Tina Fontaine's body was discovered five years ago today. Here, five community members weigh in on everything that needs to change.
Since her death in the late summer of 2014, 15-year-old Tina Fontaine has become an emblem for the epidemic of violence that besets Indigenous girls and women in Canada.
In the case of First Nations girls and women, the notion of expendability often translates to sexual abuse and exploitation—an idea that’s reflected in TV and movies, too. In the late ’80s, McIvor challenged the inherent discrimination in the Indian Act, taking her case to the Supreme Court in British Columbia. She won—but rather than eliminate discrimination entirely, the Canadian government created a secondary class for women and their descendants, codifying their lesser-than status. Last year, the government finally passed Bill S-3, which would eliminate sex discrimination from the Act, but with one major catch: there’s no timeline for its implementation.
In 2007, The Caring Society sued the federal government for discriminating against Indigenous children by under-funding on-reserve services and support, from education to health care. In Manitoba, 15 percent of the population is Indigenous, yet at least 85 percent of the kids in care are First Nations. Tina Fontaine was one of those kids. In the summer of 2014, she was apprehended by Child and Family Services in Winnipeg.
The associated trauma isn’t past-tense but painfully present, too. These events have left their mark across generations in elevated rates of illness and disease, mental distress, depression, addictive behaviours, substance abuse and suicide. The good news: after a decade of resistance, the Canadian government recently agreed to increase funding for on-reserve child welfare services. That’s just the beginning, though; ultimately Blackstock hopes the Canadian government will grab a calculator and take the righting of its wrongs seriously.
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