Should the Liberal government’s promised inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women include men and boys?

Canadian aboriginals are killed at roughly four times the rate of non-aboriginals. And a growing number of aboriginals and others believe the stark conditions that lead to the high murder rate for indigenous women and girls are also behind the even higher rate of homicides of indigenous men and boys.

Since aboriginals males are murdered more often than aboriginal females, advocates believe a gender-inclusive examination of the homicide crisis is the only way to gain a full picture and find healing. Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett has expressed openness to such an approach.

University of B.C. Okanagan political scientist Adam Jones, a specialist on genocide, says politicians and commentators have ignored the murders of aboriginal men out of moral confusion. That’s because statistics also show aboriginal males are most often the killers of aboriginal females.

“It’s the case that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of severe violence against aboriginal and other women are male. But that has often occluded our understanding of the way that males can be even more vulnerable to violence from other males than women are,” says Jones, who advises the United Nations on anti-genocide programs.

The call for adding indigenous men and boys in the national inquiry is supported by a range of aboriginals, including Janine Cunningham, who serves on a national indigenous committee of the Canadian Association of Social Workers and belongs to B.C.’s Tsilhqot’in (Chilcotin) tribal group.

The statistics are disturbing. UBC Okanagan researcher Penny Handley has discovered that 2,500 aboriginals were murdered between 1982 and 2011 (out of a total of 15,000 Canadian murders).

A further 105 indigenous females have in that period been reported missing. Yet Jones, who collaborates with Handley on research, wonders why no data has been collected on missing indigenous males.

Of all of Canada’s aboriginal murder victims, Handley found 71 per cent were men or boys.

At the other end of the grim homicide equation, however, former aboriginal affairs minister Bernard Valcourt and the RCMP have acknowledged seven of 10 killers of aboriginal women were aboriginal males. Only eight per cent of the females’ killers were strangers.

Talk about the federal government’s inquiry into murdered aboriginal women has long made headlines in B.C.

That’s in part because of earlier investigations into the deaths and disappearances of dozens of aboriginal and non-aboriginal women over several decades in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and on the Highway of Tears west of Prince George.

In B.C., aboriginals comprise about 20 per cent of all homicide victims, even as aboriginals make up only five per cent of the population. That lopsided murder rate soars even higher on the Prairies; more than half of Saskatchewan’s murder victims are aboriginals.

B.C. aboriginal leader and author Ernie Crey, whose sister disappeared in the Downtown Eastside, believes “now is the time for those who want the inquiry to examine the deaths of aboriginal men and boys to speak up.”

Since federal officials are in the process of meeting with interested parties across the country to set the inquiry’s terms of reference, Crey, an adviser to the Sto:lo tribal council, said the opportunity is ripe to urge expanding its scope. “I don’t know anyone … who would object to the inquiry looking into the murders of indigenous men.