Canada’s Ongoing Issues With Indigenous Violence
Canada’s MMIWG2S crisis show how colonial systems, state neglect, and silence continue to endanger Indigenous lives.
What Canada Tries Not to Teach
There is a moment when learning becomes impossible to ignore. It arrives quietly, often through a single story, a name, or a question that refuses to leave your mind. For many Canadians, the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people is one of those moments. It challenges not only what we know about our country, but also how we respond once knowing is no longer optional. This is a living failure that demands personal acknowledgement as much as political action.
Two Images of Canada
For decades, Canada has carefully cultivated an image of itself as a moral leader. It presents as a defender of human rights, a promoter of gender equality, and a model liberal democracy. In 1994, Canada sponsored the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. Since 2015, it has been governed by a federal administration that openly brands itself as feminist.
At home, when the UN Special Rapporteur finally conducted an official visit to Canada in 2018, the resulting 2019 report was blunt. Indigenous women and girls, from First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities, were found to face violence, exclusion, and poverty driven by institutional and intersecting discrimination that the state had failed to address. The violence was not described as random or inevitable. It was identified as structural and sustained by systems that were never meaningfully dismantled.
This gap indicates that while Canada can speak the language of equality, it is allowing Indigenous women, girls, and gender-diverse people to remain among the most unsafe populations in the country. Both truths coexist, and the contradiction has proven deadly.
How Families Forced the Country to Listen
National awareness came from families who refused to accept silence. For decades, mothers, sisters, aunties, and communities searched for their loved ones while navigating police indifference, racism, and public apathy. Their grief became activism because there was no other option.
The National Day of Awareness on May 5 emerged from this grassroots pressure. Its origins trace back to the 2013 murder of Hanna Harris on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in the United States. When law enforcement failed to respond adequately, Hanna’s family organized their own search. The marches that followed crossed borders and resonated deeply with Indigenous communities in Canada who recognized the same patterns of neglect. By 2017, advocacy had grown strong enough that political recognition became unavoidable.
The movement continued to expand through the National Week of Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives, organized annually since 2021. Each year, families centre the names and lives that the country ignores. The red clothing worn in solidarity is a refusal to let disappearance become normal.
Colonialism as an Ongoing Structure
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls made one finding unmistakably clear. The violence is rooted in colonialism, and it is still an ongoing system. Settler colonialism in Canada was designed to replace Indigenous societies, which required the erosion of Indigenous governance, culture, land relationships, and especially the authority of women.
The Indian Act of 1876 formalized gender discrimination into law. Many Indigenous nations traditionally recognized women as leaders, knowledge keepers, and decision-makers. The Act replaced those systems with male-dominated governance structures imposed by the state. For more than a century, Indigenous women who married non-Indigenous men were stripped of their legal status and expelled from their communities. This legal exile broke families, cut women off from support, and made them vulnerable by design.
Residential schools deepened that damage. From the 1880s until the last school closed in 1996, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families in an explicit attempt to erase their identities. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission later named this process cultural genocide. In Quebec, most residential schools opened later and closed later, meaning the trauma remains fresh and intergenerational, carried by parents and grandparents who are still alive.
When residential schools ended, the child welfare system continued the same logic. Indigenous children were removed at staggering rates, often because non-Indigenous caseworkers misunderstood or judged Indigenous parenting practices through a colonial lens. The Inquiry confirmed that what changed was the institution.
Land dispossession compounded everything. Forced relocations, the creation of reserves, and the seizure of traditional territories severed the relationship between people and place. In Quebec, Innu families from Pakua Shipi testified about deportations in the 1960s organized by religious authorities, enforced through threats of cutting off assistance. Resistance was punished, and the damage to identity was deliberate.
Institutions That Failed and Still Fail
The Quebec-specific findings of the National Inquiry reveal how deeply institutional neglect runs. Health and social services were described as chronically underfunded and culturally unsafe. Western intervention models often focused on separating families, clashing directly with Indigenous approaches that prioritize community restoration. Families testified about Indigenous babies who disappeared from hospitals between the 1950s and 1970s, taken for treatment and later declared dead without documentation, bodies, or burial.
Policing failures were equally devastating. Families recounted missing person reports dismissed as runaways, investigations delayed or abandoned, and basic information withheld for decades. Rose-Ann B.’s family only learned key details of her murder twenty-five years later, after authorities reopened the case solely to declare it time-barred. Many families were left to search on their own, learning through experience that urgency was a privilege not afforded to Indigenous victims.
Indigenous families spoke of being treated as second-class citizens, convinced that their loved ones would have mattered more if they were not Indigenous. Indigenous police services, created under the First Nations Policing Policy, were underfunded and constrained by jurisdictional confusion. Cultural behaviours such as avoiding eye contact, a sign of respect in many Indigenous cultures, were misinterpreted as aggression, escalating encounters.
Gladue and Ipeelee rulings were intended to address Indigenous over-incarceration, but the Inquiry found that in cases involving violence against Indigenous women, these principles were sometimes applied in ways that normalized abuse. Survivors described a system that lost evidence, dismissed complaints, and moved slowly while lives remained in danger.
Poverty as a Manufactured Risk
The violence does not exist in isolation from material conditions. In Quebec, Indigenous women earn less, face unemployment at twice the rate of non-Indigenous women, and experience poverty, food insecurity, and unsafe housing at disproportionately high levels. Overcrowded homes and structures in need of major repair are common. These conditions limit choices and trap people in unsafe situations. They are the outcomes of policy decisions layered over generations.
What gives the Inquiry its moral weight are the voices of survivors and families. Kirby B., whose sister Rose-Ann was murdered, spoke of silence as an accomplice, naming not only institutions but bystanders who chose not to act. Adrienne A., a community Chief, endured such intense institutional abuse that she suffered multiple heart attacks, yet still believes change will come when younger generations refuse to accept what was normalized.
The National Inquiry named the crisis genocide, moving beyond the language of culture to recognize a pattern of destruction enabled by both action and inaction. This naming matters because it demands a response proportional to the harm.
The federal government’s launch of the Federal Pathway in 2021 acknowledged the findings. The Calls for Justice insist on structural change, independent accountability, long-term funding for Indigenous-led policing, mandatory cultural training across public services, and transparent data collection on violence. These are demands for a different relationship between the state and Indigenous peoples.
The Work That Cannot Be Deferred
Learning about this crisis changes what responsibility looks like. It means refusing to treat Indigenous violence as inevitable by listening without defensiveness, supporting Indigenous-led solutions, and pushing governments to move beyond symbolic gestures. It also means breaking the silence in everyday spaces where indifference still thrives.
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You mentioned that the Gladue principles haven't stopped the over-incarceration of Indigenous people. The federal numbers show just how bad it has gotten. Dr. Ivan Zinger, the Correctional Investigator, recently reported that Indigenous women now make up almost 50% of the federal female inmate population. That is despite representing only about 4% of women in Canada. It seems the justice system is still operating exactly how the colonial structures designed it to.
Thank you for writing on this topic. Addressing indigenous rights and standing in society is the most important internal challenge facing Canadians right now. We must acknowledge the truth and move forward in reconciliation. Indeed, reconciliation is the only viable path forward, otherwise like our southern neighbours we will break apart because of the racist misogynist lies and privilege built into the foundations of our nation.