School in Selkirk, Man., crafts display of nearly 2,000 faceless dolls for upcoming Red Dress Day

Red dresses are typically used to honour and remember missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, but a high school in Selkirk, Man., is bringing awareness in a different way.

A display of nearly 2,000 faceless dolls was created by Lord Selkirk Regional Comprehensive Secondary School students ahead of Sunday's Red Dress Day, theNational Day ofAwareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two-Spirit People.

Mackenzie Serger, an Indigenous student in Grade 11 who helped make the dolls and set up the display,says it's good to see Indigenous representation at her school through the dolls.

"It was really nice, and it was kind of touching, because I know a lot of the school is Indigenous," she told CBC.

Some of Serger's family members are residential school survivors, and there are other students who have relatives who have disappeared, she said.

"It's just really nice to see the fact that some of those people can be represented through these dolls we made in the school."

Caroline Oth, a Grade 10 student originally from Germany who has been in Winnipeg since September, says she hopes awareness of MMIWG can help prevent more women from going missing.

"It's important that people are reminded of what happened in the past," she said.

The school's textile arts class prepared the dolls, as well as hair and clothing for them, before distributing the materialsto other classes, Oth said.

There are plans to make the display permanent rather than an annual event, said Caitlin Schick, a human ecology teacher at Lord Selkirk Secondary School.

'We need to have this conversation'

"We need to have this conversation all the time, and we need to bring awareness," Schick said.

"I think a lot of our students might have missing relatives, and sometimes they go unnoticed."

The process of putting together the dolls for the display was a conversation starter, Schick said.

"Some of them have red dresses, some of them have red handprints over their mouths," she said.

"A lot of them wanted to be colourful and commemorate the women who went missing and think about what kind of hair they had did they have grey hair? Were they older or younger? What did they wear when they went missing?"

Craft display of nearly 2,000 faceless dolls created for Red Dress Day

5 months ago

Duration 2:25

A display of nearly 2,000 faceless dolls was created by Lord Selkirk Regional Comprehensive Secondary School students ahead of Sunday's Red Dress Day, the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Two-Spirit People.