Truth and rights:
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls delivered a sprawling, scathing final report. Will it translate into real change?
The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is released, with a plea that its 231 calls for justice are not ignored
It was, of course, the BY SHANNON PROUDFOOT · consciously freighted language that grabbed all the headlines the day the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its final report.
The document—as big as a New York City telephone book and the product of nearly three years of work, hearings across the country and considerable controversy—called the thousands of cases of dead and disappeared daughters, aunts, mothers, wives and friends “nothing less than the deliberate, often covert campaign of genocide,” adding, “This is not what Canada is supposed to be about; it is not what it purports to stand for.”
The 1,200-page report was handed over to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during an hours-long closing ceremony at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que., just across the Ottawa River from the Parliament Buildings, on June 3.
It seemed nearly every person in the crowd was wearing at least one item of red clothing, the hue that has come to symbolize the lost women and girls and the urgency to find justice for them. Like the hearings themselves, the ceremony was designed to let every member of a large and diverse community add their individual voices to a collective truth that screamed not to be ignored.
A running theme in the remarks and in the report itself was an invocation to all Canadians—particularly non-Indigenous ones—to look closely, listen and allow themselves to be implicated in the ingrained patterns of racism and colonialism that allowed these deaths and abductions to happen—and therefore to be implicated in the solutions, too. “Today, the commissioners and I hold up a mirror to Canada,” chief commissioner Marion Buller said. “We reflect back what we have heard and what we have documented.”
She elicited a big cheer when she urged Indigenous people to “decolonize yourself ” by learning the history of their people and the “true history” of Canada. But Buller’s main message was a relentlessly fierce exhortation not to look away or back off on this issue now that the report is printed and bound. “The murders, the abductions, the human trafficking, the beatings, the rapes, the violence—yes, the genocide—will continue unless all Canadians find the strength, courage and vision to build a new, decolonized relationship with each other based on respect and self-determination,” she said.
Commissioner Qajaq Robinson—who was raised in Nunavut and speaks fluent Inuktitut but is not Indigenous—suggested some might have similar reactions to her own: “Guilt, shame, denial, the urge to say, ‘No, no, that’s not what this is. This is not who I am. I didn’t play a part in this. My ancestors didn’t play a part in this. We’re good people.’ ” But the families and survivors who spoke to the inquiry in 15 community hearings across the country revealed a collective reality she urged others not to dismiss. “It’s the truth,” she said. “It’s our truth, it’s my truth, it’s your truth.”
The closing ceremony was for the most part a polished affair, but there were emotionally raw moments and countless personal gestures that made it far different from the usual government event.
The ceremony was held in the Grand Hall of the museum, the same room where the inquiry was launched with great hope in 2016. It features a soaring stretch of windows on one side that look directly out onto Parliament Hill and a museum backdrop of a West Coast tree line, six Indigenous houses and a row of imposing Pacific Coast totem poles.
Everywhere you looked, T-shirts and homemade placards spoke for the family members who had come to listen: favourite snapshots transformed into desperate posters of the missing, birth and death dates that occurred far too close together, smiling women and girls who together represented a national tragedy, but whose faces, when worn on the chest or clutched in the hands of people who loved them, became once again who they were: real people.
They were too numerous, and in many cases their fates were so bureaucratically overlooked as to be uncountable beyond “thousands,” the report concluded. (An RCMP report estimated that almost 1,200 women and girls were killed or went missing between 1980 and 2012.)
Commissioner Michèle Audette said that some of the value of the sprawling report is that it made the scale of the tragedy, and the social and historical ills that created it, too glaring to ignore. “We need to change. Did we really need a national inquiry for that? No,” she said. “But with this inquiry, we will be able to say to the academics, to the lawyers, to the people who don’t think that there is a genocide today: ‘We have 1,200 pages to prove it.’ ”
She became emotional when she invoked another prominent theme: that the momentum cannot be lost now, and all the work and good intentions and fierce advocacy cannot fall into silence. “It has to happen. If it won’t, I’m not sure we will have another national inquiry,” she said, voice breaking. “And I’m not going to wear this on my shoulder or my heart, because we need to change, right now.”
Over its nearly three years of existence, the inquiry had been riven by staff turnover, high-profile resignations, criticism from families, advocates and Indigenous leaders and multiple delays. At times it seemed on the verge of collapse amid fears its scope was too broad and its timeline too short to get a grip on such an ongoing crisis. A 2017 Mac
lean’s story found the whole project plagued by “mundane logistical troubles, and more existential tensions over the inquiry’s guiding framework and philosophy.” The Assembly of First Nations called on the leaders of the inquiry to demand changes, while other stakeholders advocated for different leadership or a “reset” of the entire project.
Just weeks before the final report was to be delivered on April 30—itself a delay from the Nov. 1, 2018 deadline in the original terms of reference—the inquiry announced that the federal government had opted to delay the release for translation.
When the report finally landed in public, the inquiry’s recommendations proved to be monumental in scope and minute in detail, constituting 231 separate “calls for justice,” which Buller said are “not mere recommendations or optional suggestions. They are legal imperatives.” These items are contained in a small, square book about the size of a slice of bread—an addendum to the report—and they range from calling on federal, provincial and territorial, and Indigenous governments to implement a National Action Plan, to improving policing in remote communities, training people in the hospitality industry to recognize sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and calling for more Indigenous staff in child welfare systems.
“They are calls for justice,” Buller said. “Because that is what you, the families and survivors, told us that you want: justice.”
The day after the report was released, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde urged people not to get so fixated on semantics that they miss the entire point of the inquiry. “I wouldn’t get hung up on whether or not the word ‘genocide’ is used,” he said, when asked about the apparent reluctance of government officials to apply it. “I’d be more focused on the implementation plan, on the recommendations. That’s the big thing, because we really want to end violence against women and girls. That’s really what it’s about.”
Other observers saw the massive and diffuse nature of the report—its 231 calls for justice dwarf the 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example—as potentially inducing paralysis, rather than action, on the very real tragedy the inquiry was created to tackle. “The commission sets ambitious goals and the authors of the report insist their prescriptions are a package deal that has to be accepted as a whole by all levels of government,” Chantal Hébert wrote in the Toronto
Star. “In so doing, they may be programming their report to fail.”
At the closing ceremony, Trudeau sat in the front row of the audience, but he was a distinctly secondary presence. He did not rise from his seat or speak until late in the morning, when he mounted the stage to receive the final report, symbolically bundled up on a cradle board similar to the ones some Indigenous people use to swaddle their babies. “The action protects the sacred truths within the report and symbolizes rebirth and new possibilities,” the inquiry explained of this part of the ceremony. “A new nation is born.”
When Trudeau spoke, he was relatively brief, saying he was “humbled and grateful” to receive the document, acknowledging the fraught work that went into creating it.
“The process has been long and I can only imagine how awful it’s been to relive such intense pain,” he said. “And to the families and survivors here today and to those watching or listening at home, I want you to know that this report is not the end. The work of the commissioners, the stories they have collected and the calls for justice they have put forward will not be placed on a shelf to collect dust.”
That last line earned loud cheers, and he had to pause before continuing: “I know and you know that we need to fix the way things work in this country.”
Trudeau did not use the term “genocide,” though someone in the crowd shouted the word and insisted he use it. The following day, he said his government “accept[s] the finding” that the lost women and girls represent a genocide, though he declined to say he personally agreed that Canada had committed such a thing.
Heavy semantics aside, it was Robinson who perhaps most neatly summed up the monumental rebuke the report directs at a certain notion of Canada—and how the response to it could provide an answer to the country’s existential soul-searching. “I say to you now, it might challenge who we think we are, who we hope to be,” Robinson said, totem pole sentries soaring above her head, weathered and cracked by time and climate. “But who we will be, and who we are, is ultimately defined by how we respond now that we know.”
‘Who we will be, and who we are, is ultimately defined by how we respond now that we know’