After years of neglect and willful ignorance, it was recently, December 8, 2015, the Canadian federal government decided to issue a formal inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indienous Women and Girls (MMIWG)—one of the largest neglected issues in Indigenous human rights treatment in Canadian history. A report from the RCMP back in 2014 had stated that there had been more than 1200 missing and murdered Indigenous women between 1980 and 2012; however, Indigionus women’s groups had reported far over 4000. The clear divide among the reports had to do with the system that the government and law enforcement used when it came to identifying cases by ethnicity and turned away when the calls of these women needed to be heard.

A recent report had found that Indigenous women 15 years and older were 3.5 times more likely to experience violence than non-Indigenous women on the basis of their ethnicity in addition to the seven times higher homicide rate. There are thousands of stories to be told by the victims, and family and friends, but the country has failed to tell these stories of the deep traumas and violence to the community. Amnesty International and Legal Strategy Coalition on Violence against Indigenous Women are large organizations that have been vocal on the critical issues of data collection and action of the RCMP. MMIWG in Ontario and Quebec weren’t even taken into account by the RCMP’s data. Following in the Fall of 2015, eight officers from the Quebec Provincial police were suspended on the account of 14 allegations of abuse of power and sexual assault on Indigenous women, and a series of cascading events started to garner national attention.

The national inquiry on MMIWG was then launched on December 8, 2015 by the federal government with a pledged amount of $53.86 million over a course of two years with much criticism of its own when it came to the investigation. However, in recent years national awareness on the issue had gained an immense amount of support for Indigenous families. Manitoba’s provincial government recognized October 4th as a day to honour MMIWG. While much of the Canadian population is in support of this human rights issue, there is still so much to uncover, and so much to reconcile. As Canadians, we must push each other and the government to act on the necessary truth and reconciliation to Indigenous families and communities, along with the victims, to address the dark and neglected human rights issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada’s history and modern day.