THUNDER BAY – The Ontario Native Womans Association (ONWA) held its Annual General Assembly (AGA) powwow to honour the families of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls on Sunday.
Cora McGuire-Cyrette, executive director, ONWA, says that it’s an opportunity to come together as a community to focus on healing and remember the legacy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
“And it really is about, as a community, coming together to really make a safe space for women to come together to heal,” she said. “And make it to be like a safe space for families, as well as honouring those that are no longer here.”
McGuire-Cyrette says that while it may be painful for organizers to hold events like this especially with personal experiences dealing with the trauma of losing family members, it's important to them to bring awareness education and healing to communities.
“So that our grandchildren’s grandchildren don't have to have this issue, like, how do we create a community that's safe for it to be an indigenous woman,” she said.
“And that's what that's what we're doing as a community, as an Indigenous community, we're coming together to create safety and we need our larger community, our larger non-Indigenous community, to come together with us, to create safe spaces, to create safety for indigenous women.”
In attendance of the event was Brampton Centre MPP Charmaine Williams, Associate Minister of Women's Social and Economic Opportunity of Ontario, who says that being invited to ONWA’s 51st AGA and Powwow has been an honour and a pleasure.
It's been such an eye-opening experience, we're talking about women in leadership, and women are the center of communities of Canada,” she said. “And so being able to come here and have us be together, it's such an empowering experience.”
Williams says that, in her role as Minister of Women's Social and Economic Opportunity of Ontario, the first thing for her to do is listen.
“My background in supportive services, social services, taught me to be a person here, to listen, and as a black woman I know that our situations can be very similar and I think we need to really look at some of the driving causes that have impacted women in Canada, especially our indigenous community,” she said.
“And my role is to look at how we can empower women, to be the driver of their economic future, how we can get women healthy so that they can get jobs and be able to take care of their family, those are some of the goals that I am here to listen and connect with organizations so we can create pathways to accomplish that.”
