Marion Buller headed the 2019 National Inquiry on
Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls.
Photo by BNI Brunswick News /Postmedia News

The title of this piece is a deliberate play on Rebel Without a Cause, a classic 1955 film starring James Dean, which sought to explain the moral decay among middle-class American youth.

Its use here reflects the moral decay exhibited by the wearisome portrayal and explanatory shallowness of the differentially high murder rates of indigenous women and girls compared to non-indigenous ones.

While there is no single, absolute number for the total studies on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Canada, the crisis has been the subject of hundreds of reports by indigenous organizations, government bodies, academic researchers, and international organizations going back decades.

A key 2014 literature review by the Legal Strategy Coalition on Violence Against Indigenous Women (LSC) identified 50 major reports containing over 700 recommendations. Since then, dozens more studies have been completed.

The National Inquiry into MMIWG Final Report (“Reclaiming Power and Place,” 2019) is the largest, most comprehensive of these studies: its two volumes are based on testimony from over 2,380 people.

The key themes in most of these studies are: (1) systemic neglect: police have inadequately investigated these missing and murdered girls and women cases; institutional racism and misogyny underlie these investigations; (2) genocide: the 2019 National Inquiry concluded the violence constitutes a race-based genocide; (3) intergenerational trauma: many studies point to the long-term impact of residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and the Indian Act.

These reports also show that in virtually all cases involving indigenous women, the victim and accused knew each other, suggesting that both parties identified as indigenous.

This disparity between the murder rates of indigenous and other women and girls saw the June 2019 National Inquiry report mincing no words when it claimed there currently exists in Canada “a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples … empowered by colonial structures … leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.”

The chief commissioner of the National Inquiry, Marion Buller, a B.C. Provincial Court judge, former president of the indigenous Bar Association, and a member of the Mistawasis Indian Band, wrote in her opening comments that the report is about “deliberate race, identity, and gender-based genocide.” Buller declared that “The violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people is a national tragedy of epic proportions.”

The Final Report declares that its use of “genocide,” which occurs no fewer than 72 times in its first volume alone, is in keeping with the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

This Convention is the gold standard for identifying this heinous crime against humanity wherever it might occur. Article 2 of the UN Convention defines genocide as:

“… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Sloppy, politically motivated reasoning underlies the MMIWG Final Report’s genocide accusation.

Unlike universally recognized genocides like the Holocaust and the Holodomor, none of the murders of these indigenous Canadian women was aimed at destroying them as an ethnic, racial, or other grouping. More particularly, despite the many differences and the varying definitions of genocide, there is one necessary and sufficient feature that distinguishes a genuine genocide: that the murder of members of another group be deliberate, systematic and organized, as opposed to coincidental, unconnected and uncoordinated.

This wasteful $92 million Inquiry and the enormous “Indian Industry” it is part of have surely done the former and will continue to press for the latter. The Supplementary Report’s legal opinion makes the financial motivation crystal-clear: “Under international law, Canada has a duty to redress the [genocidal] harm it caused and to provide restitution, compensation and satisfaction to Indigenous peoples.”

The latest MMIWM study was released on January 23 by the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) at the University of Toronto. It monotonously updates and confirms the MMIWG report's findings. It also introduces an additional aspect, specifically the differing ethno-racial approaches to indigenous and non-indigenous murder cases.

Like the NNIWG report, the IJB study showed that indigenous women and girls are killed at rates six times higher than non-Indigenous women.

The IJB reviewed 1,329 cases in which women and girls were killed or died under suspicious circumstances in Canada between 2019 and 2025. Just over 25 per cent--or 340 victims--were indigenous. Of those cases, 165 have been resolved in court.

But unlike the NNIWG investigation, the IJB study focused on the fact that the perpetrators are frequently convicted of lesser offences than those guilty in the deaths of non-indigenous victims, an understandable observation to anyone following changes in indigenous criminal sentencing in recent years.

