A national roundtable on murdered and missing indigenous women is no longer coming to Yellowknife, according to the Premier of the NWT.
In October last year, Bob McLeod announced a roundtable on the issue would be held in the city in February.
McLeod made the announcement on his return from a working group of territorial and provincial aboriginal affairs ministers in Nova Scotia.
Yellowknife hosted the Walking With Our Sisters memorial (pictured above), which honours missing and murdered indigenous women, earlier in January.
However, McLeod now tells Moose FM that logistics mean the roundtable is set for Ottawa, instead.
“The national Aboriginal organizations want to have it in Ottawa for a number of different reasons,” he said this week.
“We would have loved to hold it in Yellowknife but there were some logistical problems.”
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McLeod insisted he was not disappointed that the event would no longer be held in the Northwest Territories.
“As long as the roundtable is held, that will be fine,” he said.
McLeod wants the national roundtable to focus on the factors behind high rates of violence against Aboriginal women.
The roundtable is not a replacement for a national inquiry, which remains a priority for many organizations.
View more photos from the Walking With Our Sisters memorial – which honours missing and murdered indigenous women and which visited Yellowknife in January – on Facebook.Â
