VIDEO: Maple Ridge students asking community to march for murdered and missing Indigenous women

Say her name.

That was the goal of three students at Maple Ridge Secondary during a series of presentations to their peers on Friday, April 28, to honour those Indigenous woman who have gone missing or been found murdered across the country.

Wearing stark, bright red dresses, Grade 10 students Eden Owens, Nye Holmes, and Peyton Foster stood up and read the stories of six women before asking the audience to say their names.

“Saying the name of a missing or murdered Indigenous woman humanizes her and leads us to see her,” explained 16-year-old Holmes, a member of the Circle of Indigenous Youth and Allies, the Indigenous leadership group at MRSS that put on the presentations.

Now they are also hoping the community will support them and also walk with them this Friday, May 5 – commonly known as Red Dress Day in Canada and the United States.

The girls are trying to get at least 1,813 people to walk one lap of the track at their school to symbolically walk the entire length of what is known as the Highway of Tears, a 725 kilometre stretch of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert, along which nine young women went missing or were discovered murdered between 1989 to 2006. All but one of the women were Indigenous, according to the Carrier Sekani Family Services’ Highway of Tears governing body, a group dedicated to stopping the violence along the highway.

Say Her Name, Walk Her Walk, is the name the group gave the project that includes the series of presentations recognizing and honouring missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada.

“This honouring and knowledge is important because the stakes are too high to pretend this isn’t happening. We need to educate ourselves so that we can begin to break the cycles of domestic violence and missing and murdered Indigenous women,” noted Holmes.

“We’re hopeful that by providing the information to keep survivors of domestic violence safe from harm and providing compassion and respect, we can all, ultimately, be part of the prevention of future domestic violence cases,” she added.

Eden Owens, 15, researched the life of Amanda Cook, who was only 14 when she went missing from a harvest fair in Manitoba in 1996 and was discovered four days later dead in a wooded area near the fairgrounds. An autopsy revealed she had been beaten to death.

Owens, who is Indigenous herself, started her research last year, when she was only 14, and it touched a nerve knowing this could happen to any Indigenous woman.

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“I just felt closer to her and related to her more because she was my age and we had things, like, similar. I just felt like I wanted to honour her,” she explained.

Holmes, who is also Indigenous, presented on the life of Noelle O’Soup, who was 13 when she went missing in 2021. Her body was found early 2022 in Vancouver. Holmes said she chose to research O’Soup for much of the same reasons that Owens chose Cook – they were about the same age as each other, and also because O’Soup, she said, was from Maple Ridge.

“It scares me for myself, but also for my family,” said Holmes about what she learned from her research.

Holmes also explained the significance of the colour red as it is the only colour in the spirit world.

“So wearing red invites these women back to us to spend this time among us as we honour them,” she said.

Kiera Meunier, 17, a Grade 12 student at Westview Secondary, also came to support the students.

She brought her drum and led the Woman’s Warrior song, that the group sang.

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“It’s an empowerment song,” explained Meunier. “So, it just helps bring us all closer, especially with such a heavy topic like this.”

The song was created by a woman for only women to sing.

“Men can drum to it, but they can’t sing it,” she said.

Everyone in the community is being invited out on Friday, May 5, to walk a lap of 400 metres at the MRSS track.

The walk will be taking place between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and those dropping by will easily spot the check-in tents at the track.

Every walker will be handed the name and story of an Indigenous woman or girl who has gone missing or found murdered in Canada, so they can read their story while walking and be reminded why they are participating.

The three girls learned a lot from the project, and are hoping their work will get people talking and educating one another.

“We learned more about the lives of these women because we want to share the lives of these women and the truth about their lives,” said Owens.

“And not just their deaths,” Holmes added in.