Brandi: A personal mission to report on MMIWG
Welcome to Signal for Help, a special podcast series from the Canadian Women’s Foundation and award-winning women journalists, Media Girlfriends.
We know that gender-based violence is a problem, and we want to support survivors in our lives, but there’s a lot of stigma and silence around gender-based violence in our society: too many people who experience abuse are shamed, silenced, and stigmatized, and too many people don’t feel confident and competent in supporting them.
Featuring interviews with survivors and experts, we’ll explore how everyday people can better support survivors of gender-based violence.
This podcast includes stories of gender-based violence. Please listen with care.
Listen. Stay open without judgment or advice. Focus on what they need.
These are just a few ways we can better support survivors, as we learn this week from Brandi Morin, a Cree/Iroquois/French award-winning journalist and bestselling author from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta.
Brandi speaks from first-hand experience as a survivor of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) crisis. As a pre-teen, she was sexually assaulted and held for a week by a group of unknown men. She later recounted her experience to a counselor at her group home only to be met with blame.
Her experience propelled her into a life of writing, bearing witness to others who have suffered trauma. Today, she specializes in sharing Indigenous stories, including her own in her memoir, Our Voice of Fire: A Memoir of a Warrior Rising.
Brandi’s story reminds us how important it is to respond well to disclosures of abuse — so we can avoid more harm and help survivors heal.
Transcript available here: https://canadianwomen.org/blog/new-po...