By Cheryl Jahn

New report on gender-based violence against women

Feb 14, 2025 | 3:26 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – The issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women in Northern BC is not a new one. It stems back to the early 1990’s when one young Indigenous woman after another disappeared; some of whose bodies where found, others who were not. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the disappearance and discovery of the remains of 14-year-old Aielah Saric.

In July of 2006, the Carrier Sekani Family Services, the Prince George Native Friendship Centre, and the Lheidli Tenneh First Nations submitted a series a recommendations in relation to the Highway of Tears Symposium.

“So there are many recommendations in the reports,” says Mary Teegee, Executive Director for Carrier Sekani Family Services and one of the authors of the original report. “We still have the 33 Highway of Tears recommendations that we haven’t fully fulfilled all those.”

And now, the same group, along with the help of the Northern Institute for Research and Evaluation, has set another 36 recommendations looking into the issue.

DRIPA suspension

Private property concerns highlighted as province suspends parts of DRIPA

59m ago

Barry Seymour

Local First Nations leader will be missed

2h ago

Drought Conditions

Lowlands face drought despite snowpack

2h ago

“We have to have a very organized and loud voice to have all of the recommendations seriously looked at,” says Dawn Hemingway with Northern FIRE. “If you think about the intro title to the report, when is the solutions going to start happening? One of the participants said that. And to me, that’s the heart of this work.”

Some of the newest recommendations include: Celebrating progress by creating a timeline from the 2006 Symposium to the present, engaging boys and men through Safe Streets programming, convening a meeting with Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity Kelli Paddon and Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation Murray Rankin to discuss prevention in Northern BC, seeking funding for, creating, and sustaining a permanent a data observatory on Northern BC, and investigating the possibility of an RCMP “point person” with consistent responsibility for status updates on cases.

But the Northern is a small cog in a very large wheel in trying to bring attention to the issue. But Mary Teegee argues we have a large voice.

“There was everybody was at the table,” says Teegee. “We had the families of the victims. We had different levels of government. We had different stakeholders sitting at the governing body table to make decisions and push those recommendations forward. And that’s it. That’s a that’s a good example for the rest of Canada.”