In Canada, indigenous women are six times more likely to die violently than white women. The Highway of Tears is an endless road in the province of British Columbia, where women and girls have disappeared since the 1970s, at least 19, but unofficially estimated at over 40. Most of them belonged to the indigenous population. They do not stand alone but are said to be the result of more than a hundred years of colonial policy, whereby indigenous children were snatched from their families to be placed in boarding schools.
Boarding schools that had to destroy ‘the Indian in the child’, but in many cases irreparably damaged the child itself. Practices that took place well into the 1990s. Emy Koopman speaks to family members of a girl who disappeared along the Highway of Tears twenty-five years ago and she discovers that the disappearances are still not a thing of the past.
