A crowd marched through Nanaimo streets to the beat of drums while thinking about missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit individuals.
The No More Stolen Sisters March took place on Friday, Feb. 14, from Diana Krall Plaza to Maffeo Sutton Park.
Indigenous women and girls are over-represented among Canada's murdered and missing women. An RCMP report in 2015 recorded that between 1980 to 2012, there were 1,181 unresolved murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. As a population, the rate of homicide is six times higher for Indigenous women than non-Indigenous women.
The annual No More Stolen Sisters March began in Vancouver in 1992 as a vigil for Cheryl Ann Joe and has since spread nationwide. The Nanaimo march was organized for the second year in a row by Leah Vaisanen, Indigenous students' representative with the Vancouver Island University Students' Union, who said it's a way to bring awareness and attention to the issue.
"It's a way for Nanaimo to … [come] together as a community to really use our voices loud to bring action, bring justice and really bring accountability," Vaisanen said. "I feel like our law enforcement needs to do better, our federal government needs to do better in funding for resources for Indigenous peoples and to hear our voices to get this going with the calls for justice."
Some of the attendees were marching in memory of those they personally lost, including Jalissa Moody and Francine Gascoyne, who were marching in honour of their great-grandmother Levina Moody, a member of the Nuxalk Nation who was murdered in 1969 in Williams Lake.
"The message we would like to bring to the public is we would like justice to be brought to the murder of Levina Moody, because now to this day … it's an unsolved murder and yet there's enough evidence," Gascoyne said. "The three men who have murdered her has passed on but we as a family would like justice and have them labelled as murderers for what they did."
