UPDATE: Angela Meyer's family remembers 'a very loving girl' at MMIWG Yellowknife hearings

When Kathy Meyer was asked what her favourite memories of her daughter are, she thought about the question before answering.

“Her smile. So many. She was such a good baby,” Meyer said.

“She exuded a lot of love. She loved to be hugged. She talked to anybody, she was a people person. Everyone was important.”

Those closest to Angela know she loved to put on makeup, do her nails, colour her hair and buy new clothes.

The young Inuit woman once had many friends, too.

“She was a very good [and] loyal friend and... of course, people drift away when people don’t understand her illness,” Meyer said.

In the early 1990s, Angela started to show signs of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and by the time she went missing, she was really struggling with the illness.

Because of it, Angela took several medications and gained weight, which bothered her.

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Her mother says she's haunted by thoughts of her daughter.

She questions if someone grabbed her and took off, or if Angela decided she had enough and didn’t want to be found on Nov. 27, 2010 in Yellowknife, N.W.T.

Regardless, the family says Angela’s disappearance wasn’t a priority to the Yellowknife RCMP.

“We felt more could have been done,” Meyer said.

“We had friends here organize a search right after Christmas and January and that’s when the RCMP went out with a helicopter.”

An RCMP canine unit went out searching, too.

“A lot of times when hunters go missing up here there’s a search and rescue sent out right away... I don’t know why they felt she was any different,” said Meyer.

At first, RCMP treated Angela as a runaway because she went missing three times before she vanished for the last time, but family insists she wasn’t on the run.

Since her November 2010 disappearance, RCMP have been in contact with them approximately five times.

“We initiated a couple of them,” Meyer said.

According to her, RCMP contacted family shortly before February 2015 to let them know a different officer was taking over Angela’s case.

Despite her feelings about how the case was handled by authorities, Meyer says she can rely on family and friends for help when it comes to searching for her daughter and communicating with the media.

When it comes to a federal inquiry into Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous girls and women, Meyer says she has mixed feelings.

“The story has to be told. I understand that for all the other missing and murdered aboriginal girls and women. Then I go beyond that and think about all the missing people,” she said.

“The other side of me, I wonder what other inquiries, what has become of them? Has anything been done?”

Thinking about her daughter nearly five years after she disappeared, Meyer remembers the good despite the pain:

She proudly says even though her daughter was deeply affected by mental illness, she was named athlete of the year during the Yellowknife Special Olympics in spring 2010, before she went missing.