‘We Are Human Beings, Not Something You Can Just Get Rid Of’: Inside the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Crisis in Canada

It was a mother’s worst fear. 

On September 7, 2020, Sheila Poorman received a phone call with a message no mother wants to ever receive: her daughter Chelsea, who had just gone out to have dinner with her sister in downtown Vancouver the night before, had gone missing. 

The 24-year-old Cree woman made one last phone call to her sister earlier that evening. Little did the family know that it would be the last time they would hear Chelsea’s voice. “She had gone missing years before, but she contacted us as soon as she could,” Sheila told More to Her Story. “This time, it just felt different, like something wasn’t right.”

What was even more distressing, Sheila said, was when she made the police report, she felt she wasn’t taken seriously by authorities. “I felt like I was pushed aside, and anything I said was irrelevant,” she said. “It was frustrating and heartbreaking.”

Desperate for answers, Sheila spent several days following Chelsea’s disappearance walking the streets of Vancouver, her daughter’s photos in hand, asking people if they had seen anything suspicious.

After more than a year of searching, Chelsea’s body was found in April 2022 at the back of an abandoned mansion. “She was missing her cranium, part of her skull, and some finger bones,” Sheila said, her voice cracking as she recalled the day they found her daughter’s remains. “They said that [when Chelsea was found] she was covered in a blanket.”

In a May 2022 press conference, the Vancouver Police said Chelsea Poorman’s death was deemed not suspicious. “They were trying to say that it was animals that got her, but did the animals put the blanket back on her?” Sheila said. Chelsea, who had rods in both her legs and arms as a result of a previous car accident, couldn’t have possibly climbed up the abandoned mansion’s fence to get into its yard. Instead, Sheila believes somebody took her there.

Later that year, the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner (OPCC) initiated an investigation into the allegations of neglect by the police officers who handled Poorman’s case. Chelsea’s family is still waiting for the results of the investigation. 

“My Chelsea wanted to be a paramedic, she wanted to go back to school, she had so many dreams,” said Sheila.

Like Sheila, Brenda Wilson has been waiting years for clearer answers — thirty-one in all — after the death of her sister Ramona, who went missing on June 11, 1994.

Ten months after Ramona’s disappearance, her body was found near Smithers Airport in British Columbia. Two young men had found Ramona’s body curled up in a fetal position inside a shallow grave. 

Following Ramona’s death, more women either went missing or were killed in the area. This 725-kilometer stretch of highway in British Columbia would become known as the Highway of Tears, where more than 40 women and girls, most of them Indigenous, went missing or had been found murdered. 

Ramona had recently celebrated her 16th birthday before she went missing. “Thinking that she was only 16 for three months…that’s hard to swallow,” Brenda said. 

Losing her sister, the youngest among her siblings, had been very difficult for Brenda’s family but especially heart-wrenching for her mother. “My mother always asked, ‘What were her final thoughts? What was she thinking of? Was she thinking about me? Did she cry out?” Brenda shared. The day the authorities called them to identify Ramona’s remains and her clothing, her mother dropped to the ground, Brenda recalled. 

“After Ramona was found, my mom lost all hope and couldn’t bear living without her; she almost took her life a few times,” Brenda said. 

Every year, around the anniversary of Ramona’s disappearance, Brenda organizes a community walk in the town of Smithers to call for justice for Ramona and for women who shared a familiar fate. It’s also her family’s way of letting others who may be going through the same crisis know that they are not alone.

“Ramona would want that because that was her last job,” adding that her sister, who worked as a peer counselor before she died, would have wanted to spend her life supporting other people in need.

According to data from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) report, Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to go missing or be murdered compared to other women in Canada. While Indigenous people only make up 4.3 percent of the population in the country, Indigenous women make up 16 percent of all female homicide victims and 11 percent of all missing women. 

Some studies estimate that up to 4,000 Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been murdered in the last three decades, with some unsolved cases even dating back to the 60s and 70s. 

