Photos taken in 2022 and 2023.

Click here to read Elizabeth McDonald’s coverage of the 2022 march for The Ubyssey.

Click here to read Charlotte Alden’s coverage of the 2023 march for Cascadia Daily News.

Each year on February 14 — intentionally coinciding with Valentine’s Day, a day of love — thousands of people flood Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood wearing red and carrying signs and red dresses to commemorate missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG).

The march is an emotional and sensory experience: family members deliver sobering speeches about their loved ones who never made it home. Hot tea and bannock are passed around to those in attendance. The sounds of triumphant women’s warrior songs, reverberations of drumming, and the scent of burning sage fill the air.

The 2022 march culminated in the toppling and defacement of a statue of John “Gassy Jack” Deighton in Vancouver’s Gastown. In 1870 Deighton, a British colonist, married a young Squamish woman and later married and had a child with her 12-year-old niece Quahail-ya after his first wife’s death; Deighton was 40. The statue was toppled after nearly 25,000 people signed a petition to remove it.