Clarifying dissenting voices: Exploring the ambivalence around the Canadian national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls

Abstract

From the outset, the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (NIMMIWG, 2016–2019), whose mandate was to investigate and report on the systemic causes of all forms of violence against Indigenous women and girls, has faced complaints from survivors, families of the missing and murdered, and Indigenous associations across the country. By exploring the crisis of legitimacy experienced during the NIMMIWG’s process, this article traces the interplay between the inquiry’s legal scope, public grievances and possible testimonial outcomes. The objective is to consider how conflicting views and ambivalence in understanding the inquiry’s vision and role have impacted this truth-gathering process focused on survivors and families’ testimonies of colonial and gendered violence. The first section recalls general doubts and suspicions expressed in Canadian media (2015–2018) towards the inquiry’s goals and actions, notably with respect to questions of liability. The second section analyses a few public testimonies about ‘stolen sisters’ given during the Montreal public hearing, which reveal an irreducible tension between finding new forms of accountability, notably by police forces and the judicial system, and the cultural and healing remembrance platform of the NIMMIWG. The last section reflects on how this state-sponsored apparatus, based on a language of truth-telling and remembrance, avoided an opportunity to address systemic structures of violence towards Indigenous women, girls, queer, trans, and two-spirit people with regard to inequalities and redistribution faced by families and survivors of loved ones, not only in their everyday lives and their experience of destruction and death, but also, I argue, in sustaining their participation in this state-sponsored process and its aftermath.

The Canadian state is unlikely to willingly engage in dismantling its own supremacy and, thus, the persistent energies of Indigenous women and their supporters are required to educate, expose, and disrupt settler colonial domination and violence against Indigenous women and girls. [. . .] For as long as these systems of oppression continue to exist [settler colonialism, racism, patriarchy], Indigenous women and girls will continue to pay the price with their lives.

Bourgeois (2018: 81)

Introduction

In 2021, Indigenous peoples ¹ made up 5% (1.8 million) of the total population in Canada. Not only are they the fastest growing demographic group in the country, but also the youngest (Statistics Canada, 2023). This seemingly positive picture hides the fact that Indigenous peoples, and especially Indigenous women and girls, have been historically targeted by violence in Canadian society. ² Consequently, tackling the high rates of violence, death and suicide in Indigenous populations requires acutely naming and acting on the disparity of treatment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in this country. Nevertheless, closing the gap of inequality is challenging because of the imperialistic ideology behind ‘settler colonial projects and practice’ (Simpson, 2016: 442) that has manifested in government assimilation policies (e.g. Indian Act, 1876 ³ ) and resulted in enduring impacts caused by land removal, cultural dispossession and so on. This legacy has been challenged by activist movements focused on Indigenous rights, sovereignty, resurgence and particularly the re-possession of lands, languages and ceremonies. Henceforth, with regard to the neoliberal sociopolitical landscape of the last decades, some would say that the complex Indigenous-settlers relationship ⁴ has changed – whether on questions of legal policies, political willpower, acceptance of cultural values or economic development ⁵ – but Indigenous intellectuals (e.g. Alfred, 2015; Palmater, 2015; Simpson, 2008) and campaigners (e.g. Defenders of the Land, Families of Sisters in Spirit, Idle No More) have proven that the struggle against colonial oppression and domination continues in Canada.

One of the lived realities that crystallizes the rampant social inequalities and injustices against Indigenous peoples in this country is the alarming rate of disappearances and deaths of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women, girls, queer, trans, and two-spirit people ⁶ (IWGQT2S ⁷ ). As the literature shows, the specific gendered violence experienced by these groups is rooted in the experience of colonialism, the stereotyping of Indigenous peoples and especially the sexualization of IWGQT2S (Dean, 2016; Razack, 2016; Smith, 2003). While many federal, provincial and territorial official inquiries ⁸ have reported serious national concerns regarding violence against Indigenous women and girls, it took over 30 years of mobilization by families and advocacy organizations ⁹ before this human rights issue became a political priority.

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls’ (NIMMIWG, 2016–2019) mandate ¹⁰ was to examine the root causes for the disproportionate violence against Indigenous women and girls and to subsequently make recommendations. For this article, the inquiry will be conceptualized as a form of transitional justice bodywork, a commission looking into individuals and policies to gather information about historical wrongdoings. The aims of such truth-seeking processes are usually: ‘to discover, clarify, and formally acknowledge past abuse; to respond to specific needs of victims; to contribute to justice and accountability; to outline institutional responsibility and recommend reforms; and promote reconciliation and reduce conflict over the past’ (Hayner, 2002: 24). However, even prior to the inquiry’s official start, grievances from survivors, families of missing and murdered IWGQT2S, and Indigenous associations around the country were overflowing and the inquiry was under a relentless fire of complaints (e.g. the process was said to be too ‘bureaucratic’ (Mcdonald, 2017), ‘legalistic’ (Belcourt, 2017), ‘frustrating’ and ‘upsetting’ for families (Kane, 2017)). This article aims to reflect on how these opposing views – as forms of narrative of accountability, truth and memory – may have impacted the inquiry by evoking ‘impossible justice’ regarding the ongoing disrespect and extreme violence experienced by IWGQT2S. This breach in the inquiry’s truth-gathering framework revealed a blind spot of the NIMMIWG’s work; ¹¹ therefore, it seems worth exploring since it calls into question the false ‘redistribution-recognition dilemma’ discussed by Nancy Fraser (2000) – a theory of justice that rethinks the relation between economic and cultural injustice instead of trying to put one ahead of the other – a reflection that has not yet been formally addressed in the context of the NIMMIWG.

