I sit at my desk in the warm afternoon light and listen to the young Indigenous woman on the computer screen in front of me recount the three times she was almost killed by a man.
A survivor of sex trafficking when she was barely a teenager, I think of how close she came to being one of the names on our list of 340 Indigenous women killed in criminal or suspicious circumstances since 2019. Instead, she is alive, her words filling my lungs with horror.
There were many others. Those, whose stories we pieced together from accounts of their grieving families, police reports, and court transcripts detailing the circumstances of their deaths.
One of them was a 30-year-old mother of three from Manitoba, killed allegedly by her common-law partner with an extensive history of violence and psychosis. Hours after her body was discovered in a ditch off the highway, her three children were pulled, dead, from a burning car. Her teenage cousin was later found murdered in the family home.
How is it possible that five per cent of Canada’s female population makes up 26 per cent of all the killings of women in this country?
We still don’t have a satisfactory answer.
What we can say is that when these deaths have happened, the experience of their perpetrators in the justice system is markedly different than those accused of killing non-Indigenous women.
Our analysis shows they are less likely to get charged with murder. And indigenous women are more likely to have their cases go unsolved.
Many Indigenous victims receive no media coverage of their case. In the absence of public acknowledgment, social media becomes the meeting place for grieving communities, surviving family members speaking out in rage or seeking answers and GoFundMe pages raising money for tombstones and legal services.
These posts bring humanity to women and girls otherwise erased or ignored. They had families who loved them, vibrant personalities that brought joy to their communities and goals they wanted to achieve.
The question is no longer whether the system is failing Indigenous women. The evidence is already there. The question is how many more names will be added before Canadians demand that it stop.
It is our hope that the inequities that spring from the data we have compiled nudge Canadians toward action.
- Behind the Reporting: Measuring the justice system’s response to the killings of Indigenous women and girls - 12 February 2026
- IJB Gets Action: Ontario NDP demands changes to hospital funding model after IJB investigation - 5 February 2026
- Why Ontario hospitals are turning to bank loans to stay afloat - 29 January 2026