Chapter 20 Spirit of the Stolen MMIWG2S+ People and Indigenous Grassroots Organizing

A Land Now Known as Canada

Since the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) launched the public campaign “Sisters in Spirit” in 2004, the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women have been given significant national and public attention. Today, research studies, media, and government reports, including the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, established in 2016, have all documented how the endemic problems of colonial poverty, sexism, racism, and government neglect heighten the conditions for violence against Indigenous women to occur (see National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls 2018). This literature and other scholarship shows how the intersections of systemic colonialism, racism, and sexism (e.g., Carleton and Green 2014; Lawrence 2003), criminal justice, police, and government inaction (e.g., Harper 2006; Jacobs, and Williams 2008), media complacency (Gilchrist 2010; Jiwani 2009), and portrayals of the women as underserving “prostitutes” and/or “drug addicts” (Eberts 2014; Razack 2000) make Indigenous women more vulnerable to violence. As Marlene Jack from Carrier Nation, and relative to the four disappeared Jack family members out of Prince George in 1989 states, “there is a hating on First Nations women.”2 In the same vein, Cheryl James points out how people target Indigenous women because in a settler society, they are not safe or protected and are considered accessible:

Forty years ago, when I was nine, my mother was murdered. My dad eventually remarried and, some years after, my stepmother was murdered and left on the ice of the Assiniboine River. For many years, my sister was sexually exploited and heavily drug addicted. Growing up, I could not understand why all of this was happening and I was angry and confused. So, I also went missing a lot. One time, I was with my sister at the ice rink, and two men came up to us and began to rub themselves against us. I could not imagine what they were thinking to believe that they could do this. With some time through school though, I began to learn about colonialism. I then understood what these men and others had learned; they learned this behaviour long ago brought by the settlers when they first came here.3

Indigenous women, children, and Two-Spirited throughout Canada and elsewhere are woven into a colonial patriarchy of sexualized and racialized violence that continues well into Canada’s colonial present (Amnesty International Canada 2004; Amnesty International USA 2006; Human Rights Watch 2013). This chapter builds on the above-mentioned scholarship as part of a large-scale initiative to document the work of the Indigenous grassroots organizing.

Cross-Country Road Trip

The interviews presented in this chapter were collected on a cross-country road trip to interview families and community members who had been involved with different types of strategies and initiatives to address the murders and disappearances such as search support, raising awareness, or offering healing. In this section I outline various aspects and details of that journey and the methods involved.

In the summer of 2016, Gladys Radek, a Gitxsan Wet’suwet’en First Nations woman and anti-violence activist, my then unborn daughter, Charlie Chartrand, her father, Ari-Matti Kortelainen from Rovaniemi, Finland, and I, a white settler from Sudbury, Ontario, set out on a cross-country road trip to interview families and community members of the missing and murdered.4 Beginning and ending in Québec, we traveled and camped at various locations across this land now known as Canada, visiting reserves and urban and rural centres. In total, we drove more than 10,000 kilometres over the course of seventeen days. The places we visited, in order, included Manitoulin Island, Ontario; Thunder Bay, Ontario; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Regina, Saskatchewan; Kelowna, British Columbia; Vancouver, British Columbia; Quesnel, British Columbia; Edmonton, Alberta; and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. In total, we interviewed twenty-three Indigenous family and community members who shared stories and insights into their grassroots work and experiences concerning the murders and disappearances of loved ones.5 The families and places visited on this journey trace Gladys Radek’s own national walks across the country and the cities and families that hosted her and the volunteers as they walked to raise awareness of the murders and disappearances (see Chartrand 2014). In other words, these were the families and communities that Gladys had an intimate familiarity with, and who supported her anti-violence and awareness raising work.

Throughout our conversations with the family and community members, we considered the different approaches and experiences of their work, the impact it has had on them and their families and communities, and the struggles and challenges they encountered. None of the families and communities we spoke with were funded for the work they did. Their work was on a volunteer basis, out of necessity, often for years, and with few or little resources as they struggled against an apathetic and hostile system of justice and public. While the experiences of individual participants were substantially different, each conversation brought a unique and different quality and perspective to the work against violence, such as sex trafficking, endemic racism, bureaucratic apathy, and colonialism. Their stories collectively highlight the significance and importance of their work and what they do, such as coordinating search efforts, raising awareness, supporting and uniting each other, and keeping the spirits of the women alive.