Previous research called for a more inclusive perspective of the NIMMIWG, notably including Indigenous males (Hansen and Dim, 2019), while others considered that the inquiry demonstrated new ways of addressing cultural rights violations (Luoma, 2021). Some have tried to examine the tension inherent to the hybrid nature of the NIMMIWG as ‘a state (public/national) inquiry, a human rights report, and an official history (rewritten and archived)’ (Wegner and Lawless, 2021: 1), while others described its conditions of failure as ‘neither an effective public inquiry nor an effective Indigenous legal mechanism’ (Stanton, 2022: 176). One of the biggest difficulties of this truth-seeking process was that it bore the aura of ‘colonial inquiries’ (Murdocca, 2017: 124), which deal with historical forms of colonial violence and contemporary realities. Therefore, one can assume that testimonies of loss, grief, and accountability for IWGQT2S produced within the NIMMIWG worked as ‘reparative justice, reconciliation, and restorative justice practices’ (Murdocca, 2017: 126), thus navigating between evidence of ‘the everyday life and exceptional violence’ (Murdocca, 2017: 123). ¹² In that context of truth recovery, it seems imperative to look back at how the critiques opened the conversation about symbolic and physical harm done to individuals and the social fabric of communities (Spelman, 2002: 53). In addition, let’s remember that when ‘truth seeking is not followed by further actions (reparations, prosecutions, etc.) there is a danger that any reparative effect is undermined’ (Lawry-White, 2015: 177).

Therefore, exploring the crisis of legitimacy experienced by the NIMMIWG may reveal the interplay between the inquiry’s legal scope, public grievances and possible testimonial outcomes. It is anticipated that the prioritization of a therapeutic or cultural recognition paradigm regarding truth-telling has limited the expression of material forms of redistribution and redress. ¹³ It is expected that rebalancing those needs for social recognition and economic redistribution of the moral, ethical and political cost of bereavement through the NIMMIWG will show the unexpected burden put on the survivors and families that witnessed the unspeakable truths about ongoing structural violence in Canadian society.

This article is thus divided into three sections. The first section traces back the interplay between the inquiry’s official positioning and the grievances expressed by the families and advocates of the missing and murdered IWGQT2S in Canadian media between 2015 and 2018, ¹⁴ notably with respect to the questions of social and legal responsibility. While this text sample is not exhaustive, it is exemplary of how many were feeling at the time of the NIMMIWG. The second section explores testimonies given during the Montréal public hearing, because the author was present and was able to grasp the ambivalence that existed between a culturally sensitive truth-telling process and a justice-based approach in dealing with human rights violations. The final section further develops the main argument, which is that the NIMMIW’s truth-gathering process was reluctant to address findings of legal and economic implications in reporting and investigating crimes against IWGQT2S, thus preventing some survivors and family access to justice, answers and forms of accountability regarding the historical harm done to them and their loved ones.

• Section 1: A Crisis of Legitimacy: Requesting a Fundamental Shift to the National Inquiry

A national inquiry must look not only at the individual instances of murdered and missing Indigenous women but also at the root causes like child welfare rates, chronic poverty and homelessness, incarceration rates, domestic abuse, the residential school legacy, inter-generational trauma, the impacts of ongoing colonization and oppression, and systemic discrimination within Canada’s laws and policies to name a few. (Palmater, 2016: 259)

In Canada, the domination and dispossession of Indigenous peoples has allowed excessive violence to be exercised and imprinted on Indigenous women’s bodies. Indigenous women (and/or ¹⁵ queer, trans and two-spirit people) are more than six times more likely to be killed than non-Indigenous women in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2016a). As a historically marginalized group, they deal with complex issues of poverty, intergenerational loss, violence and trauma, and the failure of police forces and governmental departments and institutions to ensure their safety and their access to equal opportunities, first and foremost to justice. The NIMMIWG’s mandate was to investigate ‘systemic causes of all forms of violence’ against Indigenous women and girls in Canada, as much as investigating ‘institutional policies and practices implemented in response to [that] violence’. However, the first element had already been extensively studied in previous reports; ¹⁶ as such ‘the long-awaited final report of the NIMMIWG confirmed what we have long known: “the history of colonization is gendered”’ (p. 231) (Brant and Lavell-Harvard, 2024: 12). As for the second element, even though ‘restorative justice emerges from the desire to reconstruct a just society [. . . by] a method of truth finding and truth telling’ (Rotberg, 2006: 37) to set new societal orientations, critics have raised strong doubts about the capacity of state-funded apparatuses to criticize police and judicial institutions (Campbell and Wellman, 2024; Chartrand and Savarese, 2023). One of the limits is that the dominant judicial interpretative framework of colonial governance does not sufficiently address social inequities, patterns of discrimination, and racism, in the historical past as much as their persistence into the present day (Murdocca, 2013). Considering those pitfalls, how could the NIMMIWG produce meaningful contributions that would go beyond a ‘moment of performative grief withing acts of “feel good” reconciliation’ (Brant and Lavell-Harvard, 2024: 15)? This section explores the NIMMIWG ‘trauma-informed approach’, ¹⁷ and its component of wellness, which faced many challenges in the inquiry’s implementation, hence evoking the prospective of an ‘impossible justice’.

From the beginning of the NIMMIWG in September 2016, many people, such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Pamela Palmater, acknowledged and respected the fact that the inquiry was put in place at the families’ request, but voiced very little faith in the inquiry’s ability to impartially address historically unbalanced relations of power. ¹⁸ This doubt was fuelled by the inquiry’s Terms of Reference, which stipulated that this instrument ‘could not provide monetary compensation or restitution to anyone’ (NIMMIWG, 2016c), nor could it attempt to solve pending cases, but ‘if new evidence comes to the attention of the commissioners relating to a case, they can refer the new evidence to the appropriate authorities to re-open the case [their notices are not binding]’ (NIMMIWG, 2016c). Compounding this remark with the mistrust between commissioners, families, Indigenous associations, and state authorities, these problems made the decision by the federal government to set up a national police task force to investigate MMIWG (CTV Television Network, 2017) highly questionable. Why would this new task force be more successful in investigating the old, and sadly new, cases of missing and murdered IWGQT2S?

