By Libby Brooks, The Guardian
“'Remember my face,' Sii-am Hamilton told the crowd gathered on Finnieston Street near the high fencing that surrounds the Cop26 summit on Tuesday morning. 'Remember because it’s not if, it’s when you will go missing, if you are involved in land rights.'
The rally for murdered and missing indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people heard a painful litany of lost loved ones from witnesses from Alaska to the Amazon, and the legacy of their absence for families and communities.
'Say their names,' said Delee Nikal, a Wet’suwet’en activist. 'Do not forgot our sisters who have been stolen.' Like her fellow speakers, she was explicit: 'The femicide is directly linked to the ecocide … there needs to be more awareness that these extractive industries, all that is affecting our climate and destroying our territories, is intertwined with violence against our women and girls.'
In Canada, Indigenous women and girls are targeted for violence more than any other group, and are 12 times more likely to go missing or be killed. In the US, the justice department found that Native American women faced murder rates more than 10 times the national average.
But this abuse does not happen free of context: in 2019, Canada’s national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls accepted the link between 'boomtown' and 'man camp' environments that emerged around resource extraction projects and violence against Indigenous women and girls, as well as increased sex industry activities in those areas."
