Taking Back Stolen Voices: Mahlikah Awe:ri's poetry as resistance for more than 500 missing girls

Taking Back Stolen VoicesMahlikah Awe:ri's poetry as resistance for more than 500 missing girls Over the past 30 years nearly 600 aboriginal girls and women have gone missing under mysterious circumstances, many of them murdered and many still gone.This is a topic neither fully addressed by the Canadian government or by major news sources, a situation which is hugely problematic for the safety of this marginalized group.Despite the lack of Canada-wide media attention, in recent years many families of the missing girls, and some organizations have come forward to raise awareness of the issue and to support these women.Mahlikah Awe:ri, a Torontonian with African-American, Mohawk, and Mi'kmaq descent, is a spoken word poet, musician, poetic rapologist, and an advocate for indigenous peoples in Canada through the organization IdleNoMore.Because of her passion for the rights of indigenous peoples and her dedication to providing a voice for the missing and murdered women, Awe:ri now travels across Canada to speak and perform her resistance poetry.The poem I will discuss, "Dying Breed," is a spoken word poem addressing both contemporary and past issues faced by aboriginal peoples, effectively portraying the difficult position in which imperialist Canada has placed these individuals.In this essay I will argue that Awe:ri's poem effectively fulfills a need for resistance poetry for Aboriginal peoples by both bearing witness to colonialist oppression and linking traditional performance with contemporary poetry to reach a wider audience.Richards 2 My argument will be twofold: I will begin by explaining the necessity of activism for these women by presenting first a historical representation of aboriginal peoples in Canada, followed by a description of my research procedure which will show the lack of representation of the missing women in current Canadian media.This explanation will support my argument that Awe:ri's poem is an effective poem of resistance, since I will then analyze how the poem fulfills this need by addressing the issues of silence and liminality in a style that itself acts as protest.Finally I will discuss the connection between the Native oral tradition, African performance poetry, and contemporary slam poetry, to display how Awe:ri performs a successful tool for activism.For the purpose of this essay I will first explain the concept of liminality, or of being placed in a liminal position.To be in a liminal position is to occupy a space either between or on both sides of a threshold or boundary; however, in this context it can be interpreted as existing between two cultures, without entirely belonging in either.As imperialism and migration between countries and cultures has created nations such as Canada, it is very important to understand the resulting impact on individuals in groups who are forced into a liminal position and do not feel they occupy a place in their countries of residence.This first section of my essay will address the historical treatment and representation of Aboriginal peoples in Canada to examine one notion of what it means to be represented as if you were part of a cultural "dying breed", and then I will link this analysis to the fact that there are more than 500 Aboriginal women who are literally dying in this country as a result of rapists and murderers.Canada has a horrific history of cruel assimilation and the removal of the culture of its Indigenous peoples.The residential school system that Canadian policy put in place

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