I'm heading out to Sagkeeng First Nation.
It's a self-governing Indigenous community, about an hour and a half's drive north of Winnipeg.
And out of 600 First Nation reserves across Canada
Sagkeeng has one of the highest numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
And I want to find out why.
The community has invited me to their meeting place, Turtle Lodge.
So my name's Laura, I'm a First Nations journalist from Australia.
My people are Ngiyaampa Weilwan people of Northern New South Wales.
A bit about myself, my dad grew up on a reserve in Australia.
Reserves are a bit different I think in Australia from here.
All of you have lost someone, firstly I wanted to hear about your experiences
reporting people missing or murdered, to the police.
My niece was murdered two and a half years ago.
I feel like there's so much unanswered questions that the police could've did more.
Because her fingernails were broken, she had some bruises and yet they said that she died by suicide.
We went to the police and few things had happened to her.
They told me that she was stabbed 17 times, and I never caught any word after that.
It's overwhelming to hear so many heartbreaking stories in this one room.
The most shocking comes from Isabelle Fontaine, whose sister Sharon
was killed by Canada's worst serial killer, pig farmer Robert Pickton.
Robert Pickton may have killed up to 49 women, before he was finally caught by police.
They couldn't find her, and they said as if she was a prostitute, an alcoholic you know.
So they said they wouldn't look for her because they thought she was a sex worker?
Yep, mmhmm.
That's - You know that they said that?
And how they found her is through her fingernail DNA.
Where was that found?
At the Pickton farm.
They said she was tortured by the pigs, the pigs ate her.
And all they found was the fingernail.
I'm sorry.
Just under half of Canada's 700,000 people with registered Indian status live on reserves.
There is racism.
Chief Hart is working with the inquiry, travelling to reserves around Manitoba.
He takes me through some of the social issues that lead to the shocking statistic.
You can go to any home, there's 15, 20 people living in a house.
You don't have to go too far from here where we have people living in homes that are condemned.
There's no proper infrastructure.
The problems here, such as overcrowding, poverty and lack of resources are strikingly similar
to many Indigenous communities I've seen back in Australia.
Chief Hart says these conditions force women and girls out of their homes, and into danger.
You know they get caught up in everything, they get caught up in those social problems that are out there
now we're seeing how our women and men are going missing because of that.
First Nations people here and across Canada carry a heavy load.
With poverty, discrimination and generations of dispossession.
It leads to a kind of multi-layered trauma
that Indigenous people in Canada and Australia live through every day.