In addition to this preoccupation around police accountability (Human Rights Watch, 2013; Razack, 2015), which involves the recognition of systemic racism and racialized policing of Indigenous-police relations in Canada (Comack, 2012: 30), the matter of time was a recurrent theme in criticisms of the NIMMIWG. Many critiqued the short period allotted (2 years, and a 6-month extension ¹⁹ ), others, its slow start, characterized by multiple delays (e.g. no functional website before December 2016; the first public hearing began 9 months after the inquiry started) described as a ‘lack of progress’ (Native Women Association of Canada (NWAC), 2016) on an urgent issue. It also affected communications with the survivors, families and communities, notably due to privacy obligations, since the people who participated in the pre-inquiry hearings were not contacted to be registered as witnesses for the community hearings ²⁰ (Canada Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 2017b):

‘We are very concerned. The two-year mandate that the National Inquiry Commission has been given leaves a very short time for the mandated tasks of establishing regional and issue-specific advisory bodies, creating trauma-informed and culturally aware counselling services, and beginning the substantive process of listening to family members, loved ones, and survivors express their stories all across Canada’, said NWAC President Francyne Joe. (NWAC, 2016)

On 15 May 2017, an alliance of individuals and civil society organizations, mostly survivors, families and associations of MMIWGQT2S, raised concerns about the inquiry’s direction, saying it was in ‘serious trouble’. The principal signatory of the open letter was the Métis artist and activist Christi Belcourt. By underpinning eight areas of questions, doubts, and concerns – (1) communications, (2) respecting the spirits of our relations and ceremonies, (3) extension, (4) leadership, (5) trauma-informed process, (6) supports for families and loved ones, (7) Privy Council Office and (8) independence – the letter called to redirect the NIMMIWG so that it could fulfil its vision and mandate. It also asked how the inquiry was going to include historically marginalized social groups, like ‘people who are street-involved’, ‘people engaged in sex industries’, ‘individuals wanting to testify about matters related to police violence’ and ‘Two-Spirit and Transgender individuals and experts’ (Belcourt, 2017). This kind of exclusion of witness is not uncommon in ‘truth-telling mechanisms’ (Brounéus, 2010: 411) based on ‘victim-centered approach’ (Hayner, 2002: 16) which might favour some modes of expression during public hearings (e.g. emotional display of sadness). During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, with regard to Indian Residential Schools, a ‘slippage between different kinds of truths’ (Niezen, 2017: 84) was observed during the public hearings. As such, the TRC commissioner-in-chief explained in a 2019 address that the truth-telling process was summarized in two kinds of truths: ‘factual truths’ (quantifiable elements of the testimony) and ‘relative truths’ (how people felt as a consequence of what happened) (Niezen, 2017: 83). The TRC, while pursuing a wider historical and educational agenda, had an obligation, said the chief commissioner, to ‘give a balanced story at the end of the day’ (Niezen, 2017: 83). In relationship to multiple truths, how would the NIMMIWG interpret possible contradictions arising from truthful testimonies?

Not long after, the NIMMIWG chief commissioner (Marion Buller) published a response to Belcourt’s letter, addressing the eight areas of criticism and adding two points (‘schedule’ and ‘vision’) raised by the inquiry team. Most of Buller’s letter (2017) consisted of acknowledgements of some flaws, which she called ‘weaknesses’, in the early stages of the inquiry, and insisted on the will of the inquiry’s staff to ‘increase transparency and build trust’ with families, associations, and the signatories who requested a fundamental shift in the NIMMIWG. To say the least, the commissioners’ hope to succeed in ‘combining Indigenous cultures and protocols with the Western legal system’ (Buller, 2017: 8) was challenging, since more than 25 inquiry staff members had resigned or been fired by July 2018. This included high-profile resignations, such as Michael Hutchinson, the communications director (4 February 2016); the executive director Michèle Moreau (6 July 2017), and the commissioner Marilyn Poitras (11 July 2017), who later said in an interview (CBC, 2017a) that she stepped down because she was concerned about the direction of the inquiry. This was a direction that seemed to prioritize a therapeutic or cultural recognition paradigm regarding truth-telling, as she later elaborated:

‘You tell us your sad story and we’ll figure out what to do with you. And we’re headed down that same path. And if it worked, we would all be so fixed and healthy by now. It doesn’t work’ (CBC, 2017a).

Moreover, this quote reveals the preponderance of a reconciliatory ethic oriented towards a teleological approach – one that assumes actions are oriented towards expected outcomes (e.g. healing or wellness) – a causal claim that has long been challenged in peacebuilding literature (Brounéus, 2010: 410; Ross, 2003: 327). In fact, there have been documented risks and negative effects of cumulative traumatic exposure, of recalling or retelling painful memories of violence (e.g. prevalence of depression and PTSD; Brounéus, 2010: 415). Even though public hearings can allow for new narratives to emerge, ‘the social fields in which testifiers are located are complex’ (Ross, 2003: 332). While trying to unify the private and the political, they might not necessarily unsettle the dominant discourses on responsibility, restitution or retribution. On the contrary, they often become standardized and replicable.

Accordingly, ‘in order to regain trust and ensure that families are no longer feeling re-traumatized in this process’ (Belcourt, 2017: 1), one of the substantial shifts requested by critics of the inquiry was to question the NIMMIWG’s legal and top-down colonial structures of consultation with Indigenous communities (Galloway and Ha, 2017). In July 2017, at the annual meeting of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), a motion calling for the NIMMIWG to be reset and for the current commissioners to resign was defeated. The grievances were that the inquiry did not focus enough on investigating police conduct (CBC, 2017c), even though there was a forensic team reviewing police files across the 14 federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions. In the same breath, the document specified that ‘there are differences in the powers ²¹ of the National Inquiry to consider police conduct’ (NIMMIWG, 2017c): for example, in British Columbia, the commissioners could not make findings of misconduct, but they could in Ontario. This statement did not explain how the inquiry’s team was going to thoroughly investigate (e.g. from police files and databases) the frequent allegations of police misconduct in the case of MMIWGQT2S. In fact, those criticisms were often raised by family members and Indigenous women’s associations during the inquiry’s process describing the police’s lack of responsiveness and communication in following up on the cases of their loved ones. In other cases, like the murder of 14-year-old Tina Fontaine in 2014, not only did the Winnipeg police fail to take reasonable steps to protect Tina when she was in their custody (Palmater, 2016), but the provincial Child and Family Services were also unable to prevent, detect and respond with adequate resources to Tina’s needs while under their care (Manitoba Advocate for Children Youth (MACY), 2019).

