Red dresses will be hanging on Main Street once more in preparation for a memorial march on Wednesday evening.
This year’s Women’s Memorial March will be held on Feb. 14, starting at about 5:15 pm at Pioneer Square.
The march will head down Main Street and finish at the Flin Flon Aboriginal Friendship Centre, where a reception will be held with music, drumming and jingle dancers.
Women’s Resource Centre executive director and event organizer Colleen Arnold said the march was first held in Flin Flon four years ago.
“It’s to draw attention to the racialized nature of violent crime toward Aboriginal women,” she said.
Several red dresses will be displayed on hangers along the route. The red dresses serve as a visual metaphor for the growing number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada – estimated by RCMP at around 1,200 and growing since 1980.
“With the red dresses hanging there, it really gives you a visual. You’re walking by a woman who should be here with us and is not. As you march down the street, it really shows you the issue and the amount who have are missing or murdered.”
The dresses are part of a larger installation with the REDress Project, an ongoing art-based campaign to bring awareness to issues faced by Indigenous women and girls. The campaign began in 1992 after the brutal murder of Cheryl Anne Joe, a woman of Coast Salish ancestry, in Vancouver.
