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Copyright of Journal of New Brunswick Studies / Revue d'etudes sur le Nouveau-Brunswick is the property of Journal of New Brunswick Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article contributes to the growing body of research on grieving mothers who have turned to activism to publicize the loss of a loved one, to raise awareness, and to advocate for justice (Baydar and İvegen; Bejarano; Burchianti; Karaman; Savarese). In publicizing their grief, the mothers stressed that their loved ones were persons whose loss was deeply felt. Mothering scholars and advocates have demonstrated how the women effectively used their collective suffering as a basis for social change (e.g., Karaman). This article analyzes Alberta-based mother, Vivian Tuccaro, who has advocated for justice on behalf of her daughter, Amber Tuccaro, since she disappeared over a decade ago. In this article, Vivian Tuccaro's advocacy, supported by her son, Paul, and her community, is scrutinized for its lessons on the promotion of justice in the aftermath of a daughter's disappearance. This article highlights the Tuccaro family's grief as, tragically, one of many families affected by the loss of a murdered daughter. It also stresses their work to commemorate Amber's life. As the article discusses, the Tuccaro family's advocacy has taken many forms, including participating in news conferences and news stories, filing a complaint regarding law enforcement failings, establishing Facebook pages, testifying before national forums, and hosting memorial round dances, which is a particular focus of this paper. The memorial dances are a demonstration of decolonial grief that remaps mourning into spaces, thereby unsettling some of the dominant ordering and indifference that propels violence. As Karyn Recollet states "Indigenous round dances that produce spatial tags are symbologies of Indigenous motion. As such, they become tremendously meaningful as filling rupturous spaces with love" ("Glyphing" 136). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decades, scholars have investigated mothers' roles in ensuring their daughters and loved ones unexplained disappearances and deaths by violence are publicized and acknowledged. Here, I draw from previous scholarship to explore whether there are commonalities between a mother's quest for justice after her daughter's death in a Canadian prison and other mothers who similarly demand accountability after a loss. The mother's name is Coralee Smith, the mother of the well-known teenager and deceased prisoner, Ashley Smith. In this text, I work to theorize Coralee Smith's agency by drawing parallels with other mothering actions to demand redress for disappearances and losses. In this text, I offer fresh insights to the mothering literature by focusing on activism by parents of criminalized children, rather than adding to the studies on criminalized mothers. Incarcerated mothers are the subject of recent scholarship, but little research is available on the experience of mothers who provide support to incarcerated daughters and who demand accountability following deaths in custody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This poem is written for a young mother, Marijoy, who disposed of her baby that died immediately after birth on 3 July 2015. She expressed profound remorse when interviewed by law enforcement. In this poem, details of the case are put alongside lines by Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), a well-known mystic prominent in the twelfth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]