I had like a huge conversation about it with my mom before and, you know, like she told
me this, this native word, which was, uh, and it means to be strong inside and it means
to stand up for what you believe in and speak up when you need to speak.
And when I heard that word, I started crying because it felt so, it felt so like deep in
my heart, like it just stuck there.
And I was thinking about everything that is going on now.
And she, she kept telling me, she's like, you know, we need a voice as things happen
to us.
It's like, it's not as important as, you know, something happening to another culture or
another religion because we've never really spoke up and we've never really made ourselves
like there.
Never been, you know, the people to go to, the people to put on the news.
I remember, I remember the cries, the broken homes and the missing friends, the days when
I was terrified to go outside and be met with a predator or the days when I felt so lucky
to just be home with my parents.
I remember, I remember the girl that used to sit next to me in class, the one that would
cry endlessly and tell me it was something from the past.
I remember how people would say how in the like we were with her tanner skin, her braided
hair and her beaded jewelry.
And now we can think about is her face on those homemade posters entitled missing.
I remember overhearing my dad saying how lucky we were to be white, how lucky we were to
have these privileges that that girl didn't have.
I remember, I remember the time when my mother had cried for me when I was 10 and I'd gotten
myself lost in the mall.
I also remember girls like me continued to go missing, some from other communities and
some from families I knew, but I don't remember, I don't remember anyone except for her family
reaching out right away to go to her aid instead of waiting for eight hours just in case to
realize they were 24 hours too late.
I don't remember the police ever searching or the Amber Alerts ever reaching the news
and I don't remember the government ever adjusting the 34 cases of murder and abuse.
Do you remember?
People should know like we've been changed so much like we sometimes were not even put
in the textbooks like my, like I've heard so many things about history books being only
about these explorations of these white explorers and these Europeans, but they were never really
focused on who were there first, who was here first, and who, you know, who helped you,
who helped you survive.
And you know, they don't talk about the consequences that we went through for trying to help everyone,
for trying to, you know, for trying to give our appreciation of them, you know, let them
into our community.
We were trying to accept them and, you know, and just knowing that people still believe
in that same thing today.
It's really hard.
It's really hard.
It's really hard to believe that people don't know where we come from.
People don't know like what we've gone through.
Like I know many, many of my ancestors that went through residential schools and for me
to be as privileged enough to be here and not anywhere else.
Well, when I told my mom, I remember she was like, I want you to be the one to, you know,
tell the world about it.
She said that she didn't want me to stop, you know, saying stop telling people about
it, stop informing people about our culture because one day, you know, it's either we're
going to die out or we're going to flourish.
She said there's a lot of people who suffer from not telling the truth, from not speaking
out, and we get overlooked because of that because anyone who doesn't speak out doesn't
get a voice.
I said, okay, mom, I'll do it.
I said, I'll do it, you know, for, for us.
I'll do it for, you know, the reserve, I'll do it for the community.
The 34 missing cases of indigenous women, the 34 cases of murder and abuse, like that
all happened.
And, you know, like, no one ever addressed that, like, even I've never seen that on the
news.
And, you know, it was only until I started, you know, doing actual research and I, you
know, I started talking to my mom and I started talking to all of my relatives and I started
asking them, like, do you have you ever heard anything about, you know, missing indigenous
women other than the people on our reserve and this, and they said only a few but never
enough.
