Canada Isn’t Cooked, Elon. It’s Bleeding.

You have 200 million followers and you used them to mock a genocide. I have a pen. Let’s go.

Dear Elon,

You were late-night scrolling and found it amusing — an acronym representing the murdered and missing women and girls of my people — and you typed three words: Canada is cooked.

And then the pile-on began. Ted Cruz, with his seven million followers. Other far-right voices, loud and ignorant, who have no idea about the crisis we are facing here — a crisis that is, in fact, a genocide. Mockery rippling across your platform like a wave of sewage.

Understand this: I have stood at the grave of Tina Fontaine. I have sat with fathers weeping for daughters found decomposed on mountainsides. I have walked the Highway of Tears — that 725-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 in British Columbia — and I have sat at kitchen tables with grandmothers whose granddaughters were dismembered and thrown into landfills. I covered this crisis from California to Vancouver, from the Highway of Tears to Winnipeg, and I won one of the highest journalism honours in the world — an Edward R. Murrow Award — for bearing witness to it. I accepted that award in New York City, grateful not for myself, but because the attention meant something for our sisters and our families.

I am also a survivor. I’m one of the ones who made it out.

I spent my childhood in and out of foster homes. It was a cold and lonely system. When I was 12, I ran away from a group home with two other girls. It was freedom, or so I thought. I don’t even remember exactly how many days I was missing. Each day blurred into the next. At one point, two men in their late 20s held me hostage at a downtown apartment in Edmonton, Alberta, where they raped me several times. After fighting for my life for several days, I escaped and fled to the safety of my Kohkum’s home — my grandmother. I didn’t tell her what had happened. I was in shock. I just wanted to feel loved and safe. I did eventually tell a group home worker I had been raped. Nothing was ever done.

“They told me that they should teach me a lesson”-Jennie from my award-winning series Snatched Away with Al Jazeera English.

I could have ended up a grim statistic. I didn’t. And I have spent my life since making sure the women who did are not forgotten.

So when you smirk at an acronym, Elon, your’re not mocking a bureaucratic string of letters. You’re mocking Jessica Patrick, 18 years old, found deteriorated beneath a spruce tree on Hudson Bay Mountain, her father Mike Balczer still driving these roads looking for answers years later. You’re mocking Jennie — name changed to protect her — a Gitxsan woman who was walking home from school at 19 when two men in a white pick-up truck dragged her down an embankment, raped her in the mud, and left her naked and alone. She dropped her backpack on the road as she ran, hoping someone would find it as evidence if she didn’t survive. She survived. But ten years later, she still can’t travel alone to the corner store. You’re mocking Morgan Harris, 39 years old, and Marcedes Myran, murdered by a self-proclaimed white supremacist in Winnipeg — dismembered, stuffed into garbage bags, and dumped in a landfill. The government initially refused to search for them. Said it wasn’t feasible. As if they weren’t worth the effort. As if our women belong in the garbage. Morgan’s daughter Elle never got to say goodbye. Marcedes’s grandmother Donna Bartlett still carries her handwritten poems — she loved chocolate cake, hid her kokum’s shoes to make her laugh, and wrote poetry since she was 12. You’re mocking Rebecca Contois and Ashlee Shingoose — Buffalo Woman — whose family waited years just to know her name. You are mocking Tina Fontaine, 15 years old, murdered and dumped in the Red River in Winnipeg. I visited her grandmother’s home north of Winnipeg. I saw her childlike face framed on the walls. She reminded me of myself at that age.

These women are not statistics. They’re not a punchline. They’re not an acronym too long for your attention span. The names I’ve named are only a fraction of the thousands of our women and girls who’ve been lost to this crisis.

MMIWG2S — Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people — is long because the crisis is vast. And yes, the full acronym you mocked is even longer. Every letter represents a community of people who have been targeted, erased, and left without justice.

The length isn’t bureaucratic bloat, Elon. It’s a body count.

It encompasses daughters, mothers, grandmothers, Two-Spirit relatives, stretching across Turtle Island from the northern tip of British Columbia to the streets of Winnipeg to the highways of the American Southwest. It took decades of families screaming into the void before anyone would even name it. If you want to understand why, I’d suggest you read the 1,200-page final report of Canada’s National Inquiry into MMIWG. I know that’s a lot of pages. But then again, it’s a lot of women.

The violence against our women didn’t begin with dysfunction in our communities. It began the moment settlers stepped onto this land. Nations herded onto concentration camps called reserves. Over 150,000 children ripped from their families and run through residential schools where abuse was policy — thousands never came home. Then the Sixties Scoop. Then child welfare systems that still, today, remove Indigenous children at catastrophic rates. The addiction, the poverty, the fractured families — that isn’t a character flaw. That’s the designed outcome of a system built to destroy us. And it’s the reason our women are vulnerable. It’s the reason they are hunted.

When people say our women are murdered mostly by Indigenous men, they use that stat to dismiss the crisis, to say it’s our problem, our failing. That stat is skewed, and it misses the entire point. What perpetuates the violence — in our communities and beyond — is racism. It’s continued colonialism. It’s a system that’s made our women vulnerable by stripping resources, breaking families, and then refusing to protect them. It is a policing system that, when a naked, bleeding Indigenous woman runs into a store on Main Street, sends five male officers and asks how much she had to drink. It’s a government that declares searching a landfill for the remains of murdered Indigenous women “unfeasible.” It’s a man with 200 million followers who looks at all of that and types Canada is cooked.

Women like Elle Harris and Melissa Robinson — who spent 38 straight days at a protest encampment in -30 degree Manitoba winters, sleeping in shifts to keep a sacred fire burning — aren’t waiting for governments or billionaires to save them. They built their own street patrols. They’re out every night in fluorescent vests in the most dangerous neighbourhoods in Winnipeg, because if they don’t protect their own women, no one will.

This is not a fringe issue. This isn’t a joke. The 2019 National Inquiry into MMIWG called this what it is: a genocide. It brought forth 231 Calls for Justice. A national action plan was due in June 2020. It was postponed. It’s still not done.

Mike Balczer, father of Jessica Patrick talks about burying her. From my award-winning series with Al Jazeera English.

And now, instead of action, we get mockery from the world’s most powerful social media owner, amplified by politicians with millions of followers, while the very organizations on the frontlines trying to keep our women alive are watching their funding get stripped. Resources being cut while governments push through legislation to plunder our lands. They take what they want. They have always taken what they want. And they take our women.

Maybe you could fund it, Elon. You have all the money in the world.

Maybe, if you have a heart — if you can look beyond a long acronym and see the human beings behind it — you could give something back. This is an in-depth, complex, horrifying crisis. It’s not a late-night joke.

Our women are not throwaway. Our women are not drunks. Our women are not a bureaucratic inconvenience. Our women are the ones who hold our nations together even after everything was done to break them apart.

I know because I am one of them.

And I vow to keep saying their names — Tina. Jessica. Jennie. Morgan. Marcedes. Rebecca. Ashlee, Buffalo Woman — for as long as I have breath and a byline.

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Brandi Morin is an award-winning Indigenous journalist and survivor. Her reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls has been published by Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and others. She is Cree/Iroquois/French.