The REDress Project, created by Métis artist Jaime Black, uses empty red dresses to honor Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people and to make visible a loss that has too often been ignored. This poem by Lorna Goodison is written in the spirit of remembrance and witness, inviting us to stand among the dresses and feel both the grief and the call to care.
Many Native Women Missing
At first it seemed
it was just
the cedar tree
extending a limb
to one or two
disembodied
red dresses.But now the forest
is redolent
with wind-sock
frocks twisting
from branches
of firs, pines
and arbutus.The shadow
of a black mother
bear climbs up
unto warning posters,
tears at the hems
of empty dresses.
Scores of native
women missing.
Retrieved from Room Magazine on February 14, 2026 and written by Lorna Goodison.
Invitation: “At first is seemed…”
The Redress project installation at the University of Winnepeg. Photo by Sara Crawley.
Lorna Goodison is a Jamaican poet, essayist and writer with her work centering on Black womanhood, ancestry, and the spiritual life of the Caribbean diaspora. In 2017 she was the poet Laurette of Jamaica. Her early collection I Am Becoming My Mother won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and helped establish her global reputation, while her memoir From Harvey River received Canada’s prestigious Trillium Book Award for its lyrical reconstruction of family history and migration. Across poetry, fiction, and essays—including Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems, Oracabessa, and Mother Muse—she has shaped contemporary literature with a voice that joins personal memory to collective history. She is Professor Emerita of English Language and Literature, Professor Emerita of Afro-American and African Studies.
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