Mobilizing Against Colonial Violence: Centering Indigenous Women-Led Initiatives for MMIWG2S+ People

Abstract

Through an investigation of grassroots initiatives for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit+ (MMIWG2S+) people, we show how Indigenous women are central to mobilizing against a colonial, racialized, and gendered violence. Drawing on Indigenous feminisms, we first offer a historical contextualization of Indigenous dispossession that highlights how Indigenous women because of their centrality to the land as life creators and life givers remain the targets of colonial, gendered, and racialized violence and genocide. Through a case study of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES), we exemplify how the persistence of this ongoing violence and genocide is, in part, achieved through the combined practices of spectacles and erasures whereby the violence against Indigenous women is sensationalized, while the quotidian colonial violence is erased. Drawing on several examples in the DTES from the Unearthing Justices resource collection of over five hundred Indigenous-based grassroots initiatives for the MMIWG2S+ people, we show how, through their lived wisdom and experience, Indigenous women work to dismantle the quotidian colonial violence in a way that reaffirms relations, builds community, and moves towards Indigenous self-determination. In this article, we argue that while Indigenous women are the targets of a colonial, gendered, and racialized violence and genocide, they are also central to understanding and dismantling it.