.
An example of the perceived indifference to the disappearance of Indigenous women is seen in the case of Shirley Lonethunder, a Cree woman from the White Bear First Nations reserve in Saskatchewan who was last seen by family in December 1991.
In 1992, when the first Women's Memorial March took place and families were demanding thorough investigations into their missing loved ones, the Vancouver police refused to concede that there might be a serial killer preying on the Downtown East Side despite the frequent disappearances, mostly because no bodies had been found.
[12] Many workers and friends of Pickton's made reports to the police of suspicious behaviour, sightings of women's belongings on the farm, and even a woman's body spotted in the slaughterhouse.
Pickton often came to the Downtown East Side to dispose of waste and used the opportunity to offer women money or drugs to lure them into his car and take them to his farm.
Sherry Rail, who disappeared in 1984, was not reported missing until 1987 when a team was initiated by the RCMP to investigate unsolved cases of sex trade workers.
Failures surrounding incompetent criminal investigative work constituted by prejudice against sex trade workers and Indigenous women.
In the 20th century, this area was largely populated by loggers, miners, fishers, railway workers and other single male labourers who resided in cheap hotels and boarding rooms.
Due to categorizations of this area as working class, and dominantly masculine, the Downtown Eastside was deemed, as Longstaffe writes, a zone of "immorality and physical decay.
Longstaffe says,"Multiple factors, including the impacts of residential schools, colonial land and resource policies, technological developments, changes to subsistence and capitalist economies, and growing populations contributed to overcrowding, housing shortages, unemployment, poverty, welfare dependency, alcohol addiction, and poor health.
Before 1985 when the Indian Act was amended, thousands of women without legal status lost their band membership and their right to live on reserves, and were forced to move to city centres.