Throughout history, Indigenous innovators have been finding sustainable solutions to local challenges, supporting their communities and empowering women’s leadership. For the past few centuries, colonial structures — from imposed patriarchal attitudes to residential schools — disrupted traditions and created systemic barriers to prosperity. The impacts of this are still very real in Canada, as shown by the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. 

In Northern Canada, women and young girls are almost three times more likely to be victims of a violent crime than women in the south, and Indigenous wo