Students in a recent GRSJ class were tasked with writing letters to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, drawing together new knowledge from their Gender, Race, Sex and Power course, critical thinking skills, awareness of current events and individual advocacy.
Below is a small sampling of their letters that were sent to the Prime Minister’s office (names on the letters have been removed).
3 Letters Sent to PM Harper
“The students did the letter writing to Harper in class for 15 minutes,” said GRSJ Associate Professor Dr. Lenora Angeles. “In that brief period, students were able to apply their intersectional analysis skills through their strong voices and compelling arguments in more than 30 letters sent to the Prime Minister. Through the exercise GRSJ students understand that what they are learning in class has real-world implications, particularly in discovering their power to affect change.”
The exercise was Application of Gender Thinking & Intersectional Analysis. Dr. Angeles asked that students ‘Help PM Harper Hone His Intersectional Analytical Skills, writing a 150-word letter to the Prime Minister (without using the words intersectionality or intersectional analysis) showing him how he could view the Tina Fontaine death differently’. The background given to them by Dr. Angeles was:
Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old aboriginal girl from the Sagkeeng First Nation just north of Winnipeg, was found a in a bag in Winnipeg’s Red River. She was in government custody at the time of her death. There are more than a thousand missing or murdered aboriginal women in Canada. The average homicide rate for aboriginal people is seven times the Canadian average. Aboriginal people are reportedly twice as likely as their national counterparts to be victim of violent crime and more than twice as likely to be subjects of sexual assault. PM Stephen Harper said, “It’s very clear that there has been very fulsome study of this particular … of these particular things. They’re not all one phenomenon. We should not view this as a sociological phenomenon. We should view it as crime.” Harper extended his sympathies to Fontaine’s family but reiterated no inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women would be called. “The RCMP has said itself in its study, the vast majority of these cases are addressed, and they’re solved through police investigations,” said Harper. “We’ll leave it in their hands.”
