Canadian national inquiry: Giving a voice to missing and murdered women

After over two years of work, Canada's inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women has concluded and the report reached the public domain. We spoke to two of the women who fought for years to bring global attention to the violence.

It has been almost 50 years since Helen Betty Osborne - a Cree woman who dreamed of becoming a teacher - was abducted and brutally murdered near The Pas, Manitoba, a town deeply divided along racial lines, its white and indigenous residents once described as "world's apart".

In many ways, the death of the 19-year-old was indicative of cases to come - an indigenous teenager forced to leave her remote community, targeted by four men simply because of her race, and a family's long wait for justice.

Fifteen years ago, Amnesty International called the assault and murder of the shy young woman "an unheeded warning".

The violence faced by indigenous women and girls is now in the spotlight as a national inquiry into missing and murdered women drew to a close after more than two years of hearings and testimony.

"It took 40 years to get to this present moment and only because indigenous women have been on the ground making noise about this," said Robyn Bourgeois, an academic and activist who researches female indigenous activism in Canada. "Without them we wouldn't be here," she said.

The campaigners include family victims who have campaigned tirelessly for their lost loved ones, and grassroots organisers and activists like Beverley Jacobs and Terri Brown, who also lost family .

For Jacobs, the murder of her 21-year-old cousin Tashina General in 2008 was a turning point in her work. For Brown, whose 41-year-old sister, Ada Elaine, died in 2001, the loss continues to haunt the family, who say she was murdered and that her case was mishandled.

Jacobs, a Mohawk lawyer, was the lead researcher of the Amnesty report into discrimination and violence against indigenous women, and spent months travelling across the country meeting the families of women who had disappeared or been killed.

"At the time it was the families doing all the work," she said. "They were the ones doing the poster boards, and the searches, having a really difficult time with police, just not getting any answers."

Her endeavour began just as a related, horrific murder case was about to make headlines around the world.

Police had arrested Robert Pickton, a serial killer who had been preying on women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside district for years - many of his victims indigenous, many of them marginalised.

Authorities had long denied there was a pattern to the disappearances, or that they might be linked.

A subsequent provincial inquiry laid bare the systemic failure and bias that allowed Pickton to murder women for years without being caught.

Pickton was eventually sentenced to life in prison for the murder of six women. He had initially being charged with killing 26 women from a total of 69 who had gone missing throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

His high-profile trial brought with it a growing suspicion among campaigners like Jacobs that what had happened in British Columbia, where indigenous women were disproportionately reflected among women reported missing or killed, would be seen on a national level.

"That [case] was a leverage point," Bourgeois said.

It was also where Jacobs, the Mohawk lawyer, began her work. "The first task I thought I needed to do was to go to the Downtown Eastside because Pickton had just been arrested," she said.

Women who had been working for years to bring attention to what was happening brought her to the killer's pig farm, the site of the murders.

"It was horrible. It was before any trial, I'm not sure if any charges were laid yet. But [investigators] were digging up the ground," Jacobs said.

Brown, a long-time indigenous activist and, like Jacobs, a former president of the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC), was instrumental in raising the alarm about the "horrific number of women" who were disappearing in Vancouver.

Under Brown's leadership, NWAC collaborated groups like with Amnesty, Kairos - a faith-based group - and the Anglican and United churches to create a national awareness campaign.

But Brown says it was a repeat of Vancouver - they were most often met with indifference. There were also significant gaps in record-keeping, making it difficult to gain a full picture of the violence.

Some unofficial ing of the missing was taking place. In Toronto, Amber O'Hara - an Anishinaabe woman and Aids campaigner - began compiling an online database. And according to Brown, women in the Downtown Eastside "were doing great work, they were keeping count of the women who were being lost".

"Families would come in and say 'We haven't seen her for weeks.' And police would say 'Maybe she's on vacation somewhere'. Well excuse me, they never left that 100 block of the Eastside."

Brown, then heading the Native Women's Association of Canada, decided there needed to be a formal compiling of the data.

"I wanted to put numbers to this because no one believed us," she recalled. "But we didn't have the resources, I did my own research and presented it but they said: 'Well, how do you know that it's true":[]}