From empowering to repowering: A study on missing and murdered indigenous relative’s advocacy groups as a way of retaking power to meet the needs of the MMIR crisis
Abstract
In 2010 a Canadian artist named Jamie Black created an art installation called the
REDress Project. The installation featured hundreds of hanging red dresses—to bring attention to
the vast number of Indigenous women who had gone missing or murdered (Indigenous
Foundations, 2011). This art installation was part of a growing movement to bring attention to
Indigenous people who had gone missing in Canada. Over the next few years, the REDress
Project exhibit toured the country, bringing more widespread attention to a problem that had
been gaining national interest since the formation of the National Coalition for our Stolen Sisters
in 2002 (Harper, 2006)
In 2014 the Canadian government published a report titled Missing and Murdered
Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview (Government of Canada, 2014). This
report sparked a debate over the validity of the statistics, which reported 1,181 missing or
murdered Indigenous Canadian women, of whom 164 were considered active cases, and 225
were designated unsolved (Tasker, 2016). Some argued that the numbers were too high. In
contrast, others believed the numbers were too low, citing firsthand experiences of
undocumented and misidentified family members and the Walk 4 Justice initiative, which
collected 4,232 names of missing or murdered Indigenous women (Tasker, 2016). Disputes
about the accuracy of the numbers cited in the National Operational Overview led to a movement
to bring attention to the number of cases, lack of statistical consistency, and lack of awareness
from non-Indigenous people.