Moose Hide campaign against abuse aims to change culture

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This article was published 16/09/2018 (2048 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PAUL Lacerte was hunting in northern B.C. when epiphany struck, as his daughter, Raven, dressed the moose they’d brought down.

“We’d harvested a moose, and I’m watching her, and she was so fierce and powerful and so vulnerable in this place we call the ‘Highway of Tears,’” the Victoria-based Indigenous community leader said Monday in Winnipeg, at the launch of the month-long anti-violence awareness Moose Hide Campaign.

The Highway of Tears is a 724-kilometre stretch of the Yellowhead Highway between Prince George and Prince Rupert, infamous for the many women and girls, mostly Indigenous, who have been found murdered or reported missing in the area.

As members of the Carrier First Nation, the Lacerte family’s traditional hunting territory is on the land the highway runs through.

“And so we had a moment of clarity, inspiration that came from the land: to tan that moose hide, cut it up into squares and give it to men, as an outward commitment not to do violence against the women and children in their lives. To stand up. To speak out. And to think about our privilege as men and to be better as men,” Lacerte said.

That was in 2011.

Since then, the grassroots campaign has taken off, with a foundation established to work with hundreds of institutions across Canada that have taken up the cause. Some 1.2 million tiny squares made from tanned moose hide have been distributed to Canadian men and boys to wear on their jacket lapels each fall.

Lacerte and his daughter, Raven, attended the Winnipeg launch, along with about 30 guests, including advocates for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, Manitoba Minister of Justice Cullen and Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Arlen Dumas.

“It’s important to have a grassroots movement like this to engage people,” Cullen told the audience at RCMP “D” Division Headquarters.

“That’s what it’s about, changing the culture.”

Canadians are asked to answer the campaign’s call and participate in its annual one-day fast from food and water, from sunrise to sunset on Oct. 18.

Assistant commissioner Scott Kolody, commanding officer of Manitoba’s RCMP, said he will take part in the fast this year, as a symbol of his commitment to the cause.

“The tragic reality is that violence against women and children is far too prevalent in our communities,” he said.

Dumas said ending the cycle is a form of healing which can only begin with the co-ordinated efforts of the country’s institutions and citizens.

“There needs to be preventive things in place to do that. There’s ways we have to collaborate and work together to properly protect people… so that it doesn’t need to get to the issue of actually assaulting somebody,” he said.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca