L'Enquête nationale sur les femmes et les filles autochtones disparues et assassinées au Canada: Explorer la relation entre l'existence de critiques externes et la prise de parole des témoins lors des audiences communautaires

Abstract

Faced with the alarming rates of disappearances and murders of Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people in Canada and in response to the demands of victims' families and Indigenous women's associations, the Canadian government set up the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2016–2019). Its mandate: to identify the systemic causes of violence and produce effective recommendations to remedy them. From its announcement and during the course of its work, the inquiry faced a great deal of criticism, particularly from families and Indigenous women's associations, undermining the trust of many in the commissioners and in the process. It was thus against the backdrop of those brewing tensions that many people affected by the violence came forward to tell their stories at community hearings held across the country. As we consider public testimony to be a vector of social agency for these witnesses, we ask how external critiques conveyed in the media sphere influenced these narrative spaces internal to the inquiry. Through the use of computer-assisted text analysis (based in textometry) applied on a corpus of transcripts from the fifteen community hearings, we were able to identify the presence of certain criticisms, which occupied a relatively small space in the hearings. What's more, our explorations enabled us to reveal that witnesses bore a dual responsibility: to tell their story and to avoid downgrading the investigation in progress.