Murdered And Missing Indigenous Women Quotes

For the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and survivors of residential schools.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it,” she read out. “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

Grief is an important part of the work. So many of the movements I’ve been a part of in my lifetime—the movements against wars in Afghanistan/Iraq and against Islamophobic racist violence here on Turtle Island, movements for sex work justice and for missing and murdered Indigenous women, movements led by and for trans women of color, movements for Black lives, movements by and for disabled folks and for survivors of abuse—involve a lot of grieving and remembering people we love who have been murdered, died, or been hurt/abused/gone through really horrible shit.

The state is not our ally. White feminism is not our ally either, because discussing violence against women without discussing gender violence within a colonial context has no meaning for me. Gender violence and murdered and missing indigenous women are a symptom of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and genocide. They are symptoms of the dispossession of indigenous peoples from our territories.

We talk about the importance of adoption, but we don’t mention that Indigenous children are forcefully taken from their Indigenous families without consent and adopted into white families, not just throughout history but still today. We talk about violence against women of color, but we don’t say anything about missing and murdered Indigenous women, whose families must decide whether they can trust the government to seek justice for their sisters, daughters, grandmothers, and aunties. We talk about police brutality, but we don’t mention that Native Americans are killed by law enforcement at a higher rate than any other racial group in the US. If the church really wants to get to work to face the injustices of our time, the church cannot ignore the injustices against Indigenous peoples that have been happening since before the birth of this nation.

It is a positive sign that a growing number of social movements are recognizing that indigenous self-determination must become the foundation for all our broader social justice mobilizing. Indigenous peoples are the most impacted by the pillage of lands, experience disproportionate poverty and homelessness, and overrepresented in statistics of missing an murdered women, and are the primary targets of repressive policing and prosecutions in the criminal injustice system. Rather than being treated as a single issue within a laundry list of demands, indigenous self-determination is increasingly understood as intertwined with struggles against racism, poverty, police violence, war and occupation, violence against women, and environmental justice. ... We have to be cautious to avoid replicating the state's assimilationist model of liberal pluralism, whereby indigenous identities are forced to fit within our existing groups and narratives. ... Indigenous struggle cannot simply be accommodated within other struggles; it demands solidarity on its own terms. Original blog post: Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory and Practice. Quoted In: Decolonize Together: Moving beyond a Politics of Solidarity toward a Practice of Decolonization. Taking Sides.

Jessica McDiarmid. Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Atria Books, 2019. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force: A Report to the Minnesota Legislature. December 2020.

Robinson further explained that, “intersectionality theory also highlights the connection between speciesism and sexism, revealing the way that female animals and feminized others, including the land, are treated as objects for domination and rape (Adams, 1990). Given the ongoing problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, the US, and elsewhere, it is important to highlight the role that the intersection of sexism and speciesism play in making it possible for individuals, the general public, police agencies, and governments to treat Indigenous women as if our suffering is unreal, or unimportant.

The women, so many missing and murdered Indigenous women, were all connected. To one another. To me, she thought, to a mother tree. They were all one. They were red.

It took years and years for the chorus of voices demanding an inquiry into the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada to be successful. We heard for years that one of the factors leading to the demise of these women was the assumption that they lived high-risk lifestyles such as working in the sex trade. This was a common reason for rejecting pleas for an inquiry. Even if this were true, does it justify a failure to protect them or properly investigate their deaths?