Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Highway Of Tears

Somewhere between 18 and 48 aboriginal women have been murdered between 1969 and present while hitchhiking along the 500 mile stretch of British Columbia's Highway 16 between Prince Rupert and Prince George. This highway has earned the name, "Highway Of Tears". If these women were "white" something would have been done about it years ago. The fact that they are "marginalized" women has allowed the killings to continue. It is time to once again bring attention to this travesty and force the RCMP and the BC Government to take action!

Painting belonging to Hazelton Mayor Alice Maitland to honour a girl murdered on Hwy16 - shows ghosts of past victims trying to stop a young woman from hitchhiking!





8 comments:

  1. Don't really think it is safe for anybody to hitch hike, in this day and age.

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    1. No question George. It is a question of young girls, poverty and culture.

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  2. I question if you can actually propose these cases were "marginalized" when I do a Google search and it finds 25,400,000 results.

    Sounds to me like someone is paying attention and talking about it.

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    1. Not the cases Don, the women. If these had been the daughters of middle / upper class white families the RCMP would have been all over this killing spree decades ago. The unfortunate fact is that cases of missing or murdered poor aboriginal women are treated very differently than the cases of missing or murdered rich white women. In Canada this is a sad fact.

      A case in point is Robert Pickton who murdered 49 prostitutes between 1995 and 2010. mostly aboriginal women whose bodies he disposed of on his families pig farm near Vancouver, BC. Vancouver City Police had been given hints and clues about the goings-on on the pig farm for years before they started a serious investigation.

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    2. Well I hope Canada comes into the 21st century soon and stops treating these people in that way.

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  3. I agree with George. I wonder why they continue to hitchhike unless there is no other way to get around.

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    1. Many were young, poor women many of whom were traveling to medical appointments. It is a very isolated stretch of highway where a person could stop and pick up a hitchhiker and be back on the road without any chance of being seen. Many of the abductions / murders happened at night where headlights of approaching vehicles can be see for miles and there are very few residences.

      Efforts are being made to introduce a free bus / shuttle service on that highway. It would have to be free because of the poverty so prevalent in the scattered communities and villages.

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  4. Hi! I'm doing a project on the Highway of Tears, and I need to analyze a non-written source - I chose the first picture in this article, but I can't find where it came from originally. If you're still on here and happen to know where it came from (I know you wrote this seven years ago, so this could be a stretch), it would be great if you could just reply to this comment! Thanks!

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