Muskoka students ignite change

As part of this year’s 1 Billion Rising events on the Muskoka Campus, students held a coffee house to raise money for the Lindsay Wilson Memorial Scholarship Fund.  Lindsay Wilson was a Nipissing University student on the Muskoka Campus who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend during the final week of her graduating year.

The following day, more than 30 people, including community, Bracebridge Mayor Graydon Smith, students, staff, and faculty came together to create awareness about violence against women.

Realizing that there was not national memorial to honour women who have experienced violence, students Avery Saunters and Kirsten Nicholson unveiled a maquette depicting what they hope will soon be a life size monument calledIgnite.  

Below are the words they spoke that day:

What started out, as an idea has become a reality. After a realization that no nation-wide memorial existed in Canada to honour all murdered and missing women and survivors of violence, we decided that needed to change.

This memorial is to be inclusive of all women across Canada who have been affected by violence and continue to be affected by violence today. We want to recognize that these women are not just numbers in a statistic, but people in our homes and our communities.  

This memorial is for our mothers, our daughters, our sisters and our friends
This memorial is for the women we have lost and for the courage of the survivors
This memorial is for the missing and murdered Indigenous women
This memorial honours every single woman who has ever experienced violence in their lifetime.

We chose organic shapes to abstractly represent the female body. We used three levels of the same shape to represent matriarchy and connection between generations and communities. We wanted the shapes to be separate but integrated to represent difference as well as unity. We hope that one day we will raise enough money to create a much larger version of this to become a monumental sculpture on the grounds of the university.

We are calling this project Ignite.

Ignite: To catch fire. To erupt. To wake. To spark

We ignite to re-spark this movement to end all violence against women. We ignite to raise awareness, to empower, and to make change. We ignite to give a voice to the stories that went unwritten and the stories that go untold. We ignite to raise hope. 

Today is the beginning of a plan to turn this maquette into a sculpture so big that this issue can no longer go unnoticed.  Today we re-ignite the flame for this movement.