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Paulson’s letter was viewed among advocates for an inquiry, whose pleas the Harper government has ignored for months, as an unsubtle plug for the status quo. But there is another way to view the statistic. If it can put to rest the simplistic fiction that violence against aboriginal women is mostly perpetrated by strangers, in contradiction of all the available evidence, then it is helpful.

For at the end of all the investigating there will still be this incontrovertible fact: Though aboriginal women make up just 4.3 per cent of the population, 718,500 individuals based on the 2011 National Household Survey, they accounted for 16 per cent of the 6,551 female homicides recorded in Canada between 1980 and 2012 (which is 32 per cent of total homicides over that period). These figures were highlighted in the RCMP’s report, Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview, released in the spring of 2014.

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So there is, in fact, a scourge of violence against indigenous women in Canada, and it is hugely disproportionate. But this doesn’t apply just to women and girls, but to the entire indigenous population. In a widely quoted essay in 2006, “Aboriginal Victimization in Canada: A summary of the Literature,” Justice Department researcher Katie Scrim found aboriginal Canadians were three times more likely to be victims of violent crime than non-aboriginals.

In some populations that figure is low: While digging through data from the Nunavut Bureau of Statistics during a visit to the territory in 2013, I was shocked to find that between 1999 and 2011 the territorial homicide rate had doubled; it was more than 12 times the national average; and Nunavut’s suicide rate is 10 times the national average. This is an epidemic, one that makes a mockery of every pleasant-sounding bit of government-sponsored Pablum about inclusion, growth and progress in the far north.