Missing: Tashina General

From a comment left @ UBUNTU. Please fwd and crosspost widely:

Hello.

I’m a member of that big Allied Media Conference community. I met some of you last year in Detroit.

Thank you for this post– no one else was talking about the victim as a mother, as a good student, or as a military vetran. Mainstream media also did not talk about the verbal abuse and degrading language those men were using.

I’m a Canadian woman, from Toronto, and I lived in downtown Detroit for a couple of years. The neighbourhood I lived in was mainly poor and black; the school I was attending was primarily rich and white.

There were many differences between the “Americas” I experienced inhabiting and travelling back and forth between those two places, but the crazy level of highly racialized sexual violence was a sort of golden thread, uniting these communities that are usually considered quite different.

Thank you for recognizing and talking about the hostile climate that hate speech creates.

Today I’m reaching out to everyone I can thing of to tell you all that Tashina General, a Mohawk woman from the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, has gone missing.

She is five months pregnant, and she has been missing for almost three weeks.

Tashina is the cousin of some family frineds of ours; they are frantic. Because she is a Native woman, there is not much press coverage of her disappearance.

There are over 500 missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada; the violence Native Canadian women face is connected to the violence indigenous women are facing in Guatemala and in El Salvador and along the US Mexico border in the Juarez region.

In your piece, you spoke about the “rapeability”, to use Andrea Smith’s word, of black women. Native American and First Nations women, too, are considered somehow especially or inherently “rapeable”.

We all and up frozen inside our own communites, or even limited to our own homes, or to a room in that home, and some of us at times go without any sort of home at all, trying to keep our back pack close to us, as it has now become our only safe space in the world. we need to reach out to each other.

The white women who go on to date or marry those young, privileged white men will likely rue the day they thought that somehow their men would hurt “that other sort” of woman and not them– the reality is that all of us are considered “rapeable”, and there is no “other sort” of woman.

Our lack of solidarity as women is killing us.

Please keep Tashina in your prayers, and if you’d like to know more about Tashina and the other missing women, please google NWAC, the Native Women’s Association of Canada.

Sasha