Those travelling to Ladysmith this weekend to celebrate the region’s German heritage at Oktoberfest will also be prompted to remember and reflect upon another aspect of Canadian history.
For the duration of the weekend, a collection of red dresses will be hanging on the grounds of St. John’s Lutheran Church as part of an installation set up to remind passersby of the thousands of Indigenous women and girls who are missing or have been murdered in Canada.
Jennifer Mielke, a member of the St. John’s Lutheran Church congregation, said she wanted to put up this display to spur people to consider their own relationship with Canada’s history of colonization and its ongoing impacts on Indigenous communities.
“It’s a small thing, and maybe it will do nothing for people, [ . . . ] but my hope is that maybe that will make people reflect upon that, or if they’re Christian, for example, maybe they’ll start to include these missing women and girls in their prayers, or maybe they’re going to go home and have a discussion with their family and friends, or maybe they’re going to take stronger action and put more pressure on the government,” Mielke said.
The display is being organized as a local iteration of the REDress Project, an installation first created by Métis artist Jaime Black in 2010 in which she hung hundreds of red dresses around the University of Winnipeg campus “to invoke a presence through the marking of absence,” Black wrote, explaining the project.
Since the project’s first installation, hundreds of red dresses have been hung in communities across Canada and the United States, each one a visual reminder of the disproportionate number of Indigenous women who have not returned home.
Indigenous women represent 10 per cent of missing women in Canada, while only five per cent of Canada’s total population self-identified as Indigenous on Canada’s 2021 census.
Estimates suggest that around 4,000 Indigenous women and girls and 600 Indigenous men and boys have gone missing or been murdered between over the past 50 years. In 2016, the Canadian government launched an inquiry into this endemic of violence against Indigenous women.
The inquiry’s final report called the systemic violence perpetrated against these women a “Canadian genocide.”
“But I don’t want to make it a political thing. I just want to make it this sort of individual, how do you feel as a person, what can you do, and what do you want to do?”
Mielke will be setting up a basket filled with red ribbons at the Oktoberfest breakfast on Saturday morning, inviting people to take one to the church around the corner from the festival’s headquarters at the Ladysmith community centre and tie it on a tree there.
Inside the church, she will have set up a series of four artworks by Indigenous artists that together are meant to guide viewers through reflection on the ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous women. These artworks were made available to Mielke through the Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church In Canada, which has a special committee dedicated to encouraging conversations about reconciliation across its congregations.
Mielke, who sits on that committee and is also on the Oktoberfest board of directors, decided to organize her red dress display to coincide with the festival weekend because of the greater visibility it would get.
“It’s actually probably a great time because we’re not celebrating any sort of colonial conquest, we’re just celebrating our heritage and where we came from,” she said.
“And it’s a great opportunity to educate people about, ‘Yeah okay, we’re here and we’re proud, but we also acknowledge that others have been displaced on the land that we celebrate.’”
Jim Goos has been a pastor at the church for four years. He said he read portions of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Report that details the history and legacy of the Indian Residential School System, and believes the act of hosting opportunities for reflection on this history is a small but important step in reconciling with Indigenous communities.
“I was shocked at how we have mistreated our people. So we should be doing . . . I mean I don’t know what the answers are, 100, 200 years later, how do you fix this? That’s beyond my area of expertise, but I think conversations need to happen, and this is one way we can have some conversations,” he said.
“I think we can be part of the solution, rather than assuming the government is going to do it all for us. I think the grassroots conversations, and the working together, will also go a long way. But just showing we recognize our Indigenous neighbours, care about them, want to talk with them and work with them, is a big step forward.”
