Highway of Tears Audiobook (Free)

“These murder cases expose systemic problems… By examining each murder inside the framework of Indigenous identification and local hardships, McDiarmid addresses these extremely issues, finding reasons to consider the deeper roots of each work of violence.” —The New York Times Publication Review

In the vein of the bestsellers I’ll Become Gone at night and The Series Becomes a River, a penetrating, deeply shifting account from the lacking and murdered indigenous ladies and young ladies of Highway 16, and a searing about Highway of Tears indictment from the society that failed them.

For many years, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch out of highway in northwestern British Columbia. The corridor is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has arrive to symbolize a national crisis.

Journalist Jessica McDiarmid meticulously investigates the devastating impact these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their neighborhoods, and how systemic racism and indifference possess created a environment where Indigenous women and women are overpoliced yet underprotected. McDiarmid interviews those closest towards the victims—mothers and fathers, siblings and close friends—and provides a romantic firsthand accounts of their reduction and unflagging battle for justice. Analyzing the historically fraught social and ethnic tensions between settlers and Indigenous individuals in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada—today estimated to number up to four thousand—contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in the country.

Highway of Tears is a piercing exploration of our ongoing failure to provide justice for the victims and a testament to their households’ and areas’ unwavering determination to find it.