The first story I heard about “the missing” was from a Dene elder, Catherine, just over 10 years ago. She was speaking about the impact of tuberculosis on her family at a health conference. The topic triggered her memories of residential school, and of a younger sister who never returned.

Last March, about two weeks into the pandemic, Steve Teekens got a call from the police. Teekens runs an Indigenous housing agency and the officers were calling to say one of his clients had tested positive for COVID-19. It was the first case to surface at the Native Men’s Residence, an organization that provides emergency shelter, transitional housing and deeply affordable rentals to a clientele of mostly Indigenous men in Toronto.

In her 18 years as a police officer, Det. Sgt. Alana Morrison has worked some of the Nishnawbe Aski Police Service’s darkest files: homicide, domestic violence, child sexual abuse.

She has interviewed more than a thousand victims — many of them more than once.

“We’d bring them in one door, interview them, collect our evidence and then shove them out the back door with no support,” says Morrison. “Every time, my brain said, ‘This isn’t right.’”

"The process of decolonizing my spirit and finding my way back to my sacred responsibilities had begun," writes National Observer reporter Emilee Gilpin in Vancouver, B.C.