Missing: Annie Yassie was 13 when she disappeared over 40 years ago

Eva Yassie's dream about her missing baby sister is almost always the same. Annie Yassie is still 13, she is standing in the distance and she is smiling.

But when Eva asks her questions, Annie doesn't answer. When Eva tries to touch her, Annie can't be reached.

"It really disturbs me, these dreams," Eva Yassie says, taking a long drag on a hand-rolled cigarette. "I call her name and see if she can.… She just looks at me and smiles, and fades away. I can't get no answers."

Questions have haunted Eva Yassie for 42 years, since June 22, 1974, when Annie disappeared into the night a few kilometres outside Churchill, Man.

She was just a kid, 13, just back to Dene Village from residential school. She was drunk and with a grown man decades older. He was also drunk. They got into a cab and headed to the nearby gravel pits, a common hot spot for bonfires and parties.

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Hours later, the man returned to town in a taxi. He was more drunk than before and without Annie. She has not been seen or heard from since. As for the man last seen with her, police and later Eva confronted him about that night.

"He says 'I don't remember. I don't remember nothing. I was drunk,'" Yassie said. "But he couldn't even look me in the eye."

It is yet more evidence of the hell that was Dene Village, an alcohol-soaked, poverty-stricken housing compound for the Sayisi Dene, whom were forcibly relocated from their land by the government. Those years — between 1956 and 1973 — were crime-filled and blood-stained. Survivors like Eva are broken. She wears her grief like a tattered blanket. Her eyes are perpetually on the verge of tears. Cigarettes are almost permanently affixed to her shaking fingers.

"I think I drink to forget," she says, simply. 

But she doesn't forget her sister, nor does she want to. She remembers the small things. Annie loved Christmas. Annie loved to sew doll clothes. Annie loved denim. Annie loved the "hippie" look of the day.

"She used to sleepwalk, too," Yassie says of Annie. "I used to have to keep an eye on her in case she walked out of the building."

Yassie says police once theorized Annie might have been "sleepwalking" the night she disappeared. It was a theory they later abandoned.

The saddest part is not knowing — not knowing what happened and why it happened.  And not being able to bury her.- Eva Yassie, Annie Yassie's sister

Through the years, Yassie has returned to the gravel pits.

"Walking, I did a lot of walking" there, looking for any sign of her sister. Once late at night, she saw a shoe hanging from a tree — a shoe that was identical to her Annie's. The next morning, however, it was gone.

Other times she sees someone who looks like her sister, and all Yassie can do is stare at them.

Then there are her dreams. Usually it's just Annie. Sometimes Annie's with a group of strangers. Yassie says her friend has these dreams, too. Again, Annie is standing there, again saying nothing. These dreams, Yassie says, also disturb her friend.

But the worst, Yassie says, is simply not knowing the truth.

"The saddest part is not knowing — not knowing what happened and why it happened.  And not being able to bury her," Yassie says. "That's what really bothers me."