Beverley Jacobs

After leaving university, Jacobs became a consultant, launching her firm Bear Clan Consulting. She advises clients on issues such as Bill C-31, Residential Schools, Matrimonial Real Property, and Aboriginal Women's health issues.[1]

Jacobs' consulting work led to a project at Amnesty International that changed the course of her life and career. In 2004 she wrote the Stolen Sisters Report, a document that exposed the racialized and sexualized violence suffered by Indigenous women in Canada, and the failure of law enforcement to protect them or to prosecute their attackers. It helped catalyze the founding of the Sisters in Spirit movement, which worked to push government, police, and media to pay attention to the growing number of missing and murdered Indigenous woman in Canada, and the large number of unsolved cases.[1][3]

In 2004 Jacobs entered the world of Indigenous politics, winning the election for President of the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC), largely on her work with families of missing and murdered aboriginal women. Jacobs was re-elected for a second term as President of NWAC in 2006.[2]

As president of NWAC Jacobs negotiated $10 million in funding from the federal government to support research into 500 of the missing and murdered Indigenous women, to create a national registry, a hotline, and public education programs.

Vigils became a hallmark of the Sisters in Spirit movement. Families of the missing and murdered would gather with pictures of the missing women, sometimes lighting candles or releasing balloons all as a means of trying to attract media attention to their cause. Bridget Tolley, an Algonquin woman whose mother was killed by Quebec police in 2001, is credited with proposing the idea to NWAC as a media strategy. [4][5] In her role as president, Jacobs attended the 2008 meeting at which Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to survivors for abuses under the residential school system.[6]

Jacobs chose not to run in the 2009 election. Her pregnant cousin went missing in January 2008; her murdered body was found three months later. The perpetrator was prosecuted and convicted.[3][7]

After Jacobs left NWAC, the Conservative federal government, led by Stephen Harper, cancelled the Sisters in Spirit project. They said they would not fund any future projects if NWAC used the name Sisters in Spirit in any of its programming.[8][9]

But families who had met through the Sister in Spirit campaign formed Facebook groups, and stayed in touch, and continued to hold vigils, forming a new social movement.[10] In 2012 alone, 163 vigils were held across Canada.[4] Families also began pushing for a National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Women. The federal Conservative government refused to consider an inquiry. After they were unseated in 2015, the newly governing Liberal Party quickly announced they would hold an inquiry.

Jacobs continued to practice law on a part-time basis. She also completed an interdisciplinary PhD in Law, Sociology and Aboriginal Health at the University of Calgary, Alberta. She remained involved with the movement Families of Sisters in Spirit at the grassroots level, and joined the voices advocating for a national inquiry.[11]