On legal grounds, it is worth mentioning that in the international human rights framework, when it comes to the official response to violence that threatens the inherent dignity and worth of every human being, there is a notion of ‘due diligence’ that comes into play. This ‘due diligence’ means that ‘a state must take reasonable steps to prevent human rights violations, use the means at its disposal to carry out serious investigations, identify those responsible, impose the appropriate punishment and ensure that the victim receives adequate reparation’ (Amnesty International, 2004: 5). As I will explore in the next section, these elements of accountability are among the most recurrent requests voiced by families, ²² survivors and communities, as well as Indigenous associations ²³ throughout the inquiry’s truth-gathering process.

• Section 2: Hope and Mistrust: An Ambivalent Process of Truth-Telling and Justice

‘This commission (NIMMIWG) is developing in the context of truth and reconciliation. The families are granted a lot of space, which is desirable, but the judicial aspect is also central if we want to obtain justice’ says Viviane Michel, director of the Québec Native Women’s Association. (Le Devoir, 2018, translation by the author)

As I have just demonstrated, the inquiry’s work has been undermined by doubts and suspicions coming directly from survivors and families of missing and murdered. This crisis of legitimacy in the implementation of the NIMMIWG brings forward the question of equality and transparency in coming to grips with these crimes and preventing future repetition, but also in imagining ways to heal from this appalling violence. In this section, by analysing transcriptions from the Montréal hearing, I will argue the inquiry’s ‘families-first’ and ‘trauma-informed’ approach ²⁴ has neglected the families’ request for a justice-based approach of accountability. Before going further, it is important to note that testimonies contribute to memorializing violence in the present in relation to ongoing effects of the past. As such, personal recollections of everyday life interactions are entangled with collective experiences of racialized and gendered colonial, militarized/policed/judicial state violence. Therefore,

the process of naming the violence presents a challenge [. . .] because such naming has large political stakes, and not only because language falters in the face of violence. The complex knotting of several kinds of social actors in any event of collective violence makes it difficult to determine whether the event should be named. (Das, 2007: 205)

As such, was silencing even considered as a form of inscription of structural violence in the face of what the inquiry’s work called the ‘truth-gathering process’ (NIMMIWG, 2019c: 6)?

The ‘truth-gathering process’ was described in the inquiry’s lexicon (NIMMIWG, 2017b: 5) as ‘an ongoing process, rather than an event’, that allowed for ‘multiple truths or perspectives to be brought forward’ by survivors and family members who had lost loved ones (this included ‘families of the heart’, referring to people who may not have been biologically related). More importantly, it was designed as ‘not presumptive about finding the truth or deciding what is the truth’ (NIMMIWG, 2017b: 5) – contrary to Western-based legal model of truth-telling. This ‘truth-gathering process’ was notably conducted through 15 ‘community hearings’ (Part 1 of the truth-gathering process ²⁵ ), held across all provinces and territories. Depending on the families’ and survivors’ preferences, they could choose whether to share their testimonies through a public process (which took place in a large room with an audience, where the testimony was filmed and streamed through a Web platform) or opt for private testimonies (called ‘in camera’ testimonies), available only to the commissioners and their authorized legal and research teams.

Since I attended the community public hearing held in Montréal (12–16 March 2018) – one of the two hearings that took place in the province of Québec – I was able to note a troubling pattern of ‘testimonial injustice’ towards survivors and their families when reporting cases and receiving a follow-up with the relevant authorities. The concept of ‘testimonial injustice’, ²⁶ developed by Miranda Fricker (2007), describes when ‘a speaker receives an unfair deficit of credibility from a hearer owing to prejudice on the hearer’s part’ (Fricker, 2007: 9). In other words, the experience of disbelief, contempt and indifference felt by the authorities when reporting a crime or trying to obtain information about a loved one links testimonial injustice to the stories told by NIMMIWG witnesses. As a result of this initial exploration, and due to space limitations – two testimonies will be analysed here to identify the ambivalence between truth-telling and justice. These testimonies were selected for their capacity to highlight contradictions in the inquiry’s mandate and the expectations of survivors and families of ‘stolen sisters’. This said, other testimonies may be included in future systemic analysis of these observations.

The first testimony is that of Sarah Nowrakudluk (NIMMIWG, 2018c), concerning the 1994 death of her sister Alacie Nowrakudluk, a 35-year-old Inuk woman who lived in Montréal, and whose body was found in the water a month after her family reported her missing to the Montréal police. Her sister told the commissioners that the police never attempted to contact them after they declared their loved one missing. Expressing a wish, the witness said: ‘it would have been nice if someone would have called the police, our local police, or call us directly to our phone at home in Inukjuak to tell us like they’re doing everything they can to look for her’ (NIMMIWG, 2018c: 28–29). The family never saw the coroner’s report, something that was rectified only 24 hours before their testimony to the NIMMIWG – because a barrister ²⁷ from the inquiry had requested a copy from the coroner’s office. In the absence of marks of violence found on her body, the coroner reported that the cause of death was drowning, associated with a high level of blood alcohol content. The family still has many questions surrounding the circumstances of her death, but also about the police investigation and their lack of communication with family members in Inukjuak. ‘“How” is the question one must ask. [. . .] The relatives who lost their loved one need full information released to them’ (NIMMIWG, 2018c: 17). In her testimony, Ms Nowrakudluk reported that Alacie’s family and friends had to conduct the search alone in a city they did not know well, notwithstanding the fact that her mother spoke mostly Inuktitut and only limited English. When asked by the inquiry’s staff if she knew of any searches organized by police? The witness replied: ‘Not to my knowledge. Looks like nobody was ever searching for her’ (NIMMIWG, 2018c: 26). Of course, this dreadful situation raises questions about racial profiling by the Montréal police ²⁸ and their failure to respectfully follow up with families of missing and murdered IWGQT2S.

