A giant warrior woman on Saskatoon’s 20^th street is getting a lot of attention and raising awareness of murdered and missing women. Mary Longman’s latest work, Warrior Women: “Stop the Silence!” is on a huge billboard above AKA art gallery. Mary explains that it began as a memorial work inspired by her mother Lorraine Longman, a courageous and resilient survivor.

Regular beatings in Residential School caused a severe head injury at age 8 - and a lifetime of grand mal seizures, and premature dementia. Young, attractive, and poverty-stricken, but no longer able to attend school, or to work as an adult, her uncles taught her to fight in order to survive the violence, crime, and vulnerabilities of her position, and she became known as “the toughest chick in the hood.”

Born in 1949, she passed away in 2012, but had seven children in a row beginning at age fifteen; all of them were apprehended by social services. By the time she was 21 she was parentless herself when her pregnant mother, Emma, was killed by a drunk driver in Regina, at the same time injuring her grandmother. The driver was given six months sentence – the length her grandmother was in hospital.

Mary’s tribute to her mother’s tenacity and courage in the face of every loss is transformed into the Indigenized version of Americanized Wonder Woman, symbolic of the Indigenous struggle in the aftermath of centuries of deliberate assault, not only with the residential schools and the ‘60’s Scoop, but the ongoing assault on Indigenous peoples for over five hundred years.

Her image and legacy in the billboard calls for an end to the violence, and silence, as she becomes the voice for millions of Indigenous people slain from 1492 onwards by colonial armies: settlers inhumanely competing for resources, land, gold.

“Canadians want the truth, and feel betrayed when they have learnt that they have been lied to by omission,” Mary noted. “History in Canada did not start five hundred years ago with European contact. Human history started in Canada 30 000 to 40 000 years ago with the Indigenous people.”

But this erasure in the history texts and government discourse of an occupied genocide has not been acknowledged, apologized for, or memorialized, notes Longman. Raising a tightly clutched red and white campaign ribbon calling to action a national campaign for Indigenous Genocide, “Warrior Woman” shouts out, “Stop The Silence!” Mary hopes to bring justice and truth, a paradigm shift that acknowledges both the genocide, and the Indigenous guidance and knowledge shared with newcomers.

“My mother’s story was the incentive to draw a bigger picture on Indigenous genocide in history, whether it was direct or cumulative.”