Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

by Carol Muree Martin, Harsha Walia

On April 3, 2019, The Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre (DEWC) released Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside based on the lived experience, leadership, and expertise of Indigenous survivors. This comprehensive report is the culmination of a participatory process with 113 Indigenous women and 15 non-Indigenous women regarding the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Violence against Indigenous women, girls, trans and two-spirit people is one of the most pressing human rights issue in Canada today. We know that the over-representation in statistics on homicides, poverty, homelessness, child apprehensions, police street checks, incarceration, and overdose fatalities is not a coincidence; it is part of an infrastructure of gendered colonial violence. Colonial state practices target women for removal from Indigenous lands, tear children from their families, enforce impoverishment, and manufacture the conditions for dehumanization.

Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is an extraordinary report with Indigenous women survivors at the center; rather than as a secondary reference. Indigenous women in the Downtown Eastside (DTES)—a neighbourhood known as ground zero for violence against Indigenous women—are not silent victims, statistics, or stereotypes. This unprecedented work shares their powerful first-hand realities of violence, residential schools, colonization, land, resource extraction, family trauma, poverty, labour, housing, child welfare, being two-spirit, police, prisons, legal system, opioid crisis, healthcare, and more.

Authored by Carol Muree Martin (Nisga’a and Gitanyow) and Harsha Walia with 128 collaborators, the compelling stories, rigorous research, and holistic recommendations within the 220-page report drastically and urgently shifts the lens from pathologizing poverty towards amplifying resistance to and healing from all forms of gendered colonial violence. We are honoured and thrilled to share the tenacity, brilliance, and warrior women spirit of Red Women Rising.

216 pages, ebook

Published April 3, 2019

Reviews

[Leah Horlick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Canada commits genocide against Indigenous peoples and Indigenous women. Read this report and the MMIWG report.

http://dewc.ca/wp-content/uploads/201...

[Trisha Roberson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Must-know Vancouver specific information on the missing and murdered indigenous women and the conditions of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The stories and statistics support each other, including personal loss of sisters, cousins, friends, fear of police, lack of adequate housing options that are safe for women, etc. This is much needed education for vancouverites.