The second testimony was given by Françoise Ruperthouse (NIMMIWG, 2018b), an Anicinabe from Pikogan, who took the stand specifying to the commissioners that she was speaking on behalf of her mother. She added: ‘my parents were overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and regret’ (‘mes parents ont été envahis de culpabilité, de remords’: 38) after two of their children (Tony and Emily) disappeared only a few years apart, both while under the care of health institutions in the province of Québec. In the late 1950s, Françoise Ruperthouse’s brother was airlifted to the hospital in Amos for treatment of a respiratory infection but never returned home. The family was told by the hospital staff that he had died, but no body nor death certificate was presented to them. Only in 2016, with the help of a journalist who gained access to medical records, did the family learn that Tony had recovered from bronchopneumonia in Amos but was later diagnosed as an ‘idiot’ and transferred to a hospital in Baie-Saint-Paul, where he died at the age of 7 (NIMMIWG, 2019b: 69). In Emily’s case, then age 5, she had been taken to the hospital in Amos after a bee sting due to an allergic reaction. After that admission, Emily was not seen again for over 30 years, until health authorities in Baie-Saint-Paul contacted the Pikogan health centre looking for her family because her health had deteriorated. The family was able to travel to see her, and even though the medical team said Emily did not recognize anyone, the first thing she said when she saw them was ‘Mommy’. When the family asked a nurse what had happened to their sister, she was evasive: ‘That, for instance, I have not idea about’ (‘Ça, par exemple, j’ai aucune idée’: 34). A few months later, the family was able to take Emily back to Amos where she died in 2010 (NIMMIWG, 2019b: 68). During her testimony (NIMMIWG, 2018b), Ms Ruperthouse wondered whether her brother might still be alive and whether medical tests were performed on her sister, who could not talk or walk when they found her confined to a hospital bed. The question that comes up repeatedly in her testimony is: ‘What did they do with my brother and sister?’ (‘Qu’est-ce qu’ils ont fait avec mon frère et ma soeur?’: 14). She describes how the medical staff dehumanized her parents: ‘my parents […] they were treated like animals […] I want justice for that’ (‘Mes parents [. . .] ils ont été traités comme des animaux [. . .] je veux qu’il y ait une justice pour ça’: 34). Who oversaw the decision not to inform the parents that their children had recovered and were admitted to other institutions? ²⁹ This situation raises serious questions around the state’s failure to protect Indigenous children, the complicity of healthcare workers and administrators in removing them from their families, and more importantly, the impunity that continues to shield perpetrators from justice for these dreadful offences.

Apart from the fact that these two cases involve different persons, institutions, ³⁰ Indigenous nations, geographies and time periods, what they share is the struggle and isolation experienced by the families who, whether the event occurred 30 or over 65 years ago still want to know what happened to their loved ones. In the case of MMIWG, I argue that the concept of ‘ethical loneliness’ (Stauffer, 2015: 3–4) – as a form of otherness – can be experienced by survivors and family members in response to the unjust treatment of IWGQT2S and the widespread violation of their human rights. Before and after telling their stories, they may feel ‘abandoned’ by official institutions (e.g. the police) and individuals (e.g. the inquiry’s staff) whose responsibility is to address such dehumanization and act upon it. As such, the ‘lack of response to harm’ (Stauffer, 2015: 28) may result in ‘the injustice of not being heard’ or acknowledged, which can affect a subject’s autonomy of their sense of connection to themselves and others. Therefore, the unfair disadvantages that Ms Nowrakudluk and Ms Ruperthouse described are linked to the prejudice they encountered when reporting, discovering or seeking information about the disappearance of their relatives. In the first case, the police showed neither urgency nor diligence in responding to Alacie’s disappearance. A striking example of that negligence is that, to the Nowrakudluk family’s knowledge, no official search party was organized (‘the police never indicated whether they were looking for her’: 10; ‘in our communities, whenever one person is missing the community readies itself together, collectively, and search for the mission person’: 11), and no interview was conducted with the last person to see Alacie alive. This lack of responsiveness by the Montréal police echoes the results of a study by Flores and Alfaro (2023), which examined NIMMIWG testimonies and interviews reflecting on police (in)action justifying violence against IWGQT2S in Canada. They found that police narratives were either intrenched in pathologizing stereotypes or lack of concern (‘there’s nothing we could do’: 403), leaving families to confront three recurring styles (linguistic and behavioural strategies): (1) indifference, (2) callousness and (3) lack of information (Flores and Alfaro, 2023: 400–401). This kind of systemic practices by police raises the question: how many cases like Alacie’s are there?

In the second case, hospital authorities showed neither diligence nor empathy when dealing with Tony and Emily’s and their parents by not disclosing the exact treatment their children endured under their care, and they undoubtedly violated fundamental ethical principles around informed consent by displacing their children to other institutions, notably a psychiatric hospital in Baie Saint-Paul. But the different levels of responsibility regarding Canada’s healthcare system render the family’s search even more difficult, since the system is partly a responsibility of the federal government (that must offer supplementary services to certain groups of people, including Indigenous peoples), but also administered by the provinces and the territories (Government of Canada, 2018). Furthermore, until the 1960s, some establishments were maintained and managed by charities and religious institutions. Therefore, it is unclear if the NIMMIWG was able to investigate thoroughly those disappearances as a form of ‘medical colonialism’ (Shaheen-Hussain, 2020) and adequately address the liability of multiple levels of governments’ funding, private and public hospitals. Then, what was to happen with open cases brought to the commissioners’ attention? As such, the inquiry was probably unable to address the ‘structural and cultural violence’ (Mullen, 2015) within Canadian society that led, on one hand, to the normalization (or quiet acceptance) of IWGQT2S’s vulnerability and dehumanization, allowing those brutal disappearances (violating human rights); and on the other hand, instilled colonial fear in Indigenous families when it came to the health care system or police interactions. Moreover, since the inquiry did not aim at resolving personal cases, how would the families, who have testified, find appeasement if there is no justice for their loved ones?

