Open Racism Underpins Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson’s Bid For Reelection
The systemic oppression of Indigenous people at the hands of Canada’s institutional racism and colonialism is well documented, and not disputed by any rational person: the Indian Act, the reservation system, unsafe drinking water, disenfranchisement, broken treaties, police violence, over-incarceration, generations of abuses in residential schools, discriminatory treatment accessing healthcare, food poverty, malnourishment, substance abuse, youth suicide epidemics, lack of educational and employment opportunities.
All thoroughly documented, all available at your fingertips with the most cursory search. Taken as a whole, all amounting to inter-generational genocide.
And that’s not even counting the separate and continuing slow motion genocide of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. An unremitting orgy of violence against women at the hands of men, and subsequently swept aside due to the racist and misogynistic inaction of Canada’s founded-in-colonialism policing, judicial, and political systems.
At least three Indigenous women from Manitoba were victims of an alleged serial killer with a history of violence against intimate partners. The remains of one woman, Rebecca Contois, were found in a Winnipeg dumpster. The remains of two other women, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, are, according to Winnipeg Police, buried in a Winnipeg landfill.
For a year now, Indigenous activists alongside regular, non-racist Manitobans have been petitioning the provincial government to mount a search for the remains of Harris and Myran.
And at every step, the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Heather Stefanson has stonewalled them, refusing to spend a penny, estimating that the search would cost $184 million ($136 million US) and ostensibly place the health of searchers at risk.
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