Clarifying dissenting voices: Exploring the ambivalence around the Canadian national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls

From the outset, the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (NIMMIWG, 2016–2019), whose mandate was to investigate and report on the systemic causes of all forms of violence against Indigenous women and girls, has faced complaints from survivors, families of the missing and murdered, and Indigenous associations across the country. By exploring the crisis of legitimacy experienced during the NIMMIWG’s process, this article traces the interplay between the inquiry’s legal scope, public grievances and possible testimonial outcomes. The objective is to consider how conflicting views and ambivalence in understanding the inquiry’s vision and role have impacted this truth-gathering process focused on survivors and families’ testimonies of colonial and gendered violence. The first section recalls general doubts and suspicions expressed in Canadian media (2015–2018) towards the inquiry’s goals and actions, notably with respect to questions of liability. The second section analyses a few public testimonies about ‘stolen sisters’ given during the Montreal public hearing, which reveal an irreducible tension between finding new forms of accountability, notably by police forces and the judicial system, and the cultural and healing remembrance platform of the NIMMIWG. The last section reflects on how this state-sponsored apparatus, based on a language of truth-telling and remembrance, avoided an opportunity to address systemic structures of violence towards Indigenous women, girls, queer, trans, and two-spirit people with regard to inequalities and redistribution faced by families and survivors of loved ones, not only in their everyday lives and their experience of destruction and death, but also, I argue, in sustaining their participation in this state-sponsored process and its aftermath.