The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, better known as the MMIW, is nearly a year old. It would be fair, though, to say it has been derailed before even leaving the station.

In it’s 11 months, the MMIW has managed to hold one – yes, one – hearing. That was in Whitehorse in June and a week before testimony was to begin, no one had a clue who would be relating their stories or when.

Despite a budget of nearly $54 million (which will almost certainly climb higher) and a timetable of two-and-a-half years (which commissioners have already said will need to be extended), the inquiry has achieved little other than driving employees away and angering First Nations groups.

Earlier this month, one of the MMIW’s five commissioners, law professor Marilyn Poitras, resigned. Before that, the executive director quit, as did a communications advisor, the director of operations and the manager of community relations.

Its first communications director was fired earlier this year.

The explanation for all this dysfunctionality may be that the MMIW seems to have a preconceived notion of what it wants to find – that white racism is the cause of most cases of murdered and disappeared indigenous women and girls. Yet it cannot reconcile that pre-made conclusion with the truth.

The truth is most First Nations women who suffer violence and sexual violence are victims of spouses, partners, ex-husbands, boyfriends, neighbours, relatives, or criminal accomplices.

And the majority of those abusers are indigenous men.

It was puzzling last summer when the Liberal government released a list of goals for the MMIW. Not on the list was an examination of just who was murdering all of these indigenous women and why.

So from the start, neither the Trudeau government nor the MMIW was truly interested in getting to the bottom of the problem. And if you refuse to identify the source you will never find a solution.

But there clearly is a problem.

First Nations women are as many as six times as likely as non-indigenous women to suffer violence, such as domestic abuse, assault, sexual assault and murder.

The Liberals and the commissioners seem to want to find that this is the result of rampant racism, in much the same way the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2008-2015) was eager from its outset to blame residential schools for all the problems with broken indigenous culture.

The Liberals and the MMIW inquiry seem keen to find that racism infects our police forces and courts, who because of that bigotry turn a blind eye to violence against indigenous women. That would “prove” the violence itself and the perceived lack of institutional and societal concern are by-products of racism, not of broken indigenous culture.

But here are a few facts to mull over.

Indigenous men are even more likely to be victims of violence than indigenous women. So indigenous women aren’t more victimized and more ignored.

Furthermore, the rate at which crimes are solved and prosecuted is the same for crimes against missing and murdered indigenous women as it is for similar crimes against non-indigenous women. The “clearance rate” is about 90 per cent for both.

In other words, there is no systemic bias or blindness that ignores the plight of female indigenous victims.

White society can’t be blamed mostly, nor an indifferent court system, nor the RCMP and local police.

But since the commission was designed not to blame First Nations culture or indigenous men, it is stuck in a politically correct limbo.

It is tasked with finding the truth, unless the truth it finds is politically incorrect, at which point the MMIW’s mission becomes ignoring the truth.