The conversations and stories here reflect only some of the vast and extensive work carried out at the grassroots level. They nonetheless provide rich and valuable insight into the many ways that Indigenous families and communities are constellations of resource and supports. It is also through this grassroots work that the curtain of colonialism is pulled back to reveal the vast injustices and violence within the lands known as Canada.6

Willed Forgetfulness

Colonial systems are not designed to remember—they individualize, compartmentalize, and decontextualize. They are designed to shelve and forget. Warren Cariou (2006, 730) calls these activities part of a “willed forgetfulness”—a process whereby the politics and violence of colonial settlement are repressed, while settler culture shapes and limits the context of how Indigenous people can be understood or remembered. For the disappeared and murdered, this willed forgetfulness is reflected in the numerous reports that have documented the failings of police reporting and investigations along with many discrepancies, inconsistencies, and inadequacies in the recording, sharing of information, and acting on missing person’s cases and reports of violence (e.g., Amnesty International 2009; Bennett et al. 2012; Native Women’s Association of Canada 2010). This includes delayed investigations, not notifying families, failing to investigate or lay charges, failing to respond to complaints, and even perpetrating the violence (Native Women’s Association of Canada and Feminist Alliance for International Action 2016; Palmater 2016; Human Rights Watch 2013; 2017). Even when policing practices and failures are investigated, such as with the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry (Oppal 2012), there is no direct accountability, Indigenous concerns remain largely unrepresented, and the investigation fails to systemically look at how policing intersects with colonialism, sexism, racism, and poverty (Bennett et al. 2012; see also Collard 2015). Willed forgetfulness is at the core of settler relations as it fragments a collective and shared approach to and memory of colonial violence and Indigenous struggles and, for the murdered and disappeared women, works to erase the magnitude of the problem while the families and communities compete to keep the cases and memories of the women alive.

As part of these activities of a willed forgetfulness, the police have a singular bureaucratic function of solving cases. Their work is narrowly drawn around finding perpetrators, building cases, and getting clearance rates. Families, on the other hand, have to advocate to have the police continue their investigations. As a result, families are segregated from the investigation and struggle to keep case files open. The families we spoke with often pointed out that the police would threaten to terminate the investigation if the families went public or spoke to the media. Some family members were threatened with obstructing justice and arrest if they continued actively searching for the missing. We were further told that many of the community members who were interviewed by police reported being ignored or considered unreliable sources when they provided the police with information. It was also pointed out that the police would release mug shots of the women rather than a family picture, making it hard to elicit public support. Often times, new officers were repeatedly assigned to the case, which resulted in lost information and missed leads. As Henri Chevillard, Muskegowok (Swampy Cree) noted, “the laws and practices are there to keep the existing colonial structures in place.”7 Policing protocols, legal and bureaucratic lingo, absence of information, and redacted documents keep families veiled from knowing or understanding what is going on in the investigations and are dependent on a system that is directly linked to an unacknowledged colonial logic and ongoing violence.

The violence and murders of Indigenous women not only destroy generations of families, but it also prevents Indigenous people from intimately connecting to each other (see also Simpson, 2014). This is evidenced in the many barriers faced by the families we spoke with who became their own advocates and investigators. Glendene Grant, who has been actively searching for her daughter for the past 10 years, points out how it consumes most if not all of her “time, money, resources, and emotion.”8 Self-advocating can include families continually waiting by the phone, constantly searching, putting their lives on hold, losing employment, turning to substances, or losing support. The accumulation of such factors ultimately tears families apart. As the sisters Bonnie Fowler and Cindy Cardinal note, “families are forced to compete for scarce resources and attention with the police or media, which further divides and separates the families.”9 In their attempts to advance policing operations and keep the cases open, families are isolated from each other and heavily taxed on time and resources. Their efforts are often individualized, displaced, and fragmented with the array of work required to learn and navigate a criminal justice system, work with the media, or taking care of the endless details necessary to pursue settler justice through a conventional criminal justice system. When Gladys Radek’s daughter went missing, rather than call the police, she posted the disappearance on Facebook.10 Her daughter was found within 48 hours by Gladys’s online community. As Gladys points out, “It is community supporting community that is important—how is a criminal justice system able to respond in that way?” Alfreda Trudeau pointedly asks, “How will we ever find justice through all these systems that have colonized us?”11