The IJB analysis uncovered what it termed “several anomalies” in how the justice system deals with those who kill indigenous women.

For instance, the most serious charge in Canada’s justice system is first-degree murder, carrying a mandatory sentence of life in prison. Only 25 per cent of those accused in the deaths of indigenous women and girls faced that charge. In cases with non-Indigenous female victims, first-degree murder charges were laid 37 per cent of the time.

When an indigenous woman is killed, 64 per cent of cases end with a plea bargain, compared to 57 per cent in cases with a non-indigenous victim. (Still, the average sentence for the death of indigenous and non-indigenous women remains the same: just over 10 years.)

Almost all--97 per cent — of female indigenous victims in the IJB’s database whose outcomes were known were killed by someone they knew, as the MMIWG report also found. But that figure is also high--90 per cent--for non-indigenous victims.

Seventy-six of the indigenous cases that were resolved in court--or 46 per cent--ended with a finding of manslaughter, which criminal lawyers say is characterized by a lack of intent to kill. Manslaughter was the single most common sentencing outcome in the homicides of indigenous females.

In contrast, of the 384 concluded cases involving non-indigenous victims, only 24 per cent ended with a manslaughter outcome. The most common finding was second-degree murder, the outcome in 137--or 36 per cent--of these cases.

Second-degree murder carries a minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life in prison, while manslaughter carries no minimum sentence unless a firearm is involved.

The most serious charge in Canada’s justice system is first-degree murder, carrying a mandatory sentence of life in prison. Only 25 per cent of those accused in the deaths of indigenous women and girls faced that charge. In cases with non-indigenous female victims, first-degree murder charges were laid 37 per cent of the time.

The numbers appear to show differences in how indigenous and non-indigenous cases are dealt with, said Michael Spratt, an Ottawa criminal defence lawyer for 20 years.

“When you look systemically … [Indigenous women’s] lives and their health and their safety are not valued as highly,” he says.

“It is something that should cause further inquiry.”

IJB analysis made no mention of the Gladue principles, a careless or deliberately biased omission

What Spratt failed to mention, deliberately or not, is that this disparity is the result of the employment of Gladue principles in sentencing indigenous defendants.

Gladue principles are a Canadian legal framework from the Supreme Court case R. v. Gladue (1999) requiring judges to consider the unique systemic and background factors of indigenous offenders when sentencing, aiming to address overrepresentation in prisons by looking at colonization's alleged impacts like inter-generational trauma, racism, cultural loss, and abuse, and exploring community-based, restorative justice alternatives to jail. These principles emphasize restorative, culturally sensitive solutions, such as healing circles, rather than punitive ones, by examining factors that lead to contact with the law, many of which are shared with non-indigenous people, including millions of immigrants from non-European countries.

The Gladue principles make no mention of high warfare-based murder rates, infanticide, or the generally abusive treatment of women among many tribal people during North America’s pre-contact period, nicely summarized by James Pew in his recent essay The Pitiless Savagery of Early North America. Nor does Gladue sentencing appreciate that these and other lethally violent activities were reduced or eradicated by colonialism.

Not only their statistical evidence is very similar but because their explanatory narratives are both incomplete and skewed

More specifically, the IJB analysis focused exclusively on uncovered disparities in how the justice system deals with those who kill indigenous women; it made no mention of the Gladue principles, a careless or deliberately biased omission.

Legal experts say the reasons behind the numerical discrepancies are complex.

In remote areas, including reserves, restraining orders are often ineffective in keeping perpetrators away from victims, says lawyer and activist Marion Buller. Because of this, indigenous women and girls face unique challenges to protect themselves from fatal violence, she claims. For many, access to resources and shelters is limited or nonexistent, while the stigma of speaking up is profound.

While this may be superficially correct, Buller and others refuse to ask why so many indigenous people continue to live dysfunctional lives on remote, lawless, and poverty-stricken Indian Reserves.

