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Every Valentine’s Day, First Nations people, with their friends and allies, walk the streets from Gastown to Chinatown, to honor and remember the missing women of the downtown eastside. Their march represents a critical intervention into the damaging representation of First Nations people that is propagated by the city of Vancouver, and by the nation. This appropriation, according to Ruth Phillips,
| requires the narrative positioning of indigenous people as predecessors to white settlement. Removed from the main story they become marginal, sources of picturesque detail and local color who lend distinctiveness to the national self-image, but who cannot be allowed to speak as full members of an international community (2000:180). |
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