At the heart of an Indigenous response to colonial violence is the grassroots work that recognizes the immediate need to not just simply solve cases, but to build a constellation of support, resources, and knowledge in a way that connects families and communities. This is evident in Bernadette Smith’s Drag the Red initiative, which started when volunteers came together to drag the Red River in Winnipeg after a young woman’s body was found in 2014. The initiative took root when the police refused to further search the river to help potentially find any other missing persons, with police stating it would be ineffective and dangerous. As Bernadette Smith points out, there is a disconnect between the support that is needed for the murders and disappearances and the support that is actually being offered. To drag the river, family and community members pool their resources to provide boats, financial support, mapping and navigating the river, identifying bones, and search and rescue training. The families also developed a Missing Persons Toolkit to help families navigate the media, build an investigation, log communications with police, and offer various ways to carry out searches. Other initiatives in supporting families in their searches include offering accommodation or paying for a hotel room, building banners and signs of the missing, providing gas and supplies for searches, offering food to volunteers, and carrying out fundraising initiatives, among many other things.

Although the criminal justice system is depicted in neutral terms of simply pursuing justice, Bernadette Smith tells us that, “there is much work needed for the system to develop in the area of community building and looking at the human side of that case.”12

Grassroots Re-Memory

Unlike the closed and fragmented discourses of colonial systems, the women’s spirits and stories are not structured cases, but open, non-linear, and connected. Caught between the justice deficit and willed forgetfulness, Indigenous families and communities also carry out the act of remembering in a way that connects and supports families. Hargreaves (2015, 83) highlights that “the women are not isolated, culpable, or victimized figures but each belonging to, and now senselessly missing from, a broader network of familial and community relations whose present work it is to ‘let it not be forgotten.’” Remembering occurs through connection and belonging and is evident in the magnitude of work carried out by the families to keep the women’s stories and memories alive though walks, marches, vigils, art installations, theatre performances, concerts, gatherings, drumming, ceremonies, healing, searches, fasts, feasts, presentations, petitions, postcards, reports, and social media, among many other forms of resistance and remembering. As outlined below, the critical mass of energy created in this way not only highlights the vastness of grassroots resource, but the profound importance of relations and the value of each of the women stolen from their land and communities.

Integral to keeping the stories of the women alive is weaving families and community together. Gladys Radek is a carrier of stories. In her advocacy, Gladys has carried out five walks across Canada, each covering approximately 7,500 kilometres and lasting over three months. Throughout these walks, Gladys and other volunteers go from community to community, sharing stories and collecting the names and images of the disappeared and murdered. She remembers hundreds of women’s stories and, as they walk from town to town, she recounts them to other family members and posts a picture of each woman on her “war pony” (i.e., vehicle). Through her walks, she connects families from coast to coast and keeps the stories, memories, and spirits alive.

Grassroots activities of remembering are also reflected in the practice of holding up pictures of the disappeared and murdered during meetings, marches, and protests, in a collage or sea of women who have been taken from their loved ones. These are strong heuristic tools that flash glimpses into the breadth and depth of the problem, while remembering and celebrating the beauty and gifts of each these women in life and in death. Remembering is a way for families to keep the searches going; to keep finding answers and justice; to (re)connect the people and land; and to keep the spirit of the women alive (see also Hargreaves 2015, 62). The act of remembering is an important anchor in the face of a system designed to forget.

Rowe and Schelling (1991) suggest that memory loss or erasure occurs when there is no collective sphere in which remembering can take place. Acts of remembering or re-memory capture an essence or structure of a feeling that remains blind to conventional approaches. During our own cross-country journey when we would arrive in Indigenous communities or reserves, many of the residents would approach the war pony (i.e., vehicle) to look at the women’s images that were posted on the car. Some of the residents would know one or more of the women, and many more shared their stories of someone in their lives who was disappeared or was murdered. Unlike the distanced and voyeuristic gaze we received in settler communities, Indigenous communities would routinely support our journey by donating food and gas, providing information, offering a place to stay, and sharing their own stories of loved ones. This collective and shared support and understanding is reflective of a profound and intuitive awareness of what justice needs to address an ongoing and deep-seated colonial violence.