Buller also claims the IJB’s findings reflect “important systemic problems” that impact the outcomes of cases involving female indigenous victims: “If police don’t see the life as being as important … how does that affect how they collect the evidence that goes before the prosecutor?”

Lost in an argument that places all the blame on extrinsic factors is the high probability that the lives of these murdered indigenous women are seen as unimportant by their almost exclusively indigenous male killers.

The two reports discussed here have much in common, not only because their statistical evidence is very similar but because their explanatory narratives are both incomplete and skewed.

The result is that IJB’s report could easily have translated the MMIWG claim that there exists, “a race-based genocide of indigenous Peoples … empowered by colonial structures…leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in indigenous populations” into the following statement: “The numerical discrepancies in the punishment of indigenous males who murder indigenous females reflect a gender-based genocide empowered by colonial structures leading directly to the current differentially high rates of violence, death, and suicide among indigenous women compared to non-indigenous ones.”

Had the IJB’s report done so, it would never have mentioned that these and other adversities like hunger, starvation, high infant mortality rates, and low life expectancy were ever-present among indigenous people during the 12,000-year pre-colonial period.

Indigenous leaders, activists, and hangers-on have not generally sought to free their people, their lives, or their communities from the fetters and legacy of colonial Canada

Ironically, blaming colonial and post-colonial policies for the murdered and missing females, and elevating the phenomenon into “genocide,” is also wrong-headed because, by and large, indigenous activists have fought to strengthen or refine most of the traditional colonial and post-colonial features of their relationship with the Crown.

What this means is that the differential distribution between indigenous and non-indigenous female murder victims (and their perpetrators) would have long disappeared save for the differential treatment of indigenous people not only by the criminal justice system where Gladue sentencing principles and woke judges rule supreme, but also because of the special treatment of indigenous Canadians in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the treaties signed by indigenous leaders with Britain and Canada creating separate land reserves (now speciously called First Nations) and rights for aboriginals from early first contact to the present, the Indian Act carefully defining indigenous status, the entrenchment of separate and privileged Indigenous rights in sections 25, 35, and 37 of the 1982 Canadian constitution, two federal ministries totally devoted to indigenous issues, and untold billions of dollars of special programmes and funding reserved exclusively for indigenous people.

Indigenous movers and shakers have eagerly embraced all these special rights. In other words, indigenous leaders, activists, and hangers-on have not generally sought to free their people, their lives, or their communities from the fetters and legacy of colonial Canada. Instead, they have sought to materially benefit from and build upon the colonial dependency relationship.

A major failing of all these reports about MMIWG--the grounds for which they can be terming “murders without a cause”--is their scant consideration of other explanatory frameworks focusing on the precise causes of homicide in Canada. Police reported in 1996 that 38 percent of homicide victims consumed alcohol or drugs or both at the time of the offence. The pattern has remained consistent since 1991, when this information was first collected.

While the reasons people kill impulsively are still disputed, many of them seem to be linked, in part, with a neurological inability to properly control feelings of disappointment, frustration, and anger as they interact with those around them, especially under the influence of mind-altering substances such as drugs and alcohol.

There may also be a murder connection to years of personal disappointment and failure, which results in a combination of profound hopelessness and deep-seated resentment. Accordingly, they tend to externalize blame by punishing those whom they hold responsible for their miserable lives.

Whether or not these micro-level factors have influenced the disproportionate rate of the murder of indigenous females, many historical factors surely have exacerbated this discrepancy between aboriginal and other Canadians.

In retrospect, in the interest of full equality with non-indigenous people, both the British government and Canada's founders should have treated the country's indigenous people in precisely the same manner that such people were treated around the world for millennia, namely by slowly but fully and beneficially assimilating them as part of an overall colonization enterprise.

Only time will tell whether this full equality will ever exist.

Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba, is editor of —REAL Indigenous Report.

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