Listening to the families of missing and murdered indigenous women

 There have been calls for years now for a public inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women in Canada and the numbers would seem to bear out the need for answers. According to the RCMP, there were nearly 12-hundred cases of murdered and missing indigenous women and girls between 1982 and 2012. According to a U.N. report this year, young First Nations, Métis and Inuit women were five times more likely to die under violent circumstances than non-aboriginal women.

The first phase of the Liberal government's promised inquiry is set to get underway today in Ottawa, as government ministers meet with some of the family members behind those missing and murdered. 

Today, we were joined by three family members touched by tragedies for their thoughts on how an inquiry should go ahead. 

• Bernadette Smith's sister disappeared from Winnipeg in 2008.
• Ernie Crey is a former social worker and Chief of the Cheam First Nation in British Colombia. His sister Dawn's DNA was found on the farm of the notorious serial killer Willy Pickton. 
• Joyce Carpenter's daughter's death more than 20 years ago was not investigated as a homicide, despite the coroner saying that it should be.

This segment was produced by the Current's Leif Zapf-Gilje