What's the issue with canada and indigenous women going missing? It is legit or just smoke and mirrors? Asking from an American.
Way more Native men go missing, and it's oddly under-reported by media, reserves, politicians, etc. It's sort of like someone will occasionally post various snippets from media that discuss how women are most affected by some issue, but categorically admits somewhere that men are definitely the most affected. Like that UK newspaper that had the graphic in a piece on living rough that showed 4 stick figures, 1 female, and the caption "About 25% of the homeless are women", as though women's homelessness is clearly the only reason to tackle homelessness, and not because I want to keep street-shitting drug addicts from shooting up on my porch, and trying to steal cigarette butts from the ashtrays on my porch.
It's definitely a thing, but it's also a case of it being overwhelmingly a case of Native on Native crime so it's one of those subjects here where people kind of make it a cause, but also don't do too much about it head on.
The only exception I'm aware of is a string of missing women reports that follows one of the pipeline corridors, back in the 80's, and the victims were all lot lizards, some Native, some not.
Kind of.
The thing is that so much of this stuff takes place on the reserves, which are notoriously corrupt despite all the taxpayer money that the government funnels over to them. In a certain sense these places are autonomous shitholes; much like the black on black crime example: if the cops do more to stop this stuff they'll get bitched at, if they don't do more then they'll get bitched at. Not even trying to carry water for the cops here or anything, but I'm not sure what they're supposed to do considering how things are.
There's also the issue that all reserves are technically permitted their own "Reserve Police", but most don't, unless they can get extra money from the gov't to funnel into the pockets of family members. The RCMP are only on reserves if they're specifically called, AFAIK.
It's a bit of both. There is definitely an issue with brutality against indigenous people by non indigenous people simply because they don't like "natives." A lot of it stems from the incorrect belief that indigenous people get a ton of benefits white people don't, which isn't actually the case.
It also stems from how public education doesn't teach a whole lot about how the government fairly recently treated indigenous people, so a lot of Canadians don't actually comprehend the deeper issues going on behind the stereotypical view of "natives are drunk and violent."
However like the usa, there's a lot of people that take a few intro courses on the history and social justice issues surrounding the brutality and inequality and focus all the blame on cops and the evil white politicians. It's unfortunate because while they think they'll helping by white knighting indigenous people, they're ignoring very real issues within the aboriginal-canadian population. So much so that you're now racist for pointing out that issues lie within their community, as well as outside of it.
So it's like the usa in the way that black people are actually discriminated against, but Americans like to blow past black on black crime and focus on only one aspect of the issue instead of the whole picture.
I find it a pity that a lot of rhetoric is spouted by pseudointellectuals who think that their sociology 101 course in college makes them experts, and then spout off their limited knowledge to the even less educated.
Meanwhile those that dedicate their life to researching the whole picture and come at the issue with a multifaceted approach are deemed as bigots.
I'm not aboriginal myself and I don't have enough knowledge to speak on it deeply but I do know l that every aboriginal person I know from Canada will say that white on native crime is an issue, but express disappointment in how native on native crime is brushed under the rug as if it doesn't exist
As badly as the Natives were treated, they DO get a fuckton of gibs. There's tons of reserves that get lease-right money from energy companies, and I know of several reserves that have 6 figure payouts for members that turn 18, along with a house, and the money is pissed away on partying. When the money is gone, the welfare and rotating baby-daddy circus begins. There's several reserves that have tried to create business opportunities (I'm thinking Goodfish) that then complained that the gov't "poisoned our water!", when the reality is that the industrial laundry services they built and run dump untreated waste water into the lake that provides their drinking water. That story was all over the news for a couple years, and it didn't mention the industrial laundry effluent in any of the major media pieces, that came out quietly, much later.
You get a double post, because of the massive topic change -

What the fuck is this retardation.