Red Dress Day walk brings stories, solidarity to Regina streets

Sarah Onyango · CBC News

· Posted: May 05, 2025 8:24 PM EDT | Last Updated: 5 minutes ago

Monday's rain didn't halt dozens of assemblage members from walking in Regina's 2nd yearly Red Dress Day lawsuit astatine the mâmawêyatitân centre.

The lawsuit was portion of a nationalist time of consciousness for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit radical (MMIWG2S).

After the rainy walk, students and assemblage members gathered astatine Scott Collegiate to perceive stories honouring the lives of missing Indigenous women.

For Gwenda Yuzicappi, sharing her daughter's communicative is simply a mode to support her representation alive.

"If I tin fto 1 much idiosyncratic cognize what happened to her, that's my purpose," said Yuzicappi, whose girl Amber Redman went missing successful 2005.

Yuzicappi said she felt her daughter's beingness during the locomotion and wanted to connection comfortableness to others who person experienced akin loss.

"Coming present for Red Dress Day, with truthful galore inner-city children, youth, adults, being capable to stock her communicative gave maine a batch of honour and respect. As First Nations women, we matter. Our lives matter," she said.

Held annually connected May 5, Red Dress Day is simply a nationalist telephone to extremity gendered and racialized unit against Indigenous radical successful Canada.

"It deepens understanding. Empathy grows from that and processing allies for our Indigenous assemblage is truthful important," said Rhonda Haus, main astatine Scott Collegiate.

This is the 2nd twelvemonth the schoolhouse has hosted a Red Dress Day ceremony, creating abstraction for reflection, learning and solidarity.

"It's a almighty accidental for our students and assemblage to perceive first-hand experiences and recognize the trauma and stories shared today," Haus said. "I deliberation of Amber Redman's household and the profound interaction their communicative has connected everyone who hears it."

Participants brought signs, photographs, and accepted items to honour those lost.

Inside the school, the lawsuit featured drumming, ceremony and abstraction for families to stock memories. Many attendees wore reddish oregon ribbon skirts, and immoderate students painted reddish handprints connected their faces, a awesome of the lives mislaid and voices inactive unheard.

"I deterioration this reddish look overgarment to locomotion successful solidarity with families and communities, and to locomotion for the women and two-spirit radical who can't locomotion with us," said Izzy Sunshine, a pupil astatine Scott Collegiate.

As a young idiosyncratic successful the community, Sunshine said she hopes much of her peers volition prosecute and retrieve those who person been lost.

"I conscionable privation to nonstop a connection to everyone who saw america walking today, and everyone here: I enactment and basal with families."