Demonstrators march in Downtown Eastside to honour women lost to violence and poverty

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — For the 30th year, thousands of people are marching through the Downtown Eastside to remember women who have lost their lives to violence.

Myrna Cranmer is one of the Women’s Memorial March organizers, and she says it’s been a traumatic year, with dozens of women dying in the area.

“This year, I know of 50 women that we have lost in the Downtown Eastside due to COVID, opioids, and just the violence of poverty. Fifty women, it’s just mind-blowing,” she says.


According to Cranmer, the march allows family and friends to mourn their loved ones and raises awareness about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

“We’re marching for these women and for all the women, of the unsolved murders, all the missing women, or the women that have died in the community. Because it seems this is the only way they are remembered,” she says. “February 14th becomes the day where the families and the community can grieve.”

A 2014 RCMP operational overview shows that police recorded 1,017 incidents of Indigenous female homicides from 1980 through 2012.

In 1992, Cheryl Ann Joe was murdered in Vancouver. The 26-year-old Indigenous mother of three went missing on January 20 of 1992.

Joe was one of many missing and murdered Indigenous women every year in North America.

Her mutilated body was discovered in a parking lot in East Vancouver.

On Feb. 14 of that year her mother, met with a group of people where Joe’s body was discovered marched in memory of her young daughter as well as other women and girls like her.

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Every year since her death, thousands of people across Canada and the United States meet to participate in marches on Valentine’s Day.

According to the Assembly of First Nations, Indigenous women make up 16 per cent of all female homicide victims.

The march started at 10:30 a.m. at Main and Hastings Streets and goes through to 4:00 p.m.

“People still don’t realize that Main in Hastings is going to be shut down for a couple hours, and that really bothers people, which is great because some of the people it bothers, they get it — and other people are angry that Aboriginal Indian women are taking up space again,” Cranmer adds.

“We take up the streets not in protest, but in memory.”

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