Organizers of an upcoming march are asking residents to take part in a display of red dresses to represent Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous women.
The red dresses will be displayed on Flin Flon’s Main Street next Friday, Feb. 12, to coincide with the Women’s Memorial March held that evening.
The Women’s Memorial March began in 1991 as a response to the murder of a Coast Salish woman in Vancouver. Since then, communities across the country have opted to host this annual march in honour of all aboriginal women who have been murdered or gone missing.
Flin Flon has been holding the march since 2014.
“It’s a really important issue that all of Canada needs to look at and be aware of,” says Colleen Arnold, director of the Women’s Resource Centre, one of several organizations putting together the march.
This year, organizers of the Flin Flon march are introducing the REDress project to the Women’s Memorial March, in order to bring further awareness to the issue of missing and murdered aboriginal women.
The REDress project is the brainchild of Métis multidisciplinary artist Jaime Black. She collects red dresses and displays them in public spaces to convey an artistic, social and political message.
“I hope to draw attention to the gendered and racialized nature of violent crimes against aboriginal women and to evoke a presence through the marking of absence,” writes Black on her website, Redressproject.org.
Flin Flon march organizers are asking for donations of red dresses, which will be hung up along Main Street. They are also inviting businesses and organizations on Main Street to display a red dress outside their business, and are asking community members to hang a red dress outside on the day of the march, or to wear a red dress in solidarity.
“The image itself will be powerful…to see the dresses just hanging there,” reads the press release for the initiative. “When you walk by them it will feel like you are walking by someone…but no one is in them. It will be a kind of visceral reminder of these women.”
The Flin Flon Women’s Memorial March will begin at Pioneer Square on Friday, Feb. 12 at 4:30; attendees will march to the Flin Flon Friendship Centre, where bannock will be served amid songs and speeches from local leaders.
Donations of red dresses can be dropped off at the Women’s Resource Centre until Feb. 11, or the centre can pick up dresses if needed.
