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The Montréal massacre 19 years later—
remembering is not enough
By Susie-Jane Miller
I am the work study student at UVic’s Equity and Human Rights Office. Over the past month and a half, I have been coordinating the organization of a commemorative event for the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. This day was initially declared in response to the 1989 massacre at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique when 14 women were brutally murdered solely because they studied in a male-dominated field. They transgressed gender barriers. I look around today, and I notice that although much has changed, still these invisible barriers exist.
Victoria is a city situated on unceded territory; this means there are no treaties. As I endeavour to plan a campus event focused around inclusion, I start to wonder what it actually means to be a visitor here. Although I self-identify as a woman, and a queer student, which leaves me left out of a lot of conversations and spaces, I notice the layers of privilege that have ensured my ability to attend university, my mobility and my financial security. I notice the generational gap between those of us who remember the massacre and those of us who do not. This personal connection to how it felt to be a woman in the wake of such an awful headline is something I do not have; I was three years old. So I struggle to make meaning of it.
I call myself a feminist. Like many feminists before me, I fight to tell people that the personal is political. Today, unequal gender relations persist in our community. Women at UVic still experience sexualized violence. Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes drastic cuts to funding for women’s groups and organizations. Racism, sexism and colonization intersect to create an absence of outrage in response to the disappearance of Indigenous women from the downtown east side of Vancouver. Feminism still carries a stigma. But it goes deeper than that. Those who are marginalized by race, class, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation, non-normative gender identity or other ‘difference’ face exponentially more invisible barriers.
The Montréal massacre cannot be viewed as an isolated incident from the past. We, as a society, raised the man responsible. With this day of Remembrance and Action, I want people to get angry. I want people to be indignant. I want people to act. To reframe the massacre as, not isolated, but a symptom of systemic injustice forces us to look at our own lives, and our own privilege. It is not good enough to remember—we must act.
Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Ring or the University of Victoria.
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