Lucia & Shayla Yellowknife, Northwest Territories

Fair address: Yellowknife Regional Learning Fair

Project: Walking With Our Sisters

Our project, Walking With Our Sisters, is about the missing and murdered Indigenous woman. Walking With Our Sisters is a massive art installation with more than 1700 pairs of vamps or moccasin uppers. Each pair represents a missing or murdered Indigenous woman's unfinished life.

What was the most interesting thing you learned about your topic?

The most interesting thing that we learned was that the small vamps represented children who never returned home from residential school. These innocent children were taken from their families and never seen again. The same is true of the 1181 woman women who also disappeared.

What important lessons have you learned that you want to share with other Canadians?

We learned that the general social service is not collecting data on missing and murdered Indigenous women. It is our hope that by sharing our project that the women get the attention that they deserve. We also learned that 90% of the missing and murdered woman in Ontario were mothers. Aboriginal women and girls are the group that are at highest risk for experiencing violence in Canada.

How would you compare your life today to the lives of those studied in your project?

We can't imagine what the women and girls went through. They were probably worried for their lives while we live today with very few worries.