Say her name. Say their names

for me,
hair over my ears
= too long!!

My hair is eight weeks past its last cut. It is wild and bushy, and I am the only one who cares. I can do what I like with the hair on my head.

On Saturday, I attended a rally in support of the WOMAN * LIFE * FREEDOM movement in Iran that marked the one-year anniversary of the death-in-police-custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested by that country’s morality police for allegedly not covering her hair appropriately.

At the rally, the local Iranian community leader made a statement and closed by asking us to “say her name”, so we replied, three times, chanting her name MAHSA AMINI. It was a powerful way to pay tribute to this woman, silenced by forces that seek to restrict and restrain women’s freedoms in the 21st century.

Say her name

The first time I was in a crowd rallying in support of a missing female was in the early 1980s, in Edmonton. Six-year-old Tania Marie Murrell had been abducted, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.

We said her name

There are so many, too many, women, missing and murdered, whose names we must remember, whose names we must say as a way of keeping their spirit alive and their cases open.

In Manitoba, every day, we say the names of Morgan Harrris, age 39, and Marcedes Myran, age 26, and Mashkode Bizhiki'ikwe (Buffalo Woman), believed to have been in her 20s, and Tanya Nepinak, age 31, and there are more, so many more, too many more.

Say their names

In Canada, on December 6, we remember the 14 young women killed at Polytechnique Montréal. We say their names: Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, and Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz.

Say their names

Say the names of all these women killed in this world where safety does not exist for women. These women named above (only a tiny fraction of the women who die at the hands of gender-based violence every day, somewhere) are from different communities across Canada and around the world. What connects them is why they died: They were, simply, women. Living female, in a world where that is, too often, a liability for their own safety. 

Say their names

None of us is safe, until we are all safe. 

May that day come in my lifetime. 

#Woman Life Freedom

#Missing Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

#Search the landfill

#White Ribbon Campaign

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.