They marched to remember.
They marched to mourn.
And they marched to remind everyone that the women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside today deserve "compassion, community, and caring."
"The women’s memorial march continues to honour the lives of missing and murdered women and all women’s lives lost in the Downtown Eastside," says the organizer's homepage. "Increasing deaths of many vulnerable women from the DTES still leaves family, friends, loved ones, and community members with an overwhelming sense of grief and loss. Indigenous women disproportionately continue to go missing or be murdered with minimal to no action to address these tragedies or the systemic nature of gendered violence, poverty, racism, or colonialism."
The first DTES women’s memorial march was on February 14, 1992 in response to the murder of a woman on Powell Street.
This year's march attracted thousands of people who, after congregating at Carnegie Centre, took their message to the streets of the DTES and Gastown in the early afternoon on February 14, 2018.