Unlike the singular policing function that trivializes and erases the collective memory of the murders and disappearances, Indigenous families and communities return the collective memory of the women to the land and people by connecting community, weaving the women’s stories together, and creating continuity to the murders and disappearances. Goeman (2013, 154) points out that “speaking, telling, praying, and witnessing assures the power of story to decolonize spatial discourses by reminding us of the connections people have to each other and the life-giving force at work.” Resistances emerge out of colonialism’s repressive limits and willed forgetfulness and through the collective knowledge and wisdom that compete with colonial structures of land acquisition, resource depletion, hierarchies of commodity value, and patriarchal violence against women. Through grassroots activism, collective spaces are created, alternative justices are realized, and the spirits of the women continue. These grassroots actions result in the unearthing of colonialism’s forgotten and hidden secrets and in revealing the stories of the land and people that have not yet been told.

National Spectacle

Colonial systems continue to enact ways that block, repress, and disappear the spirits of the women not only through a willed forgetfulness that creates an invisibility and erases the collective memory, but also through a visibility that shapes and limits how the women can be remembered and their disappearances or deaths understood. This making visible is achieved through what Audra Simpson (2011, 206–07) describes as “spectacle.” As she notes, spectacles do many things in the political and social arenas, but in settler societies they are particularly useful in distracting attention and possibilities from what is at stake in the lives of Indigenous people. In other words, the spectacle maintains a voyeuristic public interest that gives an appearance of state and public support or intervention, while allowing settler complicity in colonialism, racism, and violence to disappear. This colonial reality is evident in the way the deaths or disappearances of thousands of Indigenous women over years since contact can remain invisible even when in public view.

The recent public attention given to the disappeared and murdered Indigenous women has been rife with spectacle, portraying women and families passively or as victims, while failing to systemically investigate colonial structures. Hartman (1997, 34) underlines how liberatory discourses of enslaved peoples draw on white spectatorship of violence as the only measure for emancipation: “the humanity of the enslaved and the violence of the institution can only be brought into view by extreme examples of incineration and dismemberment or by placing white bodies at risk.” It is a voyeurism whereby the audience is both “fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance” (Hartman 1997, 3; 34). The witness, or spectator, is called upon to participate in a macabre and sensational display of Indigenous “suffering” and “victimhood,” as one of the few means that elicits state and public support. Cynthia Cardinal and Bonnie Fowler observed how during the Oppal Commission they were consistently referred to as the victims in written documents and when addressed.13 This narrative of victimhood and dependence was also articulated by some of the families who, for example, did not want to fundraise or ask for money in their searches as “too many think we are trying to get money from people instead of seeing the good we are doing in raising awareness.”14 Families are often denied support unless they passively participate in such spectacles.

While spectacle reifies a canon of stereotypes about Indigenous people needing some kind of support, help, or saving, victim discourses shape the context of how violence can be understood and how and when support and resources will be provided. Veracini (2007, 274) argues that victim discourses lend themselves to a certain historical amnesia that posits an “after the fact” compensation rather than rectifying current practices. Apologizing for residential schools, offering funding for the Sixties Scoop, or providing victim restitution to families of the disappeared and murdered are compensations that Gladys Radek refers to as “payoffs” that work to silence the families who are then often no longer invited to consultations. Suffering and victimhood become a necessary vehicle for legitimacy in a settler colonial context.15 Spectacle thus offers a “colonial fantasy of Indigenous victimhood” (Hargreaves 2015, 103) whereby only certain forms of violence are made visible, significant, intelligible, and relevant.

For Hartman (1997), what is even more remarkable is the way spectacles of violence become naturalized and assimilated into the normal, while ignoring the everyday “quotidian violence” of colonialism. Culhane (2003, 595) shows how in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) there is a media and public preference for exotic and spectacular representation of drugs, sex, violence, and crime rather than the ordinary and mundane brutality of everyday poverty. Tuck (2009) refers to this attention as a damage-centred focus that pathologizes and characterizes Indigenous peoples as broken and in need of help or saving, particularly by white settlers.16 Ernie Crey considers the DTES to be a service trap and form of isolation and segregation for Indigenous people.17 Bernie Williams points out that the DTES—as one of the economically poorest—is also the “largest reserve in Canada.”18 Noting how young urban males are “invariably portrayed as either victims or perpetrators,” Tuck (2009, 413) further observes that “these characterizations frame our communities as sites of disinvestment and dispossession; our communities become spaces in which underresourced health and economic infrastructures are endemic.” In a “damage-centered framework” such as this, “pain and loss are documented in order to obtain particular political or material gains” (412). This is also what Henry Chevillard refers to as the “Indian Industry, whereby government or public recognition largely results in Native exploitation and instituted poverty as resources and capital are used to service state officials, professionals, and the surrounding municipalities, but rarely make their way to our people.”19 Indigenous people on a whole gain very little from these processes or spectacles, whereas white settlers, or as Bernadette Smith notes,20 those central decision makers who have the least amount of experience or, also stand to benefit the most in displays of benevolence and support that fail to change the colonial relation or the violence (see also Collard 2015).

