Missing and Murdered Women in Canada

Reviewed by: Yesenny Fernandez

Review started: February 20, 2021

Review finished: February 20, 2021

Site Link: Community-Based Database of Missing and Murdered Women in Canada

Data and Sources

• Online database of digitized information on missing and murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Trans and Two-Spirits in Canada.
• Sources include interviews, a blog, and transcripts.
• Digital database of victims for the past 14 years,
• Tributes of victims’ interviews, sex workers project action collaboration, transcripts.
• Research Guides on the Black Women Oral History Project and African American Women
• Images of victims

Processes

• The project has a database of community discussions about moving beyond awareness raising to strategizing about how to end violence.
• A community list of victims’ names.
• Tribute to specific victims where the family of the victim collaborated.
• A blog with events and reports
• Disability justice in indigenous ceremony- Oral histories were transcribed and digitized

Presentation

• The community-Based Database of Missing and Murdered Women in Canada project presents information through interviews of victims and collaborators.
• List of victims’ names, year of incident, and from which group of Aboriginal people they belonged (if any).
• The site has a donate banner, a get involved banner, and a signup form on the sides of almost all the pages.
• There are links to their social media, such as a Facebook page (No More Silence) and a Twitter page (@NoM0reSilence)

Digital Tools Used to Build It

Web Hosting Provider: Fastly

Languages

English (primary language)

Review

The purpose of the No More Silence database is to document the details of each of the deaths of Indigenous Women, Girls, Trans, and Two-Spirits in Canada, covering the enormous information gap that exists with clear and shocking interviews of the lethal violence exercised against women. Starting with the database page, the reader is given the history of how the page was created and all the collaborators who helped to make it possible. The events that No More Silence hosted were possible thanks to “funds from the Community Knowledge Alliance of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.” The creators of this database saw it necessary to involve the communities instead of the government to honor the women and provide family members with a way to document their loved ones' passing. Unfortunately, in the second page of the site, most of the videos are private and do not allow the user to browse through them, all we know is that it was an event on Wednesday, July 20, 2011, at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto and the discussion was titled “Where to take our efforts to end the murders and disappearance of Indigenous women/Two-Spirit/Trans and a screening of the film: “Survival, Strength, Sisterhood: Power of Women in the Downtown Eastside.” At the end of the page, there are three videos focusing on community-based responses to violence, but the audio is incomprehensible.

The clean colors are helpful for the purpose of the content. Interestingly, when it comes to design at the top and bottom banners of most of the pages there are two hummingbirds which could symbolize healing but on the sides of these hummingbirds there is barbed wire; could this be to represent how the victims were sacrificed or to represent courage from the families of these victims coming together and not letting their women fall into oblivion?

The community lists page is easy to understand as there are four drop-down bottoms named after cities in Canada and each section has a list of the names, age, the location where the victim was found dead, and the date when it occurred. The team could have improved the list by sorting by dates and not by alphabetical order of names and I noticed how the user is not informed from what year they are collecting information on victims and that could have improved the site. Additionally, only in the “Newfoundland and Labrado” drop-down list, we can see the group of Aboriginal people the victim belonged to, but why not in the other ones? To keep the site consistent, it would have been good to keep the same order of components within the pages.

The tribute section gives us the story of three women who lost their lives, but their stories are told from the perspective of their family members and not the media manipulating the information. This page clearly points out the aim of the No More Silence database; they want family members to talk about how important these victims were to them. Moreover, what really called my attention was the images of the victims, and one might think that their privacy was violated but it is the family members who provided these photographs allowing the user to learn about them all the way from their childhood until the moment of their deaths. There are videos within the tributes where we learn more about the victims like in the case of Bella, where her sister, Melina talks about that moment being one of the worst ones of her life, and by listening to her we see the story in a much more transparent way because if it was the media telling us about it which we do have some hyperlinks in the same tribute page, perhaps we wouldn’t experience it the same way.

The smudge don’t judge page gives us the opportunity to hear the story through interviews from Two-Spirit, Trans, and Gender Non-Binary Indigenous who have survived violence. By listening to community members, we can sense their pain while they speak from being disproportionately affected by hate crimes and physical assaults. In addition, the disability page provides us with information on how the site collaborators also held zoom meetings to provide support for community members who experienced “physical, mobility, sensory (sight and hearing), intellectual, developmental, mental health, or trauma.” In addition, I personally feel this is a very strong page as it allows us to learn from stories with no edits and no made-up memories but real community members or victims’ families telling us their experiences. There are indeed many improvements that could be made to the database but many events such as the global pandemic have occurred, and this could perhaps be the reason for the site not being updated.