Where The Red Dress Hangs: A Poem

This poem was written by a settler, with deep humility, grief, and respect.

It is not written to speak for Indigenous women, girls, Two-Spirit or gender-diverse people, or for the families and communities who continue to carry the unbearable weight of loved ones who are missing, murdered, or still waiting to be found. Their voices, stories, names, and truths must remain at the centre.

It is written from the place where the author stands, as someone whose life has unfolded on land shaped by Indigenous presence, Indigenous care, Indigenous law, Indigenous resistance, and Indigenous love, and also by the ongoing violence of colonialism. It is an attempt to sit honestly with what it means to inherit the benefits of systems that have harmed Indigenous women and families, and to ask what responsibility looks like beyond sympathy, beyond awareness, and beyond words.

This poem is offered in honour of the women who carry Nations, the Grandmothers who carry memory, the Mothers who carry families, the Aunties who carry community, the daughters who carry futures, and the relatives whose absence is still felt in every room where they should be.

May it be received not as an answer, but as a small act of witness. A commitment to listen. To believe families. To remember the names. To make room for truth. To refuse the silence that allows Indigenous women, girls, Two-Spirit and gender-diverse people to be taken, forgotten, dismissed, or made invisible.

With respect, this poem is offered in remembrance, in accountability, and in love.

Where the Red Dress Hangs

Names. Townships. Rivers. I was taught the map before I was taught the land. Sauble. Little Tub. Colpoys.

Roads first. Lines first. Names pressed flat across places, lakes and rivers, as if naming a thing was the same as knowing it. As if a country could be inherited cleanly, without the sound of weeping under the floorboards, without the missing gathered in the walls, without women walking ahead of us in the dark carrying everything we were too careless to honour.

I was taught that heroes left home.

They crossed thresholds. They entered forests. They fought monsters. They returned changed, bearing fire, bearing medicine, bearing some bright proof of courage in their hands.

But no one told me the first threshold was silence.

No one told me the monster might wear a uniform, or a judge’s robe, or a social worker’s badge, or a government seal. No one told me the monster might be a polite country, a country that says sorry with its mouth and keeps taking with its hands. No one told me that sometimes the call to adventure is not a call at all, but a woman’s name spoken after years of not being spoken, a red dress moving in a tree where no body stands.

I came late to the story.

That is the truth of it.

I came carrying the wrong tools. Sympathy. Good intentions. The soft furniture of guilt. I thought grief was something I could stand beside for a while and then leave, like a neighbour’s house after a funeral, closing the door gently behind me.

But Indigenous women had already been carrying the world.

They were carrying children and water and ceremony. Carrying language in the mouth when schools tried to cut it out. Carrying Grandmothers in their bones. Carrying nations through kitchens, courtrooms, classrooms, blockades, birth rooms, shelters, funerals. Carrying the names of the disappeared like bundles wrapped against the weather. Carrying the dead without letting them become only dead.

I did not know that a woman could be a doorway.

I did not know she could be the road and the warning, the fire and the one who keeps it, the song and the breath beneath it. I did not know that when an Indigenous woman goes missing, a whole architecture trembles. A child loses tomorrow’s story. A grandmother loses the hand that would have reached for hers. A community loses a keeper of medicines, jokes, recipes, language, tenderness, fury. The land itself knows the absence.

And still, the country asks for evidence.

As if absence has not been testifying for generations.

As if the empty chair is not evidence. As if the unanswered phone is not evidence. As if the mother pacing the highway is not evidence. As if the river giving back a body, or refusing to, is not evidence. As if the red dress, hollowed by wind, has not already told us everything.

In the old stories, the hero descends.

Into the cave. Into the belly of the whale. Into the place where the old self dies.

I think this is where settlers must go.

Not forward, not yet. Down. Back. Beneath the clean national story. Beneath the schoolbook. Beneath the anthem. Beneath the small proud myths we were fed like bread. We must go where the records are kept, where the names were changed, where the children were taken, where the women were not believed, where the police reports thinned into dust, where families were made to beg for urgency.

We must go there without calling ourselves brave.

There is nothing heroic about finally looking.

And yet, somewhere in that descent, something can be laid down. Not responsibility. Never that. But innocence. The false kind. The kind that made us dangerous. The kind that let us say we did not know, when not knowing had been arranged for us, and we had agreed not to disturb it.

Indigenous women do not need to be made sacred by my grief.

They were sacred before I arrived.

They were leaders before I learned the word reconciliation. They were scholars before universities found the language of decolonization. They were protectors before environmentalism had a logo. They were law before Canada wrote itself into being. They were the first home, the first ceremony, the first drumbeat beneath the ribs of a people.

And some of them are still missing.

This must not become metaphor too quickly.

A woman is not a symbol when her mother is still waiting. A girl is not a teaching when her room is still untouched. A Two-Spirit relative is not an awareness day when someone still dreams of their laugh and wakes to the cruelty of morning.

So let the red dress hang where we have to see it.

Let it trouble the civic square. Let it move in the churchyard. Let it appear at the school, the courthouse, the police station, the bridge, the office window, the edge of the field where the sumac reddens in autumn. Let it be beautiful only in the way truth is beautiful, which is to say unbearable, and necessary, and not ours to decorate.

I am trying to learn a different ending.

Not the hero returning with treasure.

Not the settler forgiven because he has finally felt something.

Not the country redeemed by ceremony it did not earn.

A different return.

One where I come back quieter. Emptier of excuses. More useful. One where I understand that the work is not to be moved for a day, but to be changed in the structure of my living. One where I stop asking Indigenous women to carry the proof of their own humanity into rooms built to deny it.

One where I listen when families speak.

One where I believe them before the inquiry, before the headline, before the body, before the apology.

One where I teach my children that this land is not empty, never was, and that every road we travel has memory under it.

One where the missing are not made to vanish twice.

The old stories say the hero returns with a gift.

But perhaps the gift, for those of us who came by way of harm, is not something we bring.

Perhaps it is something we give back.

The land. The story. The space. The microphone. The records. The children. The names. The right to be searched for. The right to be mourned fully. The right to live without becoming a lesson in someone else’s awakening.

And still, beyond all this grief, Indigenous women rise.

Not because suffering made them strong. That is another thing settlers like to say when we want pain to become useful. They rise because they have always risen. Because Aunties organize. Because Grandmothers remember. Because Daughters refuse. Because Mothers call the names into microphones, into courtrooms, into the cold morning air. Because somewhere, a girl is braiding her hair and laughing. Somewhere, a woman is carrying water. Somewhere, a Two-Spirit relative is coming home to themselves. Somewhere, the drum is not a symbol but a heartbeat, and the heartbeat continues.

I was taught the map before I was taught the land.

Now I am trying to learn the names beneath the names.

Trying to stand where the red dress hangs and not look away.

Trying to understand that the journey was never mine to lead.

Only to answer.

Zaageeng. Sintub’dik. Naamewikwedong.

Matt Wannan grew up in Bruce County at a time when the differences between settler and Indigenous communities were often misunderstood, exaggerated, or exploited, rather than met with honesty, relationship, and care. Much of his learning has come later, through listening, through everyday relationships, and through the steady guidance of Indigenous women, Knowledge Keepers, and community leaders. His work with Grandmother’s Voice has helped shape how he understands responsibility, belonging, and respect, not as abstract ideas, but as ways of living. Sitting in circle with GMV has continued to teach him the value of Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and the importance of showing up with humility, openness, and a willingness to be changed.