This colonial relationship is akin to what Henri Chevillard further describes as “Native 101—where Indigenous politics and education occur in a white man’s system that gives a bastardized version of who First Nations were and are in this country.”21 In many ways, new trends of decolonizing, reconciliation, or Indigenizing often occur within colonial institutions, primarily with white settlers who take on Indigenous teachings, advocacy, territorial acknowledgements, and sweats and ceremonies, with little or no Indigenous participation or consultation, or in any way that might otherwise benefit Indigenous people (see Wilson 2008; Tuck and Yang 2012). The processes and fallout from spectacle and victim discourses of recognition such as victim compensations, cultural sensitivity training, and apologizing for historical wrongs, change little for those who directly experience the day-to-day violence of colonialism, while neglecting to effect change—let alone absolve all sorts of obligations to Indigenous people.

For disappeared and murdered Indigenous women, even though the crisis has gained national and international recognition, the effects of this visibility rarely benefit the day-to-day lives of the women or the people. As Bernie Williams notes, “nothing has changed . . . there is still a war on our women.”22 Leah Gazan points out that Indigenous women are denied access to government meetings across the country where decisions are being made about their lives and well-being: “Individuals who hold colonial titles are allowed to participate, while excluding Indigenous women who have the wisdom of experience and traditional knowledge” (Chartrand et al. 2016, 258). It is within a visibility of spectacle and invisibility of willed forgetfulness that so-called modern, industrial, and civilized settler colonial states erase the day-to-day colonial violence, trivialize colonial projects over land, resource, and people, while fragmenting the critical mass of support that currently exists within the grassroots. Within a visible invisibility of the Canadian state, Indigenous people are both overdetermined and overlooked.

Standing Witness

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls has been both a source of spectacle and remembering. While supported by some families and community members as a national recognition of the systemic violence against Indigenous women and a move toward justice, others have dismissed it as erroneous and a waste of resources that are deflected from Indigenous communities (Gardner and Clancy 2017). The inquiry has also been rife with spectacle, with the media reporting on the lack of transparency, narrow scope of the inquiry, silenced family members, internal disorganization, and multiple resignations, including lawyers and “top-level officials” (MacLean 2018). As Aleck Clifton notes, the recommendation of the Inquiry will join the “stacks” of other reports with all of their recommendations that will likely continue to be ignored.23 The reports, however, do not simply “collect dust.” As Clifton further points out, they have a “few blood stains too ’cause all those reports are from the families who lost loved ones through violence—those recommendations already made by the grassroots people of this country.” Within the visible invisibility of the state and its processes such as the Inquiry, and central to it, are the Indigenous grassroots families and communities who nonetheless continue to structure a presence.

In Therapeutic Nations, Dian Million (2013, 56), a Tanana Athabascan scholar, reminds us that the stories of the families and people are at the “heart of the struggle.” Million explains how truth tribunals, such as those established for residential school survivors, require participants to draw on past “victimization” to adjudicate present grievances. This form of contained “reconciliation” and “healing” is created within pathology narratives that treat poverty, drug and alcohol use, and violence as historical colonial trauma and individual problems, while healing is seen as a form of capacity building and human capital. As the author notes:

It is a Canadian nation-state discourse where truth tribunals look to international human rights narratives that Trauma requires all those positioned by its narratives to return to the site of the crime (the past as colonial history) to legitimate their claims. In the present, the victims of Canadian colonial abuse are compelled to “witness,” to “tell” therapists, self-help programs, or tribunals about their trauma. This is an important discourse of our times in Canada and the United States, the arena where those who have been powerless attempt to take their power by appealing to the moral discourse of the perpetrator. (Million 2008, 268)

Within trauma discourses, victimhood becomes one of the few means by which the public and the state are catalyzed to some action. As Million (2008) argues above, it is this Eurocentric trauma paradigm and the very attempts to contain and control the discourse, however, that produces the strength, resilience, and resistances to state and civic narratives and activities.

