Métis artist and activist Jaime Black-Morsette first hung seven red dresses in the boughs of a willow tree overlooking the Red River in Winnipeg 15 years ago.

When she used those first red dresses to make a statement, she had no idea that Métis author and playwright Maria Campbell had produced a short film in 1978 called The Red Dress, in which a red dress serves as the symbol of a character’s desire to become an artist and be able to speak for her people. 

The dresses were intended as a reminder of the hundreds of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people (MMIWG2S) recorded in Canada, and as a call for justice. Over the next year, people donated hundreds of red dresses for this work. Since 2010, Black-Morsette has created more than 100 such installations across Canada and the red dresses have become iconic. May 5 is now recognized as the National Day of Awareness for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people – also known as Red Dress Day. 

Black-Morsette found out about Campbell’s video, which was created before she was even born, in the course of working on REDress: Art, Action, and the Power of Presence, the forthcoming anthology she edited for HighWater Press. 

Métis artist Christ Belcourt writes about the film in the essay “The Power of Red and the Power of Community,” her contribution to the book. Belcourt describes how she too only found out about the film in 2022 while travelling with her father and Campbell, and watched it to discover that her great-grandmother had appeared in it as an extra.

The red dress is a symbol that connects the work of Black-Morsette and Campbell, and the colour red has, as Belcourt writes, “found its way into an expression of power, grief, strength, and solidarity in this movement, a movement mostly led by women, for an end to violence against Indigenous people as a whole.”

Black-Morsette had “an inkling” for several years before work on the anthology project began that the REDress project could find another life as a book. Though she had the idea independently, she was approached by HighWater Press to create just such a book.

Black-Morsette worked alongside HighWater Press and Portage & Main Press editor Lisa Frenette on the anthology for more than two years. She asked a wide range of Indigenous grassroots activists, academics, and other artists she had collaborated with – nearly all of them women – to contribute, telling them only that it was a book about the REDress project. The book will be published on April 1, with a launch to follow on May 4 at the Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. 

“As a creative I really like having a lot of space to try and respond to something as I want to, and so that’s what I did with the writers,” Black-Morsette says. “I was very open to what people wanted to contribute because I wanted to allow them to have complete creative freedom.”

The result is a slim but potent anthology that includes a multitude of voices in a multitude of media. There are poems, including several by Black-Morsette, essays, reproductions of paintings, photographs, and performance stills. Black-Morsette likes that the book’s format allows readers to come to it for short, impactful readings and then return again later. The book also serves as a record and archive for the grassroots and community work to bring attention to the ongoing issue of MMIWG2S.  

“This work it’s living; it’s breathing; it’s growing; it’s moving and changing all the time,” Black-Morsette says. 

In a poignant example of the continuing relevance of the REDress project, as work on the book was underway the news broke in the spring of 2023 that four Indigenous women were murdered in Winnipeg, their remains believed to be in a landfill site south of the city. The provincial government at the time refused to search the landfill, and in response, the families of the victims and their supporters established a camp in an open grassland nearby. Cambria Harris, the daughter of one of the women, led the call for justice. She contributed two poems to the book.

The landfill search began in the fall of 2024, and remains were found and confirmed in March 2025 to belong to two of the missing women, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran.

“It’s almost spiritual timing,” Black-Morsette says, speaking with Q&Q days after Myran’s remains were identified. “This book was being written in the two years while we were fighting on the frontlines to have the landfill searched. We were doing that for two years. Cambria, who wrote for this book, that’s her mother they just found.” 

The ongoing reality of the MMIWG2S crisis added an extra layer of challenge to the typical anthology process, Frenette says, as did the fact that many of the book’s contributors were directly affected. 

“Working on an anthology as an editor, in general, is challenging: you have multiple voices, multiple contributors, multiple moving parts,” Frenette says. “But with this book, because of the topic and because of who contributed, it was so much more. … It’s such emotional labour for everybody.”

Black-Morsette is excited the book will soon be out in the world, and is proud of the accomplishment.

“It’s amazing to have all these voices, and to have a record, and a bit of an archive for the really important work that myself and the community are always doing,” Black-Morsette says. “And I think that’s the flip side of this horrible stuff happening – for every woman that falls, there’s a hundred women who stand up in her place. That is the power that I want to turn my attention to, as we keep fighting.”