By Christine Bennett For Metro
April 16, 2014
Halifax community members gathered on Wednesday to weave a 10-foot dream catcher to honour missing and murdered aboriginal women.
The Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre on Gottingen Street hosted the event with support from the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
They’re making 824 small dream catchers to hang off the large one, each of those representing one of the aboriginal women currently missing in Canada.
“A dream catcher is to help you have good dreams and take the bad dreams away, but in this case, those women who are missing, their dreams are gone,” said Debbie Eisan, who works at the centre. “We want to make sure that their dreams are not going to be forgotten and their lives won’t be forgotten.”
The purple ribbon on these dream catchers represents the missing woman, and the black bead represents the mourning of that woman.
The bead usually goes in the middle, but this time it’s at the bottom because there’s nothing to celebrate, Eisan said.
This idea came after the death of Loretta Saunders, an Inuit woman who was murdered in February while she was studying at Saint Mary’s University and writing her thesis on missing and murdered aboriginal women.
Eisan is calling on the government to provide equal and fair treatment to aboriginal cases.
“I just want these cases to be treated with the same respect, importance, and dignity as they would any other missing and murdered woman,” she said.