Dian Million further highlights that Indigenous women use the victim platform to advance their own experiences and narratives that challenge the racialized, gendered, and sexualized nature of their colonization, and thereby transform “the debilitating force of an old social control and shame, into a social change agent in their generation” (Million 2008, 54). For Million (2008, 64), these affective narratives

denote important emotional knowledge that became available to individuals, families, and sometimes people but that did not always “translate” into any direct political statement. However, it is exactly this emotional knowledge that fuels the real discursive shift around the histories and stories of residential schooling. One of the most important features of these stories is their existence alternative truths, as alternative historical views.

Through the ongoing neglect, violence, and state abandonment, grassroots stories and spaces do not simply mirror state narratives, but use those narratives to advance an internal awareness, while they simultaneously create folds of what Derrida (1982, 18) terms difference, “the ‘active’ moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces . . . against the entire system.” It is an outside both formulated from and a threat to the inside. Although such narratives and grassroots activities are very much shaped from within boundaried arenas, they also find their own force and move in ways outside of colonial routines and fantasy. As Anderson (2000, 116) notes, “foundations of resistance, such as strong families, a sense of community and a close relationship with the land, provide the strength to defy the many oppressive experiences that an Aboriginal woman is likely to encounter.” Such resurgence is fashioned both within and against a colonizing framework and through relations of support and counter narratives that, as outlined below, expose and challenge institutional arrangements, official discourses, and authority.

By navigating between colonial systems and Indigenous knowledge, the grassroots unearth colonialism’s present-day projects and operations and make us see what we would not have seen or understood otherwise—the untold stories of the land and people. “Land is more than the diaphanousness of inhabited memories; Land is spiritual, emotional, and relational; Land is experiential, (re)membered, and storied; Land is consciousness—Land is sentient,” (Styres 2019, 27–28). It is through the grassroots—the work that is done at the level of the land—that connections, belonging, and re-membering occur and that strength, resource, and resurgence are found to shift the colonial violence. For Bonnie Fowler and Cindy Cardinal, it is the grassroots advocates who mobilize the information, while being on the same level of understanding and shared experiences.24 For Cheryl James, it is through her walks, the honour of her mother’s memory, and the drum that she finds her voice, speaks out, and supports others.25 For Sharon Johnson it is the healing she finds in hearing and carrying the stories of other families when she hosts and supports walkers as they pass through the territory.26 For the Iskwewuk E-wichiwitochik members it is providing support and creating opportunities for the families to tell their stories, while acting as shields from the media and public and protecting each other in their experiences.27 Bernadette Smith reminds us that we need to know about the many Indigenous contributions that keep Indigenous women sacred. “We do not to see the women as sex trade or poor but loved and missing and we want to push these other issues out of the picture.”28 It is a work that stands in relationship with the people and land and the many disappeared and murdered. As long as the grassroots live on, so will the women’s spirits.

Against the public voyeurism, discourses of victimhood, bureaucratic structures, and other colonial interventions, Indigenous people stand witness to their ancestors’ histories, bear the experience of Canada’s settler colonialism, and hold the stories to know what their land, communities, and people need. For Henri Chevillard, “change can only happen from the grassroots; the ones who institute difference and raise voice.”29 This is also what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2011, 52) refers to as a “presencing”—subtle and ongoing waves of disruption that affirm, nurture, and strengthen relationships and form spaces where the creation of new realties and different ways of being can flourish. But, as Bernie Williams notes, “people are doing the work, and have been for a long time, without acknowledgement or support.”30 The lack of support, racism, trauma, competing resources, lateral in-fighting, and violence all take a toll. Many of the families and communities are overwhelmed by the lack of resources and hardships in this work. Bonnie Fowler argues that this is an effect of colonialism where, “even within ourselves we are trying to be together but it’s not always happening.”31 As Darlene Okemaysin Sicotte points out, although it is their independence that allows them to get the work done without political or colonial interference, more resources are needed to support their initiatives.32 While we critically contextualize the disappeared and murdered Indigenous women and how colonial justice continues to obtain currency today, we must also continue to find and support these spaces of alternative knowledge, methodologies, and justices. As Chickadee Richard says, “when one of our women or children go missing, you are taking away from the strength of our community and all the potential of our women.”33 It is through the grassroots that the murdered and disappeared women find a field of visibility and strength, outside of and in relation to colonialism’s erasures and spectacles.

