This past year in technology has been as busy as Donald Trump's Twitter feed. It feels like everything shifted on us: news, ports, emojis, bots, virtual reality and mainstream media.

Let's start there.

There's another story to the tragic saga of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) and it's coming to light through an Instagram project created by the National Film Board (NFB).

What Brings Us Here -- a project by writer and filmmaker Katherena Vermette and producer Alicia Smith -- profiles volunteers of the Drag the Red and Bear Clan Patrol of Winnipeg. These grassroots movements patrol neighbourhoods and search the banks and waterways of the Red River in response to the many missing in their communities.

Imagine the houses in your hometown all have cardboard doors, or leave their doors wide open. Now imagine inside all those houses there are safes, jewellery cases, storage lockers and desk drawers all protected by locks made of paper. As you would expect, all of those houses and lockers and drawers would be easy pickings for professional burglars or even for unskilled thieves looking for something to pawn.

Now, imagine instead of stealing anything, the home invaders hid tiny devices inside all those poorly locked containers. Let's suppose those devices could make phone calls whenever and to wherever the invaders chose. Maybe the gizmos lay hidden in all those storage lockers and desk drawers, in all those homes, for years -- undetected and benign.