The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Report echoes what many grassroots activists, families, and communities of MMIWGT2S have been saying for decades while working, grieving, and surviving the targeted violence that did not cease for a moment as the inquiry conducted its business.

Resisting and grieving thousands of stolen loved ones in the face of relentless colonial violence in a country that was founded on a genocidal Doctrine of Discovery. A racist doctrine that saw the land as empty and Indigenous peoples as invisible and inferior.

Only by dehumanizing Indigenous persons — especially Indigenous women, girls, trans, and two-spirit persons — could the land be seen as empty of humanity and open for extraction and exploitation. The systems of governance and law that sought to dispossess Indigenous people from their lands continues to enact violence and dehumanization at alarming rates.

Genocide is the correct and appropriate word to describe the targeted and systemic violence Indigenous women and girls face from Canada. Some might view this as an academic exercise, but such commentary disrespects the voices of Indigenous women and girls who are the real experts when discussing and knowing the daily and complex realities of surviving genocidal policies and laws of Canada.

This reality has been detailed in the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Persons, the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, the many task force and inquiry reports that began in 1980s, and now, again, in the National Inquiry report. This is no longer an academic exercise. Genocide was enacted in the British North American Act and the Indian Act with the aim of erasing Indigenous peoples from existence and from their lands and territories.

The recommendations of the National Inquiry reinforce numerous inquiries and reports that have pointed to systemic police failures, racism, sexism, and ongoing efforts at colonial erasure of Indigenous people.

In 2004, Amnesty International’s Stolen Sisters report urgently recommended that Canada develop “a comprehensive, co-ordinated national plan of action in keeping with the scale and seriousness of the violence and discrimination experienced by Indigenous women.”

In 2008, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women echoed the recommendation that Canada develop a specific and integrated plan. A National Plan was never formed.

In 2015, the Legal Strategy Coalition on Violence Against Indigenous Women analyzed 58 reports containing over 700 recommendations for stopping violence against Indigenous women and girls. Although there has been general consensus about the root causes of violence against Indigenous women for some time, there has been a complete failure to plan or implement the necessary responses. And so, the violence continues along a cycle of predictable abuse and apology.

Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the legal system “let us all down” by failing to uphold the dignity and humanity of Cindy Gladue, an Indigenous woman whose body faced barbaric treatment by Canada’s legal system. A legal system that violated Indigenous laws while claiming to seek justice in prosecuting the man, Bradley Barton, responsible for her death.

With the release of the Inquiry report, Prime Minister Trudeau echoed this apologetic sentiment, “we have failed you” he said to families, survivors, and the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls of Canada. Apology after apology are issued without transformative change, while legal and political systems continue perpetuate violence against Indigenous women, girls, trans, and two-spirit persons.

Indigenous people have been in a violent relationship with Canada for too long. When you are in an abusive relationship and the abuser continues to apologize, you cannot keep waiting for the abuser to change, you cannot wait for the abuser to recognize your worth. We cannot rely on a genocidal government to change its institutions.

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Indigenous women, grassroots activists, MMIWGT2S families and communities most affected by violence, many of whom went unheard in the inquiry processes, have been calling for new relations. Canadians have an opportunity to stand alongside Indigenous women in respecting aunties, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, and cousins.

We continue to honour the generations before us who resisted this violent order and form networks of healing relations guiding us to a better future for the next seven generations.

Dr. Beverley Jacobs, CM, is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Windsor and a recipient of the Order of Canada for her work honouring MMIWGT2SDr. Julie Kaye is an assistant professor in Sociology at the University of Saskatchewan.

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