A healing lodge for Indigenous women would be an important step – Toronto Star
June 11, 2019
Of all the shames described in last week’s report from the national inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, none is worse than the plight of Indigenous women in Canada’s prison system.
The headline numbers are bad enough: Indigenous women make up just 4 per cent of the female population, yet more than 40 per cent of the country’s female prison population are Indigenous.
And while crime rates have been falling nationally, along with the overall number of inmates, the situation has been getting steadily worse for Indigenous women. They are actually the fastest-growing group in the prison population, as has been documented over many years by Canada’s prison watchdog, the Correctional Investigator.
