At eight years old, Nahanni Fontaine remembers waking up with her knees up and her panties down after family members built a place for her to sleep on the floor while guests were over.

"I couldn't figure out what was going on," she said. "I certainly know I didn't go to bed like that."

Fontaine — now an NDP member of the Manitoba legislature — says she was just five when she was sexually abused for the first time.

"I remember that as if it happened just yesterday."

She recalls a drunken guest pushing her body onto a bed on the floor, pulling down her underwear and performing oral sex.

Years later, at the age of 12, she was molested again by the same person — only this time, she knew exactly what was happening.

Fontaine — a long-time advocate for missing and murdered indigenous women —knows her story is far from an isolated case.

The prevalence of abuse, both among victims and perpetrators, is expected to be key theme in the national public inquiry examining the issue, said Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett.

Fontaine said she knows very few indigenous women who haven't gone through a similar experience.

During a months-long investigation by The Canadian Press, a number of leading experts and authorities flagged shocking levels of sexual abuse in some indigenous communities. They also pointed to potential links to the aboriginal suicide crisis.

For Fontaine, who grew up in Winnipeg, abuse also affected members of her family from the Sagkeeng First Nation in southern Manitoba.

She said her mother, who died of a heroin overdose in Vancouver in the 1990s, was also a victim of abuse who was involved in sex work.

"Death was inevitably coming her way," Fontaine said.

Starting at 12, Fontaine struggled with her own substance abuse.

She said she is public about her own story, especially in her role as a legislator, because she feels a responsibility to protect children.

"At the end of the day truth is not necessarily the easiest path, it is the only path."

Fontaine said she agrees with the sentiments of Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde, who has been urging chiefs to confront the problem of abuse and incest within their communities.

Leaders have a sacred responsibility to address the issue, she said, adding it is not their sole burden to carry but they have the ability to lift others up — including women, youth and elders.

"Indigenous people have always been courageous and we can be courageous in this as well," she said.

Indeed, experiences of sexual and physical abuse among indigenous women and girls are so pervasive they are expected to overwhelm next year's national inquiry, where commissioners will examine and report on the systemic causes of the violence.

Hearings are expected to begin in early 2017 and will undoubtedly draw attention from around the globe, said chief commissioner Marion Buller.

In May 2014, the RCMP documented 1,181 murdered and missing women between 1980 and 2012. A year later, it said 32 additional aboriginal women had been murdered and 11 more had disappeared since it first reported on the issue.

The force also cited an "unmistakable connection" between homicide and family violence.

Aboriginal women are vulnerable precisely because they're aboriginal and women, said Dr. Yvonne Boyer, a Canada Research Chair at Manitoba's Brandon University.

Boyer co-authored a report on trafficking of aboriginal women for the Public Safety Department in May 2014 that noted many of its participants suffered sexual abuse as a child, contributing to a pattern of exploitation that carried on into their adult years.

"I see it as all being on a continuum," she said in an interview.

"You have children who are abused, you have young teenagers that are abused, they go through life, then it is just normalized behaviour ... some of them, we just don't hear their voices anymore because they're gone."

The links between missing and murdered women and childhood sexual abuse are undeniable, added Wally Oppal, who led B.C.'s hearings on how authorities handled cases in the wake of the Robert Pickton investigation.

Pickton — one of Canada's most notorious serial killers — was convicted in 2007 of the murders of six women and charged in the deaths of 20 others. A number of them were aboriginal.

Oppal's report found aboriginal women experience higher levels of violence in terms of both incidence and severity and are disproportionately represented among the missing and murdered.

"I still think of those women and what had happened to them ... the abuses that had taken place and why they had left home," he said.