Andria Meise was born in Dawson Creek, B.C. and raised in Kelowna. Her sister Danielle remembers Andria being taken away several times as a child, and says she spoke of abuse in care.

“I just remember her coming home in the middle of winter, no shoes, no coat, crying — telling us that this was the stuff that was going on in her new home,” said Danielle.

Andria was the oldest of four children. Danielle describes her big sister as her best friend, as a free spirit who was “like a bird.”

Danielle says Andria was always working — often as a server or housecleaner. But when her addiction picked up she worked in the sex trade. She says her sister worried that something bad might happen.

“When you’re kind of living that lifestyle it’s a daily thing. Just being native and being female you know, anything could happen at any time,” said Danielle.

“I was her spotter for three years to where I would take license plates of the dates, write down the time and the place where she was picked up and when she was supposed to be dropped off. But there was times where she’d refuse people because she had a weird feeling about them or she’d be returned with bruises on her face, or things like that.”

While the two sisters lived through hard times in addiction, Andria was always up for an adventure says Danielle. She laughs as she tells a story about a weekend they spent camping with fruit pickers in the Okanagan.

“I remember she tried to go fishing and she caught a fish and she was so scared she threw the fish in the lake and ended up falling off a dock and it was just the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. This grown woman just terrified of this tiny fish.”

It was 2006 when Danielle says she first tried to report her sister missing in Kelowna. She says she continued to make reports and feels like the RCMP did not take her seriously because of Andria’s lifestyle.

Andria left Kelowna in 2008 and was known to move between Dawson Creek and Fort St. John.

It was somewhere between June and September 2010 in Grande Prairie, Alta. when an uncle saw Andria at a Tim Hortons. This is the last report of anyone seeing her. RCMP opened a missing persons file in November 2012.

“I was happy when they finally took my report seriously. It’s written down on all the missing posters: November 19, 2012. And I’m like, okay, why didn’t you put in the eight times I’ve tried since 2006 to report her missing?”

It’s hard to say what police should be doing now, says Danielle who rates the investigation as a six out of ten. She says if police would have taken her reports seriously, earlier on, maybe things would be different. Maybe they would have been able to get Andria home safe, before anything bad could happen.

When asked what she thinks about the upcoming inquiry into missing and murdered girls and women, Danielle says she thinks it’s a good thing, but she worries about it being done properly and the role that police will have.

She says her sister Robin does most of the communicating with police these days and that even after all these years, the feelings of missing Andria are still fresh.

“To just have her gone it’s … like, I have two children. She has never known that I was pregnant. My sister has a daughter that she didn’t even meet because she was gone. Her children, she has a 20-year-old daughter who's been through college, who's in the culinary arts. It’s just amazing the things that she’s missing every day that she’s not here.”