Conclusion

Just as colonial violence is carved into our landscape and collective psyche, grassroots activism is foundational to any anti-violence work and antithetical to a colonial project as it creates multiple arenas for the women’s spirits to permeate the colonial curtain. It is the grassroots that “creatively negotiate colonial traumas that seep into bodies, spirits, relations, structures, systems and places” (de Finney 2014, 9). This is what justices look like in their most organic form. As Jeff Corntassel and Cheryl Bryce assert (2012, 153), Indigenous strength resides in connecting with homelands, cultural practices, and people, and is centred on reclaiming, restoring, and regenerating homeland relationships. Indigenous resurgence and resource form important and vital pieces of knowledge and practice to rethink how the families and communities are central to addressing the violence and keeping the memories and spirits of the women alive.

Although very much a part of our social life and landscape, the murders and disappearances are not easily understood through modern channels of thought that continue to impose colonial models and technocratic systems of justice that fragment and forget. As Gladys Radek notes, the issue is expansive from health, child welfare, violence, to colonialism and it is “collectively and slowly killing our people.”34 As the families have also highlighted, while the government, the criminal justice system, and the Inquiry attempt to address the murders and disappearances, colonialism remains inherent in their structures, and that also determines and limits the contours by which the murders and disappearances can be remembered and understood. As a result, they reproduce the current colonial violence experienced by Indigenous people. As Chickadee Richard points out, “systems come from a white way of thinking—you were colonized before you colonized us—you need to fix your systems and your colonizing nature.”35 Any discussions, recommendations, and plans to address a violence that is endemic to Indigenous women and people must flow from the grassroots. As Marlene Jack highlights “Our First Nation’s people are strong. [We] want what’s rightfully ours.”36

Notes

1. 1 Bernie Williams, interview by Vicki Chartrand, 26 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

2. 2 Marlene Jack, interview by Vicki Chartrand, 26 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

3. 3 Cheryl James, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 22 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

4. 4 Funding for this project was made possible through a Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture (FRQSC) Emerging Scholars research grant to 1) identify and document the initiatives of Indigenous family and community members to address the murders and disappearances; 2) illuminate the personal experiences of the families and communities from carrying out this work; 3) and assess how these activities inform a broader understanding of the experiences and contributions of Indigenous people in Canada today.

5. 5 All 23 interview participants, except for one, indicated that they wanted to have their names made public.

6. 6 The reference to disappeared and murdered Indigenous women is also inclusive of missing girls, trans and two-spirited persons. Although violence against Indigenous men and boys is significant, a gendered focus acknowledges that the violence experienced by women is fundamentally different.

7. 7 Henri Chevillard, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 22 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

8. 8 Glendene Grant, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 25 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

9. 9 Bonnie Fowler and Cindy Cardinal, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 1 July 2016, Bishop’s University.

10. 10 Gladys Radek, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 1 July 2016, Bishop’s University.

11. 11 Alfreda Trudeau, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 19 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

12. 12 Bernadette Smith, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 22 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

13. 13 Cardinal and Fowler, interview.

14. 14 Anonymous, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 28 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

15. 15 Radek, interview.

16. 16 This was the case for Bernice and Wilfred Catcheway who were asked by a lawyer from the Inquiry not to testify, so as to not jeopardize their daughter’s case, despite their nine years of being vocal in their daughter Jennifer’s disappearance (Taylor, 2017).

17. 17 Ernie Crey, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 27 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

18. 18 Williams, interview.

19. 19 Chevillard, interview.

20. 20 Smith, interview.

21. 21 Chevillard, interview.

22. 22 Williams, interview.

23. 23 Aleck Clifton, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 26 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

24. 24 Fowler and Cardinal, interview.

25. 25 James, interview.

26. 26 Sharon Johnson, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 20 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

27. 27 Darlene Okemaysin Sicotte, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 2 July 2016, Bishop’s University.

28. 28 Smith, interview.

29. 29 Chevillard, interview.

30. 30 Williams, interview.

31. 31 Fowler and Cardinal, interview.

32. 32 Sicotte, interview.

33. 33 Chickadee Richard, interviewed by Vicki Chartrand, 22 June 2016, Bishop’s University.

34. 34 Radek, interview.

35. 35 Richard, interview.

36. 36 Jack, interview.

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