Families call for respect for Indigenous lives

WINNIPEG Family members of missing and murdered Indigenous women sobbed, fought back tears and expressed anger Monday as they recounted what happened to their loved ones.

They also recalled running up against what they said was indifference from police and people in general.

"What was she to society — nothing?” Isabel Daniels asked the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women about her cousin, Nicole Daniels, who was found frozen to death in 2009.

“Like the 1,200 other aboriginal women that are murdered and missing?”

Nicole was 16 when she was found face down, with her clothes partially removed, behind a Winnipeg auto body shop on the morning of April 1, 2009. The night before, her family said the teen had gone out with an older man she had met on a telephone chat line.

An autopsy found a high level of alcohol in her system and the police ruled out foul play. They attributed the removed clothing to paradoxical undressing — a misplaced feeling of warmth that can occur when people suffer from severe hypothermia.

Her family told the inquiry hearing in Winnipeg they have no doubt Nicole Daniels was murdered.

“She had bruises on her arms that we saw when she was in her casket, and she didn't have those bruises before. She had bruises on her legs,” Nicole's aunt, Joan Winning, told the hearing.