Of course, I am not in a place to discuss the possible healing testimonial outcomes for Alacie, Tony and Emily’s families, but because their demands to the commissioners point to the legal scope of the inquiry, it would be important to specify that possible distortions of the judicial power of the inquiry may have come from the fact that the NIMMIWG had the authority to ‘order a person to testify’ or ‘order a person or organization to bring physical evidence’. One of the difficulties is that since these processes were not made public, when a police officer, a coroner, or a representative of a healthcare facility was called to explain discrepancies in problematic cases brought forward by witnesses or the legal research team of the NIMMIWG, there is no way to know where this review led to afterwards. I believe this situation created a growing gap between the families’ expectations towards the NIMMIWG, and the possible outcomes of this multifaceted and multi-phase process. In both testimonies discussed in this section, the witnesses are speaking of the burden their family carried for so long (‘burden of memory’, Hackett and Rolston, 2009), sometimes in silence because of the risk of re-victimization (Tagore, 2009), and they are now asking for accountability from the police forces and health care workers in the deaths and disappearances of their loved ones. Sarah Nowrakudluk said explicitly that her family ‘need[s] some answers. We need peace’ (NIMMIWG, 2018c: 20); ‘I want to be here to speak for her because she was missing and we never really got justice for her. I want to know what happened’ (NIMMIWG, 2018c: 3). Françoise Ruperthouse has the same objective: ‘the purpose of being here is to understand and know what happened’ (‘le but d’être ici c’est de comprendre et de savoir qu’est-ce qui s’est passé’; NIMMIWG, 2018b: 10); she insists on the way the mysterious disappearance of her siblings ‘has haunted her family’ and that the family wants ‘answers before her 84-year-old mother, Hélène-Joséphine, dies’ (CBC, 2018a). Meanwhile, the Executive Summary of the Interim Report, published a few months before their testimonies, maintains that the inquiry team ‘ha[s] the power to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, but cannot resolve individual cases or declare who may be legally at fault’ (NIMMIWG, 2017a: 3). This observation shows that there are conflicting views and ambivalence in understanding the inquiry’s vision, role and function during the truth-gathering process and beyond, as illustrated with legitimate material demands expressed by many families.

• Section 3: Widening the Lens of Recognition Through Redistribution and Redress

The latest two sections have shown that dissenting voices existed during the NIMMIWG’s work, but also that they revealed a tendency, within the inquiry’s truth-gathering process, to favour cultural recognition (i.e. the tendency to focus on symbolic forms of justice – through trauma-informed healing), instead of more material ones (retribution and redistribution with regards to structural violence fuelled by social inequalities that reproduce contexts of vulnerability and dehumanization). Before going into this main argument, I wish to sum up a discursive effect I noticed in the transcriptions: the tendency to depoliticize or erase the need for retributive justice and accountability. The first illustration of that tendency was the consensual, when not paternalizing, tone often used by commissioners during the Montreal hearing. For example, here are Commissioner Audet’s words after Ruperthouse’s testimony (NIMMIWG, 2018b):

Thank you Françoise for having [. . . had] the courage to come here, far from home, to talk about something that has weighed heavily for too long [. . .] Your message is clear that this is unacceptable. (49) / I have a lot of admiration [. . .] I’m honoured [by your speech] (51) / Thank you for having the courage to come here, and continue to carry this message. Continue to educate Canadians, because people have listened to you. (52) ³¹

Am I the only one to read this toning down of Ruperthouse’s truth-telling as a way to leave aside difficult questions like government legal obligations to protect all citizens independently of their origins (race), gender or class? The NIMMIWG suddenly appears lacking leverage in dealing with exceptional human rights violations it is supposed to investigate. The second illustration of the tendency to depoliticize or erase the need for retributive justice and accountability, was raised in Alacie’s sister’s testimony, with regard to the discrepancy that existed for years between how the Nowrakudluk family remembered their loved one (as a violent death) and the official coroner’s cause of death (by accident, that was revealed to the family only 24 hours before taking the stand). ³² In trying to understand possible ‘narrative harm’ on the memory of a person that no longer exists, Tomasini (2017) talks about ‘disremembering the dead’. It can be caused by narrative omission by ‘surviving interest-bearer’ (Tomasini, 2017: 26) or by institutions postmortem (e.g. police, coroner, medical staff). I believe this kind of harm to the memory of the dead (individually or collectively) can be productive in revealing omission in colonial inquiries (whether intended or not), which strengthens the status quo. As an illustration of dismissal (omission) with regard to the families asking to reopen cold cases and prosecute the people responsible for the disappearance or murder of their loved ones, the inquiry’s staff insisted on the fact that it could not ‘re-investigate individual cases; declare who may be at legal fault; blame for a failed investigation, prosecution, search and rescue, or failure to save a life; award any sums of money for compensation; interfere with any active criminal case’ (NIMMIWG, 2016c).

The contrast between cultural recognition and material redistribution can be observed in the NIMMIWG’s (2019e) final report. On one hand, it stipulates specific ‘calls for justice’ (recommendations) directed towards the justice system (calls for justice no. 5.1 to 5.25), police services (no. 9.1 to 9.11), social workers and those implicated in child welfare (no. 12.1 to 12.15) and so on. On the other hand – even with a family-first and trauma-informed approach – the commissioners’ work did not give direct responses to the survivors and families, who wanted to know who was accountable for mishandling their loved ones’ investigation, wondered about ways to access justice (i.e. retaining free legal counsel in order to prosecute), or when asked for more organizational transparency when trying to access health or police information with regards to their love one’s case. Of course, there was a great load of expectations and suspicions towards the inquiry’s truth-telling process, which generated ambivalence in participants’ expectations towards the commissioners, their legal team, and the original mandate. Therefore, the NIMMIWG’s staff should have informed thoroughly the participants of the inquiry’s limits, notably to examine police accountability with regard to specific cases. Observing the inquiry’s final report language made me wonder what would have happened if the whole process had been oriented towards ‘truth-finding’ (Rotberg and Thompson, 2000) instead of a ‘truth-gathering’ – a decision which was justified to respect ‘an Indigenous conceptualization of gathering multiple truths’ (NIMMIWG, 2017a: 58). Even though testimonies in colonial inquiries are set in a temporality where a lot of structural and systematic deficits are deemed beyond the scope of the inquiry itself, which creates a paradigm of ‘infinite delayed justice’ (Murdocca, 2017: 129), it would have been productive – just like other historical or truth commissions who rally around the slogan ‘never again’ – to uncover the truth (facts) about what happened (e.g. to lay the facts into who made the decision to transfer Emily or declare Tony dead). That gathering of material evidence may have contributed to producing common understanding in how to prevent ongoing disappearances and deaths of IWGQT2S. Certainly, there is a need for individual truths and experiences to be told publicly, but if the inquiry’s mandate had encompassed misconduct and neglect at the hands of the police and the justice system, the final recommendations may have been less courteous. ³³ Like Gutmann and Thompson (2000) said: ‘some commissions sacrifice the pursuit of justice as usually understood for the sake of promoting some other social purpose such as reconciliation’ (22). But the authors specify that the ‘pursuit of justice does not presuppose a punitive or retributive view of punishment’, they can mean bringing individuals to trial (alleged of having committed crimes) or even granting amnesty in exchange for full testimony (i.e. to know really what happened to the loved ones).

