Unbroken: My Fight for Survival,
Hope, and Justice for Indigenous
Women and Girls
by Angela Sterritt
Greystone Books
312 pages
$35
The weight of Angela Sterritt’s new memoir, Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls, will sit heavy on the mind and the heart of the reader. A rigorous and detailed examination of some of the hundreds of cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls reported in Canada over the last fifty years, Unbroken is also a personal story of resilience and survival from a journalist whose own life path resembles those of the women and girls she reports on.
Sterritt’s parents divorced when she was two. The daughter of a white mother and a Gitxsan father, she is a member of the Gitxsan Nation, whose territories are located along the Skeena River and its tributary, the Bulkley River, in British Columbia. At fourteen, Sterritt found herself living on the streets, hitchhiking across Canada and the United States, and living in singleroom occupancy residencies in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside.
Seamlessly intertwining her story as a teen living on the street with the stories of the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, Sterritt uses her skills as an award-winning investigative reporter to provide evidence of the catastrophic consequences of colonialism in Canada, not only on her ancestors but all Indigenous people living on this land today.
Digging into the history of colonialism in Canada, Sterritt makes the link between patriarchal policies and the stripping of the ancestral knowledge and power from Indigenous women and girls, who, pre-colonization, “were revered as the backbone of our communities.” Today, she explains, “Indigenous women are more likely to die prematurely or experience violence than any other race of women in Canada.” She adds that despite Indigenous women and girls making up only four percent of the female population, between 2001 and 2015 they represented almost a quarter of all female Canadian murder victims.
Outlining the multiple ways in which Canadian institutions—from all levels of government to law enforcement bodies, the judicial system, and the media— have failed Indigenous women and girls, Unbroken is an invaluable record of the relentless efforts by Indigenous communities to find justice for their loved ones. Sterritt illuminates one of the darkest episodes of this country while also being a testament to the richness and tenacity of the Indigenous Peoples whose lands we live on today.
