1x1 - Lost Women

August 30, 2020

In Canada, indigenous women are six times more likely to die of violent causes compared to white women. Emy Koopman speaks to relatives of an indigenous girl who disappeared along the 'Highway of Tears' twenty-five years ago, and discovers that these disappearances are still not a thing of the past. Since the 1970s, unofficial estimates suggest that more than 40 (most of them indigenous) women and girls have disappeared along British Columbia's endless highway. This is said to be the result of more than a hundred years of colonial policy, whereby indigenous children were snatched from their families to be placed in boarding schools to destroy 'the Indian in the child'. Practices that took place well into the 90's.