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Cass McCombs releases heartbreaking, inspiring "Run Sister Run" video

It’s been a great year, musically speaking, for Cass McCombs, whose excellent album Mangy Love came out this past August, but not a great year for the world. An ongoing tragedy is the Highway of Tears in Canada, which is the subject of Cass’ new video for “Run Sister Run” off Mangy Love. Via Vogue:

In British Columbia, they call it the Highway of Tears. A 450-mile stretch of road along the Trans-Canada Highway has claimed the lives of dozens of young women, many of them indigenous, who have disappeared on this road or were murdered nearby. Across Canada, the numbers of missing and murdered indigenous young women over the last several decades is exponentially higher, with estimates as high as 4,000. It was the type of news that was hard to ignore in Manitoba, where Tracie Léost, the featured subject of a new video for Cass McCombs’s “Run Sister Run” quickly became outraged.

“Every second day it seemed like there was another story about a young First Nations female who had gone missing or murdered,” Léost remembered recently by phone from Winnipeg, where she is now studying social work at the University of Regina. “And our prime minister at the time, Stephen Harper, denied that there needed to be an open inquiry into it. I kept bringing it up to my indigenous studies teacher until finally he said to me, ‘If you want to see changes, why don’t you do something about it?’”

Léost ended up going on a 115 kilometer run to raise awareness for the “unsettling epidemic,” and photographer Rachael Pony Cassells later asked Léost to re-create her run for Cass’ new video.

Read the rest of the heartbreaking and inspiring story here. Watch the video above, and here’s commentary on it:

And here’s pictures of Cass’ recent Music Hall of Williamsburg show: