Convoy through downtown Edmonton to mark year since MMIWG report released
A convoy from Edmonton's Borden Park to the Alberta Legislature will take place this morning to mark the one-year anniversary — and an absence of action since then — of a report that offered more than 200 recommendations relating to murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada.
"We're just going to shout it out, get it out there," Stephanie Harpe, an event organizer and who spoke as a witness to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, told CBC Radio's Edmonton AM on Wednesday.
"[People] can go to the national inquiry website, look at the 231 calls to action, see how you can implement that in your business, your life, our friends. That conversation — when we're not in the room — that's meaningful to us."
The inquiry delivered its final report June 3, 2019, concluding that decades of systemic racism and human-rights violations had contributed to the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of Indigenous women and girls.
The report said it constituted a genocide.
The federal government has postponed its long-awaited action plan because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The unveiling of the strategy was expected to coincide with the anniversary of the report.
Harpe's mother Ruby Ann MacDonald was murdered in Edmonton in 1999, a case that remains unsolved.
She is also a survivor of domestic abuse, a topic she has spoken on during a Ted Talk as well to 31 Indigenous communities last year.
The convoy will start in the parking lot at Borden Park Road and 78th street at about 11 a.m.
People are asked to remain in their vehicles, to set up in a drive-in theatre style before the convoy is escorted by event organizers through downtown Edmonton to the legislature grounds.
