Fighting for Canada's Indigenous Women

Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this interview.

Since 1980, up to 4,000 indigenous women in Canada have gone missing. Although indigenous women only make up about 4 percent of the country's population, they account for 16 percent of all homicides, and 11 percent of all missing people.

Those stats are sadly familiar to Melina Laboucan-Massimo.

“My sister Bella was found two years and just over nine months ago," said Laboucan-Massimo. "It was probably one of the worst phone calls I've ever received in my life. She had just graduated from college. She left our community, the province of Alberta, to go to Toronto. And three months later, she was found dead, and the case is still unsolved and listed as suspicious."

Until recently, the Canadian government only acknowledged a fraction of the missing person and homicide rates that surround indigenous women. But that's changing under the Trudeau Administration — new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently appointed Minister Carolyn Bennett, Canadian minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, to lead a reconciliation project with indigenous women. 

“The whole of our government is going to have to fix this," Bennett said at the Women in the World panel on April 7th, 2016. "We know it's not going to be overnight, but we will launch a public national enquiry to get to these root causes, and we're going to put in place some of the things that we can do right now that the families have been talking about for a very long time. And it's time that we get on with it.”

Dawn Lavell-Harvard, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, the organization that first raised awareness of the problem, says the issue is tied to a history of neglect and ill treatment. Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear our full conversation.