Overall, the commissioners’ focus on gathering people’s truths and providing a safe space for their story to be shared and heard is valuable, since for some witnesses it was their first opportunity to have their life experiences recognized publicly. However, the lack of interest in addressing complex historical structures of violence towards IWGQT2S may have given the paradoxical impression that rather than actualizing its ‘due diligence’ and ‘mak[ing] findings on the existence of racism and discrimination in the criminal justice system and on the competency of police response’ (CBC, 2017c); it used the survivors and families’ testimonies to recommend long-term structural changes within the nation’s institutions and services, without responding to some of their direct needs and concerns. As an illustration, the ‘short-term aftercare programme’, as the inquiry called it, described the ‘culturally appropriate support available to registered families who shared their truth in order to ensure continued healing’ (NIMMIWG, 2019f: 47). It was intended to address immediate needs, up to 3 months after the testimony. It was decided that instead of creating a unified provincial, territorial or federal programme to support the survivors and their families (for example through grassroots organizations or government agencies), financial support of up to $3500 would be available to each individual so that they would ‘have full choice and control of their aftercare’ (NIMMIWG, 2019f: 47). The commission’s decision was justified by saying that witnesses expressed their ‘lack of trust in the service providers, a lack of financial resources to engage in memorials for lost loved ones, and geographical barriers to accessibility’ (NIMMIWG, 2019f: 47). This left a burden and responsibility on the shoulders of witnesses to find counselling, healing programmes, activities to support their physical wellness and so on. Lorelei Williams, a family member of a missing and murdered IWGQT2S, testified during the inquiry and stated that she had never received any information on how to apply for financial assistance for follow-up care (CBC, 2018b). Furthermore, to my knowledge, this short-term aftercare programme was not designed to cover attorneys’ fees or provide professional help to file official complaints to the police (again what is left out or considered outside the boundaries of colonial inquiries). Besides, what happens if the presumed healing journey has not yet begun after the $3500 is spent or the 3-month period has passed? Can we then say that this is a trauma-informed after care programme (one of the principles put forward by the inquiry)?

As it was previously remarked in this article, there are no guarantees that telling your truth publicly will set you free (i.e. catharsis), or contribute to the testifier’s healing journey or well-being. Trauma is not linear (Edkins, 2006) and it is embedded in social dynamics of power that can marginalize certain social identities (Alcoff, 2001) or try to gain benefits from an instrumental interpretation of their voices and stories (Alcoff and Gray, 1993; Alcoff, 1991) in a larger national history. In addition, testimony – as a linguistic exchange – involves that the ‘speakers are vulnerable’ (Dotson, 2011: 238) because they rely on an audience to ‘hear’ and reciprocate (understand, take seriously, act) on what was communicated. This is when ‘epistemic violence in testimony’ can occur, intentionally or not, because of the hearer’s ignorance, thus allowing for ‘harmful practices of silencing’ the speaker (Dotson, 2011: 239). In this aspect, a culturally sensitive and ‘victim-centered’ truth-gathering process was not a bad idea, as it fostered different ways to honour the missing. That said, I argue this has limited the possibility for issues of redistribution and redress to be fully considered. I would also add that the inquiry’s process often performed an ‘optic of vulnerability’ (Razack, 2016) – based on a language of risk and protection – that obliterated the structural inheritances of ‘colonial terror’ ³⁴ on women’s bodies and experiences. This concept of ‘colonial terror’ renders visible the sociohistorical process of dehumanization – that is still at the heart of today’s overrepresentation of missing and murdered IWGQT2S in Canada – and illustrates the denial about ‘who benefits(ed) from instilling the terror?’.

Settler colonialism has long been embedded in the cultural logic of elimination of Indigenous peoples, and extractive dispossession (Greer, 2019; Wolfe, 2006); which resulted in deaths, displacement, exploitation and domination. Therefore, it did not come as a surprise that the redistribution of wealth was addressed in the final commission’s report stating that: ‘poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, unemployment, and barriers to education and employment which have been proven to make it difficult to meet one’s basic needs are at a much higher risk of being targeted for violence’ (NIMMIWG, 2019a: 114). But financial facets (both direct and indirect) of that colonial terror on Indigenous families, were sometimes left aside from the inquiry. In her testimony, Ms Ruperthouse spoke about her mother borrowing money to travel to the city to pick up her son’s body; when she got there, she was told ‘the baby is no longer here’ (‘le bébé n’est plus là’: 39). Ms Nowrakudluk spoke of the fact that when the family learned the terrible news, they could not afford another plane ticket from Nunavik to the South of the province. Those examples show that many blind spots were neglected regarding the issues of socioeconomic disparities, prior to the inquiry’s process, but also within it and with regard to its aftermath, in particular: economic limitations, family obligations, health issues, which limited the survivors and families’ participation. Not the smallest of those aftermaths are ‘inadequate investments’ to prevent, prioritize and protect Indigenous women’s safety (Ontario Native Women Association (ONWA), 2024: 5); which may leave the survivors and families feeling disconnected or betrayed from previous expectations.

