Every December 6th hundreds of vigils are held across the land now known as Canada for the 14 white women killed in “The Montreal Massacre”. Many people have pointed out that women from many different groups (Aboriginal, Of Colour, Trans, Disabled, Sexworker…) have been excluded and forgotten during the December 6th vigil. The December 6th vigil is supposed to be about stopping violence against women and honouring women who have experienced violence. Why exclude certain women?
Sadly, this year, 2013, twenty-four years after the killing and the first vigil, the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is hosting a vigil which openly excludes Transgender women.
For the last three years I have brought attention to the problem of exclusion during December 6th (see links below the poem). This year I have named the week Remembering All Women on December 6th.
An open letter from Trans woman Cindy Bourgeois to the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter will be published this coming Wednesday on blackcoffeepoet.com. On Friday December 6th, poet Whitney French reads a poem by Aboriginal poet Connie Fife called Resistance.
We start the week of remembrance with a poem by Mohawk poet Janet Marie Rogers…
Move A Mountain (Walk A Mile In Her Shoes)
By Janet Marie Rogers
We want more
and we want it now
We want it to stop
and we want it to stop now
lies are violence
stop telling lies
and holding back
facts
there is only truth
and you know this
we know this
we feel it
truth is a choice
so choose it
it will set you
free
freedom
is worth it
We are survivors
with many scars
lined along body territories
brought together making
road maps looking like turtle’s back
this land mass
our home, where sisters
go missing, we miss them
this physical place so disconnected
we hear them call to us
they keep calling to us
Come back Sisters
to the teepees and lodges
Come back Aunties
to the bighouses and wigwams
Come back Grannies
to the forest deep lean-tos
Come back Clan-Mothers
more than ever, we need you
Do not walk softly
instead let your steps resound
on solid ground, travelling down into
earth where my grandmother
sleeps and yours does too.
We knock on her door and say
show us the way
teach us, the words
feed us knowledge and
reconnect us to earth
Criminalized catastrophes
make headlines every time
The time it takes to keep
us safe takes up so much.
Hours better spent collecting
beautiful lessons and blurring
the lines between us until
we begin to move together
venturing outward under
magical moonlight without
worry of darkness or danger.
Running in celebration through
light filled fields
this need for protection
produces so much distraction
makes my head, and body
ache with exhaustion.
Stay calm reclaim your place
If we can really walk in her shoes
we wouldn’t be walking at all
but running for our lives
running with the wolves
We stand and watch
digital clocks rollover
into another year
without resolution or solution.
We see Elders mimic
Creator in folded-armed stances
They ask
“you don’t know war is wrong yet”
“You haven’t stopped the violence”?
Simple teachings are within reaching
we take it one step to the next
we make it our business
to correct this
we expand our minds
to the endless possibilities.
It looks like razor sharp wit
and feels like fire flares
sounds like heart beats on the ground
so you better walk loud
because.
there is nothing more powerful
than a woman naked
standing in nothing
but her intoxicating beauty
her gorgeous forthrightness
her strength to protect those
she loves.
No weapon can penetrate this.
Action.
Our survival is a political
action
we walk
with intention
our legacy
is us, living
as examples
agents of change
moving in unison.
It is time it is time
To move, move
move the mountain.
Janet is a Mohawk/Tuscarora writer from the Six Nations band in southern Ontario. She was born in Vancouver British Columbia and has been living on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people (Victoria, British Columbia) since 1994. Janet works in the genres of poetry, short fiction, spoken word performance poetry, video-poetry and recorded poems with music and script writing.
Read an interview with Janet Marie Rogers here.
Watch a video of Janet reading poetry here.
Please SHARE (on Face Book) and Tweet this post, and Comment (below).
To learn more about December 6th vigils and their exclusionary practices click on the links below:
Challenging The Whiteness of the December 6th Vigil
To me, the Vigil is as meant to be – for these fourteen women and as such it embodies all women and all people and hopes for an end to violence.
No, katy, with all respect, it does not embody all women. If it truly did, we’d also see those who attend the dec 6th vigil attend, support, and promote, as a matter of course, other vigils, specifically vigils for women of colour, sex workers, marginalised women. As it stands, those 14 women are re-victimised, by being post-humously appropriated as representatives of, just for one example, the 26 (known, and how many more?) victims of Robert Pickton. The latter were as much women as the former. They too are re-victimised as are their families and communities re-traumatised, when you and others tell these people that someone else ‘stands for’ them, that honouring someone else is the best they can hope we will do for their memories, for their loss, for their responsible call for justice.
The choice of those 14 women to ‘stand for’ (or, to use your bitterly appropriate term ’em-body’) all women may resonate for you. But it does not do so universally.
To put it another way, would you accept it, were Canada to adopt the celebration of, say, Martin Luther King Day, and then declare that, because we celebrate MLK, Christmas is no longer a holiday, because MLK stands for christmas, and now embodies Christmas.
Do you see it now?
All respect.
Prairiepoems,
Thanks so much for your response to Katy mcCuish’s comment!
Peace, Prayers, Poetry,
Jorge Antonio Vallejos
Black Coffee Poet