West Hill joins the REDress Project

The REDress Project, an installation art piece by Jaime Black, a Winnipeg Metis artist, was added to today in Scarborough. There, members of West Hill hung red dresses along Kingston Road and Orchard Park Boulevard. It was a dramatic sight. 

Jaime's work was originally developed in 2012, but this year she decided it needed to be expanded. Each red dress is hung as a remember, a tangible symbol of an aboriginal sister who has been murdered or remains missing. In the past three decades, twelve hundred women have gone missing or been killed yet there has, to date, been no official investigation in to the issue. 

The Native Women's Association of Canada's Fact Sheet on Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women shares some of the grim reality. 

• between 2000 and 2008, Aboriginal women and girls represented approximately 10% of all female homicides in Canada. However, Aboriginal women make up only 3% of the female population
• the vast majority of women in NWAC’s database (88%) were mothers; NWAC estimates that more than 440 children have been impacted by the disappearance or murder of their mother.
• 70% of the women and girls disappeared from an urban area and 60% were found murdered in an urban area; only a small number of cases occurred on-reserve (7% of missing cases and 13% of murder cases)
• nearly half of murder cases in NWAC’s database remain unsolved
• aboriginal women are almost three times more likely to be killed by a stranger than non-Aboriginal women are

Find out more about Jaime's REDress project and share the word. Our sisters need our voices and our passion.