Missing women remembered through project. (News).

Shelley Napope, Janet Sylvestre, Barbara Eyapaise, Georgette Flint, Nichole Whitehead, Ramona Wilson, Constance Lynne Cameron, Lana Derrick, Olivia Gayle Williams, Glenda Morrisseau. The names are probably not familiar to most people, but Amber O'Hara hopes to change that.

The women listed are missing or murdered, and just a few of the many whose names, pictures and stories appear on the Web site O'Hara has created to remember them and increase the public's awareness of them.

The Web site is just one part of the Vanished Voices--Never Again! project.

O'Hara's work as an AIDS educator takes her to First Nations communities across the country During her travels she's heard many stories about women who have gone missing.

"Over and over again I've had people share stories with me about how they had a cousin that was missing, or an auntie that was missing or a mother that was missing. And I just kept thinking, 'Well, why didn't I hear about these cases?' And so, over the last few years, I've been just watching in the news, and researching on the Internet, and not finding a whole lot of cases. And I'm thinking, 'This is crazy, because our women are going missing. Our people are going missing, and it's not even being in the news."'

Then, a few years ago, O'Hara looked at a poster of yet another missing person, and looking back at her was the face of someone she knew; Nicole Whitehead, who she'd met during one of her AIDS workshops.

Whitehead was 15 when she disappeared in April 2000. She had left her home in North Bay, Ont. on April 25, and called her mother the next day from Detroit, Mich. and made arrangements to meet up in London, Ont. the following day. That was the last time anyone heard from her.

The shocking thing to O'Hara is how little media attention is given when First Nations girls and women go missing, in comparison to the attention paid when the missing person is from a white, middle class family.

"When Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were killing young girls, look at the media coverage. I mean, it was horrible what they did. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter what color your skin is, what language you speak, what cultural background you come from, if a person is missing, a person is missing, and it needs to be taken seriously.

"When you look at the injustice of it-the media that went around, that was out there around Paul Bernardo, and any of the cases, and then you look at Nicole Whitehead. I mean, she was a good kid, you know. She was a beautiful kid...and nothing in the news about her. Nothing."

The lack of attention paid to these disappearances is due, in part, to the fact that a number of the missing women were prostitutes or drug users. Their lifestyle, however, should not be used to judge their worth, explained O'Hara, who has lived that life herself.

"I was addicted for 13 years. Nineteen years clean and sober now," she said.

"The issue is that they are missing, and we need to find them. And I think that we as a community, as a First Nations community, have a responsibility to be there and to help prevent this. I mean, I walked that path for years. I know how easily you can get trapped into it. And I think that we have a responsibility to our future, not just to our women and our daughters, but to our future," she said.

"I remember when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, my dad sat me down and showed me the medicine wheel, and he said to me... 'I want you to look at these four different colors here. Those represent partly ... each of the races of the four races of the people of our society.' And he pointed to the red portion, and he said, 'And that portion is no bigger than any other portion, and it's no smaller. You're no better than and you're no worse than anybody else. Don't let anybody ever tell you anything different.' And I was only so tiny when he told me that, and I've never forgotten that. So we need to get that across to other people because, yes, when I see any person missing, man, woman, child, whatever, of any race, it concerns me," she said.

O'Hara hopes anyone with family members who are missing will contact her so their names and stories can be included.

"And the other thing we want to do is add some kind of a hotline information so that if it is runaways, they can contact their families and anonymously just say, 'I'm okay. Don't worry. I'm okay. I don't want anybody to know where I am, but Jam okay.' So that the family can have some kind of... I mean, I can't imagine going to bed night after night after night, year after year, wondering where my kid is."

(see Quilt page 27.)

In addition to the Web site, O'Hara is also working on a memorial quilt as part of the Vanished Voices project, with family and friends of the missing or murdered women making panels commemorating their loved ones.

The quilt is patterned after the AIDS memorial quilt. O'Hara hopes that the finished quilt will travel from community to community, across Canada, or even around the world, as a way of educating people about the high numbers of Aboriginal women who are disappearing.

"I didn't want it to just be a pretty quilt, with nice little panels on it. I wanted it to be more than that. I wanted it to be an educational project where we could go into communities and educate our youth about the dangers out there, and about the situation. This is what's happening. This really is happening. Look at all the faces. Look at all the names of the people who have vanished."

O'Hara believes that most 'of the women who are missing are already dead, but that doesn't dull her determination to help bring them home.

"If one person comes home alive it's worth it. If we get any of them home to be buried in a good way, it's worth it. Because it's so important. I mean, I faced that. I'm facing death and the whole thing with my community. My community has surrounded me in helping me do this in a good way, so I can die in a good way, so all my ceremony can be done in a good way. One of my Elders is making my dress and my moccasins for me. And that's very important. It's very important that we do everything full circle.

"And that's really important to those families. And it's important to the spirits of those people. Because my teachings, what I was taught was that we don't make it to the spirit world at peace until we're buried in a good way, and until there's closure. And I'm just thinking about all these spirits there are floating around, really, really angry that they're still out there and nobody's found them. And they want to go home. They want to be buried in a good way. They want to go home to their. families. And their families deserve that."

The Vanished Voices-Never Again! Web site is at www.geocities.com/waabzyl/native.html. Amber O'Hara can be reached via e-mail at [e-mail], or by phone at 416-913-8711.