The Highway of Tears

The Highway of Tears is a 724-kilometer stretch of Highway 16 in northern British Columbia, Canada, along which a disproportionate number of women and girls — the majority Indigenous — have been murdered or disappeared since the 1970s. The RCMP officially acknowledged 18 cases directly linked to the highway, but Indigenous communities and advocacy organizations have long maintained the true number is far higher, with some estimates exceeding 40 or 50 victims. The remoteness of the route and the limited resources of communities along it have made victims highly vulnerable and investigations difficult.

Many of the victims were hitchhiking — one of the few available methods of transportation along a route where bus service is extremely limited and the distances between towns are vast. Indigenous women and girls disproportionately relied on hitchhiking due to poverty and lack of alternatives. The connection between this economic vulnerability, hitchhiking, and victimization along the highway became a defining example of the broader crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada.

The Highway of Tears murders intersected with broader national failures in how missing and murdered Indigenous women are investigated and treated by Canadian institutions. RCMP investigations were repeatedly criticized as inadequate, and the families of victims consistently described being dismissed or marginalized by law enforcement. Several suspects were developed over the decades, and Bobby Jack Fowler — a convicted American sex offender — was identified after his death as responsible for at least one Highway of Tears murder through DNA evidence.

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which reported in 2019, found that the violence constituted a genocide and called for fundamental transformation of Canadian institutions. The Highway of Tears became a central symbol in that inquiry. Improved bus service was added to portions of the highway following advocacy campaigns. Several Highway of Tears cases remain unsolved, and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada has never been fully addressed.