This national crisis continues to this day. In early March, human remains that were found at a Winnipeg-area landfill weeks prior were finally identified as those of Marcedes Myran and Morgan Harris. Myran and Harris were two of four Indigenous women who were killed by serial killer Jeremy Skibicki in 2022. Skibicki, who targeted Indigenous women, took them into his home, where he sexually assaulted and killed them before dumping their bodies into garbage bins and dumpsters. Local reports said Skibicki, who cited white supremacist beliefs, admitted the murders were racially motivated. 

“Canada was built on very colonial — what I call ‘racist’ policies,” said Josie Nepinak, who is President of the Native Women’s Association of Canada. A survivor of the residential school system in Canada, Nepinak said the residential schools, which were first widely established by the Canadian government in the 1880s, were intended to “kill the Indian in the child.”

“Us little brown kids, we became little white people, who were obedient and assimilated into the country,” she said, adding that for years, Indigenous peoples were told they were savages, that their lives don’t matter, and that they had to fit into what was considered the Canadian mold at the time.

“The residential school made us feel less human,” Nepinak said. 

This, she believes, is colonial violence and the premise from which the country was grounded. “That laid the foundation of death and destruction of Indigenous women,” she explained. “Indigenous women’s lives have been considered less valuable than non-Indigenous women,” she added. 

The atrocities committed in the residential schools, the Indian Act, and the reported forced sterilization of Indigenous women, “those are all acts of genocide,” she said. 

Asked about her first-hand knowledge of the MMIWG crisis, Nepinak shared that her own aunt was murdered in 1976 in a major city in Canada. “She was 27 years old at the time, and her murderer has never been found,” she shared before excusing herself to wipe off her tears. 

In 2011, her cousin Tanya also went missing. Her remains, she said, have never been recovered. “These are our mothers, our sisters, our aunts, our nieces, our granddaughters, and we have to do better,” she said. “Canada has not done enough.” 

From 2016 to 2019, a National Inquiry into MMIWG was conducted. The independent and public inquiry investigated the MMIWG crisis in Canada by reviewing reports and hearing testimonies from Indigenous families. By the end of the inquiry, a report was produced that outlined 231 calls for justice. These demanded actions from all levels of government sectors–including the police, justice system, health care system, and the media. Out of all 231, 215 were calls to the federal government. 

In a statement sent to More to Her Story, a spokesperson for Indigenous Services Canada, which is a government body that works on policy measures geared toward First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities, said that since the launch of the National Inquiry into MMIWG, the government had made efforts to advance the federal work outlined in the Calls for Justice. 

In 2024, the federal government also announced a Canadian $1.3 million investment into the development of a pilot program called the Red Dress Alert.  “(It is) the first step in understanding how an alert system could work and can be used to locate a missing Indigenous woman or girl in the critical hours following their disappearance,” the spokesperson said. 

However, the pilot’s final launch has still not been announced. 

Amid criticism from advocates, including the Native Women’s Association’s 2024 report which found that “the federal government has yet to respond to this genocide with a sense of urgency,” Indigenous Services Canada recognized that the work to address the MMIWG crisis “requires sustained efforts over many years and, in some cases, several generations.” 

Brenda Wastasecoot, a member of the York Factory Cree First Nation and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Indigenous Studies, believes there is still so much that needs to be done, especially by school educators. “Social agencies must also educate themselves about colonization, systemic racism, [and the] residential schools’ historical impacts,” she said. 

“This is a national crisis; Canada needs to support this work going forward,” Wastasecoot said. 

With a federal “snap” election coming on April 28, Wastasecoot believes it will be up to the next Prime Minister and leaders to take this crisis on “(They need to) do right by our people.”

The new Canadian Prime Minister and Liberal Party Leader, Mark Carney, has yet to announce any concrete plans to address the MMIWG crisis in Canada. In 2024, Carney’s Conservative opponent Pierre Poilievre faced backlash during his first address to the Assembly of First Nations for not mentioning anything about the MMIWG crisis in his speech. 

As for Sheila, who continues to seek justice for what happened to her daughter, she hopes that no other family will go through what her family had to go through. 

“These women are human beings,” she said, her voice trembling as she started to get teary-eyed. “We have to start treating First Nations women as human beings, not something you can just get rid of like trash.”