Let’s illustrate our support for award-winning Indigenous writer and activist Dawn Walker (details below). The Saskatchewan Government is threatening Dawn with decades in prison for trying to protect herself and her child. She’s being punished for surviving by a system that over-charges her, just as it does so many other Indigenous people. It is imperative that our voices be heard and our faces be seen calling for the dropping of all charges.
Currently subject to brutal bail conditions in Treaty 6 Territories (in an area colonially known as Saskatchewan), Dawn is hooked up to an electronic monitoring device, and forcibly separated from her child. Dawn needs to be freed and charges dropped. Her situation reflects a systematic failure to support her when she was most in need. Dawn has not failed anyone; the system has failed her as it does so often with Indigenous women, women of colour and LGBTQIA2S+.
SEND A SELFIE OF SUPPORT
1. Take a selfie and send it to Women Who Choose to Live at tasc@web.ca if you are comfortable with us sharing your selfie on social media. Please include Drop the Charges and #StandWithDawn among your slogans.
2. Share the selfie on your own social media and encourage people to sign the petition (link below)
3. You can stay up to date with Dawn’s case at https://www.standwithdawn.com/ and donate to her legal fund at https://gofund.me/0a503c39
4. Please keep sharing our petition: https://www.change.org/p/free-wrongfully-jailed-indigenous-writer-domestic-violence-survivor-dawn-dumont-walker
5. Learn more and share these excellent articles:
https://rabble.ca/indigenous/nearly-half-of-all-canadian-women-experience-domestic-violence/
https://pamelacross.ca/no-other-choice/
The 2017 Human Rights Watch report, “Police Abuse of Indigenous Women in Saskatchewan and Failures to Protect Indigenous Women from Violence,” found that Indigenous women victims of violence (including domestic violence) and those at risk reported police insensitivity to their well-being, vulnerability, and cultural background. In addition, far too many Indigenous women survivors of male violence are prosecuted and incarcerated, as documented time and again, recently by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
A powerful statement from Iskwewuk E-wichiwitochik/Women Walking Together asks that “people pause to consider what would make someone as accomplished as an author of four novels, national humour-award-nominated writer, newspaper columnist, law school graduate, Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Executive Operating Officer, and loving mother and friend flee with her child to another country in the way she did…. The indisputably well-established lack of safety of Indigenous women in Canada, and a pattern of failure in police and other societal supports for them are part of the context in which all Indigenous women—including well educated, connected, and accomplished women like Dawn—have to make decisions when they don’t feel safe or know their children are not.”