Why Closure for Families Equates Indigenous Sovereignty

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Human Rights Crisis

In Canada, when Indigenous women disappear at the hands of private actors, our government has sustained a systemic pattern of neglect—an outright refusal to conduct an investigation so that families can put their sisters, daughters, mothers, wives to rest. Effectively, the failure to conduct a proper investigation results in a strategic benefit—it allows the government to continue to exert control over Indigenous communities through the transmission of generational trauma. Living with sustained trauma that is imposed becomes the barrier for Indigenous communities to exercise self-determination.

What is largely absent from our public discourse is the explicit knowing that by not acting on an ethical duty to alleviate generational trauma for Indigenous families and communities by providing closure through an investigation, Canada maintains a foothold in the lives of Indigenous peoples. Without this expansive government culpability discourse, Canada will continue to act with impunity as it sustains its colonial power and dominance, evidenced notably by “eradicating the Indian problem” as legislated in the Indian Act.

In December 2022, the Winnipeg police laid criminal charges against the man who murdered four Indigenous women, Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois and an unidentified woman (at the time), with the given name Mashkode Bizhiko’kwe (Buffalo Woman). In June 2022, the Winnipeg police concluded that the remains of two of these women, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, were located at the Prairie Green Landfill, but maintained that they would not conduct a search. The justification used by the Winnipeg police for why they were not conducting a search was infeasibility.

Despite the outcome of a feasibility study requested by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs that it was feasible to conduct a search and mitigate the health risks (of exposure to toxic chemicals and asbestos), the government of Manitoba in July 2023 stated that it would not fund the search and the federal government would not commit to authorizing the search.

In a letter dated December 8, 2023, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) warned Canadian authorities that by refusing to undertake the search and fully investigate the deaths of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, Canada could be in contravention of international law. Specifically, the CERD made clear that Canada was denying the victims and their families equal treatment and protection under the law and “closure, the right to mourn their loved ones and to bury their bodies with dignity.”

The persistent denial and lack of accountability by Canadian authorities, as we've witnessed in Winnipeg, to fully investigate the deaths and disappearances of Indigenous women is twofold: Indigenous peoples are reminded of (and continue to carry) earlier forms of injustice and oppression that were imposed on them by the government, for example, the imposition of Indian residential schools, and this gets compounded by the government’s indifference, unwillingness, or lack of urgency to do what is necessary in the present day to bring closure to families.

With the absence of their loved ones or their bodies, families who, (a) without knowing their fate and (b) knowing that there is little chance the government is going to help them, experience devastating impacts on their health and well-being. The repeated and ongoing transmission of trauma by the government sustains—a generational trauma loop—that is Indigenous specific. Chronic exposure to trauma impacts not only individuals but entire families and communities become affected, which results in “social malaise, weakened social structures and high rates of suicide.”

Cambria, the daughter of Morgan Harris, in an Ottawa news conference pleaded with the government to find her mother. Her words were, “Is human life not feasible?” The message from the government and through the media when Indigenous women go missing is that it is an Indigenous problem, not a Canadian problem.

With a collective understanding that we live in a post-colonial era, whereby Indigenous women in Canada suffer a disproportionate burden of traumatic events due to contemporary forms of colonial violence, we can then begin to hold the government to account for standing in the way of Indigenous sovereignty.

We must be cognizant that Cambria's insistence for her mother to be brought home is a call to action that runs deeper—by fighting for closure, she is refusing to let herself and her community be controlled by the government through psychological paralysis.

*On March 17, 2025, Marcedes Myran was found, and on March 7, Morgan Harris’ remains were identified after a search of the Prairie Green Landfill.