Where the Red Dress Still Hangs: Honouring Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit and Gender-Diverse Relatives

On May 5, we see the red dresses.

They hang from trees. They move in the wind. They appear in windows, schools, Friendship Centres, community spaces, front yards, public buildings, and along roadsides. They are beautiful, but they are not decoration. They are not symbols we can soften into something easier to look at. They are absence made visible.

Red Dress Day, also known as the National Day of Awareness and Remembrance for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit and gender-diverse people, began through the REDress Project by Métis artist Jaime Black, whose work used empty red dresses to make visible the lives missing from families, communities, and Nations. May 5 has become a day of grief, remembrance, action, and public accountability across this country.

But for Indigenous families, this is not one day.

It is every day a mother waits for a phone call. Every day a grandmother lights a candle. Every day an auntie checks the news, checks Facebook, checks the missing persons pages, checks the silence. Every day a community organizes its own searches because too often the systems meant to protect them arrive late, listen poorly, or fail entirely. Every day a name is spoken because someone is afraid the world will move on.

At Grandmother’s Voice, we understand that to speak about missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, Two-Spirit and gender-diverse people is not only to speak about violence. It is to speak about who Indigenous women are. It is to speak about the sacred place women hold in our families, our teachings, our languages, our ceremonies, our food systems, our songs, our medicines, our stories, and our survival.

Before there was a Canada, there were women carrying law.

There were grandmothers who knew when to plant, when to harvest, when to move, when to wait, when to speak, and when silence itself was a teaching. There were aunties who corrected with love, who fed everyone, who noticed what others missed, who held the children who were not biologically theirs because kinship was never meant to be small. There were mothers who carried babies on their backs and whole Nations in their hearts. There were sisters who gathered medicines, protected younger ones, teased the boys, stood beside the fire, and grew into women who would one day be remembered as the ones who kept everyone connected.

There were Two-Spirit and gender-diverse relatives who carried balance, vision, responsibility, and belonging in ways colonial systems tried to erase but never truly could. There were women who held names, women who held bundles, women who held grief, women who held the line when everything around them was designed to break it.

Indigenous women were never disposable.

They were made disposable by systems that needed them removed, silenced, doubted, criminalized, displaced, ignored, and forgotten. That is the wound beneath the wound. The violence is not random. The disappearance is not only individual. The murder is not only one moment. The failure to search, the failure to listen, the failure to care, the failure to believe, the failure to protect, these are part of the same colonial pattern.

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls named this crisis as genocide, rooted in race-based, gender-based, and colonial violence, and called for transformative action through its Calls for Justice. That word, genocide, is not comfortable. It is not supposed to be. It asks this country to stop pretending this is a tragedy without authors, without policies, without systems, without choices.

Because Indigenous women do not simply vanish.

They are taken from places where someone should have noticed. They are harmed in systems that should have protected them. They are dismissed in hospitals, in courts, in police stations, in shelters, in child welfare systems, in schools, in media coverage, in public memory. They are too often treated as if their pain is expected, as if their absence is ordinary, as if their death is explainable before it is even investigated.

That is why we remember Heather Winterstein.

Heather was 24 years old. She was an Indigenous woman. She was loved. She was a daughter, a relative, a person with a story that did not begin or end in a hospital record, an emergency room note, a toxicology report, or an inquest transcript. Her death became the subject of a coroner’s inquest in Ontario, where questions of anti-Indigenous racism, mental health and addiction discrimination, and systemic healthcare failures were placed before the public. The Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres described the inquest as an important opportunity to examine those systemic issues and work toward meaningful change in healthcare delivery.

Heather’s story belongs in this conversation because the crisis of MMIWG2S+ is not only about the moment someone is reported missing. It is also about the wider permission structure that makes Indigenous women unsafe in the first place. It is about the ways their suffering is minimized. It is about the ways their families are left to fight for answers. It is about the ways institutions speak the language of process while communities speak the language of loss.

Heather’s life asks us to confront the terrible idea that Indigenous women are disposable.

Not because that idea is true, but because too many systems have behaved as though it is.

And since this time last year, more families have had to search, plead, wait, and grieve.

