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In the opening sequence of her 2006 National Film Board documentary, Finding Dawn, Métis filmmaker Christine Welsh asks: "What is it about numbers? What do they tell us? Do they help us understand?" As the camera surveys a fragmented succession of rainy nighttime streets, Welsh's voice-over intones: "One woman goes missing. Then another. And another. For a long time, only those who know and love them pay attention. Until the numbers start to add up." The camera then shifts our gaze, leaving the darkened streets of Vancouver behind in order to resituate us, if only momentarily, at the site of the excavated Pickton farm-a locale that remains significantly unnamed in the film itself.1 Our encounter with this site begins from above, by means of a broad aerial pan of the farm and its surroundings, and then shifts to the ground below, where forensic investigators search for "traces of missing women." It is here, in February 2004, that a twenty-third woman is identified from dna found at the farm. "But like all the others," Welsh emphasizes, "she is much more than a number. She has a name. Her name is Dawn Crey." This is how Finding Dawn begins.
An expedient point of departure that establishes the statistical gravity of a situation too frequently ignored-with, the film tells us, over sixty women missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside-t his opening does more than expose an empirical "truth about violence against [Indigenous] women" in Canada (Bourrier-Lacroix 8); it also pries open, at the outset, a series of broader questions about how public knowledge about this truth gets made. Addressed to a present moment characterized not only by an ongoing epidemic of gendered and racialized violence but also by proliferating representational treatments of it (Stone and Dean 9), Finding Dawn constitutes an intervention into both the social issue of violence itself and the representational politics that contour its expression in dominant public discourse. For instance, in naming Dawn, and in unnaming the Pickton farm, the opening to Welsh's film performs a conceptual break from the representational strategies that characterize much of the recent mainstream media coverage of the missing and murdered women cases-i ncluding, namely, the tendency to render disappeared women as anonymous figures whose lives and livelihoods are made...