Wednesday May 04, 2022

Girls Don’t Hitchhike (The Highway Of Tears)

From 1970 until present day 73 women and girls have gone missing or turned up dead on Canada’s highway 16, otherwise known as the highway of tears. A disproportionate number of these women and girls are indigenous. Most of their cases remain unsolved. Most of their faces remain unseen.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police assembled a task force in 2005 in the hopes of solving 18 of these cases.

The name of the task force is E-Pana.

18 is not enough. But it’s a start. We could never endeavor to tell all of their stories today, we've told as many as we could and in time we will tell more. We also start to unravel the cultural genocide of indigenous people that has been going on in Canada and the United Stated for hundreds of years, and trace the generational trauma that is deeply rooted in the horror of residential schools.

May 5th is Red Dress Day, so wear your red in honor of the missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and 2 spirit people. For more on the red dress project, click the link below.