On May 5, 2025, Natanis Merasty, a 24-year-old woman from Saskatchewan, was last in contact with loved ones. Before her name appeared in a police update, before her movements were traced across provinces, before strangers began reading the details of her disappearance, she was already known. She belonged to people. She had a voice someone recognized instantly, a laugh someone could still hear, a way of moving through the world that made her real and irreplaceable to those who loved her. When a young Indigenous woman goes missing, what disappears is not only a person from a timeline. A chair is empty. A phone stays silent. A family begins living in the terrible space between hope and fear, where every possible sighting, every delay, every unanswered question becomes part of the grief.

Georgina Ann Sass, 46, has been listed by Aboriginal Alert as a missing Indigenous woman, with family and friends asking for help after she was last active on social media in June 2025. Those small digital traces matter because they are often where love begins searching in public. A last post. A last message. A last sign that someone was here, connected, reachable, still moving through the ordinary patterns of life. But Georgina is not a profile, a poster, or a missing persons listing. She is a woman whose absence would be felt by the people who knew the sound of her voice, the shape of her presence, the stories she carried, the routines she interrupted simply by not being there. Someone is missing the everyday things that never make it into a public alert, the way she entered a room, the way she answered her phone, the way she belonged.

Candace Wastesicoot, 43, was reported missing in Thompson, Manitoba in December 2025. RCMP said they were concerned for her safety after she had not been seen or heard from since a wellbeing check. But concern, in families and communities, is not a line in a news release. It is a physical thing. It is the tightening in the chest when someone does not answer. It is the calls made again and again. It is the instinct to retrace steps, to ask neighbours, to check places, to wonder what was missed. Candace’s disappearance is part of that painful reality, where Indigenous women too often move from being in need of care to being publicly searched for, and where families are left to carry the unbearable question of whether more urgency, more listening, more protection could have changed what happened next.

Becky Samantha McIvor, 41, from Ebb and Flow First Nation, was reported missing in December 2025 and later located deceased. RCMP stated at the time that the cause of death remained under investigation. There is a particular cruelty in that arc, from missing to found, because “found” does not mean restored. It does not return her to the people who loved her. It does not bring her back to the table, the doorway, the family gathering, the community that knew her as more than the circumstances of her death. Becky’s life was larger than the final public facts released about her. She was a relative. She was part of a Nation. She was part of a circle of people who now have to speak about her in the past tense, while still carrying everything that made her beloved.

In March 2026, a 21-year-old woman from O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation was reported missing and later found deceased near Provincial Road 481. Her name was not publicly released in the RCMP notice. Even unnamed in public, she must not be unremembered. Somewhere, beyond the limits of that notice, there are people who knew her name. People who knew her as a baby, a child, a young woman with a life still unfolding. At 21, a person should be surrounded by possibility. There should be plans, mistakes, laughter, learning, love, frustration, becoming. There should be time. The fact that her name was not released publicly does not make her absence smaller. It reminds us that so much of this grief happens beyond public view, carried by families and communities who know exactly who has been taken from them, even when the rest of the country is not told her name. How many others are just Anonymous?

These are not examples in the way reports use examples. They are not illustrations of a problem. They are loved people. They are daughters, mothers, aunties, sisters, cousins, friends, community members. They are people whose names were spoken in kitchens and cars and community halls. People whose photos were shared because someone loved them enough to say, please help us bring her home. People whose absence changed the shape of the rooms they belonged in.

And they are only a few.

That is the unbearable truth of Red Dress Day. No list can hold the fullness of this crisis. No blog can name everyone. No public statement can carry the weight of every family who has searched a riverbank, a landfill, a trail, a roadside, a city street, a hospital record, a police file, or their own memories trying to understand how someone so loved could be treated as so easily lost.

When an Indigenous woman is taken, the loss is not only individual. It is generational.

A mother is missing from the kitchen, the school pick-up, the birthday, the bedtime, the hard conversation, the ordinary Tuesday. A grandmother is missing from the stories, the recipes, the songs, the medicines, the teachings, the language, the way she said your name. An auntie is missing from the laughter, the correction, the fierce protection, the extra plate, the knowing glance across the room. A sister is missing from the future she was building. A Two-Spirit relative is missing from the circle, from the balance, from the gifts they carried for the people.

A community loses more than one person. It loses the teachings that person had not yet shared. It loses the children she may have raised, the ceremonies she may have carried, the jokes she may have told, the medicines she may have gathered, the leadership she may have offered, the healing she may have brought.

Colonization has always understood this.

