Before joining Queen’s as an associate law professor in January, Kimberly Murray spent two and a half years investigating missing and disappeared Indigenous children and unmarked graves from Canada’s residential school past.
Appointed by Ottawa, Murray worked with First Nation, Métis, and Inuit communities to help families with missing and disappeared loved ones and to determine how to respectfully handle graves where children were buried, often in unmarked plots.
Her work was deeply emotional, involving many heartbreaking stories. One was that of Reg Nepinak, who was searching for his long-lost sister, Marlene. In the 1960s, at age seven, Marlene was taken from her home on the Pine Creek Reserve in Manitoba by an Indian Agent and sent to a home for the disabled. She never returned.
Nepinak and his two surviving sisters knew that Marlene had died at 13, in 1971, but had no idea where she spent her last years or where her final resting place was. Murray helped uncover that Marlene had been sent across the country to an institution in Quebec and buried in an unmarked grave in Magog, Que. The family finally had answers, and, in 2023, they travelled to Magog to hold a ceremony to bring their sister’s spirit home.
Murray’s work as Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools reinforced the importance of uncovering these lost stories.
As Canada approaches Red Dress Day on May 5 – the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2S+) – her work serves as a reminder of the injustices Indigenous communities have long faced.
Murray, a member of the Kanehsatà:ke Mohawk Nation and Queen’s National Scholar in Indigenous Legal Studies, has been a witness to the fight for reconciliation her entire career.
In 1995, after earning her law degree, she became a staff lawyer and then executive director with Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto. There, she saw first-hand the outright racism and indifference that police and the judicial system had toward Indigenous people.
She recalls driving her two young daughters to school before heading to court, discussing a client’s case on the way. “One of my daughters would say, ‘Well, that’s just not fair.’ And all I could think was, if only the judge thought like my four-year-old.”
From 2010 to 2015, Murray served as executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Com91Ƶ of Canada. She later became Ontario’s first assistant deputy attorney general for Indigenous justice, helping communities revitalize Indigenous laws and expand legal services.
Murray encourages Canadians to take time on Red Dress Day for reflection and education. “This is a day to recognize, accept and learn about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and to think about how we can change the systems,” she says.
She suggests reading about the issues and attending Red Dress Day events to hear directly from affected families. (A good place to start is reading is the of her final report as Independent Special Interlocutor.)
Now a Queen’s National Scholar in Indigenous Legal Studies, Murray is promoting reconciliation within the legal profession. Recognizing the Truth and Reconciliation Com91Ƶ’s call for mandatory courses on Indigenous history, the law and Crown-Indigenous relations in law schools, she has developed a course titled Lawyering for Reconciliation.
She’s also conducting research on how lawyers and judges interact with Indigenous Peoples and communities, highlighting how to improve the system.
“There are many cases of bad lawyering, but I want to show the good examples so people can learn from each other,” she says. “Lawyers don’t always know how to translate what they’ve learned [about reconciliation] into their day-to-day practices.”
