Remembering Vancouver's Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance

by Amber Dean

Between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, at least sixty-five women, many of them members of Indigenous communities, were found murdered or reported missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. In a work driven by the urgency of this ongoing crisis, which extends across the country, Amber Dean offers a timely, critical analysis of the public representations, memorials, and activist strategies that brought the story of Vancouver's disappeared women to the attention of a wider public. Remembering Vancouver's Disappeared Women traces "what lives on" from the violent loss of so many women from the same neighbourhood. Dean interrogates representations that aim to humanize the murdered or missing women, asking how these might inadvertently feed into the presumed dehumanization of sex work, Indigeneity, and living in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Taking inspiration from Indigenous women's research, activism, and art, she challenges readers to reckon with our collective implication in the ongoing violence of settler colonialism and to accept responsibility for addressing its countless injustices.

Genres: Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2016

About the author

Amber Dean became an Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies and Gender Studies at McMaster University in 2011. The bulk of her recent research develops a feminist, interdisciplinary approach to exploring the social and political implications of representations of murdered or missing Indigenous women in Canada. Her manuscript, Inheriting What Lives On From Vancouver’s Disappeared Women (currently under contract with the University of Toronto Press) is the first book-length scholarly examination of the representational practices and cultural productions that bring the story of the disappearances or murders of women from the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood in Vancouver to a wider public. The book examines a diverse array of cultural productions, including police posters, documentary film and photography on the Downtown Eastside, media representations and artists’ renderings of some of the missing women, memorials (both permanent and performance-based), selected media coverage of the Pickton trial, social justice activism, and self-representations by some of the women who have been disappeared (including poetry, journal entries and participation in activist work). The book explores the potential that these various cultural productions hold for provoking a much wider sense of implication in the disappearances or murders of the women in question, and in doing so it provides provocations for reconsidering how and why these events were possible in the first place.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth the read for the intro alone.

[Susan Hanson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keep in mind this is an academic writing and reads as such. That shouldn't scare you away, but rather prepare you. This is an important issue that all too often gets forgotten. It shouldn't.

[Zabrina Mecham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely not an easy read, although an important one. It took me a long time to get through this and will be keeping an eye out for similar topic matter that is an easier read and easier to retain.