That is why it targeted women. That is why it attacked family systems. That is why it removed children. That is why it tried to sever language from mothers’ mouths and ceremony from grandmothers’ hands. That is why it treated Indigenous women’s bodies as territory to be controlled, judged, exploited, disappeared, and discarded.

But Indigenous women have never been only victims of that violence.

They have also been the ones who survived it. The ones who carried babies through hunger. The ones who hid language inside lullabies. The ones who kept medicines alive when ceremonies were outlawed. The ones who braided hair, washed wounds, challenged councils, filled out forms, sat through court, organized marches, made signs, called reporters, confronted police, raised money, fed searchers, and refused to let this country forget.

They are the heart of families, but not in a sentimental way. In a structural way. In a political way. In a sacred way.

Women hold communities together not because it is easy, but because they have had to. Grandmothers have become archives. Aunties have become safety plans. Mothers have become advocates. Sisters have become search coordinators. Daughters have become witnesses. Two-Spirit and gender-diverse relatives have become truth-tellers in a world still trying to narrow what Indigenous life is allowed to be.

Red Dress Day asks us to honour the missing and murdered, but it also asks us to honour the living.

Honour the mother still searching.

Honour the grandmother who keeps a photo beside the candle.

Honour the auntie who answers the phone at midnight.

Honour the sister who refuses to let the police file go cold.

Honour the young Indigenous woman who walks through the world knowing the statistics, feeling the eyes, planning her route, texting when she gets home, carrying keys between her fingers, and still choosing joy.

Honour the Two-Spirit youth who deserves to be loved without condition, protected without debate, and named without erasure.

Honour the women in community who carry everyone else’s grief while carrying their own.

Honour does not mean pity. Honour means action. Honour means listening when families say the investigation is not enough. Honour means believing Indigenous women before they are dead. Honour means funding Indigenous-led safety, healing, housing, health, legal advocacy, cultural reconnection, land-based work, and community care. Honour means confronting racism in hospitals, schools, shelters, police systems, courts, child welfare agencies, and media. Honour means implementing the Calls for Justice not as symbolic commitments, but as obligations.

And honour means refusing the lie that remembrance is enough.

The red dress is powerful because it is empty. But its emptiness is an accusation.

It asks: Who should be here?

It asks: Who failed her?

It asks: Who searched?

It asks: Who did not?

It asks: Who was believed?

It asks: Who was dismissed?

It asks: What would have happened if she had been white, wealthy, housed, sober, documented, protected by the systems that so often decide whose life is urgent?

It asks Canada to look at the space where an Indigenous woman should be and stop calling that space unfortunate.

On Red Dress Day, we do not gather around an issue. We gather around our relatives.

We gather around the women who raised us, corrected us, fed us, protected us, prayed for us, laughed with us, and carried our Nations forward. We gather around the girls who should still be growing. We gather around the Two-Spirit and gender-diverse relatives whose lives are sacred. We gather around the families who have had to become experts in grief, media, policing, law, search protocols, and public advocacy simply because someone they loved did not come home.

We gather around Heather Winterstein, and around the truth that healthcare systems must be held accountable when Indigenous women are not treated with the dignity, urgency, and humanity they deserve.

We gather around Natanis, Georgina, Candace, Becky, and the unnamed young woman from O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation.

We gather around all the names we know, all the names we do not know, all the names families whisper, all the names carried in ceremony, all the names still waiting for justice.

And we say: you are not disposable.

You were never disposable.

You were loved before the systems failed you. You are loved beyond the reports that describe you. You are loved beyond the headlines that shortened you. You are loved beyond the silence that tried to swallow you.

The red dress still hangs because the crisis is still here.

But so are the grandmothers.

So are the aunties.

So are the mothers, sisters, daughters, cousins, friends, helpers, knowledge keepers, fire keepers, language carriers, water protectors, medicine gatherers, advocates, survivors, and truth-tellers.

So are the families who refuse to let Canada look away.

So are the communities who continue to search, mourn, organize, teach, feed, pray, march, testify, and demand change.

Red Dress Day is a day of remembrance. But it is also a day of responsibility.

May we remember with tenderness.

May we grieve with honesty.

May we speak their names with care.

May we honour Indigenous women not only after they are gone, but while they are here.

May we build a world where no red dress has to stand in for a body, a laugh, a voice, a future, a life.

May we keep listening to the grandmothers.

May we keep believing the women.

May we keep bringing our relatives home.