True Crime Book Club - Highway of Tears

Join us for a book discussion centered on true crime and its impact on society. Copies of the book will be available to check out from the Service Center 60 days before the event. This program is for adults and teens 16 and older. We will be discussing Highway of Tears : a True story of racism, indifference, and the pursuit of justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls by Jessica McDiarmid. 

Highway of Tears : a True story of racism, indifference, and the pursuit of justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls by Jessica McDiarmid
For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern British Columbia. The corridor is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.

Journalist Jessica McDiarmid meticulously investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate in which Indigenous women and girls are overpoliced yet underprotected. McDiarmid interviews those closest to the victims—mothers and fathers, siblings and friends—and provides an intimate firsthand account of their loss and unflagging fight for justice. Examining the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada—now 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 families’ and communities’ unwavering determination to find it.