Every year, when Red Dress Day comes around, I think about the same image.
A red dress, hanging empty.
It is simple. It is beautiful. It is devastating. And that’s why it works.
A red dress looks like someone should be in it. It looks like someone is missing. Because someone is.
Red Dress Day, observed each year on May 5, honours Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people. The red dress has become a national symbol of grief, remembrance, awareness and, hopefully, change.
But the hardest part of Red Dress Day is that it asks something of us after the ceremony is over.
It asks us not to treat the day as a single moment of sadness, then carry on as usual.
It asks us to remember that the women being honoured were not symbols. They were daughters, mothers, aunties, sisters, grandmothers, friends, students, artists, workers, leaders and children. They had lives. They had people who loved them, and still love them.
A year ago, I wrote about how Red Dress Day hit me in the gut. I wrote about being a white woman from Golden, and about the Indigenous women who have been part of my life as friends, mentors, colleagues and chosen family.
That feeling has not gone away. If anything, it has settled in deeper. Because once you understand that the empty red dress could belong to someone you know, you cannot un-know it.
And maybe that is the point.
We are not supposed to look at those dresses and feel comfortable. We are supposed to feel the absence. We are supposed to ask why families have had to fight so hard to be heard, believed and taken seriously.
For many of us, especially those of us who are not Indigenous, our role begins with listening. Not speaking over. Not explaining away. Not deciding that because the issue feels overwhelming, there is nothing we can do.
Here in Golden, we are not separate from this. We live in a community shaped by Indigenous history, Indigenous presence and Indigenous relationships. We live alongside people whose families and communities carry this grief.
That is why Red Dress Day matters.
It matters because the dresses are empty, but the stories are not. It matters because grief deserves witnesses. It matters because awareness, on its own, is not enough, but it is still a place to begin.
I do not pretend to have the answers. But I do know this: silence helps no one.
So I will keep showing up. I will keep listening. I will keep believing that the empty red dress is not just a symbol of loss, but a call to responsibility.
Because those dresses represent people who mattered. They still matter.
And they must not be forgotten.
