The red dresses that will adorn downtown Orillia light posts over the next couple of weeks are far from a fashion statement.
They’re a statement on the ongoing struggle to solve the mysteries of the more than 1,200 Indigenous women and girls across the country who have gone missing or been murdered.
“There are no answers for their families, but they are in our hearts and spirits, and we want to honour them. That’s why we do this,” Dawn Ireland said of the REDress Project art installation, which was launched Friday at the Orillia Museum of Art and History.
The REDress Project was started by Métis artist and educator Jaime Black. She was a teacher in Opaskwayak Cree Nation in Manitoba, where Helen Betty Osborne was murdered while walking at night. It was years before the two men who killed her faced justice.
Black was also inspired by a group of Colombian women who protested missing and murdered loved ones in Bogota.
The REDress Project first came to Orillia in 2016, when Ireland and Jill Dunlop, who worked together at Georgian College, received permission from Black to do so. Black also attended that event.
Three years later, Ireland decided she wanted to bring the project back, but in a more visible way.
“I asked (Dunlop) if she would join me in painting the town red,” Ireland recalled, “and she jumped at it.”
The issue is dear to Becky Big Canoe, a member of the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation.
“You’ve got to be honest if you’re going to talk about these things,” she said.
And she was.
She recalled a time in the 1980s, when she was struggling with alcohol abuse and found herself wandering the streets of Orillia late at night.
With nowhere to go, she went to a stranger’s house, knocked on the door and asked the resident to call the police on her. An officer soon arrived, but instead of taking Big Canoe to the police station, she said she was driven to Highway 400, where the officer tried to tell her to get out of the car.
“I refused,” Big Canoe said. “I knew better than to be pushed out on a highway at three in the morning, because I could have become (the symbol of) one of those red dresses.”
One of the main goals of the ongoing work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is to share and listen to stories of the many hardships faced by the First Peoples of this country over the years, and that’s what happened during Friday’s event.
An emotional audience listened as one woman in attendance rattled off a list of women she knew who have been victims of violence and murder.
Members of the Ontario Provincial Police’s Indigenous Policing Bureau were also on hand, including Const. Brooke McRoberts. The former Rama Police Service officer said police “still have a lot of work to do” when it comes to relations with the Indigenous community.
“But we’ve come a long way,” she said, noting, for example, the OPP allowed her and some of her team members to attend Friday’s event, on work time, with little notice.
Approximately 30 red dresses will hang in downtown Orillia. The installation will be in place until May 10. It’s not known when the dresses will be put on display. As of Friday afternoon, the Downtown Orillia Management Board said it had not yet received them.
As people pass the dresses, Ireland hopes it piques their curiosity.
“It causes the questions to be asked: What is it about? Hopefully, they seek out the answers,” she said.
Those answers can be found at the REDress Project website.