A study directed by Puzyreva and Loxley (2017), asked a blunt question: ‘what is the cost of doing nothing’ in dealing with the consequences of Indigenous women being murdered and going missing? It mapped the types of costs that Indigenous families and communities must cover, like a funeral, ‘paying for professional counselling services and medication, travelling to court to attend a hearing or a trial and paying for legal counsel services [. . .] los[ing] income because of taking time off work’ (Puzyreva and Loxley, 2017: 24–25). These realizations evoke the continuum of the everyday life under colonial structures of violence and exclusion, to the extreme experience of loss and destruction of life itself, but also acknowledge the ethics of care ³⁵ (i.e. physical, spiritual, emotional, mental, reproductive) embodied the ones affected by missing and murdered IWGQT2S. A telling example is how families and relatives have sought guardianship of the children of IWGQT2S after their dreadful passing. In essence, testifying at the NIMMIWG’s national hearings was also a labour of care and resistance. Nonetheless, like documented elsewhere (Rousseau and Chartrand, 2023) a participation to the community hearings should not be perceived as a complete endorsement nor faith in the state-funded procedure since some witnesses echoed external criticisms of the inquiry’s work (like the ones presented in this article). At the same time, other families and survivors declined to participate in the process even though they were as much affected by the direct and indirect costs and difficult emotions regarding their loved one passing. The proposed framework drawing on perspectives of cultural healing and wellness for families and survivors was not a programme that suited all Indigenous perspectives and visions especially the ones that aimed at rectifying unequal relations of power, thus ensuring accountability and justice for the past, present and future.

Conclusion

While I recognize the dedicated and difficult work – of the missing and murdered IWGQT2S families, the staff and the Commissioners put into the inquiry, as well as many relevant recommendations in the final report – this article discussed the hope and loathing the NIMMIWG created in its wake. ³⁶ The objective was to consider how conflicting views and ambivalence in understanding the inquiry’s vision and role have impacted this truth-gathering process focused on survivors and families’ testimonies of colonial and gendered violence. I later argued that the pre-eminence of the language of truth-telling and remembrance (read as cultural recognition) was a missed opportunity to widen the lens of redistribution and redress.

That precarious balance in the truth recovery process was first explored through critiques raised by IWGQT2S activists and families in a selected media coverage between 2015 and 2018. The issue of time, trust building, well-being, as well as accountability (to tackle issues of legal accountability of police forces and inadequate access to justice), were among common preoccupations. A second section explored two testimonies shared during the community public hearing held in Montréal (2018): the murder of Alacie Nowrakudluk (1994) and the disappearances of Tony and Emily Ruperthouse over 65 years ago. Regarding the truth-gathering process, I observed a gap between the speakers and the hearers (commissioners and staff members) that I framed as an ambivalence with expected outcomes of expressing one’s truth and the search for accountability and redress regarding what happened to their loved ones. I discovered a troubling pattern of ‘testimonial injustice’ towards survivors and their families when reporting cases and receiving a follow-up with the relevant authorities, that created ‘ethical loneliness’ for some families and survivors who felt abandoned by colonial institutions – like police forces and the health system that allowed for the disappearance to go unnoticed, or when it was revealed with indifference and dismissal by the very people who should have cared in the performance of their duties. This brought up the necessity to conceptualize the inquiry’s resistance in acknowledging the complex structures of violence within the public hearing space, thus omitting to name the conditions within which, to this day, ‘colonial terror’ continues to degrade, deprive and exploit IWGQT2S knowledge, bodies and lands in this country.

This last section was an opportunity to present the main argument of this article, which is that by favouring forms of cultural recognition based on the language of truth-telling and trauma-informed healing, this state-sponsored process limited the expression of material forms of redistribution and redress. I argue that if similar truth-seeking processes portray therapeutic or healing outcomes as a sort of substitute for legal, political and economic actions, there is a possibility for lived experiences to be used and instrumentalized for larger reconciliatory ethics within the nation-state or simply silenced. To reiterate one of Commissioner Poitras’s criticisms (who resigned in July 2017), I would say that when memory work tends to prioritize the expression of human suffering in a ‘trauma-aesthetic’ (Feldman, 2004: 185), which positions the abnormal into the ground of the ahistorical, there is always a chance to reactivate a culture of victim-blaming (‘that deem violence against [IWGQT2S] as just another “Indian problem” [. . .] or a women’s issue [. . .] a national tragedy and a national shame’) (Brant and Lavell-Harvard, 2024: 18), thus discharging the perpetrators (whether the state, organizations or individuals) from taking their responsibilities. As a matter of fact, the present analysis also considered the issues of inequalities and redistribution faced by families and survivors of missing and murdered IWGQT2S in their intimate and collective experience of destruction and death, but also, I argue, in how they sustained their participation into this state-sponsored process and its critiques.

Today, while IWGQT2S peoples continue to disappear and be disproportionately victimized by homicides in Canada, I am still sceptical about how all levels of governments will implement the 231 NIMMIWG’s recommendations 6 years after they have been made public (3 June 2019). The government justified delays in their plan of action ³⁷ because of the coronavirus pandemic, thus asking Indigenous families of missing and murdered to wait (CBC, 2021). Recent statistics show that the pandemic has exacerbated ‘underlying structural inequalities and experiences of violence and discrimination faced by Indigenous women and girls’ (United Nations (UN), 2020: 3), notably the lack of access to health treatment and prevention measures, but also, ‘fatal health impacts of environmental degradation and extractive industries, notably resulting in the pollution of water resources and ancestral agricultural lands, a phenomenon often described by Indigenous women as “environmental violence”’ (UN, 2020: 4). Moreover, stay-at-home orders have resulted ‘in an escalation of domestic violence’ (UN, 2020: 5) which intersects with other forms of discrimination like the experience of rape and sexual assault, and issues of poverty, homelessness, lack of culturally sensitive services and so on. The urgency expressed by family members of missing and murdered IWGQT2S, and the commissioners’ insistence (in the final report) using words like ‘immediately’, does not seem to have been heard (ONWA, 2024).

Author biography

Audrey Rousseau is a Euro-descendant settler, Associate Professor at Université du Québec en Outaouais, specializing in the sociology of memory, Indigenous studies, women’s experience of oppression, and testimonial practices. Dr Rousseau is interested in the production, circulation and interpretation of social discourses on redress, reconciliation and social justice. Her previous research has led her to examine the contemporary struggles led by survivors of the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland, as well as Indian residential schools and First World War internment camps in Canada. Her present collaborative research, with Indigenous women associations, aims to reflect sensitively on the understudied realities of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people in the province of Québec.